…is that we rarely work alone. We don’t need to be strong in everything, we just need to be honest about what our weaknesses are and work with people that counterbalance them.
Monthly Archives: July 2016
It’s a long held theory of mine: We say the kindest, most beautiful things about people in our lives, but often forget to say it to the people themselves.
It’s a strange twist of fate. We have every reason to tell the person that we’re talking about what we said. These moments aren’t gossip, they’re quite the opposite. The same kind of cutting honesty that arises from gossip gets flipped on its head into a wonderfully candid authenticity.
Think about it- how often do you give an absolutely glowing review of someone, but never get around to saying all of those wonderful things to the person his/herself?
There’s little more we can give to others than the knowledge that they are truly and honestly valued. Let them know.
It’s funny, I think sometimes the way I write my posts makes it seem like I think I have everything figured out. I really don’t. The things I write on a daily basis are actually part of the “figuring it out”. They’re me trying to make sense of the whirr that is the rapidly changing world around us.
Please know that when I write I make no claims of truth, only perspective.
I write with the hope that these perspectives provide some value, either by introducing some way of thinking you’ve never considered before or acting as a daily reminder to reflect on what it means to be human. I write with the hope that, every once in a great while, something comes out that impacts somebody. That pushes somebody closer to meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and happiness. I write as a reminder to dream big while not losing track of the beauty and joy found in the present.
I have no clue if I achieve any of this, but I’m showing up every day and trying my darndest to do so. Thanks for being along for the ride.
I wish our culture would take a moment to think before it opened its collective mouth. We learned it when we were three years old: Think before you speak. It amazes me, the destructive cycle we enter by ignoring that advice.
In the last month alone we’ve been bombarded with so much tragedy in the world. Religious extremists killing en masse. Mentally unstable individuals using guns to injure and kill with reckless abandon. Regular instances of white cops killing black men and women. Every single time we cry out in outrage, “Why is this still happening?!”
It’s good to be outraged by these things. We need to be. Outrage is the first step towards impact, toward change. That’s the thing though, outrage is only valuable as a kickstarter for change. As a result, how we channel our outrage matters. In fact, it’s arguably the most important piece of the puzzle.
Nowadays, it seems like our culture uses these tragedies to give itself a nice little “outrage high”. We scream our outrage and spew out our opinions as loudly and quickly as possible. We then give ourselves a gold star, pat ourselves on the back, and call it a day.
In spewing out our opinions and walking away so quickly, we never stick through to the end. We add the instance to our evidence for some pre-determined argument of ours before the truth ever surfaces. We add it to the case for gun control before we know how the gun was obtained. We add it to the case for more national security before we understand who the religious extremists were who attacked. We simultaneously become more misinformed, more unwavering in our opinion despite this, and therefore less and less capable of understanding the complexities of the issues. How the hell can we find a solution if we don’t understand what the real problem is, what really happened?
In getting our high and walking away, we never make change happen. The only way to stop these things is to look at the system and create negative incentives for doing so. We have to make it so the consequences of murder, whether due to religious extremism, racism, or mental instability doesn’t pay. We need to understand why and how it happens, and how to stop it. We need to follow through. We need to show up and make change happen.
Right now, the world doesn’t need more gutteral reactive nonsense. It needs more people thinking before they speak. It needs more people taking the time to carefully deliberate the issues and say something thoughtful, something impactful. We need people to say things that make us follow through. That motivate us to push for change.
Yes, we need outrage, but less of the short-sighted and temporary and more of the considerate and change-oriented variety.
Honestly, I don’t know how to do this. Writing this is my first step. Our culture lives off of the outrage high. It screams for 3 days and then the story falls by the wayside. If you know of a way to help, send me an email or share in the comments.
Let’s speak for the sake of improvement and solutions, not for the sake of outrage alone.
Worrying is one of those emotions that is almost entirely useless. It costs us so much energy and gives us so little. Once you see it in the right light you realize that, with worry, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Let’s relate worry back to control:
If a situation is out of your control, then worrying is pointless. It causes you misery but doesn’t affect your ability to influence the outcome at all. It is literally all pain with no gain.
If a situation if within your control, you either care enough to do something about it, or you don’t.
