Life Is Like A Burrito

You go to a party. You chat up the peeps. You talk small-talk: the weather, them Yankees, the Ebola virus. You are offered a shot. You take it: yarrghthhpffft. You then ask what was in it: cheap stuff. You are asked what you do for a living. You take note of the crowd. You make a decision.

You lie.

Face it. Saying you’re a biomedical engineer results in one of two things. With the right crowd, you’ll get into a discussion about biomechanics, tissue engineering, fascinating research, genetics, medical devices that measure your heart rate and how much oxygen you have in your blood and go ‘beep’, the latest biomedical thing you read online that’s hot, weird, funky, and/or cool. With the left crowd, you get a face of feigned, short-term interest, “Oh, cool…”

So, you lie.

You say your major was biomedical engineering and that you went to grad school for more pain – I mean – biomedical engineering. Now you work for Taco Bell. Taco Bell MSG. The Taco Bell Motivational Speaking Group. You take note of the crowd. You take note of the faces of incredulousness, raining confusion upon you, sprinkled with intrigue. You compare this to faces of feigned, short-term interest: this is better.

You explain to them that not too many people know about this group, besides the tight circle of motivational speakers, and that’s how you like it. You step them through what you are first taught, affectionately called the Central Little Dogma. You deliver this while channeling your inner Antonio Banderas. You step them through Antonio Banderas: rrroll yourrr ‘R’rrrs, rrremove all yourrr dipthongs, have all yourrr vowehls vehrrry clee-ehrrr, ahnd weespehrrr VEHRRRY LAH-OODLY. AH YEHSS.

You lay it on them thick, you charming devil, you.

Life is like a burrito. Life is like a burrito where you have full control of what you put inside your burrito. You can put in the tastiest components, the most delicious ingredients. Or, you can put in shit. It is up to you. You have full control of what you put inside your burrito. Now, it is not only important what you put inside your burrito, how much and the quality, but it is also important who you share your burrito with. For just as you may be having some burrito of that special somebody, you must think about the burrito you yourself will be sharing.

You stop here. You take note of the crowd. You take note of the giggles: this is good, this is better than faces of feigned, short-term interest. You are into it. You are in the zone. You can go on. You can go on because this lie is just so damn fascinating and saturated with silliness: perfect for parties, perfect for… life.

You will undoubtedly have somebody believe you, you charming devil, you.

You will undoubtedly start to believe yourself.

Listen To Your Body

I was on vacation for the first half of the last sprint. For the second half, I powered through stories worth more points than I’ve done in a full sprint! But I almost didn’t.

I have this beautiful desk that was effectively inaccessible due to suddenly stackable mounds of stuff on top of and below my bastion of productivity – so you should now get a sense of the fire under my butt to make the space more livable. After work, I’d come home and attack post-move remnants of chaos – the refugee motif is charming for only so long. Every square inch of recovered surface was a win, an emotion stackable in its own sense, like the points of complete stories I was racking up through the week back.

Steamrolling towards a vision of a home where I’m not stepping over a box, I couldn’t help but notice competing motivations. My own medicine was dangerous: seeing progress in physical form and especially on a burn down chart was contagious. Although I was eating and resting enough, I felt like I was still running on fumes: fumes of will power. With blinders on, my body was trying to get a word in, edge-wise:

Dude, veg out.

“Don’t be weak!” I scolded myself, “Marvel at all this reconquered space!”

Dude, you suck. I require a break.

“Don’t be weak,” I whispered to myself through my teeth as I carried on. Yet, who was I kidding? I just wasn’t as efficient. You’d think this concept of taking a break is a no-brainer, but when you’re driven, slowing down represents a step in the wrong direction.

Unnecessarily long story short, I took a breather, recharged will power, and started back up again at a decent clip. This a great example of an idea in Scrum and moral of the story: work at a sustainable pace. So listen to your body and don’t get to the point where you’re body is talking to you in italics.

Dude, thank you.

You’re welcome.

