Next time you are at a brewpub or local dive look around at the other tables and look at how many tables have French fries at them.  French fries touch almost every table, often they touch every plate at the table.  The next part in our exercise is for you to think how many places you have been that had awful French fries.  So many restaurants are messing up with a food item that hits every table.  This blows my mind.  If you have excellent French fries at your restaurant you have the chance to put something on nearly every plate that makes people happy.  I keep thinking about this a lot, and what this whole concept means when applied to life.

Most of us are not restauranteurs, our ability to make French fries does not matter.  In our daily pursuits however, we often will have things that take the place of French fries.  When I talk about French fries, I’m talking about something that hits almost every customer or person we interact.  I am talking about something we are very capable of getting right too.  These “French fries” will be different things for everyone, but we all have them.  What I wonder is how many of us are messing them up all the time.

If we are looking at ourselves critically, I think we are likely to find a French fry or two we are messing up.  When I ran a Meetup group, I used to be lazy about reaching out to guest speakers.  If I had been more proactive about this, so many of our meetings could have been better.  When I didn’t focus on this, we ended up with sub-par speeches thrown together at the last minute, or no speaker at all.  This was a French fry.  This one is easy to see but I can’t help but think I have more I need to find.

Finding our repeated faults and acknowledging them can make such a big difference.  It can be as simple as recognizing what tasks we do across all or most of our projects and simply asking can this be done better?  If the answer is yes, there is then the time to evaluate whether this task or aspect of the project matters.  Many things can be improved, but they have to matter.  If they matter there could be huge upside to fixing them. 

One time this proved huge for me is changing my warmups to my workouts.  I used to have a modest warmup for my workouts.  Due to some injuries and age I have started to do a more thorough warmup.  I diligently prepare myself to lift hard with every workout.  Fixing this one thing has lead to me being stronger and having less minor injuries.  It was an easy thing to get right and I notice the impacts across all workouts now.

Now I’m telling you French fries are important, but so are other things.  If we go back to our restaurant example with a limited menu you could really get everything right.  If you get the French fries right, if you get the bun right, if you get your house sauce right, you are on your way to having every meal be good.   All of which can be done by just focusing on the things that hit every plate.

This whole post seems really simple and silly.  At the same time, how many restaurants serve really awful cold French fries?  A lot of them do, and they are missing so much opportunity.  As I have thought about this I’ve started thinking I’m serving more than a few awful French fries up in my life as well.  I am horrible at following up with people I meet.  I am awful at creating a good writing environment for myself.  These kind of mistakes hit across so many projects and efforts.  So you can say I’m thinking a lot about the French fries, and trying to make sure every plate gets hit with a dose of awesome.  Hitting each plate with a dose of awesome gets you halfway to the meal being good.  Businesses, careers, and legacies are built on serving up good meals, so there is no reason not to serve up some good fries.

Intention.  Plan.  Purpose.  Tempo.  When playing chess these are the words that float around in my mind.  Chess is a controlled game of tactics, strategy and preparation.  A good chess player will have a plan as to what they want to do in a game.  A good player will also use every move to further this plan in some way.  As even a middling chess player I recognize these things.  I try and apply these facts to the games I play.  When I follow these truths good things happen on the board.  When I ignore these truths, a lot of bad things happen quickly.  I see these things when I sit at the chess board, yet when away from the board these truths get me in more trouble.

Chess teaches lessons that I find useful in life.  The lessons of having a plan and making sure every move matters and has intention behind it are two such lessons.  The first lesson is obvious to many people.  It is indeed good to have a plan when doing anything.  Even when you go to a restaurant, your plan is to eat food, you have a plan for this simple action.  The intensity of plans can vary, and they should.  The plan for a business presentation should involve more intensity than the plan you have for your Friday night out with friends.  Having a plan is great, but without the right moves a plan doesn’t mean much.

Once you have determined a plan for your chess game you need to make the right moves to execute this plan.  You would say this is obvious, but many players don’t make the right moves to execute their plan.  Often they will make random moves that accomplish nothing towards their goals in the game.  Once you quit completely wasting moves at the board, you need to start thinking about move quality.  There are good moves that accomplish things.  There are also winning moves that win the game for you.  Some moves are also all about potential.  Sometimes you drop a chess piece on a good square and you just wait for the opportune time for it to do damage later.  A good player will always have a strong reason for why they made a move.  A good player knows that wasting moves is how you lose games, even if you are actually a more formidable player than your opponent.  Once you start making decent moves every single move in chess you become a far more formidable player.

