Renaissance Blog

People have long felt the undercurrent of a greater power. 

We often interpret this power as a god of some form. 

That is sometimes the only way that our tiny human brains can make sense of what we feel and witness with senses that we do not understand. 

What if we are sensing ourselves. Humans from the long distant future who have transcended corporeal form and mastered time, space, and inter-dimensional travel. 

Perhaps we are guiding our own race in the only way that the current humans can comprehend. 

Not to interfere, just a nudge to maintain a timeline. 

We are soon to be gods, is it hard to believe that we would come back and ensure our own survival? 

I like the idea that I am my own God. I’d make a pretty awesome God. 

“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.’

W. Somerset Maugham  

I travel quite a bit. Sometimes more than I would like. When I visit other countries I like to sample the culture as much as I can. One of the greatest ways to understand a people, is to join them at the table. This is where you discover who they are, what they value, and what nourishes them. So much of who we are comes from what we eat, and how we eat it, that you can understand people by what they eat for each meal.  

To understand a man, I don’t need to walk a mile in his shoes, I need to eat his favorite meal with him. This often  poses a challenge to maintain my paleo lifestyle in foreign countries. I tend to only do this for some meals, and when I am eating by myself I search out some semblance of a paleo diet. This is actually one of my biggest problems with eating paleo. I have been ruined. I know how good I feel when I eat clean, and it detracts from enjoying some of my travels. I find myself dreading trips to certain countries where I know that I will be challenged to find paleo food.  

I make sure to always have a few paleo packs on hand, and I go out of my way to find options that fit within my personal dietary goals. Invariably, I will spend much more time looking for a good meal than I would have otherwise.  

I am happy to experience the culinary arts of every country or region, but after I spend enough time traveling, sometimes I just need steak and vegetables. Why does that have to be so hard to find? 

There is a distinct and growing aversion among the younger generation against having a job, or being employed by another person or company. People like to equate working for someone else with lost independence or repetitive daily action.  

I think this is a defeatist attitude. Working for a larger company gives me access to the kinds of resources that I need to change the world. The pithy and over used axiom that every person has the power to change the world is overlooking the fact that a person still has to influence others to do so. Big projects sometimes take big ideas, big budgets, big teams, and a lot of time. 

I see far too many small teams with big ideas taking shortcuts that lead to a lack of scalability and real world scope.  

I see far too many people who want to hit it big fast and want all the glory so they lose sight of the big picture. 

Being part of a team is not a bad thing, unless you let it be your excuse to underachieve. You may have to consider the possibility that you don’t know nearly as much as you think you do, your idea is not nearly as amazing as you think it is, and the world has a lot to contribute to your success if you just let it. 

What is it like to wake up every morning and pretend that you aren’t dying?  

This is how I live every day. 

I am excited and liberated each day knowing that I have an eternity in front of me. 

This changes how I approach many aspects of my life, especially my career. 

I am able to find more day to day balance because I am not in a race. 

I don’t have to rush through my career. I don’t have to reach my goals before the age of 65, I plan to work indefinitely.  

I did not need my first million before the age of thirty. When I am 900 years old and looking back at my life, will it have mattered if I hit that goal at 30 or that I waited until I was 40?  

I argue that it will not. What mattered more during those early years is how I prepared my children for their futures during their most impressionable and important years. I trained myself to be ready for real long term success.  

Play the long game, don’t sprint and blow your wad too early. We have a long time to reach greatness. 

Our ancestors stole fire from the gods, we will steal their omniscience and thus omnipotence.  

In baseball, batting .300 is considered very respectable.  

That is a pretty good target for the rest of our life too. 

I make  a lot of decisions every day. I joke with my manager that my business commitment goals are to “Bat .300” 

I am really only partly joking. I have found that some people get so worked up and concerned about being right that they never make any decisions and never move forward. 

If I am 100% right 30% of the time then we will at least always be going in the right direction because I will be mostly right, most of the rest of the time. Clearly this involves a weighting factor to make sure that one wrong decision can’t be a terminal set back.  

The key is to make decisions, commit, and move forward. 

I have no fear of being wrong, I will admit when I am wrong – every time, to any person. I long to be proved wrong because it helps me grow. 

Are you afraid of making decisions? What are you afraid of? Someone yelling at you? Looking stupid? 

Are these detractors really as negative as you imagine them to be? 

The key here is confidence in your ability. If you know that you will be right most of the time, and confident that you can deal with any problems that arise if you are wrong, then you will find the ability to make the decision and move on. 

If you had to choose between being the person who never accomplishes anything or the person who achieves amazing feats while owning and solving problems that come up … which person would you imagine is more successful? 

Don’t get caught in paralysis of analysis. Believe in yourself.  

