Figure out (and remember) your "Why"

This is the second in a (currently) three-part series on the theme of getting down to work.  Check out the first post here

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In the first post of this series, I wrote about the work that I need to do, how I often don’t do it, but deep down I know the solution to get more work done.  It may not be easy, but it is simple.

So, why?  Why do we want to focus on our work and get more done?

I have begun getting up a bit earlier, so I can focus on writing when the house is quiet.  Why do I want to do this?  Why do I feel the need to do this early in the day, when everyone is sleeping?

Merlin Mann coined the term “productivity pr0n” years ago in reference to all of the resources online regarding productivity optimization.  It is so easy to go down the rabbit hole, and after 4 hours of watching (and re-watching) old Matt D’Avella or Thomas Frank videos to think, “Damn!  I’m so ready to go be productive now!”

…

“Just one more video…”

Or to go down the Gary Vee rabbit hole and think, “I can go to garage sales and sell this stuff on Ebay and make a fortune!”  But then end up tired from simply observing Gary’s hustle.

I’m not going to be Gary Vee, I know that much.  That’s not the life I want.

But I want to get things done.  I want to write.  I need to write.

I get up a little bit earlier.  The only one missing any time here is me from sleep.  That is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

I think a lot about productivity and optimization.  I strive to use my time well, but as I have gotten older, I have come to learn that time is far and away my most valuable resource.  I want to make the most of it.  But I am not interested in optimizing my time in such a way, getting so much accomplished, that I miss time with my wife and kids.

I read the final article posted on Merlin Mann’s website, 43folders.com – in which he talked about how he was spending so much time writing about and attempting to optimize productivity in his own life and for others, that he was missing out on actually living his life with his wife and daughter.

I’ll try to learn this lesson from his life, rather than having to learn it for myself.

There is important work to be done.  No doubt about it.  And there is time to get it done.  No doubt about that either.  It will take some sacrifice.  But what is acceptable to sacrifice?  For me, sacrificing a little bit of sleep is worth it.  That may give me the time that I need in order to work on the projects I want to work on, while still fulfilling my obligations to work and more importantly, not taking time away from my family.

I began writing about how deep down, I know the answer of how to get more time to focus on writing – get up earlier, when the house is quiet.  Of course, the second day I was writing, my 6-year-old came upstairs before I could even open the computer, looking for the Elf on a Shelf.  It was frustrating.  Doesn’t she know that this is my time???

Hence this post.  Writing about opportunities for productivity and optimization isn’t my important work.  Being the best husband and dad I can be is.  Part of that is processing things through writing.  But a bigger part is spending the time and being involved.

Some days, I will get up early and be able to write.  Other days, I’ll share in the excitement of a 6-year-old searching the house for the Elf on a Shelf.

Yes, I need to work.  I need to write.  But the point of this post is to encourage you to figure out your “why,” and once you do, make sure you remember it.  When your “why” interrupts your work, make sure your priorities are in line with what is truly important to you.

The point is not to blow off work to play with my kids.  But just to remember that they are my “why.”  If something takes me away from that “why,” then I need to reevaluate and reprioritize.  Some mornings, my kids will wake up early and just need me to be “Daddy.”  Nothing is more important than that.

I can always write more tomorrow.

Why is it so hard to get things done?

This is a bit of a follow up to a post from about 9 months ago.

For most of this year, we have collectively had nothing but time. We should all have gotten so much done, but have we?

I don’t know about you, but my list is still pretty substantial. And it's not like it’s big stuff either. Replace an outlet, replace some light switches, do some push-ups, fix the toilet seat. None of these things should take more than 15 minutes to complete

There’s always tomorrow

At least it feels that way.

I know other places in the country are not as closed down as we are here in Minnesota - nowhere to go, nothing to do.

What difference does it make if we push tasks to tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to look an awful lot like today.

But that’s the problem - there is no guarantee of tomorrow.

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

— Marcus Aurelius

There is no guarantee of tomorrow. So why put off what you have to do?

find important things to do

What does it matter if the closet doesn’t have knobs? It is easy enough to bend down and pull the door open from the bottom.

The outlet still works, even if it’s not perfect.

Those dishes can wait.

This is just one part of my list.

None of these seem important in and of themselves, but they are all there, hanging over me. How many things are left undone because they don’t feel like they are important? But how long does it take for the sink to smell just a little off after not doing the dishes?

How hard is it to be in a good mental space to work on the things that are important to you if you are not in a good physical space?

I have gotten a number of projects done in the garage recently, but before that was possible, the garage had to be cleaned. Space had to be made.

We can quickly feel overwhelmed by all of the little tasks in front of us. There can be so many that we look at them and feel like accomplishing any individual one will make no difference. And we’re right. It usually won’t.

But what if you make a decision to take care of 3 of those little tasks each day?

How quickly will all of those little tasks go away. If you do 3 each day, you’ll accomplish over 1,000 tasks in a year. That’s not nothing.

