Mindset Matters

Jim Gaffigan has an extremely popular comedy bit centered around the infamous Hot Pocket. He marvels at the engineering feat of creating a food product (using that term loosely, of course) that is scalding hot on the outside yet somehow remains rock solid frozen in the middle. And don’t forget about the indigestion and diarrhea that is sure to follow your meal. Not to mention, Hot Pockets probably cause cancer in the state of California. Although I rarely agree with Jim on his eating habits, I must concur here. Hot Pockets are an absolutely terrible food product. In fact, in a soon-to-be famous conspiracy (that I just made up for this blog about 17 seconds ago), it’s possible the Hot Pocket was invented by North Korea to weaken and soften up Americans for a future invasion. So why do people still buy these things? Because they are microwaveable: quick and convenient. It provides a cheap, fast, but temporary solution (using that term loosely as well) for hunger while delaying t

While I am amazed by and grateful for the advances in modern medicine – after all, I have at least one child who wouldn’t be alive today without those amazing new technologies – I still sometimes feel as though the medical community can easily get caught up in a common trap: treating symptoms and not root problems. Although life expectancies continue to rise, are people really living longer or just dying slower? Medications and treatments can dramatically extend a patient’s life without curing underlying issues. Years are added to life, but life may be absent from those years. This also extends far beyond medicine.   Even for those who are perfectly healthy physically, I believe many are suffering in other ways, settling for an existence not up to par with the life they should be living. Because of the busyness and hectic schedules we all maintain – not to mention the constant barrage of entertainment and distraction – we effectively numb the symptoms of an under-lived life whi

Our thoughts are the roots of our behavior. And our thoughts are not what we know, they are what we think about, dwell on and even tell ourselves. It’s not logic and intellect, it’s conversations inside our heads and on what we choose to focus. Our actions, the fruit, won’t be greater than the roots providing those behaviors nourishment. This seems obvious enough, yet many expect positive, meaningful fruit to come from a compromised root system. They live their lives with negative, caustic thoughts – musings of pessimism, regret, bitterness, envy, doubt, anger and jealousy – and then wonder why their positive actions are short lived. Shallow roots will never support deeps actions. And while some may get the fruit to show up for a while, it’s not sustainable. The behavior will eventually die off. The fruit gradually withers away and rots as the roots bring up poison instead of nourishment. The actions become corrupted and polluted by negative thoughts. Work from the inside

I love the stories of people who work their way up from nothing to build something great or accomplish some phenomenal feat. Someone who seems to have everything against him but overcomes tremendous adversity to succeed in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s the underdog story. We love to hear about the courage of someone who was backed up against the ropes of life and must fight through their circumstances. Someone at rock bottom and the only way out is up. Existing in a living hell, they manage to see hope and follow that light until they have battled their way to a new life. But what if you aren’t walking through hell? What if you can coast through a comfortable, reasonably successful life? What if you aren’t broke, living on the streets and trying to start a company or a social movement because really, you have nothing to lose? What if you have a six-figure income, a house in a nice neighborhood and a cushy lifestyle? Will you risk that to try for something

“Only the mediocre are always at their best.” I’m not sure if he came up with it, or just passed it along, but an old friend shared that quote with me the other day. It’s a simple but profound statement and it encapsulates the temptation of mediocrity: if mediocre is as high as you are planning to go, you can always stay at the top of your game. Mediocrity is consistent. It’s predictable. What worked yesterday will likely work again today. You won’t need to come up with a new, untried solution. You will know what to expect. You’ll still get a trophy. Mediocrity, at least in the moment, is comfortable. You probably won’t get kicked in the teeth trying to innovate a new path or plan. Experimentation is an open door to failure and mediocrity circumvents that door by sticking with the well-worn path and does what the crowd is doing and has always done. You won’t fall flat on your face all alone, because even when you do fail and fall, you’ll fail in and with the crowd. Medi

I’m learning to not take myself too seriously. When I was young, I cared too much about what I thought other people were thinking of me, was too concerned with looking good in the moment and hoped to appear right more than I wanted to good. I missed out on a lot not being able to laugh at myself. I received another lesson in this recently after we moved into our new home. We have entirely too much junk so moving required about four hundred and seventeen thousand moving boxes from Home Depot. We had so many boxes that I’m pretty sure at some point we were just moving in boxes filled with more boxes. And those suckers aren’t cheap either, so we had what probably amounted to at least one of the kids’ college funds invested into all that cardboard. Because of the financial outlay, I didn’t want to waste them after we had moved in and was able to give some of them to a friend who moved the next weekend, but we still had plenty left over and recycling was the next best option.

