Mindset Matters

Many times in life, both breakdowns and breakthroughs are created from similar circumstances. The same adversity and challenge we face that may cause us to give up and quit can also create the environment that forces us to adapt, overcome and grow. It’s all about our perspective on those moments and how long we are willing to push and persevere, allowing a potential breakdown to become a breakthrough. We love to hear stories of overcoming adversity. There are historic events like Edison’s inventing of the light bulb after ten thousand failed experiments and the Wright brother’s first flight following countless crashes and failed takeoffs. We also remember events that don’t have the same historic impact, but were played on such a grand stage that we can’t forget: Keri Strug’s vault on a badly sprained ankle that sealed the gold medal for the US Gymnastics Team or Michael Jordan’s 38 points, despite suffering from a severe flu, to seal Game 5 of the ’97 NBA Finals. As much a...

As I have mentioned recently in another post, within the last six or seven weeks my family has been to memorial services for five precious friends. The fragility of life has certainly been on my mind lately already, but was again brought back to the forefront this weekend when I received a text on Saturday from a friend of mine in Washington. She was in the hospital trying to recover from a heart attack. She was not only suffering from congestive heart failure, but the damage to her heart and descending aorta was so severe that her kidneys had shut down due to insufficient blood supply and she was in renal failure. On top of that, there was a blood clot in her heart causing further complications. The doctors are convinced her time is very short. Trying to find the silver cloud in all of this, my friend mentioned she had “at least made it past 70,” which was longer than either of her parents had lived. This statement got me thinking, especially after we got off the phone and t...

Do you ever negotiate your goals? Here’s what I mean: do you ever start out with a plan to accomplish one thing and then move the target in as you progress? You make the rules a little easier on yourself once you get started? Maybe you set out to lose ten pounds, get stuck at eight pounds, and then decide you’ve worked hard enough until this point. Plus there have been some setbacks out of your control, like the jerk who opened a Krispy Kreme right in your neighborhood, so you settle on the fact eight pounds is “close enough.” It could be you’re trying to save $20K to replace a vehicle in cash, get to $15K and then choose to finance the rest because that’s still more than you’ve ever put down on a car before. Perhaps it’s getting up an hour early and getting started sooner at work so you can get off earlier to spend more time with the family. By Thursday, however, you really feel like getting some extra sleep. Besides, the kids have probably had enough of you anyway. I am a v...

We are all familiar with “no risk, no reward,” the idea that any great outcome or result will come at the price of risk. While the product of the risk is important, and often very rewarding, I think we often overlook the process of risk. What if the reward isn’t merely in the result, but inherent in the risk itself? Not long ago, as I have mentioned in other posts, significant risk was required for survival. If you didn’t dare, you died. Chasing wild animal through the harsh wilderness – exposing one’s self to the elements, other wild animals, falls, accidents, and other perils – wasn’t an option, it was a survival requirement to fend off starvation. Simply constructing a barn, chasing down a rogue horse or traveling through a nasty winter storm to trade goods in town could all mean serious danger. However, neglecting these activities would be even more harmful. It’s because of that our Creator built within us mechanisms to reward us for the risk itself. Chemical cocktails ...

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, performed a series of experiments in which young kids were placed in a room with a single marshmallow on a table to test their willpower. Before leaving a child alone with the marshmallow, the researchers carefully explained to each child that he or she would be rewarded with an additional marshmallow if they could avoid eating the one originally given to them until the researcher returned. If they could wait about 15 minutes without giving in, the child would be able to enjoy two marshmallows instead of the single treat originally received. Some of the kids ate the snack right away. Most of them stared at it for a while or even tried looking away and covering their eyes, seeking to reduce the temptation, before eventually giving in. But a handful of the students were able to hold out until the experimenters returned to reward them with the second marshmallow. Mischel and his colleagues then followed these...

Although technology has certainly made many areas of our lives more efficient and effective, saving us precious time on countless everyday tasks, we seem to be busier than ever before. Our lives in this day and age seem to have very little margin with the hectic schedules we follow. Yet, do we have a lot to show for it? Everyone seems busy. Not everyone is productive. Peter Drucker once said, "There is nothing so useless as doing very efficiently that which should not be done at all." I think this is true for a lot of us. It’s an easy trap to fall into. We start to confuse activity for advancement and movement with progress. We run around in circles but never actually get anywhere because the activities we engage in aren’t the ones in which are time and energy should be invested. We neglect the important tasks by filling our day carefully completing that which need not be done at all. We all find a way to fill the minutes in our day with something. It’s not how ...

I was at the gym early this morning on a machine called the Step Mill. First, let me preface all of this by letting you know I despise doing any and all forms of cardio. Second, you have to understand this machine is basically an endless staircase, upon which you are essentially running up a “down” escalator. It’s something most likely invented during the Inquisition or, since they didn’t have the technology back then, maybe created an orthodontist. Either way, it’s pure evil. As I looked down at the “time” display on the sadistic machine, I noticed it was counting down the minutes I had spent on the machine from one hour. This may seem like a small detail, but it really bothered me. I felt somewhat “trapped” on the Tool-of-Satan, as if it was a sentence I must endure, rather than a mission to complete. It was as if I was trying to hang in there and survive the workout rather than conquer it. By simply switching the display to time elapsed, logging the work I had accompli...