But, there has to be more than just small household chores and tasks to do. Find something important that you want to work on. Give yourself a reason to get those little things done - to free yourself up to focus on the important things.

You should always be doing something, but don’t always be doing something

I was looking through some thoughts I’d written in my phone back in May.

The gist of it was that you should always have something that you are working on, but don’t always have to be working on it.

Have a project, something on which you can progress. But you don’t have to spend every waking moment on it.

When the work is done, it is ok to sit back and enjoy a book and a whisky by the fire, if that’s your thing. Sometimes it is good to put it all down and simply be. Rest. Find stillness amidst the chaos.

There is always more work to be done. We will never accomplish it all. It’s a little bit like knowledge - the more you know, the more you realize how little you know. The more you get done, the more you realize how much more there is to do.

One of my favorite terms I use is “directionally right.” Make sure you are progressing, that you are “directionally right.”

You don’t have to fill every available moment with work for your time to be well-spent. Gary Vee’s life is not the life for me, and I know that.

Earn the rest. Earn the stillness. Earn the Netflix on the couch. But don’t make those things your whole life.

But they are easy. It is easy to push little things to tomorrow and big things even further. But we’ve been home for 9 months, and still don’t know when we will get back to a sense of normalcy. How much have you not done in that time?

Get directionally right. You don’t have to do it all today, but do something. Start knocking the little things off of your list and figure out the big things that are important to you. Break those big things down into little things, and get to work.

Some changes

Having a nice camera and a website with “photography” in the name does not make one a photographer.

It was a nice run.  But I am making some changes.

Aaron Emery Photography is going away.  In its place will be aaronemery.net.  That seems more fitting.

The site was rarely about photography, and I haven’t really done much with photography since the photo booth for my sister-in-law’s high school graduation party, which was 3.5 years ago.  A few photo sessions with our kids, and my brother-in-law’s senior photos, but I never worked to grow it as a business, and subsequently, the business never grew.

Instead, I used the site to wax philosophical about kids, stoicism, and life.

Dropping the pretense that this was a photography business website feels better.  It feels more honest.

I’ve long heard that having a personal website is a good idea, even if you don’t use it for much.  That’s how I had been using aaronemeryphotography.com.

I’ll continue to use the website as a blog, to work on my writing, to discuss stoicism, kids, life, or whatever else happens to be on my mind.  I’ll also use it to show off the projects we are working on as Abbie and I endeavor to make and build things.  And yes, if I manage to get off my ass and charge my camera batteries, may even try my hand at some photography.

I always felt pressure related to the photography website not being used for photography.  To be honest, I felt like a bit of a fraud.  I hope some of that pressure will now be relieved.

While minor, these changes are already impacting my mindset.  As I no longer feel a thought in the back of my mind that I should be doing more with photography, I am free to write about whatever I want.  I know I was doing that before, but there was always some hesitation that I wasn’t focusing enough on photography.

So, there you have it.  Some changes are coming to the website.  You will still be able to find me at aaronemeryphotography.com for now, but that domain will be retired at the next renewal.  From today, moving forward, it will simply be aaronemery.net.

Simple, not easy - and deep down, you already know it

As I have been writing over the past couple of days, I have been working on a theme of getting down to work. It has taken me in a couple different directions and is turning into (as of right now) maybe a three-part series, beginning with this post.

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I got back to work after an 11-day vacation over Thanksgiving. The vacation was not quite what we had initially planned. We have had to postpone our trip to visit family in Alabama due to Covid, as I’m sure many others did.

With restaurants, sports, indoor activities all closed until at least December 18 in Minnesota, we haven’t had much to do. We still got a lot done - deep cleaning of the house, set up Christmas, got the garage mostly cleaned, did a bunch of reading, some all-around good R&R time with the kids.

Yet, after 11 days, not going on our trip, not doing anything particularly noteworthy, I have this lingering feeling that I wasn’t very productive over that time. Sure, I went back to work fairly refreshed for a change, but I didn’t produce anything.

I may have written in my journal twice over that time, and didn’t write for the blog at all.

I learned that even when I have time home with no work beyond some chores around the house which can easily be spread out - it is still virtually impossible to find the time during the day to work on the projects I say I care about - like this blog - especially when the kids are home.

So, what is the solution?

It is simple. But it’s not easy. Deep down, I know exactly what the solution is.

Get up a little bit earlier.

My 7-year-old is now able to wake up and get ready all on her own. The 3-year-old, not so much, but she at least regularly sleeps until 6:30-7:00a. The early morning is one of the rare moments in the day that my house is quiet. The time is there.

If I don’t want to take away time in the evenings spent with Abbie and the kids, then I have a pretty simple solution - just get up earlier.

It’s simple, really. A 3-word solution: “Get up earlier.” But that certainly isn’t easy. Even today I didn’t do it. Though I made a deliberate effort to open up the computer and write after I did get up.

For me, I need to write. To facilitate that, I already knew, deep down, what I needed to do.

What work do you need to do? What is keeping you from it? The solution of how to get to work is likely a simple one, and if you think about it for any amount of time, it will be there in the back of your brain, needling you, until you start doing it.

