Category: analysis

Blogging Break

Hello, Internet. Are you celebrating the Extended Winter Solstice season? You bet your sweet tushie I am, too. So are the Mayans. So are the zombies. So are any number of over-sized monstrosities waiting to wreak havoc on your favorite over-sized metropolis. Enjoy the show. It’s a celebration. (And if you’re waiting for Jesus, don’t hold your breath – that’s happening in 2443, as per Futurama.)

I’m going on a sprint-long (or so) hiatus to finish up deciding on Christmas presents, purchase Christmas presents, wrap Christmas presents, give Christmas presents, receive Christmas presents, unwrap Christmas presents, whinny like a pretty pony with glee grunt like a caveman with cool indifference. This will take a little over a fortnight (or so).

As I look back on this sweet ScrumOfOne blog o’ mine, I grunt with glee (like a cavepony?) at how this writing endeavour has fulfilled one of its requirements, which was to document the evolution of my approach to and focus of ScrumOfOne. Starting over half a year ago, I pushed to publish a post twice a week (or so), where I over time shifted away from the ScrumMaster side of software personal development, to spending time talking about what is the Product Owner arena: setting the vision, prioritizing stories, and balancing a ‘forward’ motion with the flow of life, taking on more Taoist concepts as of late, and most recently reflecting on lectures by life coach Martha Beck.

From here, I have a couple of concepts I can’t quite comfortably reconcile, although MB’s work seems to have given me… an answer? The two thoughts:

  • There is an approach that feels very Western. Scrum talks about taking a vision for your product, or in my spin, your self, and implementing pieces of ‘potentially shipable’ functionality (new things that you are / have / can do) in a prioritized fashion. All this while embracing change (you don’t exist in a vacuum, life happens around you can’t help but interact with it) as well as practices that promote transparency, inspection, and adaptation. I am a Certified ScrumMaster and thus have a decent understanding of this philosophy.
  • There is an approach that feels very Eastern. Taoism talks about the essence of things, how we’re all one, and a bunch of concepts that sound quite deep. Applying some of these to personal development translate to getting out of your own way to discover your essence, and then do that, which will end up being without effort. This is doing without doing, action without action, or wei wu wei.

I am convinced that all the advice we hear about how to live a better, more fulfilling, more ‘successful’, higher functioning life are all facets of the same gem. This is what I’m trying to understand. And then apply. And then share.

I want to live it, to then give it.

There are 20 draft blog posts waiting to be fleshed out, and I can’t wait to dive in. After, of course, a break that will surely be relaxing (or so).

Bag It, Barter It, Better It

The blog title brought a strange sense of levity to me, like a cool, lavender breeze combing away how some things on my to-do list are such a freakin’ drag – ugghghhgghgh! (Yes, that spelling is accurate.)

I got this from life coach Martha Beck (she is damn fun to watch, FYI), and Oprah.com‘s covered it, so that right there is validation for this being a pill of goodness for your wretched little wonderfully fulfilling life.

What you do is take a thing on your to-do list, something you don’t like all too much, preferably something that, when you look at it, makes you sneer with the disgust that matches the subsequent churning in the gut of your gut, producing a little cloud of taupe emotions. You get the picture.

Look this item on your to-do list dead in the eyes. Then tell yourself:

I don’t have to do this. I choose to do this.

Whoa! What’s that? Choice? Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus choice. Unless, of course, that item on your to-do list is something like “remove the plastic bag wrapped around my head”, at which point you have larger issues, and, yes, you have to do this, for your physiological survival to get more things done from your to-do list. From here, decide to bag it, barter it, or better it.

Bagging it means totally scrapping it. To heck with it. Proclaim it unnecessary and heave a sigh of relief as you cross it off that list (some of us get a huge kick out of that simple act of crossing stuff out). This might not always be the best option, but isn’t it nice to contemplate it? What would happen if you don’t do this thing, realistically? Can you handle this? I bet you can. If you can’t, then there’s always…

Bartering it means, well, trading in some way. Can you pay somebody else to do it? Can you get somebody else to do it, and in exchange, you’ll make them an ice cream sundae? With sprinkles and everything? This is an option – you don’t have to do it yourself. Of course, maybe you do, in which case…

Bettering it means – ok, all these words are pretty self-extra-planetaryexplanatory. What can you do beforehand, afterwards, and/or during the completion of the to-do item that’ll just make the whole experience more palatable? Can you eat an ice cream sundae beforehand, snack on Long Island Iced Tea during, then do a victory lap with root beer floats?

You have things on that to-do list. How you do them is up to you. Remember, Virginia, you have choices.

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.