We all make moves daily in our regular lives, and often we are wasting a lot of those moves.  Often during the course of my day, I just do things.  I look at these wasted moves and see so much potential for improvement.  Our moves should align with our goals and plans, my moves don’t always align.

I’ve been thinking about my interactions with my friends and family lately.  I have been wasting a lot of moves here.  When it comes to those close to me, I want to have positive relationships with them.  We should be lifting each other up.  We all know this too.  I don’t know that my actions always reflect this.  I waste moves when I sit there and never talk about anything meaningful with these people.  To be honest I am not always nice to my friends and family.  This might be normal for people to get comfortable with each other become grouchy, confrontational, rude, and negative towards each other.  This may be normal but I have no interest in being normal.  Better moves with my friends and family would simply be making sure my interactions are positive and meaningful.  These are simple, but meaningful moves, moving with intention is so important. 

Intention can come into play even with things like walking.  I go for long walks for exercise.  It is the simplest form of exercise, but could I be messing even this up?  In a way I am messing up walking.  When I go for walks, I tend to just wander around at whatever pace I feel like moving.  This is still a good move, but it is less than optimal.  If I walked a little faster, I would be in better shape.  Many days walking faster would be the better move.  Finding better moves when you are already making good moves is a path to victory on the chess board, and can’t hurt away from the board either.

One area where I make a lot of good moves, but don’t follow it up with enough of the right moves is while networking.  I have gone to countless networking events the past several years.  This is a good move for my career.  I will go to events and make all the decisions I have to make to get there.  I will often drive an hour to get to one of these events.  These are all good moves.  Then I will get there and end up just talking to my friends at the event.  At many events I don’t really end up networking, and I don’t meet anyone new.  This is not the optimal move in this situation.  This one less than optimal move means all the good moves that came before it became much more wasted.  What is the point of getting dressed, driving an hour, and then only talking to someone you already talk to five?  I set up the plan and moved forward with it, I just missed the winning move. 

There are all sorts of ways to waste moves and I find a lot of them, I also find some winning moves.  I just talked about screwing up my moves with networking.  There are also some very good moves I have made with it.  Primarily I have planted myself in the right rooms and waited for good things to happen.  I have had some good things happen to me because I was simply showing up to the opportune rooms with the right people.  Sometimes the winning move is just putting your pieces in the right place and waiting for good things to happen.  I ended up getting a pretty good job out of just talking to a guy 10 minutes at an event.  2 months later he calls me up, we have an interview and I was hired the next day.  All because I planted myself in the right room.  My moves are sometimes bad, but this time my moves were good.

I can’t help but wonder about the difference between my good and bad moves.  This isn’t thinking about things in moral terms.  This is entirely about tactics, strategies and preparation.  Knowing the reasons for bad moves does seem to be a good step in making better moves. 

The first reason I think of for my bad moves is that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing a lot of the times.  In the beginning of anything we are bound to stumble around because we don’t know any better.  I am just as guilty of that as anyone else.  At some point this is not acceptable any more.  I remember when I played tournament chess as a middle schooler.  I would run into an opening called the Sicilian Defense and I would melt before my opponent.  I kept making bad moves against this opening and I would quickly be decimated at the board and lose.  I had to learn this opening otherwise my moves would remain bad.  I got better at playing against his opening, I lost less, and the bad moves got a lot better.  Not knowing any better is a reason for wasted moves, but at some point a smart person needs to start knowing better.

Laziness is another reason for my wasted and bad moves.  I get tired and lazy.  Then I do stupid things.  There is nothing much to say about that other than it happens.  I can prevent it from happening.  I must however acknowledge that I get tired and take the easiest path.  To deny this is a strong reason for my wasted moves would only be fooling myself.  This kind of reason for bad moves is all about being honest with myself and looking at what I’m really doing and thinking.

Another area that requires honesty is looking at default behavior.  We have many moves during our days that are done completely on auto-pilot.  This is normal and not a bad thing.  Our minds would probably melt if we had to think about every single thing we do all day.  Our default moves are still moves though and can be optimal, good, or completely wasted.  Sometimes rewiring default behaviors can lead to much better moves.  Knowing some moves are just defaults programmed into our brain is a good first step in making real changes. 