Please share your simple solutions in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading

The Irony of a Job Well Done

I walked into the house, up the stairs, across the living room, into the kitchen to put some groceries away.

“Oh, he did paint!” Abbie said to me.

Even though it is literally one of the first things you see when you walk into our house, I had completely missed that the wall along the stairs had been painted. When we left the house on Friday, it had merely been primed white and was a total eye sore. On Sunday, we were home and I didn’t even notice it.

That’s the irony of a job which is well-done.

It will often go unnoticed, unless you are specifically looking for it.

This was a job, well done. But it just looked how it was supposed to look, so it didn’t immediately catch my eye.

Data Science Capstone Project

For the past few months, I have been working through Coursera’s Professional Data Science Certification. As part of the final Applied Data Science Capstone project, I studied thousands of car accidents in Seattle to determine if I could reliably predict the severity of a car accident under certain conditions.

After importing all of the Python libraries I needed and reading the CSV data into a pandas dataframe, I began the data analysis by checking the value counts and percentages of the severity codes. I also confirmed that the severity description amounts matched the severity codes.

There were multiple columns with data about accidents that occurred. As I was focusing on the predictive value of the data, I selected columns that could be known before an accident occurred - LIGHTCOND, WEATHER, and ROADCOND. While examining the data, it was clear that accidents involving speeding, under the influence, and even address types (Alley, Block, Intersection) could all have substantial impacts on the severity of an accident, none of those could be known until AFTER an accident occurred. Therefore, their predictive values were severely limited.

As the goal was to predict the severity, I settled for the data points that could potentially be known before the accident occurs. For example, if road conditions are dry and the weather is overcast, you can potentially use that to predict the likelihood or severity of an accident.

Visualizing the data helps to see if there are any trends.

Light conditions grouped by collision type

Road conditions grouped by collision type

Weather conditions grouped by collision type

Light, road, and weather conditions were all dominated by a couple of results. I made note of this.

I used this data to create train/test splits to train various machine learning models - K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines (Kernels - Sigmoid and RBF), a Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression.

After checking the first K-Nearest Neighbors model, I decided to check if there could be any value gained from consolidating some of the data. For example, light conditions had 9 possible results. But, about 85% of all accidents were in either Daylight or Dark - Street Lights On. Instead of leaving 9 results, with essentially a bunch of outliers, I combined all of the others into one option, leaving only 3 lighting options.

I did the same for weather (11 down to 4) and road (9 down to 3) conditions.

I re-ran the KNN model, with somewhat better results.

I calculated various metric scores to determine which model provided the best predictive value

These results were not very promising. None of the models did a very good job of predicting injuries at all.

All told, in the test set, there were 17,018 injury accidents.

In the KNN model, 22 injury accidents were correctly predicted.

In the SVM - Sigmoid model, 1,956 injury accidents were correctly predicted.

SVM - RBF, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression all predicted 0 injuries. Period. Not even incorrectly! Every single accident was predicted to be property damage only.

Given the imbalanced nature of the data set, it is best to not be misled by the relatively high binary F1 scores of 82+, and rely more on the weighted F1 scores, where SVM - Sigmoid comes in with the highest - a relatively unimpressive 59.97.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that this dataset does not particularly lend itself to predictive accuracy. That does not mean, though, that there is nothing to be learned from the data.

It does appear that there is a higher likelihood of injury when accidents occur in seemingly ideal conditions - daylight, clear weather, and dry roads. Perhaps this is because of a general comfort driving under those conditions.

Maybe when there are poor driving conditions, people are more careful, slower, resulting in higher instances of property damage. At the same time, the numbers are not wildly skewed. Under daylight conditions, an injury accident is a few percentage points more likely than the base rate on all of the accidents surveyed.

There are potential opportunities for further exploration, but those go beyond the scope of this project.

What are you learning?

I have said before that we all have a great opportunity to come out of this situation better than we went into it.

So what are you learning?

You could learn a computer programming language.

Learn a spoken language.

Learn a skill.

Learn a craft.

What are you learning?

I, for one, am continuing work on a data science certification on Coursera (not sponsored).

Abbie also started teaching me how to crochet.

So, what are you learning in this time?

Stay healthy out there (or better yet, in there)

Try a new approach

Just before we were all forced into “quarantine” with self-isolation and stay-at-home orders, I had received an email from Amazon about a book on my wish list which was available for $1.99 on Kindle - ironically, I did buy the e-book of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

Coupled with recently reading Brian Grazer’s Face to Face, it seemed like a great time to take at least some break from the technology that seems to dominate our lives.

And then “stay at home,” “self-isolation,” and “social distancing” become three of the most common phrases we hear.

Facebook messenger had a great app for kids to be able to connect and play games with each other, since they’re going equally as crazy being cooped up, like the rest of us.

People are finding all sorts of ways to connect with one another from a distance. Zoom-fueled happy hours where everyone gets together for an online meeting and their drink of choice - spending time together without being together.

