Randy Pausch redux

OK. Again a bit late with this one.

Randy Pausch died July 25, 2008. His last lecture watched a zillion times, Oprah, the book. Whoa. Remember Yul Brynner? Both had ads play after their deaths. Posthumous power. A legacy. A life beyond death. A life beyond yourself.

So many authors, composers, artists. More famous and influential after their deaths, than in their short lives. Jesus most of all. Still rockin it 2000 years later. Technically not dead of course.

If your goals end at your death, then you'll live it like that. If your goals are set in terms of generations, you'll probably choose more carefully, what you do with each day you are given.

Choose wisely.

Simple Prayer

God. Help me be the worshipper you made me to be, the man that I was created to be, the husband that I longed to be, the father that I hoped to be, the son that I have to be, and the friend that I chose to be.

Let it be.

IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling...the jungle book guy

ON THE MOVE

No meaningful post here really. But another geographic milestone.

We arrived in Wolseley/Regina Saskatchewan on April 26th from LA. Same continent, different universe.

Almost 4 months, 30,000 kms (at least) of commuting later, we are moving AGAIN.

New city, new house, new school (for the kids).

Another season ends, another season begins.

We are hoping this one will last!

Hope this post finds you well.

MILESTONES

Noticed the date a few days ago. It's been a year since my family and I have changed countries/continents. Amazing.

On July 11, 2007 we hopped on a plane from Sydney to Los Angeles.

On April 26, 2008 we hopped on a plane from Los Angeles to....Wolseley, Saskatchewan. Town of 1,000.

On August 15th, 2008 we will...yes hop on a plane (we're like kangaroos), from Regina to Calgary, Alberta.

Suffice it to say, that I am sincerely hoping that the hopping is going to stop for a while.

Late.

THE MESSAGE OF YOUR LIFE

Many of you will have heard from Randy Pausch. I must have been living in a cave when all that broke, on YouTube, Oprah etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Well check it out yourself.....

A good many years ago I did a branding project for a company. For it I interviewed key management and one of the questions was:

If you had 5 minutes, in a stadium of 100,000, and with 5 billion watching on TV, what would you say/do? What would be your message?

Randy Pausch had over an hour to give his last lecture. And the power of YouTube and Oprah to boot.

Most of us will not have such an audience to tell our message.....but we have our LIFETIME to live it.

What is your message? Are you living it? What a very challenging question.

To be super honest, right now, I don't really think I'm living it....I'm not even sure I know it, in detail enough to frame it and express it to you.

Let's learn our message. Live our message. I'm sure it's bigger than how you are living now.

what's your financial age

You know how you come up with something, and then you check it on the internet, and tons of people have had the same idea.....well a while ago, I was speaking with a friend of mine...who will remain nameless, coz he's a great guy...but I called him a a financial toddler. He was just very financially unaware, and frankly was a serial overspender.

So I thought. We've got our chronological age, but what's our financial age.....do we save, do we have a plan, do we budget etc. etc. do we have financial maturity.

Anyway, so I thought maybe there would be a book in it, and there might be, but I found this incredibly insightful and short quiz on http://www.unbiased.co.uk/financial-age-tool which is on the site for indie financial advisers in the UK. Take the quiz and ponder what it's trying to ask you.

Then look back on my incremental exponentialism blog.....it all ties in!

Big Picture and all the Small Details

I'm old enough to remember listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. His signoff was always significant to me "Keep your feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the stars." It's a big tangential but related to this post. Because when you look down at your feet, it's not very far away, it's right beneath you. You can see the detail. When you reach for the stars though, it's expansive, limitless, and requires a telescope to see the details.

I told my wife the other day, after a particularly bad decision I made. Please regularly ask me these two questions:

1) Are you keeping the Big Picture in mind?
2) Do you know all the Small Details?

As it has been said, "You need to know where you are going, to figure out how you are going to get there." I'm good at the Big Picture. Projecting, framing, conceptualizing. I'm also pretty good at Small Details. The minutae, the legalese, the things that can trip you up. But I'm sometimes not so good at keeping those two in balance, and context. I can easily get lost in the visioneering, or bogged down in the small details. So I'm happy that I have a wife who will keep me accountable to these two questions, which really help me make decisions, and proceed with my everyday.

After all, its the daily decisions we make that have a cumulative effect of our life's outcome, in technicolor dynamic real-time.

So ask yourself these two questions today.

Maintenance

Turned forty recently, and almost with clockwork precision:

1) Metabolism slowed down
2) Started to go grey
3) Skin not as bouncy as usual.

When you buy a new car, it comes under warranty for a good deal of time. Services are infrequent, and repairs are minor. Come 150,000 miles, and a many years later, maintenance may need to be more frequent, and repairs get more expensive, as do the accompanying parts.....

So what's my point.....as I ponder mortality for the first time in my life, it's come to my attention, that as we get older, we need to more purposefully take care of ourselves, as our physical selves from here on out may decline at an alarming rate without making an effort to keep things working. Yes, I'm talking about eating better, exercising more, and just paying more attention to upkeep.