Experiences, Not Possessions

This is what I’ve been saying for a long time! A really really long time! As long as I can remember! Like, ever since I could speak! Ever since I was able to utter utterances of glorious spittle and idful vowels! Back wh-

I’ve invested time in learning the most efficient ways to spend money to increase my marginal happiness. http://www.bakadesuyo.com/8-ways-that-money-can-buy-happiness-34746 gives a good overview, but the main point is to buy experiences, not possessions. I own very few things, but have many experiences.

The folks at Business Insider must be doing something right, ’cause I’m getting a lot of my news from them nowadays. The above is from their article ‘What It Feels Like To Be Absolutely Loaded By Age 25‘, where somebody made it big by being an early employee at a successful company, and now makes a living authoring the halfth-world reality to first-world ponderers. Or has somebody do it for him. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Stop arguing. The point is, when I make purchases, usually larger ones with some sentimental value, I don’t view it as a sunk cost, but rather an investment in a memory. (The ladies love hearing that shit. Try it sometime. Girl, you know it’s true…)

The article raised a fun scenario, where this rich dude says he’s pursuing things that money can’t buy. You don’t need crazy amounts of money to access things invaluable.

Isn’t that a relief?

What Are Questions?

Riding the T home from work, surrounded by Red Sox fans and other fellow Massholes, I find a strategic spot in the train car where I can stand lookin’ all cool ‘n’ stuff and read blog posts on my wikked smaaht phone in relative peace, tucked away from the ebb and flow of baby carriages, clueless tourists staring at the Green Line map, fresh college freshmen wearing their lanyards like an Olympic medal, and seasoned locals who are plugged in and tuned out.

That’s when my head explodes.

There is a mess. It’s fugly. I’m rather embarrassed. Lucky for me, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, plus one eggs-pert, put me back together again. I had some ‘splaining to do. I told the team of onlookers teeming with curiosity and gore that I had just read a literally mind-blowing blog post. Consider this the lit fuse to the detonating words that made it rain white- and grey-matter like a spontaneous rainbow, a weather event unnaturally left out of the Metro. I apologize in advance.

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.

…

…

Hi again. Sorry to do that to ya. So now that you’re back, let’s talk about this.

I got this gem, entitled ‘What are questions?‘, from the Signal vs. Noise blog by 37signals. Think of all the answers that are bouncing off your now-duct-taped mind. If you’re not asking the right questions, you won’t be ready to appreciate the right answers, even if they’re being flung at you. Likewise, sudden ideas and opportunistic openings in life can’t be seen in a fruitful light if you don’t have the intention to get your ScrumOfOne stories to done.

So, ask the question. Actively intend to move along your very own life vector. That’s when the answers, that may be already in front of you, will stick.

Sorry for the splitting head(…ache). I’m sure you’ll agree ’twas worth it.

Your Power Hour

Some people are night owls. Other people are early birds. I people am not a fowl of any kind, thank you very much. (However, I am a male seahorse named Spikey, but that’s a different story…)

Do you ever get that jolt of inspired activity, where you suddenly want to do this thing and then you do it? Well, capture the nature of that jolt and ask yourself if you have a time of day where you’re likely to be as productive, relative to this jolt. This is your Power Hour! Now, apologize to yourself for asking yourself another question, then ask yourself: When is your Power Hour?

For me, if I can plop myself in front of a computer from the moment I wake up, I am super productive. Also, between 8:30 and 9:30 before my first meeting seems to be when I get lots of stuff done. Such times are usually ones where I am least prone to interruption and have a strict deadline. In the latter example, that Power Hour ends with the morning Scrum at work, whereas in the former example, that Power Hour ends when I start getting hungry. These are moments of sheer focus and Matrix-like clarity.

These times of day may not happen every day, but I wager that more often than not, much like for night owls and early birds, there is a time of day where you’re naturally more efficient. If you don’t know this for yourself, find it, even if it is by process of elimination, e.g., you’re useless after dinner or before your third cup of coffee.

After determining your Power Hour (and this is more a time of day than a strict 60 minutes), think about which tasks/stories you would want to have done during this time. Also, think about this somewhat physiological logistic when setting the day’s game plan during the Scrum. Besides prioritizing to work with your natural inclinations, this visualizing of getting a set of things done during that magical time feeds the good kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, and I’ll take a positive feedback loop like this whenever I can.