I think that’s amazing.

People are staying remarkably connected in a time of isolation and distance.

That’s a new approach to happy hour.

So why not try a new approach to other things? Do a Zoom (if that’s the correct jargon) or Google Hangout (in all honesty, I’ve never used Zoom and have only heard that it’s being used to spy on us, so that’s the extent of my experience with it) and play a board game with some friends.

After college, a group of us used to play poker at a local bar, until we realized that if we all wanted to play together, we should just go to one of our apartments and play poker. This was our Thursday night tradition for years. As we all got better jobs, moved further away, and had kids, it is no longer “Thursday Night Poker,” but instead, more like “Once, Maybe Twice a Year, Poker.”

So I had an idea. I thought of stories of people playing chess by mail and started thinking about what I could do to interact with a bunch of the old poker buddies.

I dealt out 9 poker hands, a flop, turn, and river, and texted 9 of the guys from our formerly-regular poker game.

Welcome to the COVID-19 2020 Quarantine Text Message Poker Invitational

I’m acting as the tournament director, and running a single-table tournament for a bunch of friends who can’t otherwise get together. We started on Friday. It’s now Sunday, and we have dealt the flop on hand number 3. Needless to say, it’s a slow-moving game. But it got 10 of us hanging out, albeit via a text message thread.

Try a new approach to something old. You might just have some fun with it, and connect with people in ways you never realized you could in the current situation.

It’s like the higher ups at work said in some of our all-company calls in the past few weeks - have fun. There’s a whole lot of negativity out there right now, but we can still find ways to have some fun.

What will you do?

I hope this post finds you well.

We are living in strange times.

I began writing this post last weekend, and it’s amazing how much has already changed.  All the way back on Sunday, I was writing about how the zoo was closed and the recommendation was to not go to the gym, so Jiu Jitsu was out.  I can now update that to, “Pretty much everything everywhere is closed.”

The governor of California has instructed everyone to stay home.  The same in New York.

So, what will you do?

I am so grateful that Abbie and I are both able to work from home, and I recognize that not everybody has that ability in these trying times.

Obviously, nobody knows how long this is going to last.  So, what are you going to do with the next 2, 4, or 8 (or more) weeks at home with very little else to do?

Having a computer or smart phone with internet access gives you virtually endless options.

You could start (or finish) that book you’ve always been meaning to – either reading or writing.

You can clean your home.  If you’re going to be there for awhile, why not make it the best space it can be?

You can finish that project that has been staring you down every single time you set foot in the garage (like I did – see pictures below).

Learn a new skill

Start doing body-weight exercises.

The options are virtually limitless.

Don’t just sit around bitching about how much everything sucks because you can’t go anywhere.  There’s nothing fun going on pretty much anywhere in the world right now.  FOMO is gone, because there is nothing on which you can miss out.

There are people out there who are taking this time to set themselves up for the future.  Be one of those people.  While you have nothing else going on, work on yourself.  Work on those things that you always wanted but felt you never had the time to start.

And wash your hands!

Why not finish those projects that are “nearly done"?

Maybe it's you

I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m a fan of Seth Godin. I check out his blog almost daily, and if not, I stay caught up at least every few days.

Some days, he has long, in-depth blog posts. On others, it’s just a few lines of something to think about.

Earlier this week, he wrote a post called the ones who disagree with you. He makes 5 brief points about why people might disagree with you, but then ends by saying, “Or it could simply be that they disagree with you.” No deeper reason. It doesn’t have to be that they are uninformed or controlled by demons; it could simply be a disagreement.

I re-read this post this morning, and had a thought…

There are countless reasons why people could disagree with you, well beyond the 5 or 6 that Seth listed.

A big one, though -

Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re wrong.

It's hard!

“Jiu Jitsu is hard."

Devin and I started Jiu Jitsu this week. Well, she started. I’m coming back after about a two and a half year hiatus.

She told Coach Jason that some of the things they were learning were hard. And he responded, “Jiu Jitsu is hard.”

Damn straight!

It’s hard. It sucks sometimes.

And that’s good.

Like David Goggins says, “Do something that sucks every day.” And once that gets too easy, do something else that makes you uncomfortable. It strengthens your mind.

When you know that you can do one thing that is hard, there is no reason you can’t do the next hard thing.

Jiu Jitsu IS hard. Being uncomfortable DOES suck. But there are some major benefits.

Opportunities for reflection

It’s that time of year again – the end of one, the beginning of another.  The end of a decade, even.

At the same time, it’s just Wednesday.

But it’s only “just Wednesday,” if we treat it that way.

In the past, I have looked at New Year’s in this way – that it’s just an arbitrary day, no different than any other. I have looked at it, and the notion of New Year’s resolutions with some level of disdain.

I realize now that this misses a great opportunity to reflect on our lives right now.

I’ve been trying to figure out where this feeling comes from – that New Year’s is just some arbitrary distinction with no inherent value – and I think it’s from the notion that you can actually reflect back on your life, you can institute changes in your habits and actions at any time.  You don’t have to wait until January 1.