Changing our move quality in our lives is a many faceted problem.  It involves learning about what good moves are.  It involves putting ourselves in a state to make good moves, being tired rarely puts us in position to make a good move.  It involves recognizing our less than optimal moves, and that is often a function of experience.  Thinking about the moves we’re making is the first step, and that is what I have been thinking about so much lately thanks to the game of chess.

The more we look for quality moves the more quality results we are bound to get.  How are you wasting moves?  How are you looking for the optimal moves?  What things are you treating as moves that could lead to winning?  These are important questions.  The answers vary according to your strategy and plan.  On the chess board every single move impacts how the game unfolds, and when we view our “life moves” the same way, cool things are bound to happen.

It was a hot sunny day during the madness of the Covid epidemic and I paused to read the signs on the doors of the library.  I had been going to the library to do my daily writing for the last couple years.  I was curious what their rules and procedures were regarding disease prevention.  I would like to start going back to the library to do some writing.  It is far easier to be productive at the library than at home.  One of the notes on the door mentioned that the library would have Wifi in the parking lot 24 hours a day.  I thought for a second that I could work from my van in the parking lot if I needed a quiet place.  My second thought was that wasn’t really a productive place to be.  My third and final thought was “Am I too good to sit in the parking lot and write and hustle out there?  Is a van with wifi just not good enough?

After reading these signs I continued my walk and pondered these thoughts.  I had seemingly tripped over my own sense of entitlement.  Was a focused, comfortable, quiet workplace something I was entitled to?  In the end I came to feel as though these things are luxuries.  What I really needed was the most modest of workplaces; my computer, some internet, and a place to sit was about all I needed.  A van in the library would provide all these things.  If that is where I must write to be productive, then that is where I will write.

I have not taken advantage of the library parking lot Wifi yet.  Since reading the sign I have had a lot else going in life, so its not come up.  The parking lot is in my mind as a backup location for my writing practice.  If I am to find success, acting like I am above doing work in such places is a trap.  So many times we hears the stories of entrepreneurs or creative folks talking about phases of their lives where they worked in weird places.  A lot of great works started in dingy basements and garages.  Success finds a way.  It is easy to hear those stories and think that is not how I will find my success.  I sit and think that things will be comfortable for me, they may not be. 

It is worth pondering where else in my life am I acting entitled.  Entitlement can live in so many areas, and it never serves the host well.  Forging the proper attitude about all sorts of things is so important.  Things like entitlement can be sneaky, but we can catch them.

I am glad I caught this mindset of comfort and entitlement.  It has no purpose living inside me.  If the things I am working on truly matter, then comfort and entitlement will not.  That is what I learned that day while thinking and pondering life on that long walk.  So sooner or later, I may be in a parking lot in a van writing and avoiding the distractions of home.  If I don’t end up there, it won’t be because I think I am too good to sit in a van in the parking lot getting after it.

During the course of 2019 and early 2020 I wrote my first book.  I did little research about how to go about this process.  My strategy was to jump in head first and get words onto the page.  Writing a book is merely the task of stringing together sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into chapters.  For my first run at writing I didn’t want to overcomplicate this.  So I got started and through trial and error wrote about a 100 pages on lifting weights and strength training.  Through the process of doing all this I learned a lot about myself and writing books.  I plan to write more books in the future, and have a much better approach going forward.  These are the biggest lessons that come to mind from this experience.

 Lesson 1. It’s Not About Tools

There exists lots of cool software and tools to help people write books.  I have no doubt they are wonderful tools and can really help the process.  For this book, I decided not to use any of these tools.  I used tools that I already knew how to use like Microsoft Word and a Chrome Browser.  This ended up being a good decision, because I spent almost no time working on learning software and tooling.

I made this choice in the beginning of this project because of my experience as a web developer.  Writing code involves using a lot of different tools.  Some of them are very complex, and you often use many of them.  Web development can become a dance of getting tools to work together and learning how to use tools.  Really learning and mastering these tools takes time and energy.  I didn’t want to go through this process any more than I had to with writing.  I wanted to put all energy into writing if it was possible.  Luckily it was possible to just use Word and move forward.  This process was clunky at times and I wish I had features and abilities I didn’t but I made it work.  I was very concerned if I had to spend a month learning how to use some writing software, then I would just end up quitting the project altogether.  In retrospect I think this choice was a smart choice.