Unless you are a dumbass – then please don’t act, go watch TV – the rest of us have this covered. 

“Don’t wreck a sublime chocolate experience by feeling guilty. 

Chocolate isn’t like premarital sex. It will not make you pregnant. 

And it always feels good.”  

Lora Brody  

This says it all.  

If you are going to splurge, then just do it and get all the enjoyment out of it that you can. 

Then move on. 

Save the guilt for really bad decisions like cheap muffins or YouTube videos of cats. 

My other piece of chocolate advice is to enjoy real chocolate. Pass up the cheap pseudo chocolate and get the real thing. Assuming that you are keeping these splurges to a minimum then there is no time and little real budgetary difference to buying something that is a true experience.  

Savor it, enjoy the smell, the feel of it in your mouth, the taste, and the effect on your body and mind. 

Treat it like a good glass of wine or sex. Take your time and enjoy it. These are the things that elevate the human experience and add life to your years. 

You can thank me later. 

“It’s absolutely unfair for women to say that guys only want one thing: sex. We also want food.”  

― Jarod Kintz 

Men are simple creatures with complex desires.  

We desire a lot, but if we have these two bases covered, we can pretty much tolerate anything. 

I wanted to share this article and comment a bit: 

< http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pallensen20140218  >

I am sometimes overly judgmental of the vegetarian lifestyle and want to go on record that this article helped me focus on what we have in common. I have far too often seen vegetarian’s eating nothing but pasta and breads with very little actual vegetables. I find that I eat far more vegetables than the vegetarians that I meet and so I get concerned about their health.  

My only objections to the article are the same old links to the same cherry-picked research on how meat is bad for you. I am not going to get into a battle here, I don’t do other peoples research for them, and no one reading this is doing to swing their opinion one way or another based on links that I post. It is not worth my time, go do your own research. 

The critical aspect I want to point out is that we can distill the discussion down to the rest of our diets. If I ignore their grains, and they ignore my meats, then I think we can focus on the relative merits of each other’s diets with a more clear understanding.  

Outside of those two things, are they avoiding sugar and processed foods? Are they supporting sustainable and healthy farming practices for their produce? Are they avoiding preservatives, additives, and other toxins? These are the things that are really going to make a difference in a human’s health and longevity. These are things that we have in common. 

Let us share the love and pass the broccoli.  

I am not so different than you 

I was fat in college. 

I worked 60 hours a week and also carried a full engineering degree course load. 

I got married to the love of my life and she thought she had to feed me.  

We ate fried food and drank Kool-Aid because it was cheap. 

I travelled the state of Iowa for my job. I drank Mt. Dew by the quart, and fast food by the pound. 

I did not have a healthy relationship with food. 

If you saw me then, you would never say “You have a fast metabolism and can eat whatever you want.” 

Chocolate is still my weakness. 

I cannot eat one Oreo. If I eat an Oreo, I eat a package of Oreos. 

I am the master rationalizer. I know how bad they are, so I will eat all the Oreos to protect my family from the evils within. I love my wife and daughters so much, that I will sacrifice myself at the Oreo alter for them. 

I battle the same addiction to sugar that you do. I have just learned to frame it differently. 

Sugar is public enemy #1. Sometimes it gets the better of me. 

I use up far more will power than I should while trying to avoid bad food. 

Will power that I could apply to more productive endeavors.  

We all fight these battles.  

Next time you feel the desire to give in. 

Think about what you might feel like if you skip it, just this one time.  

Then maybe if you feel good, you will skip it another time too. 

You can do this. 

One step at a time. 

Religion has always fascinated me. 

I study them and analyze them. 

I observe practitioners and preachers. 

I honestly want to understand what makes people believe. 

I have tried. 

Many times in my life I have called myself a Christian. 

Deep down I always doubted. 

What makes people believe what they believe? 

Why are they so convinced that they are right and everyone else is wrong? 

I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  

I try to assume that all people are reasonable, rational, intelligent humans. 

I know that most of them are not, but I will always start them at 100% and take points away as they talk and act. 

Many times I have wanted to engage in a real philosophical, religious, discussion with people. 

I have never found one willing to truly discuss with me without falling back on defensive “bible-thumping” when exposed to my questions. 

If you are firm in your convictions, and know how to intelligently articulate them, I offer you half of a good bottle of red wine.  

Come sit down with me and help me understand. 

When I ask you questions, I am not asking you to change, I just want to understand your point of view. 

Don’t assume that you can change me either.  

Let’s come together to discuss our view of the world with an understanding that our views do not have to be validated by another’s. We may just broaden them or solidify them for ourselves, and that also has value. 

Are you strong enough in your convictions to have them questioned?  

Shoot me an email – I have a bottle of wine with our names on it.