Recently I was listening to an episode of The Liturgists podcast when Pete Holmes was the guest.  He said something that really resonated with me:

“You are under no obligation to be the person you were 15 seconds ago”

— Pete Holmes - The Liturgists Podcast

Everybody knows the joke (well, observation) that on January 1, the gyms will be packed, but by March 1, they’ll be back to “normal.”  It’s easy to then look at New Year’s and say, “See?  Completely arbitrary.”

But taking time to reflect on where you have been, where you are, and where you are going is a good thing.  Ideally, it is a practice that is more frequent than once a year, but once a year is better than nothing.

I wanted to share a couple of practices that I try to do regularly to reflect on where things are in my life.

First, just under two years ago, I began a daily-ish practice of journaling.  I have found immense value in this.  I do a modified version of the Bullet Journal.  I have a couple of pages I use as a 6-month overview where I put major events that are upcoming for quick reference.  Each month, I also create a page as a calendar with a to-do list of major things I hope to accomplish that month.  A couple of months ago, I also began a “Habit Tracker” page where I have 10 boxes for each day, with 10 habits I am working on for the given month (more on the habit tracker in a bit).

Aside from those pages, I jot down thoughts, events, and tasks to do throughout the day.  I start each day on a new page (sometimes they go a couple of lines, sometimes they go multiple pages).  Each day I start with 3 bullet points of things for which I am thankful.  I want to start each day by putting myself in a proper mindset – one of gratitude.  Some days I am simply grateful for coffee or a quiet day at the office.  Other days, it is deeper, like my daughters curling up with me on the couch watching a movie, or just their laughs.

After that I just write whatever is on my mind.  Maybe there is something big going on in my life, and I want to be able to look back and see what I was thinking in the moment.  I can look back and see how my own thoughts developed over time.  I can see when things happened, how events played out.

The journal has a finite number of pages.  It provides a natural point for reflection as I come to the end of one and begin another.  I finished one a couple of weeks ago, and I had 240 pages, roughly 8-9 months over which I could look back and see all that had happened.  We had trips, weddings, funerals.  Devin finished preschool and started Kindergarten.  So much happened.

But on the flip side, I can also see the unfinished projects (and let’s be honest – the unstarted projects), undeveloped ideas.  There is value in reflecting on these as well.

In reflecting on life, there is definitely value in stepping back to see the bigger picture – whether that is a 9-month journal or the beginning of a new year.

Ideally, for me, I am also taking time every day to reflect, and if I’m doing it right – recalibrate.

A second thing I have been doing, as mentioned before, is a habit tracker.  Each month I set up a new page, with a line for each day.  On each line I have 10 boxes of various habits or systems I am working to implement in my life.  For example, this month I have:

1. Read Bible

2. Code

3. Write

4. Journal

5. Lecture/Sermon/Audiobook/Podcast (basically some kind of learning)

6. 75 pushups

7. Cook a meal at home

8. Shop time (work in my garage workshop)

9. Clean/fix something

10. Meditate

Each day I do one of those, I fill in the box accordingly.

This practice really provides a visualization on a daily level of how I am doing with some specific things I am working on.  If I have a bunch of blank boxes, that sends a strong visual message and I am forced to reflect on how I am prioritizing my time or the systems I am working to instill

There are many levels on which we can reflect on our lives.  Was today or yesterday what I wanted it to be?  What can I do differently today or tomorrow?  Did this month live up to my hopes and expectations?  If I look at my habit tracker, maybe I can get an indication of why it did or didn’t.  Did the last year/decade take me where I wanted to go?  Again, what can I continue?  What can I do differently?

New Year’s may seem like an arbitrary thing – just another Wednesday – but it is only arbitrary if we treat it that way.  Treat it as having value in reflecting on the past year – what was good, what was lacking, where do you want to improve. Use the New Year as a perfect time to begin the habit of reflecting on your life, and it will have value. If you are reading this at some point in the future, nowhere near January 1st, the message still applies.

You don’t need to wait until January 1 to make changes and improvements to your life. Like the Pete Holmes quote above - there is nothing obligating you to be the same person you were when you started reading this post

Happy New Year!

Meaningful work

It seems that deep down, almost all of us want to do meaningful work, but we look at it the wrong way.  We think that meaningful work is work that somehow gives our lives meaning.  As I have thought about this, it seems to be putting the destination ahead of the journey.

How can we expect our work, or the output of our work, to give us any kind of deep existential meaning, if we do not treat the work – the act of doing the work – as having any kind of meaning?

The first step toward finding meaningful work for our lives might just be to discover the meaning in the work that we are doing.  Do not let something outside of you determine how meaningful it is.  Treat every aspect of your work as meaningful, and you will begin to find meaning.

Figure out what works for you

I follow Ryan Holiday and Shane Parrish and they say to read a lot. Read everything. Read everything you can get your hands on.

Then, Seneca says to not read many books, but stick with a few and know them well.

Take notes, keep a “commonplace book” for the wisdom you gain from reading.

