Month: November 2012

Shut Up

Seriously, just… shut up. Zip it.

Be still.

Listen.

Listen to your surroundings. Hear all that? Good. Now, let’s go deeper.

Listen to your self. Hear that? This is harder. Let’s rephrase.

Shift your awareness to your self. How is that? Way more doable, right? You can shift your awareness to your fingertips, your hands, move up your arms, then all over your body. Warning: now you’re suddenly meditating, you new-age-y being, you. As you’re doing this, to any degree, what you might not be noticing is that you’re NOT noticing your surroundings. Good. Now, let’s go deeper.

Shift your awareness to this state where you’re just feeling kid-like giddy joy, relaxing peace, warm emanating calm. You there? This is harder. Let’s rephrase.

Feel it. Start feeling that… how did I phrase it… kid-like giddy joy, relaxing peace, warm emanating calm. How is that? Feel good? Warning: now you’ve removed the ego, and just are. Fears, worries, and social constructs don’t exist here. Neither do physiological needs.

Get back to this happy spot. Now, while in this happy spot, slowly zoom out to your body, taking it with you. What is your body doing? Slowly zoom out of your body some more, taking both your happy spot and body with you. What are your surroundings?

What are you doing and where are you while you are happy?

You’re there and you’re doing that? Shut up. Nice! What are you doing reading this? Go do that! That sounds like way more fun. I’ll shut up now.

Cleaning The Bathroom Is Perfect For Me

Let me set the scene.

It’s a Monday evening in the middle of November. I make it home from work, happily down warmed-up left-overs, and change. The heat’s on, but it’s still a little chilly, so the WPI Superfan t-shirt is accompanied by some cozy PJ pants, but because I’ll be standing in the bathtub, the pant legs are rolled up to my knees, preserving warmth and simultaneously setting a daring fashion trend. I step into the shower, spray, wait, and scrub.

Oh man, there are sooo many other things I’d rather be doing:

  • Beatboxing with my KP3
  • Writing another blog post
  • Clearing up my desk
  • Making a sandwich
  • Eating a sandwich
  • Watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on Netflix
  • Reading that book I started a while back
  • Drinking a cappuccino
  • Purging my inbox

Nope. I agreed to do this. So I should just shut up and do wha-

My head keeps racing, though. The thought of a cappuccino AND reading that book seems fantastic; such a simple joy, such an immensely better joy than the scrub-a-licious activity at hand. My appreciation for the value of an hour grows considerably while in the shower …not showering. It gets me wondering if I could exchange something I have, like money, for somebody ELSE to do this …service. Heck, James Bond probably doesn’t clean the bathroom. He also doesn’t ever GO to the bathroom, unless it’s to kill somebody. Maybe he sweats and bleeds it all out. Then again, he probably somehow pays to have other people do that for hi-

That’s when a phrase hits me. It grazes my elbow, but I get the gist of it. There is a life coaching technique out there where whenever you’re in a situation that is sub-optimal (mind the light euphemism), ask yourself:

How is this perfect for me?

Reframe that sucker. Dig deep to find that silver lining. Be creative in determining how this is actually good for you, like medicine. Start the unfathomable sentence, then finish it, like so:

Cleaning the bathroom is perfect for me …because… it brings me into the present moment and into my body (as I partake in the minutiae of scrubbing grout).

Sure, I’m panning for gold, but hey, you know what else I get from cleaning the bathroom?

Another blog post.

PRE-APOCALYPTIC POST-SCRIPT:

Let me set another scene.

I’m in the cafe I frequent. I’m not arugula a regular. I’m a super-regular. I’m sitting at the bar, where everybody knows my name. I’m not kidding. In my ear is a whisper. I say, “Thank you, dear,” and decide to append to the above with the following.

There was a cold fact: the bathroom was being cleaned by me. On its own, this fact is rather… impersonal, emotionless. Up until the whisper, I associated one story with the experience, then another. My first story was, “Dag nabbit, dog gonnit, what the firetruck, this is all kinds of no fun, and I hate my life.” My second story was, “Here I float on a cloud… ah, such levity and freedom… and yet I am grounded, connected with the rest of existence… wholly present in sensing every last detail of the current event of which I am an active part… oh, how wondrous is this life.”

Pffffffffft – just kidding; that second story was nowhere close to what I was able to pull off, but was the direction in which I was going.