Tools can be complicated and distract us from the job at hand.  A good chef needs a few basic kitchen utensils things to cook a great meal.  I think writing can be the same way, the old writing masters didn’t have computers and they managed to write some wonderful things.  I wanted the experience of doing this without all the fancy tools.  One way I thought of it was that it was like how I learned math.  I didn’t use a calculator much at all until I had gotten to college.  Math was done by hand in my schools, I had to learn how to do it the slow clunky way so I understood the principles.  After I got to college I started using the calculator more but the principles of mathematics were at that point baked into my mind.  It is my hope that writing with the simplest of tools taught me some of the same things.  Going forward I think I will make better decisions about the tools I use.

Now that I have gone through writing a book with what I consider basic tools, I am in my mind ready to play with more complex software.  I want to find something that helps me have multiple versions of documents.  I want to find things that help me keep track of research and footnotes and references as well.  Now that I have done this thing once my hope is that I can try things and say more accurately if a tool will be good for me.  Overall I am very glad I chose this path to my tooling for this book.

Tools are great and wonderful, but I’m glad I realized early on, that the tools don’t matter much.  Effort and cleverness make up for any lack of tooling I had.

Lesson 2. Repurposing Blogposts Is A Trap

I had been writing blogposts about fitness for a while before deciding to tackle a book about fitness.  My first thought about writing a book is I could take these blogposts and put them together, add an intro and conclusion, and I might have a good book.  That is not how things turned out.  This was a trap and I walked into it.

After a little while of trying to make this work it started to look like this wouldn’t work for me on this project.  I persisted with this strategy a little too long.  I feel as though I would have been better off outlining a book and writing from scratch.  Trying to use what I already had forced my hand into bad directions and really created more work for myself.

By using already written blogposts I ended up having to do a lot more editing.  Many blogposts referred to things that made sense in the old context of being on a web page.  So I had to edit and rewrite a lot of stuff.  I think writing it from scratch might have gotten me further faster.  There was also no flow to this monster that I had assembled, which lead to more editing.  I was editing and editing to create flow to this book.  Eventually I got it all to work, but I think I made it harder on myself than it needed to be.

I would be weary of ever trying this method again.  I will probably use this method again though.  A collection of well done blogposts could make a decent book.  I have seen it work.  I think it takes the right mix of author, writing style, and subject matter to make this work.  My best advice if you want to try this is to give it a go and abandon it if it doesn’t work.  There is a trap here but it’s an easy trap to escape if you just recognize the trap. 

Lesson 3.  You Have to Find the Right Metrics

Goals are a good thing.  Yes I am sounding so simplistic here.  To be productive with my writing I needed goals.  I played around with different goals to get productive.  I settled on words writing in a day. 

Microsoft Word makes this is easy to do.  In the bottom left of the window you get a word count.  I just took my starting count and compared it to my ending count for the day.  Just having these numbers helped me really churn out the content and get through this book.

I tried setting goals of writing for X number of hours. 

I tried scheduling time on my calendar to write as well. 

In the end the metric that resonated with me was word counts.  As soon as I started to look at word counts and measure progress this way my productivity skyrocketed.  I worked on writing this book over a year, but in reality once I got to using a word count I wrote the bulk of the first draft in 30 days or something like that.  As soon as I just started looking at word counts, I felt like I had unlimited power.

My best advice to others is find the metric and goals that work with your mind.  Just because one way of looking at progress doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean there are not other metrics that won’t work.

Lesson 4. Get It Right the First Time

I spent a lot of time editing and working on revisions of this book.  A lot of this was time I didn’t need to spend on this.  I would write a section and then quit for the day.  I then would put the book together as a whole for an editing pass.  This workflow just lead to me having a lot of errors I had to fix.  If I had just reread and checked for spelling and grammar along the way I would have saved myself a lot of trouble.  This isn’t a profound lesson or insight, but it is something I messed up a lot.

Lesson 5.  Writing a Book Isn’t “Hard”

To be truthful, writing a book is both easy and hard.  Writing words to that come together into a manuscript, that isn’t that hard.  That is all it takes to write a book.  If I can write about a page an hour, then all I need to do is write for 100 hours and I have a book. 

For me all I have to do to write a book is sit down and do it.  For others it may be harder or easier.  This is a lesson for myself.

Writing a GOOD book is the hard thing.  This is where what I write matters.  I can only do the best I can do though, so I will do that.  It is not for me to judge whether what I write has any value, that is for the reader.  It is only my job to write.