Take a house for example. You don't even notice the paint flaking at first, but without attention and maintenance, it will quickly deteriorate.

So do something that's good for your body today. Something healthy. Let' live long and healthy lives.

Cheers

LIFE WITHOUT SEAT BELTS

I'm old enough to remember: laying in the back window shelf...yup, where the speakers are behind the rear seats. Usually I would look up at the sky and occassionally, get car sick looking back at the vehicle following us.

Yes I know Princess Di would probably have survived, if she were wearing her seat belt, and Lord knows how many lives have been saved since the advent of mandatory seat belts.

I have a couple of pet hates: the big food/big pharma/big insurance conspiracy, but namely big insurance. I really don't like insurance companies. For those involved in that industry, or have benefitted from having insurance, I don't intentionally want to offend you.

Now insurance feeds off fear. ie. what if negative scenario analysis. Flood, fire, accident......acts of God. Where maiming gets you more money than dying........where they calculate odds to do with your life/death issues.

Yes, seat belts save lives. And your insurance is lower because of them......

But remember life without seat belts? Unbridled, carefree. Think about it. A life without fear. Full of hope. Full of faith. Full of peace.

OPTIONALITY

I used to trade options based on stocks. These were known variously as call options and put options. You might be familiar with employee stock options: the employer gives employees the right to buy company shares at a fixed (usually discounted) price. It gives people ownership. But I digress.

There is inherent optionality in life. Options typically have a fixed expiry date. So does life. It typically has what is known as the strike price, this is the price from which the value of the option is calculated against. We could regard this as where we are at at birth for example. In a call option, the higher the value of the stock, the higher the value of the option. This is typically intrinsic value + time value. So during your lifetime, you have a fixed period of time to create value. You could measure this in $ earned in a lifetime for example.

On a balance sheet, you need to depreciate assets eg. computers. We all know that a computer is not going to last forever. In fact, even if it works fine, it will be incompatible with a lot of new software etc. in only a year's time. So suffice it to say that things don't last forever. Thus they ALL have optionality: a fixed period of time to be of value or not.

So when we expire, will we expire worthless? Or will we expire with a lot of intrinsic value......for those puzzled by this, I'll try and expand upon this concept in due course.

Thanks for reading.

JONAH & THE WHALE, AND GETTING THE MONKEY OFF YOUR BACK

For the last 9 years I've had a general sense of unease about something I believed I should devote my time to seeing come to pass. It involves putting on an event in a country where such a thing would be difficult to pull off. In the last 5 years in fits and starts I have kept the possibility alive, but never put it all on the line to get it done.

In the meantime I have variously spent my time:

1) Doing nothing
2) Doing things to distract myself from doing THE thing

So like Jonah, I've been running away. But the sense that this could be my "Signs" moment-- you know from the movie: the little girl who places glasses of water all around the house, the brother who has wasted his prodigious baseball batting skills; only to discover that the aliens threatening earth can be destroyed by water--this could be the moment, the task, the ONE THING, that I was asked to do by God, and I have found all manner of ways to avoid actually doing it. Tried to hand it off to others....

But it won't go away, I can't stop thinking about it, and it's possible I'm sitting in the belly of the whale and don't even know it.

I can't shake this perennial burden that I need to stop thinking of other things to occupy my time, and focus on getting this thing done. Mostly from the point of view that I need to be obedient to God, but really just to seek the peace, and the removal of the burden that I currently have.

SO......are you doing what you are supposed to do....or are you finding every reason not to do it. 9 years on. Mine is still here, and its getting unbearable.

Financial Statements VS. Life

I've been looking at a lot of financial statements lately. Profit and Loss statements. Balance Sheets. Cashflow statements. Reconciling accounts.

It got me thinking: if I were to take a snapshot right now of my life, and somehow could define and quantify the assets and liabilities, not financial, but personal: perhaps emotional, certainly spiritual....what would it look like? What would my accounts receivables be? What and how much would my accounts payable be? how much equity...positive or negative? Balance Sheets are notoriously unreliable as it is well and truly a snapshot, one slice of time.

P&L statements on the other hand, are over a period of time, so the crests and troughs are clear. Is there net profit? What were the costs of goods sold? What are the income items in my life. The expense items.....do I have a high overhead....

Have I lost you. These ruminations mean a lot to me, as I have always found powerful analogies to life in the world of financial concepts and terms. My first education in this perspective was in the world of optionality, and these days more in the realm of financial statements.

A company has to reconcile its accounts often, and people need to balance their checkbooks....how often do we take stock of our lives? Take inventory.....see what a snapshot looks like....see how we have spent the last year. Look for trends, imbalances....strengths & weaknesses.

Hope this has meant something to you.

Oooops. It's a new year already!

Well. My new year's resolution was to write more.....I was also going to keep to at least a monthly post on this blog...missed December, doh!

So dear reader, you find me at such a tumultuous time that I cannot even start. Though "drama" is nothing new with me, I have put myself in such a predicament that dramatic is the only way to describe it. After a fantastic break with friends in lake tahoe, though things have increased exponentially in terms of the aforementioned drama, my response to it has changed dramatically. Resignation rather than anxiety, with a dash of hope, would best describe it.