Good is the opposite of bad. Rich is the opposite of poor. Pleasure is the opposite of pain. Joy is the opposite of sorrow. Excitement is the opposite of boredom. I think we can all agree on those. But what about fear, what is the opposite of fear? It’s not confidence, because elite soldiers or extreme athletes exude confidence even in the midst of fear. What if the opposite of fear is simply relief? The opposite of fear is certainly not joy or fulfilment. It’s not pleasure or love. It’s not excitement or jubilation. At best, if you are to run away from fear, the best case scenario is probably relief. Feelings of regret, uncertainty and confusion are all likely outcomes as well. And even if you manage to find relief, that sensation is most likely temporary. However, the gifts often lie just on the other side of fear if we are willing to face it and overcome the temptation to flee. Joy and fulfillment, confidence and clarity, even triumph, these are spoils when we engage o...

Five and a half years ago, my wife and I went in for a 20 week ultrasound for our fourth child and found out we were going to have another son. We also found out this wasn’t a normal pregnancy. The ultrasound showed cysts on our child’s brain, calcification in his heart and intestines, nerve issues keeping some of his muscles in spasm and his fists clenched, and other markers for severe genetic disorders. We went in a few weeks later for a high definition ultrasound and they not only confirmed everything the first sonogram showed, but found others, including malformations of his heart and underdeveloped lungs. Our son was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a devastating chromosomal disorder that was essentially a death sentence. We were told our child may not survive the pregnancy and would never see his first birthday. We were devastated and overwhelmed. The next 20 weeks were some of the longest of my life as I tried to prepare myself for what we would be walking through together a...

Zebras, close relatives of the donkey, are a lot like people in some ways. The famous stripes of the zebra don’t do much for him when he’s out in the open. However, when a zebra is sensing a threat, he will move in closer to its herd. Once he’s surrounded by other zebras, his markings break up his shape and silhouette, making it harder for a predator to identify a single animal. The zebra hides by blending in and looking like all the other zebras around him. He seeks safety by being inconspicuous. I think a lot of us act much the same way. A peacock, on the other hand, does the exact opposite. Instead of blending in and trying to stay hidden in the face of danger, the peacock will courageously emerge as conspicuously as possible, with colorful feathers in full display. He does this to distract the threat from the other birds and give his family, the hen and the chicks, a chance to escape and flee to safety. He understands his mission and heroically executes it.   There ...

Rabindranath Tagore – the Bengali “Renaissance Man” of sorts, being a poet, musician and artist – once wrote, “Spring has passed. Summer has gone. Winter is here…. …and the song I meant to sing remains unsung. For I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument.” These powerful words caution us against living a life only half lived, the remainder being filled with regret for the dreams ignored – songs unsung, risks not taken, and art not created. There is great danger in always preparing but never doing. Constantly planning but never executing.   Too many of us are caught in this cycle, waiting for the right “season” to begin playing our song. After this coming weekend, my family will have been to the memorial services of five individuals over the last five weeks. This has been a poignant reminder that none of us know how long our spring and summer will last. The only guarantee is that winter comes for each one of us. When your winter arrives, I hope you ...

With election season wrapping up, I wanted to draw your attention to one of our local elections. It’s common for people to neglect to vote or possibly just not research their voting options and justify either action with the thought that one vote doesn’t really matter. However, we just had a state senate seat decided by eleven votes. Thousands of ballots cast and it came down to fewer than eleven votes. Lives changed, and potentially even the trajectory of our state, by just a handful of ballots. In life, our choices are our votes. Sometimes it’s easy to think an individual choice doesn’t really have much impact. Cheating a little on the diet, turning in an assignment just past a deadline, easing up a little on our effort “just this once” or cutting a corner here or there, we justify giving in because we think one single, seemingly small choice doesn’t count. In life and elections, we never know when that vote will count. Sometimes, a single choice can change everything. ...

Perfection is a wonderful - albeit, impossibly elusive - concept. It is beautiful in movies and story books, but it just doesn’t show up in real life. In fact, perfection is a real problem, because Perfect is often the enemy of Done.  Some don’t care about perfection at all and have no drive or ambition to improve and progress. I have nothing for those people. But for the few of us that strive to make a positive impact during our short lives and seek to continually improve our value to others, perfection can be quite dangerous. Now, don’t misunderstand me, pursuing excellence is a noble and admirable endeavor. But excellence is different from perfection and too many of us neglect to deliver Excellence because we are waiting for Perfect.  The determined ambitious among us often suffer from POTA, Paralysis of the Analysis. We want to continue to tweak and adjust whatever we are working on to just make it a little bit more. Unfortunately this might prevent us from ...

I recently heard an interesting definition of success: “Living a life that would make your 18-year-old self proud of who you’ve become.” At 18 years old, our entire adult lives are ahead of us. We have (probably) recently escaped high school and are eager, if not even a little fearful, to begin the next chapter of our life. Maybe we were applying to colleges or trying to get our first “real” job. We hadn’t yet been jaded by the dead-end nine-to-five job nor had we been corrupted by the pressure and politics surrounding many careers. We were naïve and full up hopes and dreams. We were probably better at seeing the world for how we wanted it to be than how it actually was. Many of us had grand plans for our futures. How has that played out for you? While my life has certainly not taken the course I thought it might and even hoped it would, I can say there were many wonderful surprise twists and turns that took my life on a better course than I had ever imagined. However, in...