inthedougout

 In the middle of my career, I kept running into roadblocks, potholes, and speedbumps.  To be clear, I wasn't really doing anything differently than I had done in the past 5 years.  From a psychological perspective, I sort of expected my continued hard work and commitment to just show up later as being rewarded.  Well, I am here to tell you that it was not.  You already knew that because you're probably a lot like me.  You've been doing the same thing - possibly very well - for the past several years and just not getting through that barrier.   The beginning of my career was fun.  Things came easy.  I had tasks and milestones.  I was a technical person.  I did technical things and I did them well.  The "elder" crew loved my willingness to take on tasks and crush them.  Little did I realize, that elder crew was likely assigning me small little tasks that were beneficial to them in their larger scheme project (put a pin...

Time for a pop quiz: how did you fail today?  What sucked today?  And what did you do about it? Failure for me, today, was having a migraine strike and figuring out what to do about it.  I'm the type of person that doesn't like to stop - for anything, not even a migraine.  I get frustrated by inactivity and not being productive.  Not because I am part of some machine that has brainwashed or forced me to work when I am not my best.  It's because I am too damn proud.  And it's possible that my pride and stubbornness was my failure for today. Sometimes our body provides the signal our brain is ignoring.   The science is either emerging or simply becoming more clear, but there is a connection between the mind and body.  That connection is the vessel for communicating all sorts of things - happiness, distress, contentment, and so forth.  The body is an excellent teacher, if we let it. There's a fine line between ignoring the warning ligh...

I often like to ruminate.  I find it sort of fun, kind of like a sick, tortured hobby.  I sometimes take ideas and run them into the ground.  And yes, sometimes these are good ideas and other times, bad ideas.   Rumination most often fails to end well, however.  Rumination can quickly turn into unbounded worry.  And endless worry wreaks havoc on your mental state, physical state, and emotional state.  We always need to be mindful of pushing and pulling the different levers... such as "let yourself feel the emotion," but let's be realistic: not for too long. When I find myself in a "worry spiral," it usually takes me a few moments, or days, before I catch myself and realize this incredibly helpful mantra: do not worry alone.   In that same vein, why fail alone? Tonight, at the dinner table, my wife put this idea into practice.  She asked each of us to describe "how did we fail today?"  This was, of course, not an invitation for ...

The reason I give a shit about failure is that we all fail.  It is a fact of human life.  And if we all fail, what are we supposed to do with all of this failure that's been piling up?  For me, personally, I didn't know what to do with all of the failure.  It sat and sat and  sat.  Eventually, it began affecting my ability to perform at a level I'm comfortable with (and to be clear, when I am not performing at a high level, I get this existential itch that bothers the hell out of me). A brief detour: a paradox is a statement or situation that seems to contradict itself or go against common sense.   Returning to the point: failure, at least the way we view it, is a bit of a paradox.  That's because failure is most typically experienced as something negative (i.e., the "oh man, that sucks" situation).  By letting that be the end of the story, we are depriving ourselves of a powerful catalyst for developing and growth.  Bumpy roads, ef...

The funny thing about failure is that people are rarely remembered solely  for their failures.  Most observers may not even realize that someone has even endured a particular amount of failure. One of the best examples of this is Abraham Lincoln.  Did Abraham Lincoln really lose 8 elections?  Did you even know that Abraham Lincoln lost 8 elections?  What's really fascinating about Abraham Lincoln is that the dude failed far more than he succeeded.  According to abrahamlincolnonline.org , the guy persisted through what I'd perceive to be a ridiculous amount of failure.  Enough failure to make most of us curl up into a ball and hide in the closet.  Let's run through what happened to him, though briefly, of course.   Between 1832 and 1858, he lost his job, had a failed business, had a nervous breakdown, was defeated for speaker, had a failed bid for Congress, eventually lost a re-nomination, was rejected for land officer, was defeated for U...

In a family, failure is abound.  It going be on a big scale, of course, but most practically, it exists on a micro-scale. To a toddler, maybe you failed by pouring the cereal incorrectly (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to a 3-year-old, you light the birthday cake too soon (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to your middle-schooler, your screen time protections backfired (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe you ordered the wrong meal, or item, and brought your family a version less, or different, than they expected. The fact is that these circumstances have a way of accumulating throughout the day... and with those failures, so does our reaction to those events.  Are we throwing pity parties?  Or are we owning it and moving forward?  That responsive, reactive energy has a lot to do with our mental state going into the next micro battle.  The thing is ... i t doesn't always have to be fixed right away.   A delay isn't a bad thing.  E...