So this is a mindset lesson.  In my mind I can write a book, that is something I can just do.  It only takes some time and effort.  There is no question it can get done.  Not questioning whether I am capable of doing a task does make that task easier. 

Lesson 6. Stay in Flow

Getting into the flow to do good writing can be a hard thing for me to do.  Once I get in the flow of writing I am best served by doing everything I can to stay in flow. 

Doing things like taking a break is problematic.  I might not return to flow after the break, I am much better sitting at the keyboard until the wheels fall off. 

Flow can be transferred from day to day.  I feel like my best writing happens when I write almost every day.  I have tried to be productive only writing on a one day a week schedule.  It is possible, it is however not all that ideal for me.  I feel as though the best way forward for me is that once I start a writing project is to work on it every day I can until it is finished. 

Flow is just that important to my process.

Lesson 7. I Want An Outline

Before writing this first book of mine, I did no outlining.  I just sat down and shoved random scraps of writing together.  I just banged my head against the wall until a coherent framework emerged.  I did not like this process all that much.  Next time around I want to do more of an outline and see if that saves me headaches. 

Final Thoughts

As I look back on my first book, these are the lessons that jump out most to me.  I am sure when I write book number 2 that some of these lessons will prove helpful, and some will change altogether.  This is just where I am at as a writer at this moment.  I hope you get some ideas from the lessons that you can implement on a project of your own. 

TV shows and movies will show the writer or genius with a trashcan full of crumpled up papers.  These are drafts that are discarded after countless fruitless attempts at greatness.  These stories often end with the protagonist making a great breakthrough.  The story beats do their job and move along the story.  In addition to these scenes moving along many a good story, they are making me think.  They are making me think about how my trashcan is mostly empty.  I am starting to wonder if I should be filling that metaphorical trashcan with more stuff?

These days my most productive form of art is writing.  I am writing a variety of things of a variety of lengths, my writing is a bit all over the place in a multitude of ways.  One common variable is that once I jump into writing something, I tend to work at it until I get something useful out of it.  For the most part if I start something I finish it, I don’t very often delete it and say “well that didn’t work…”  I am starting to think this might be a flaw.  I feel as though I am losing too many opportunities.

I think I worry too many times about finishing writing pieces I start.  Some pieces should be played with and discarded.  I don’t do that.  If I don’t have a strong idea of where I might go with things, I don’t start.  I am starting to think if I experimented more and just tried I might end up with more final products to release.  It’s not really about how much trash I create its about how many good things I create.  A truth in my life has been that I never know where good things will come from.  I am likely missing opportunities because I don’t write enough, so why do I do it?

Too often I think I view discarding a writing piece as failure.  It is not failure it is process.  Success is more about creating the most good stuff possible, not limiting “failures.”  I think ego is coming into play too much for me.  I don’t want to say that I wrote something that was garbage.  I allow the losses to hurt more than the victories feel good.  I can still throw the bad stuff out, writing is not publishing.  This arrogance is setting me back, and should be purged. 

Going forward, I feel I should view the trashcan as simply a step on my hero’s journey.  Filling the trashcan means I will be filling the blog with good things as well.  Process matters and I must remove the ego from the process.  Singers get judged on their hit songs, not all the songs that didn’t hit.  By adopting this attitude I can string together more hits. 

The world is looking like it is more and more up against something really big and daunting with this Coronavirus that is spreading right now.  I am not a smart enough man to predict how any of this may land.  I might lose a lot of family and friends, and I may not.  That seems to be a part of being in a pandemic, you don’t know how things will shake out.  I feel like I am standing watching an approaching storm.  The clouds are black, the wind is blowing, and it is uncertain how bad exactly this might be.  In a person’s life they only see so many bad storms.  These storms are moments that define us.  How we react and what we do during these times are moments that reveal our values.  We are looking at a coming storm, for some of us the storm has arrived, the question we must ask is “Now what?”

I won’t provide any answers here, I’m not smart enough to have those.  Everyone’s situation is vastly different and will necessitate different actions.  I have isolated and pretty much quarantined myself.  This wasn’t hard for me.  I spend most of my time alone anyways right now.  I will just do my writing from my parent’s house rather than from the library.  I cannot pass judgement or suggestions onto people that have a lot more going on with their lives.  It does feel to me we are standing before a pivotal time.