It’s nearly impossible to passively coast through life. While some may be characterized by being proactive and others as reactive, everyone must choose a fight in which to engage. Boiled down to a very simple dichotomy, you can fight for the things you do want in life or be relegated to fight against the things in your life you don’t want. Fighting for the things you do want means identifying and pursuing the elements of greatest value to you. The aspects of life that really make you tick, that make your heart come alive and ignite a burning within your soul. These are the things you may be able to exist without, but in their absence, you wouldn’t be truly living. Whether it’s your passions, a vocational calling, your family or a cause, these areas refuse to be quieted within your spirit and demand deliberate and determined action to pursue. And if you aren’t fighting for those things of greatest value, you will likely end up fighting against negative factors that have cre

We all go through periods in life that seem especially challenging and difficult or even heart wrenching and agonizing. When you are caught in the midst of those times, it seems as if the rain will never stop and the storm will last forever. It’s easy to forget seasons come and go and even the hard times have come, not to remain forever, but to pass if we are willing to let them. However, we often view these storms of life as a sentence and not a season. We allow ourselves to become victims of the current circumstances and rather than work to change them – or even (and probably preferably) change ourselves – to better weather the storms, we resign ourselves to be prisoners of life, destined to passively endure our sentence as if we are helpless captives. It’s this feeling of imprisonment that often makes the season drag on longer than is necessary. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as we allow ourselves to become stuck in the unpleasant scenarios we find ourselves.

“Work is the only thing that gives substance to life” – Albert Einstein* I recently heard US Senator, Ben Sasse, discuss the dangers of viewing consumption over production as a desired goal. He communicates the innate desire created within human beings to produce value and highlights the dysfunction that comes when individuals lose that balance between production and consumption and become primarily a consumer. Consumption often leads to a very empty state of being. I see this every day in my work. Just as an example, our society has an errant view of “retirement” as a chance to turn off one’s creative efforts, sit back, coast and enjoy leisure. While this can certainly be part of one’s goal, and financial freedom should create more flexibility to have that precious down time, severe problems arise when “not working” becomes the overarching life goal and an end in and of itself. We see this in micro form in people who are always trudging from Monday through Friday, just

Years ago, I had a job as a personal trainer at a local gym. I worked out there, worked there and even hung out with friends there after the workday. I planned my schedule and activities around my workouts and meals. Everything revolved around my aspirations to improve that one area of my life: my fitness and physique. While I was quickly attaining excellence and maybe even greatness in that arena, sometimes at almost any cost, I was often doing it to the detriment of the other areas of my life. I had compartmentalized excellence. I was so focused on that one narrow area of my life and being, I had begun to ignore other, much more important aspects of my existence. I was a slack employee, a selfish friend and sidetracked Christian. That isolated excellence, built on a on foundation of widespread mediocrity, was empty and meaningless. I have since learned true excellence is a habit that encompasses all areas of one’s life. It’s not an action or even a series of actions con

I was at the gym this morning (I know, I was surprised too) and as I was leaving the locker room, I noticed two large clumps of paper towels on the floor near the entrance, several feet from the nearest trash can. Although I didn’t see who had left them there, I was disappointed by both his paper-towel-hooping skills along with his general lack of concern in leaving a mess. But it is what happened next that really struck me. As I was putting on my headphones and wondering how someone could miss a large trashcan by four feet, I saw an employee of the gym walk into the locker room. He looked down at the balled-up paper towels and deliberately stepped over them. Here’s what’s even worse, he is one of the managers of the club. Now, I realize picking up trash probably isn’t in his specific job description nor is it likely a “key result area” of his performance reviews. However, as a manager and leader within the organization, it certainly falls under his greater purpose of providing