Then, Seneca says it is a tragedy for a man's wisdom to be housed in a notebook.

So, what should we do?

Try something.

If it works for you, great! Make an adjustment. If it's better, great! If it doesn’t work for you, try something different.

I think Seneca's point is that quality matters more than quantity. You can read everything, but if you don't internalize it, if you don’t remember it, understand it, it is worthless. Simply memorizing or reciting quotes from somebody else is nothing.

Use what you read, use the people who came before you as a starting point; use them as guides. But as you are walking down the path, if you see a different route, try it. Blaze a new trail.

Make the path your own. Clear the path so others can see and follow it.

Like Seneca says, speak your own message, with authority. No person holds a monopoly on the truth. Be grateful for the wisdom of those who came before, but do not be stuck thinking they have the one and only way.

Figure out what works for you - and then do it

Is that so hard?

“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?”

— Meditations 7.26

It's not your job to hold anyone accountable. That will be handled by life, nature, when they stand before God, however you want to look at it.

No, your job is to do right by them as a person, a person no different from yourself.

Remember to take time to consider why somebody does something, what good or harm they thought would come from it. Consider yourself in their position, but more importantly, from their perspective. Not their perspective with information or insights that YOU might have, but their perspective as they see it.

You might find that you can appreciate where they are coming from, and understand how you might feel and act similarly if you were in there shoes.

And if you still would not choose the path they have chosen, show compassion.

Anger is an incredibly destructive force, to the self most of all.

When you have anger toward another person, the idea of excusing or showing compassion to them seems very, very hard. You convince yourself that to excuse somebody or show them some compassion would be an injustice to the cosmos, when in reality is is only an injustice to your own oversized sense of self-righteousness - your ignorant belief that you are somehow better than them, sitting and observing their situation from afar.

But when you can lay it all aside, and see another person for who and how they are - your equal, in different circumstances - compassion is so liberating. It is so easy. Anger weighs you down. Knowing that you are not doing right by another person weighs you down. These are difficult to carry. These weights are with you everywhere you go.

Until you let them go.

I’ll leave you with one parting thought from Meditations:

“To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human”

— Meditations 7.22

Time to start posting more often

I went about a month last year, posting something new to the blog every day.

I had these visions of emulating Seth Godin, with years and years of daily posts.

And then I missed a day. Then two. And here I am, in the middle of September 2019 with only a handful of posts on the year.

At the beginning of September, inspired by James Clear, I made a habit tracker in my journal. I picked 10 habits that I wanted to work on throughout the month. One of those habits was “Write toward blog post.”

My goal for this month was to foster the habit of opening the blog and writing something. This has forced me to be deliberate in my thinking and my action. I have had to open the Squarespace app, open a new (or working) blog post, and think of something I might share with the world.

But at some point, I need to move beyond simply saving another draft. I need to post, to put my work out for the world to see.

I have also drawn inspiration from Scott Adams and his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

In that book he espouses the view that the important thing to pursue is systems (i.e. habits), not goals.

For now, it is not important for me to have a word- or page-count goal, but instead to foster the habit of daily writing. 13 out of 24 days in September so far is obviously not great, but it’s a step in the right direction.

I’m pretty sure that writing toward the blog each day is going to roll into next month’s habit tracker.

Some pictures for a change

Since this was intended to be a photography website, it’s probably good if I actually post some pictures from time to time rather than pontificating about whatever has been on my mind recently.

Here is another senior portrait session. Again, credit to my amazing wife, Abbie for her work on these pictures in posing and post-production.

If you are in the Eagan, MN area and would like to work with us on some portraits, senior or otherwise, please feel free to contact us here

Thank you, Andrew, for working with us on your senior pictures.

Did you feel that? [or MORE lies that we tell our kids]

“Did you feel that?” I asked as the door closed behind us after we had moved into the next room.

“Feel what?” Devin asked me, confused.

“When we got big again!” I replied.

In fairness, she still looked pretty confused, and Abbie was giving me a confused look as well.

Let me go back…

Last year, I wrote a post about how we lie to our kids, because a world where mermaids exist is a better world to a 4-year-old, than one where mermaids do NOT exist.

I guess we are those parents - you know, the ones who take their daughter to Disney World for her 5th birthday. It was a great trip, and one we had been planning just for Devin ever since Abbie was pregnant with Danica. We wanted a trip where Devin could spend some time with just us, and us to give her our undivided attention.

It was a great trip.

We got pictures and autographs with all sorts of princesses and other Disney characters, and Devin was just loving all of it. Then, I realized an opportunity to really buy into the “Disney magic.”

[Now, I didn’t actually hear any of the castmembers at Disney World say this next part, but I think it was pretty good - you can feel free to use it moving forward - and in return, we’ll gladly take an all-expenses-paid trip back for our whole family…of course I’m kidding…unless that’s a possibility…you can reach me here]

Anyway, before we could go in and see Tinkerbell, one of Devin’s favorites, they brought a few of us into the room before we could meet her. It was pretty dim, and a castmember came out and said we needed to get some pixie dust before we could see Tinkerbell. She waved her arm, and a bunch of LED lights lit up on the wall as though it was pixie dust. We were then led into the next room.

