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A product is not a company is not an organization, although they’re all inextricably related.

  1. product (or service) is what you make. It’s the thing you provide to your customers.
  2. company is the “who” that delivers the product. It’s not an intricate definition of who, it’s simply how customers and potential customers think of you. A company can be wonderful, but if everyone thinks they’re a jerk, it doesn’t matter.
  3. An organization is the internal arrangement of a business, how it does what it does. It’s the process used to make and deliver the thing. This is harder to see, but if you’ve ever worked for a larger company you know what this looks like.
It’s possible to have a great product with a terrible company or organization. Similarly possible that the company and organization are great, but the product itself isn’t.  Long term success is inevitably determined by how effectively you do all three.

At this point you might be thinking, “what’s the point?”. This might not seem relevant to everyone but, as with most models, there’s value in abstraction and cross-application. Consider how this relates to everything you do:

Your product is the work you do. It’s the outcomes you drive, the things you create.
Your company is you. It’s how people think of you, whether or not they enjoy working with you, and if you bring prestige and acclaim to a project.
Your organization is how you work, with others and alone. It’s your process.

Do you make great things, drive great results? Do people love working with you? Do people trust you to employ an effective process? These things apply to everything you do at both a micro and macro level, no need to reserve it exclusively for businesses.
We live in a culture that’s obsessed with doing things, with going somewhere, with achieving. Sometimes, the most wonderful moments in life come when we abandon purpose, when we give ourselves the space to aimlessly wander.

We don’t always need to be going somewhere. Take time to stop and smell the roses. Abandon intent. Go for a walk to nowhere in particular, and see what happens.

Note, your life doesn’t have to be devoid of purpos for you to have purposeless moments. Quite the opposite: a life full of purpose can yield the most beautiful moments of purposelessness.

It’s easy to view our emotions as a source of unalienable truth. They’re embedded through millennia of evolution, a beacon guiding us toward survival. The reality is that they’re more indicator than anything else, and oftentimes bad ones at that.

Fear, for instance, evolved as a way to help us get and stay out of life threatening situations. Think through your life- how many times have you felt fear, and in how many instances was your life actually threatened? I’m willing to bet there’s a low correlation between the two. Fear may have been evolutionarily useful, but our environment has changed. Evolution takes time to catch up.

If we understand and accept this to be true, we can see that our emotions are not necessarily an accurate indicator of how we actually are. You might feel fear, but that doesn’t mean you ought to be fearful. It doesn’t mean that there’s something worth being afraid about.

Try this: the next time you find yourself feeling a negative emotion, substitute the world “am” for “feel” in your internal dialogue. Rather than “I am sad”, try “I feel sad”. Rather than “I am afraid”, try “I feel afraid”. One makes you a slave to your emotions, while the other acknowledges that they’re just an indicator- perhaps a false one.

It’s easy to hide. When we’re looking to avoid the real issues, we default to any number of things:

  1. Work. We bury ourselves in it. We blindly do. We put our heads down and don’t give ourselves time to consider what we really need to be doing.
  2. Speak. Aimlessly and endlessly. We speak anything but what needs to be said, about anything but what needs to be done.
  3. Think. About anything. Critically, so it feels like it’s productive. Maybe even think about what needs to be done, but clearly with no intent for action.
  4. Resign. Submit to the situation. Believe there’s nothing that can be done. Believe that we have no control over the situation or how we feel about it. Accept defeat.
Sometimes we do it without even realizing it. How do you feel when you’re not working, speaking, or focused on the task at hand? Are you using those to hide?
…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.
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.