I have wondered before how many of these times in our lives do we get?  Sometimes men are sent off to war, those are pivotal times.  Accidents and illnesses can be the same way on a much smaller scale globally but are still huge for the people they directly impact.  Meeting your spouse is a far more positive example of these important times.  I feel like these times are the ones that really shape our story and legacy.

How we react and what we do in these times are the makings of story and legacies.  In fifty years our grandchildren may be asking what we did during this time.  I don’t say this to try and inspire anything.  This might not be a time to take drastic inspired action.  It’s probably more of a time to stay home and quarantine.  To be honest we might not even get a chance to take much action.  We might just get to sit at home and ride this out.  Sometimes the best action that can be taken is no action at all.  We might get a chance to help a neighbor out or something like that, all our situations will be different.  So this is probably not the time to hold rallies and march in the streets, but there could be other things we can do.

We can forgive, we can reach out, and we can improve during our exiles.  If we’re able maybe we should forgive debts until after this pandemic has passed.  Your neighbor that owes you money might need that 200 dollars a lot more than you right now.  Most of us have a lot of communications technology, so we should reach out to people and make them feel less isolated.  We can learn new things during this time.  I know I have a lot of reading and learning goals to catch up on.  Mostly we can use this time to do things we’re proud of in some way.  If this thing goes as bad for as long as it could, this will be important.

There is no way today to really know how long this will last.  I am losing hope that this will pass quickly.  We can only do the best we can with each day and go from there.  We must consider though where this time and where these moments sit within our life.  The things we do in the coming days will matter a lot.  Even if all we do is quarantine at home and help stop the spread of this virus, that is a legacy worth having.  This will not be over in the next few days.  We have time to sit and ponder how we should react.  I do believe this is likely going to be a pivotal time period in our lives, we should recognize that, and act accordingly.

I am a Star Wars fan and nerd.  I can nerd out hard on anything involving spaceships, lightsabers and Jedi.  I am naturally excited that Star Wars Episode 9 came out a couple weeks ago.  I have seen it twice in theatres so far.  The first time I loved it, the second time I wasn’t as into it.  The first time I saw it I was in a good state of mind, the second time not so much.  This colored my view of the film.  It also reminded me how much “State” matters.

The first time I saw this film I was excited, rested, happy, and I loved watching the movie.  The second time was a much different experience.  I was exhausted.  I was feeling sick when I got to the movie.  I sat there for the first half of the film with stabbing intestinal pains because these things happen when you have Celiac Disease.  Then the people sitting closest to me would not quit talking during the film.  It was a perfect storm to put me into a less than stellar state.  I think this is why I didn’t enjoy the film all that much the second time around, I couldn’t focus on the movie.  I was just in a weird mental place.  I’m sure next time I watch the movie I’ll like it again.

Even though next time I will watch Star Wars I will like it, last time I still wasn’t into it because of some rather small and random things.  A few common everyday things like being a little sick, and a little tired changed my state/personality/attitude 100% from its baseline.  That is how fragile state of mind can be.  It’s not really a big deal overall, I had a bad experience at the movie theatre, and that really doesn’t matter.  This almost 180 degree turn in my attitude about a movie though made me think about how many times this happens in life and I don’t realize it.

Could my state be affecting my perception of things and performance more than I realize?  If a simple state shift can take me from loving a Star Wars movie one day to ten days later thinking its mediocre, what else are state shifts impacting?  I think this sticks out to me because of the great contrast there was in my viewing experiences.  I wonder how often this kind of thing happens with daily life and I have no extreme contrast to draw my attention to it.

I feel as though I could be in a less than stellar state frequently in my life.  Am I letting myself be thrown into a bad state that negatively impacts my daily work?  I think it is quite possible.  I think it is hard to recognize when this is happening.  Work is not by its nature an extreme thing for me.  The difference between a “good” day and a “bad” day might only be a 10% difference.  I think that is something I can overlook.  I think it has impact though.  The damning thing is I don’t often think about what state I spend my days in.

Naturally being in a good state everyday is something I want.  Part of being in this good state is monitoring and managing the state I’m in presently.  If I don’t think about that, I don’t think I can change it when necessary.  This isn’t a blog post about changing state of mind.  There are a lot of ways to do that.  This is about the first step of paying attention to state.  I know I don’t do a good enough job of it.