We waited our turn, then Devin talked with her, got some pictures, an autograph, and we kept going.

In the next room, is when I asked Devin if she felt it when she got big again. All of the props in the room were oversized - a giant crayon, some flowers, berries, etc. I just played up that they were regular size, but the pixie dust must have made us small. But then when we walked through the doorway, we got back to normal size.

She was amazed. She ate it up. It added a whole new level to the experience. And it just came to me in that moment. The words were almost flying out of my mouth before I even processed it.

Ever since we got back, she’s been telling everybody how they made us small so we could see Tinkerbell, and then how the same thing happened the next day in Toy Storyland at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. (I basically used the same logic on her the next day, and since she fully bought in before, it made perfect sense to her)

Maybe I should feel bad about lying to my daughter. But I don’t - not about stuff like this. Like I wrote before, there will be plenty of time for her to become as jaded as I can be about so many things. But it sure as hell doesn’t have to happen when she’s 5. I don’t know how much longer she’ll buy into these kinds of things, But it sure seemed like it added to the experience.

To her, she was meeting THE Tinkerbell, not just somebody dressed up as Tinkerbell.

Grief

Why do we grieve?  Who does it benefit?

Does it matter, after the fact, how somebody died?  I have struggled with this question a lot in the past few months.  I think this is also why I haven’t written much lately.  I have been trying to process this.

On October 13, I received a phone call from my uncle that my cousin had committed suicide.  He was 36.

In late October 2017, I received a call from my mom that a former youth leader had stopped to help somebody who had spun out on an icy road when he was hit and killed by another driver who spun out at the same spot.  He was 37.

In each case, a person is gone.  Somebody who was loved by many.

But it feels so different for those of us who remain, doesn’t it?  But why?

Steve’s funeral was a celebration – of a life that, while it ended seemingly too early, could not have gone any other way.  Steve was not the kind of person who could drive past somebody who needed his help.  Steve was a hero, and he was a hero to many people.

Michael’s funeral was one of the most tragic things I have ever attended.  It was a whole lot of people asking, “Why?!?” or saying, “If you had only told me…”

There was so much pain.

There was pain at Steve’s funeral, too.  A wife had lost her husband, children had lost their father.  But there was celebration of the life Steve had lived.  We all may have wondered, “Why?” but we all knew.  That was just who he was.

Like in so many situations, I go back to the stoics.  Marcus Aurelius tells us that, “You could leave life right now.  Let that determine what you do and say and think” (Meditations 2.11).  At any moment, our lives could end.  So could the lives of those whom we love.

When we were in Alabama for Michael’s funeral, I was in the middle of reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.  I was going through, reading one letter each day, taking my time going through it.  During the trip, I happened to read Letter 63, which was very fitting, as it was regarding the unexpected loss of a loved one.

Seneca wrote, “Now I bear it in mind not only that all things are liable to death but that that liability is governed by no set rules.  Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.”

There are stories all over the place of people who died too young.  Just this past weekend, I watched the documentary Senna, arguably one of the greatest drivers in F1 history.  At 34 years old, he crashed.  He did not have a bruise nor any broken bones, but a piece of the car broke off and struck him in the head, killing him.

There are countless other stories.  It could happen at any time.

Seneca understood after the fact that not realizing that reality can make our sorrow that much worse, and that he had not even followed his own advice:

I realize now that my sorrowing in the way I did was mainly due to the fact that I had never considered the possibility of his dying before me.  That he was younger than I was, a good deal younger too, was all that ever occurred to me – as if fate paid any regard to seniority!  So let us bear it in mind that those we are fond of are just as liable to death as we are ourselves.

I think that gets to what hits us so hard about death.  When my uncle called me, Abbie and I were watching a movie.  I didn’t even answer the phone at the time.  He left me a voicemail.  When I listened to it, I could tell something was wrong.  I had never even considered the possibility of what happened before the words were out of his mouth.

I don’t necessarily know how to connect these next few thoughts, but I found them so insightful for dealing with loss:

Our time is limited, and life could end at any moment, for us or for those whom we love.  Seneca wrote, “Let us therefore go all out to make the most of friends, since no one can tell how long we shall have the opportunity.”

This too, shall pass.  “Even a person who has not deliberately put an end to his grief finds an end to it in the passing of time.  I should prefer to see you abandoning your grief than it abandoning you.”

He also wrote about how his loved ones remain with him in his memories of them.  “Let us see to it that the recollection of those we have lost becomes a pleasure to us.  Nobody really cares to cast his mind back to something which he is never going to think of without pain.”

He also has some seemingly harsh comments regarding the proper length of time for grief, but I won’t share those here.  You can look them up for yourselves.  While harsh, though, they do ring true.

So, does it matter how somebody died? In the moment, it is easy to say, “Absolutely!” But once we are removed by a little time, the fact remains that both Michael and Steve are gone, regardless of how.  They were both too young and left behind many who love and miss them.

