Category: outside resource

Let’s Discuss Your Tombstone

Don’t think of it as morbid, but rather, an opportunity for everlasting graffiti! If you don’t want a tombstone, then for purgatory’s sake, please just play along.

In this scenario, we have words, literally etched in stone, associated with the remains of your body. Hence, much like pondering your legacy, let’s consider the few words associated with you. For a while, I wanted:

What does not kill you,
Only makes you stronger,
But what does kill you,
Only makes you dead.

The range of reactions to this spans from laughter to corn fusion confusion to head-tilted grimaces of condescension from an over-exerted yet lame attempt at wit. That last reaction is complex, but I pick up on all of it.

Lately, I’ve liked the following, from ‘Express Yourself‘ by Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band:

It’s not what you look like,
When you’re doin’ what you’re doin’,
It’s what you’re doin’, when you’re doin’,
What you look like you’re doin’.
Express yourself.

Funky, right? Just like the song. It was the first tune I starred when I started Spotify. I happen to really like this message; I feel power in it.

So, what are you doin’? And would you want it on your tombstone?

How To Be An Animal

My sweetheart recently got me a book: How To Be A Man, A Guide to Style and Behavior for the Modern Gentleman by Glenn O’Brien. She knows I’m into this stuff, and found me a winner. (MUSHY ALERT!) Of course, I’ve already found me a winner.

The third chapter (they’re all bite-sizedly enjoyable) is entitled ‘How To Be An Animal’, wherein he mentions a very small set of things we as animals should get down, one of which is…

Getting enough sleep is essential. If God meant us to wake up at a certain time, he would have given our brains an alarm clock. (Oh wait, he did.) Sure you can get by on less sleep, but perchance to dream?

This is another sleep post (hm, exactly 11 months later). At least I’m more conscious (ha!) of how much less energetic I’ve been on the train rides back home as of late, and how I’m more often opting in to being an American that runs on Dunkin’. Entonces, ¡no mas! Time to bust this habit by creating a new habit to get at least 7 hours of sleep 4 times a week.

Sad to get to this point? Sure. And this is as good a time as ever to be a better animal.

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.