- If you elect to do nothing, you’re not really that worried. Holding onto that emotion any longer will do you no good.
- If you elect to do something about it, you’re deciding to take worry head on. Most of the time, action alone is enough to defeat the worry you face and return a sense of control.
Adopting this mentality is, of course, easier said than done. But worrying just isn’t worth it. It costs us in time, energy, and being present in our lives. Be rational with worry and get your time back.
I promise not to do too much cross promotion here, but I’m launching a new project today that I’m very excited about and wanted to share. Guess I’m putting my hypocrite pants on again…
I’ve been drumming for most of my life. While I’ve played in a lot of bands and recorded a few songs/videos, I’ve never released anything on my own. I recently set out to change that and made a pact with a friend to release 6 videos in 6 months (more accountability buddies, for the win!).
I released the first video today. It’s a funky drum cover of a song by a band that I absolutely love. Let me know what you think! If you’re interested in following the project, you can subscribe on YouTube or follow me on Facebook- I’ll likely always post it there. It’ll be a fun 6 months.
In other news, a few friends who have stepped into the arena (again):
- My good friends Aaron Walters and Gabe Milliman of Quail Turret released a mind blowing live performance of an original song on YouTube last week. I can’t recommend you watch/listen to this enough. Their talent exceeds their age by magnitudes.
- Jake Zuke (my accountability buddy for the video project) released his first video here. Jake’s a talented singer-songwriter and the video is a great cover of Gregory Alan Isakov.
P.S. Find yourself stepping into the arena? Send your stuff my way- I’d love to check it out and share projects at some regular interval here.
Creativity comes in waves. There are times when we full unstoppable and times when we feel we can’t go on. There are moments where we feel inspired and moments where we can’t work at all. Between our initial bout of inspiration and the thrill of completion there’s a valley seeking to beat us. This is the point where quitting is most likely.
When we hit the trough, it’s important to remember that, 1. The work is worth it and 2. Troughs are inevitably followed by peaks. Acknowledge that there will be troughs and learn to ride the wave.
Whether it be nationality, race, heritage, or gender, there are so many benefits that come from being proud of our backgrounds. These identities create a sense of community, confidence, and connection that brings meaning and purpose to our lives. When we’re proud of a community that we came from we’re constantly driven to make it better, creating a virtuous circle of elevated meaning and pride within it. Even when we disagree on what exactly better is it’s because we care, and with this caring comes a lot of good things.
Unfortunately, pride is a double-edged sword. Problems begin when it leads us to build borders around our community, to adopt an “Us vs. Them” mentality. We start to push others out. We put those outside of our community down. We lose the ability to appreciate other ways of life. When we become so obsessed with proving that we’re better than them, we lose sight of trying to be better than who we were yesterday.
We can and should celebrate our nationality, race, heritage, and gender, but be wary of pitting it up against some group of “others“. A New Yorker is also a North Easterner who is also an American. An Americans is a Westerner, and all of the above are united under the banner of humanity. The concept of identifying as a human is so fundamental that it feels foreign. There’s no group of “others” to unite ourselves against. It doesn’t feel like some special group despite it most definitely being so. We fail to consider that being human is something we all have in common, with tens of thousands of year of history (far more than any single culture or heritage). We fail to consider that the “other” is the human struggle that we all face on a daily basis.
We have special days to celebrate nationality, culture, and heritage. Let’s not forget to make time to unite and celebrate our humanity, or better yet, let it pervade in our day-to-day lives.
Means so much more than honing your craft and acquiring new skills.
One sign of a lifelong learner: a willingness to have their concept of the-way-the-world-is-and-ought-to-be changed.
It’s easy to live life for the euphoric high points. Weekend getaways, summer nights, debaucherous occasions with friends. They make us feel alive.
Some people mistake these moments for “life”, for the point of it all. They work to manufacture this euphoria at all costs. They live their days in anticipation of the next high.
Inevitably, life regresses to the mean. We return to the moments in between. In these moments, truth descends upon us. We can live life to manufacture the high points, or we can focus on leading a life where the moments in between are fulfilling and rich. I’m of the opinion that, if we live our life for the moments in between, the highs are more authentic and beautiful too.