Since we will carry our memories far longer than we will carry our grief, let’s strive to make our memories a pleasure to us, so we want to keep revisiting them.  The grief will eventually be gone, and it is better to leave our grief behind than to let it leave us.

I am no expert, but it seems natural to ask “Why?” in a lot of these situations.  But I don’t know if it matters after the fact.  We are left with the reality of what is.  Not what we wanted, not what should be, but what is.  How we respond to that reality is up to us, regardless of what put that reality in front of us.  Allow your memories to be good, even in tragic times.  The loss of a loved one is bad enough.  At least they can be with us through our memories.  So, let’s try to allow those memories to be good – to bring us pleasure.

Again, make the most of the time that you have.  It could be gone in an instant.  Let that knowledge determine what you do, say, and think.  Cherish your time with friends and family when they are here, not just when they are gone.

I do not write any of this to make light of suicide. Michael’s funeral was one of the worst things I have ever attended. The amount of pain in that room is indescribable. I can’t imagine the pain Michael was feeling that led to his final decision, but I can only imagine that it paled in comparison to the pain that I witnessed that day and over that weekend. Pain that seems completely unnecessary. If you or a loved one are ever feeling that way, know that you are loved and please seek the help that you need.

On Greatness

A friend at work said, “It’s about time somebody puts the Patriots in their place!”

I responded, “You mean the Super Bowl?”

He didn’t think my response was as funny as I did.  But it got me thinking – do we appreciate greatness?  Particularly in sports, we’d like to think that we appreciate greatness, but do we really?  I don’t think so.

We appreciate sporadic greatness in sports – a highlight play here or there – but when it comes to sustained greatness, there comes a point where we want to see great teams brought down.  The Patriots, the Yankees, Tiger Woods – for the Division III football fans out there, Mount Union or UW Whitewater.  Whenever dynasties have arisen in sports, the sustained success seems to be met with, “Yeah, yeah…we’ve seen this movie before.”

We want to be entertained – and it’s not entertaining if we already know the end.

Probably 10 or 11 years ago, I read a book called The Education of a Coach, by David Halberstram.  Ever since, I have been a big fan of Bill Belichick, and as a result, often find myself in the increasingly unpopular position of rooting for the Patriots in the NFL Playoffs.  I was always a big Peyton Manning fan, so I would always cheer for him, whether with the Colts or Broncos over the Patriots – but I’ve never been upset watching the Patriots extend their string of successes.

We are witnessing perhaps the greatest dynasty – the greatest coach/quarterback duo ever – the likes of which we may never see again.  And the consensus belief is that we’ve seen enough.

Not only do we not appreciate greatness when we see it sustained, year after year, but there is so much vitriol toward it.

And thinking through it, I believe it comes from a combination of tribalism with a healthy serving of schadenfreude.  If my team can’t experience that kind of success, then nobody should!  I am very guilty of this next one – If I can’t have that experience as a fan, I sure as hell don’t want those fans to have it!

I can understand the vitriol toward the Patriots from the Jets, Dolphins, and Bills fans.  I understand that feeling first-hand, as a life-long, long-suffering fan of the Minnesota Vikings.  We truly are a cursed bunch.  Our division rival, the ***** *** ******* (I can’t even type out the name of that wretched team) – has had two successive Hall of Fame level quarterbacks going back almost 30 years.  The list of quarterbacks for the Vikings since 1992…ugh.

But I understand the vitriol.  I hated Brett Favre until he went to the Jets, where I was indifferent about him.  And then I loved it when he came here.  There is not a single highlight from Aaron Rodgers that hasn’t made me cringe unless it is a highlight for the defense – a sack or interception.  Two of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game, and I get irritated by seeing their success.  How messed up is that?!?

So, I understand “hating” the division rivals.  It’s natural.

But the consensus is that we’ve seen enough from the Patriots, and they need to be brought down a peg.  Opening the 2017 season with a blowout loss at home against the Chiefs, I remember so many people cheering the demise of the Patriots.  They went on to lose 3 more games all season, with the final loss being the Super Bowl.

Earlier this season, I saw an article ranking where the current NFL season stood for teams, compared to all seasons (at least since 1960).  After 11 games, at 8-3, the Chicago Bears were having their 5th best season in 59 years.  A top-5 season!  At 8-3, the Patriots were having their 23rd best season.  A top-5 season for some teams is somewhere between middle-of-the-road and disappointing for the Patriots. The Chargers and Texans were also 8-3, which were top-10 franchise seasons for each.

That kind of success is unbelievable.  The Patriots went 12-4 and took the #2 seed, on their way to their 8th consecutive AFC Championship Game.

We are still witnessing one of the greatest sustained runs in the history of the NFL, which we will likely never see again.  Enjoy it while it lasts.  Something that has taken me a long time to understand is that the success of an athlete or team is a truly silly thing to get angry about…

Unless they’re playing against your team, in which case – screw those guys!