The whisper shed light on how these two very different stories, associated with the same one experience, were two very different perspectives, thus two very different realities of the same one experience.

OK. Seriously. I can’t believe how much I am squeezing out of this. Cleaning the bathroom was perfect for me!

Always Be Outputting

‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferriss has the following for a quote:

Lifestyle design is based on massive action.

Once you find out what this thing is that you want to always be, or always be doing, every day, that thing that brings you joy and excitement and inner peace and gets you feeling comfortable in your own body at all times, once you get to this perfect flow, just sit on your ass.

Just kidding. Go be active in this state. Of course, you won’t have to remind yourself, since you’ll want to be engaging in your new found freedom, you’ll want to be creating and connecting. Until then, until you’ve reached this ideal lifestyle for you, you are… designing your lifestyle. And what better way to get there than to… rehearse? Act it out! ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne talks about essentially playing ‘Make Believe’, which in this context is a full-contact, no-holds-barred version of visualizing. So, start creating. Keep creating. Don’t stop believing creating. If you’re an engineer like me, and you enjoy abstract things like system diagrams, then there’s always gotta be an arrow pouring out of the block that is the system of you.

Outputting takes time and energy and focus. The opportunity cost is inputting. This is reading stuff, watching stuff, and generally ingesting stuff that is not directly related to outputting. Want more time to create? Spend less time watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on Netflix and reading the New York Times. (You come up with your own version, this one is for me.) Thus, I announce a media fast, for myself. No reading fun blogs or news, very little Facebooking, no Netflix. This’ll give me the chi to work on this blog, creating music, and otherwise working on my Sprint Backlog. Reduce input… increase output. Makes sense, right? (Yes, to ‘output’ feels clumsy to reuse as a verb, but I feel it is generic and abstract enough to cover whatever lifestyle we’re ultimately after; plus, it lends itself to an easy opposite to deal with, ‘input’, unlike to ‘create’. “Spend more time creating and less time… destroying.” Nope. Misses the point.)

What I’ve noticed via continued output, specifically sticking to the discipline of cranking out two posts a week for this blog, is that I find this is getting easier. I feel like my blogging skill is becoming refined. I’m finding my voice. When I started this, I worried I’d run out of things to say; however, through continually outputting, I’ve found I’m evolving this idea of ScrumOfOne. This activity feels better to me, which I take as a good sign.

Always Be Outputting – think of this as your personal version of Always Be Closing.

Death And Manure And A Microphone

I’ve recently been getting into Alan Watts, an English philosopher who has a lot of Eastern-styled wisdom to share to Western audiences. And he does it so well since he’s studied both, having written books on Zen and having been an Episcopal priest. And then he’s got that British accent, so, c’mon, anything you say with a British accent is basically truth. He’s essentially unstoppable, with a lot of his lectures on YouTube.

One quote of his that recently caught my fascination was the following:

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death. To observe skulls and skeletons and wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up – never! That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.

David DeAngelo talks about this in one of the deeper sections of his DVD program, ‘On Being A Man’. By embracing the fact that your own death can happen, doesn’t that give you another view on life? Doesn’t that re-prioritize what you plan on doing today? All that stuff you’re worried about or that annoys you on a day-to-day basis, kinda small potatoes in comparison, no? It’s small stuff. Or, as my former supervisor would put it:

Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff.

Thus, I went to RadioShack and bought a microphone.

Clarity And Courage

I’m telling ya, last Sunday’s Corner Office column in the New York Times covered some good ground. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner was interviewed, and the first question is always about learned lessons in leadership. To this, he responds with a very Scrum-y principle: prioritization. He talks about his time at Yahoo, when Jerry Yang just became CEO:

True prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could do only one thing, what would it be? And you can’t rationalize the answer, and you can’t attach the one thing to some other things. And I was struck by the clarity and courage of his conviction.

I have not thought of prioritization in this light: clarity and courage. The ‘clarity’ part, I understand; picking out what is more important than others does require a refined vision, either an ultimate outcome or a chosen path. It is clarity of not only direction, but also values, the rationale for choosing one over another. You have to answer to at least yourself for making these choices, and thus in making these decisions, you are taking responsibility, which can entail courage. Hmmm… so the very act of deciding takes courage, since every action has an opportunity cost.

The opposite of prioritization is NOT making decisions and then living off the decisions made by others. Responsibility becomes shifted onto somebody else. Laissez-faire is neither courageous nor clear.