You know, in all of the power of perspective, truly, what doesn't kill me will make me stronger....so here's to strength.

Pray your next 12 months has started with a bang.

HUMAN DOING

What do I have to do today? What tasks must I accomplish? What's my plan of action? My objectives. My obligations. My responsibility.

No I am not advocating negligence. After all, what is adulthood without its commensurate responsibilities. Does that define us though?

Do you have a resume?

Recently, I gave a quick biography to a student, whose assignment was to give a speech about someone's life.

Aside from the pertinent details of birthplace, schooling, employment, most of the other aspects involved my accomplishments. All my doings. Like ingredients on a bottle. But I've talked about that before; humans as products.

Who am I really. All my doings surely reflect my being. My values, convictions, priorities.

Did my being match up to my doings?

If I reviewed how I had relayed the story of my life, clear areas emerged: faith, family, community, creativity, music and business. I didn't mind that to be honest. The definitions of my human BEING.

So in the midst of your human DOINGS today, why not take a moment and consider the human being you are. And how you are outworking that in your time/space continuum.

Until next time.

Belonging & Significance

BELONGING
Defined variously as happiness, security, intimacy and being at ease, in the context of relationships, BELONGING is at the core of humanity. We crave this from the day we are born. Our identity and our purpose are often driven from this key state of belonging. "Who am I" is often related to "where do I belong".

SIGNIFICANCE
Importance, meaning. We all want to matter. Down deep. Maybe some of us have given up, stuck in a routine of mediocrity and the mundane, where this side of us; the side that wants to make a difference, for our lives to mean something, to find meaning; has been snuffed out by the worries of this world.

Remember the movie "Signs". In it, the little girl has the curious habit of setting glasses of water all over the house. She belongs to her family, but her significance is not clear. It is not until the climax of the story, where they discover that the aliens, who threaten their entire existence, can be killed by water, does her TRUE significance come into play. Sometimes we don't really know our significance, but do as we are "guided". Have you had this moment yet?

Together, these two words: belonging & significance, are at the heart of every person, every group, every community. Are you part of something bigger than yourself? If so, are you important in that sphere? Do you know your purpose? Humanity, and indeed your own being, begs this question to be answered.

In this age of fragmentation, loneliness and despondency, we need to be agents of reconnection, and revealers of purpose.

Procrastination

OK. Some of you do not struggle with this.

But reality is, procrastination is well and truly wasting time. Aside from physically existing, the other area we occupy is time. It's a gift. No doubt about it. A gift.

So what we do we do with a gift. We cherish it, take care of it, make the most of it. Or we throw it away or never even open the box. Or we return it.

What will you do with your day today? Is there something you know you ought to do, get started on? Complete?

Nothing more present than today!

Antidote

An antidote is a substance which can counteract a form of poisoning.

Borrowed from wikipedia "Sometimes, the antidote for a particular toxin is manufactured by injecting the toxin into an animal in small doses and the resulting antibodies are extracted from the animals' blood."

I'm a Christian, and I heard this word today, and it really burst out in life to me.

As people we commit sin. So if we treat sin as a poison, which leads to death, and Jesus took all the sins of mankind upon himself, he then created the antidote, he became the antidote.

By having originally having sin in us, we create the antibodies to resist by accepting Christ, we ourselves become the antidote to sin.

Makes sense to me, I hope it does you.

Can I Pray For You

It's the cliche of Christians. I'll pray for you. My friend from a Jewish background, Mark, told me recently that "I'll pray for you" means "I'll think about your situation when it occurs in my consciousness next time". I think Christians may be on the same tangent.

It sort of cheapens the whole expression.

On the other hand, my friend recently wrote me an email.....it was a prayer. I was deeply moved and at the same time completely inspired to do the same. Now instead of praying for the person in private to God, I get to do that, and send the prayer to the recipient through cyberspace.

They can now keep that. Documented.

I think I'm on a roll on this email prayer thing.

So the next time I say, "I'll pray for you". Wait for the email. I'm going to do what I say.

Looking back, for just a moment.

Well. This won't be the most edifying posts, as I'm really just logging my feelings about a huge life change that we, as a family are embarking on.

We arrived in Sydney Australia, in Feb 1998, Susan 4 months pregnant. Sophia, Gabriel and Ella were all born here. On July 4th, 2007, we depart from here, after a whirlwind journey of diverse experiences, having made some deep lifelong friendships, to Los Angeles, for the next season of the Sohn family story.

Bittersweet, would be an apropos sentiment right around now. But mostly, there is a tenuous polar balance between a core sadness, and the giddiness of the promise of the future.

So, though it's brief and fleeting, I glimpse back on the road that we've travelled, and marvel at the goodness and faithfulness of God to bless us with incredible children, wonderful friends, profound experiences, purpose & fulfillment. I could say it's been a hard path that we've trodden, machete'd our way through to find direction, but if I'm objective for even a millisecond, that's really been the joy of our life together, for Susan and I, as we go forth, into the thickest jungle of all, La-La-Land.