It’s a well-documented fact that human beings respond to negativity far more strongly than positivity. Although there are many destructive consequences that come from that portion of our psychological wiring, I have been thinking more lately about a very specific effect: escape route fixation. All too often, when embarking on a journey towards a new goal or making a plan for something positive in the future, we begin with creating escape routes – the contingencies for when things go wrong and when failure hits. We start coming up with reasons the plan may fail. Don’t get me wrong, I think we need to be prepared for things to be more difficult than planned and unanticipated curveballs to come our way, but when the majority of our effort goes to planning around what might go wrong, we have less energy and resources to actually plan for what happens if things go right. We become so preoccupied with failure that we forget to prepare for success. While we need to have a mindset

Yesterday morning I sent my eight-year-old son, Bryson, to take the trash out to the street for weekly pickup. While that job didn’t used to be a big deal, we recently moved and our new driveway is about 200 feet long. It is also new construction so the driveway is unfinished, and instead of a nice paved path, it’s gravel, rocks and small boulders. Oh, it was pouring rain as well. He looked like Noah out there maneuvering the trash bin down the driveway, and not just because of the downpour, but also because that trash bin is HUGE – like a small ark. And it’s one of those special bear-proof trash cans, so it’s heavy, bulky and unwieldy, not to mention completely full.   After a few minutes, I noticed the trashcan still hadn’t made its way to the street, so I looked out to see if Bryson was still working on it. The poor guy was still at it, soaked in the rain and struggling to plod through the mud as the trashcan was getting hung up on large rocks. I wanted to go out and help

You will always have critics. There will always be people who are watching and waiting for you to fail. There are others who will undermine and criticize your accomplishments. This is especially true if you are pushing beyond the norm and striving for excellence. The higher you climb, the louder the judgement. You will not be able to please everyone. It’s this fear of the opinions of others (and even just what we think the opinions of others may be) that cause many to never start that journey towards their calling. They are too concerned with what others might think or say if and when they trip and fall. The potential failure seems magnified by the audience sitting on the sidelines. The possible embarrassment becomes amplified in our minds. What will people say if I fail? What will they think of me? But there is another voice you must be mindful of: your conscience. Your conscience is monitoring your actions and will hold you accountable, not only for what you have done,

I just received a text from my daughter (via my wife’s phone) letting me know “Dad, mom cut a foot off my hair!” She is not happy about it. My wife, after getting her phone back, let me know it was just a few inches she cut off, but my daughter is “freaking out” a bit. My wife tried to explain to the 10-year-old that her hair wasn’t as healthy as it could be and cutting off that extra length – the splitting, unhealthy portion – would allow her hair to grow back longer and healthier than before, but it would take some time. I think all this fell on deaf ears. My daughter is still not enthusiastic about the recent trim, but it’s a good life lesson. We often need pruning to eliminate the unhealthy, sometimes even harmful areas of our life so the resources can go to the more important things where they are necessary for proper development. While it’s never easy or convenient in the moment – and it often feels like a setback – the pruning is vital for long term growth. If we never

As I am sure you have too, I have heard people talk about investing in one’s self as “filling up my cup.” They “pour” into themselves through growth, learning and education along with new experiences and challenges. And of course, with a full cup, one has more to pour out into others. While I certainly agree with the idea of investing in one’s self, I have an issue with that analogy: a cup has a fixed capacity. Humans do not. Not only can we be filled beyond our current volume of skills, talents, service, etc., we can also increase our capacity for that volume. I guess what I am saying is this: rather than thinking about your potential as a cup, think about it more like a water balloon. As you fill the balloon, it starts to stretch, and the capacity for additional water increases. However, as the balloon stretches, tension also starts to build. There are internal forces which, as the balloon expands, work to prevent that expansion. Your life is no different. As yo

Over the last few years I’ve implemented intermittent fasting into my nutrition plan. Each day I typically fast for 16-20 hours with the occasional 24 hour or 40 hour fast. I have noticed that as long as my insulin levels are stable, I don’t get that hungry during the fasting portions of the day. However, once I take in that first meal, I find it challenging to be satiated initially, especially if it’s following a tough leg workout. It’s almost as if while I am fasting, my body has learned to ignore that urge, but once I feed it, the desire for food is turned back on. Learning is much the same way. If you have been out of the habit of learning and growing as an individual, that thirst remains quenched and the desire to be stretched is quieted. It’s like the mind has resolved itself to remain in its current state. But once you start “feeding” it, the hunger is triggered. As you challenge yourself with new knowledge and skills, your mind will start asking for more. As your mental