I think paying attention to state is a bit of a spiritual and mental attunement.  It involves paying attention to health.  It involves paying attention to our responses to stimulus, I didn’t need to be annoyed by the people talking in the theatre.  I could have just moved seats earlier than I did, I let that minor annoyance happen in my head, it was my response.  I think state can be impacted by our self dialogue, the words we use hold a lot of power.  There are countless things that impact our state, and I know I can do better managing and mitigating these things.  By doing so I think I can draw many benefits.

I believe that there is more success and happiness to be found when we are in a better state.  When in a good state we draw more good things to ourselves.  In a negative or bad state, we push things away.  The ok becomes great in a positive state, and in a negative, the good becomes horrible.  Recognizing our states is the first step.  The step towards experiencing life the way we want rather than letting life happen around us.  The way to enjoying Star Wars far more when we watch it because after all “This is the way.”

When I was a little guy, I used to love being read to by my mother.  I thought books and stories were cool.  When I finally went to school I was exposed to the school library.  There was a room full of books and you could borrow them and read them all.  That is what I thought and wanted the library to be.  There were apparently a lot of rules about what books you could read.  I could only read books from a certain shelf in the library.

In my elementary school, students could only get books from the shelves that corresponded to their grade.  A first grader, simply wasn’t allowed to even look at most of the books in the library.  This was disappointing to Young Nehemiah.  The books I was allowed to read were not stimulating to me on any level.  I was being held back from reading things I was capable of reading.  This was a horrible thing to do to a child.  Luckily I am a stubborn sort, so it didn’t really effect me. 

I don’t think this whole library episode had lasting implications.  This could have really turned some kids off to reading and school.  It is criminal that school teachers and librarians act like this sometimes.  My ability to read a book didn’t matter to these teachers, my grade level is all that mattered.  I was a good reader, but I was held back by the teachers because I was in first grade.  Could I have read everything in that library? Maybe not, but I was not even allowed the opportunity to challenge myself.

I think it is horrible to tell a child not to challenge themselves.  It seems counter to all that education should stand for.  I think in all levels of education we should all the students to challenge themselves.  Even if we think they are biting off more than they can chew, sometimes they can chew it.  Biting off more than you can chew and chewing it, that teaches you a lot about life.  I have done it before, and that is the kind of risk that reaps some real personal rewards.  If I couldn’t read the books I tried to read, well I guess I would have fell flat on my face.

Falling flat on your face, that should be a part of the education process.  If you don’t run fast and hard into brick walls, you never know if you can run through them.  If we break ourselves against these metaphorical walls, then that is what a teacher or mentor is for.  They are there to pick us up and help us grow.  I don’t know many teachers facilitate this experience for students.  Yoda tells us that failure is a great teacher, schools could allow a bit more failure.

The risk associated with failing to be able to read a book that was above my level was small.  If it was too much, I would have had Mom read it to me.  It would not have been a big deal.  I might have been able to read it and stayed excited about reading.  Over time I think I lost most excitement for reading and school in general.  I was a smart kid, so I got through school just fine, but I didn’t like it.  School could be fun and stimulating.  Instead we tell kids no too often.

I was told not to read books that were above my level.  This level was some arbitrary age grouping of students.  What is a first grade even?  Is it a set of abilities?  No it is a set of birthdays.  I fear we do too many things like this that are just one more step in turning students off to school.  A student should be allowed to run as far and fast as they want to.  They will figure out on their own when to slow down and set a pace.  Telling a kid not to learn something because they are too young, well that is a pathetic thing to do.

“I shall defeat all my enemies with my superpower of being insanely boring!”  That statement might be a bit of a stretch.  I don’t have many enemies to defeat.  I however do spend time cultivating this superpower of being boring.  I become more happy all the time to just do boring things.  What do I gain when I embrace being boring? 

Through boredom I can gain needed repetitions and consistency in all things.  Doing the same thing over and over is boring.  It is also the path to mastery.  I wonder if someone can’t handle a dose of boredom then can they ever become masterful at something?  In the past when I have lacked mastery, I have lacked the repetitions needed to gain that mastery.  I do feel like being willing to be bored allows you do some extra repetitions of whatever you’re doing.  This can be true for learning and mastery but also for execution.  Once you know what works and have a proven process, shouldn’t you keep repeating that endlessly?  How many businesses fail because the owner just quits doing the things that lead to success?  How often is this is due to boredom?  On some level I should never be bored doing the things that lead to success.  Boredom will still be there, but it is something I know I can endure.  Boredom is not the enemy.

Boredom is not the enemy, in fact boredom can be a great ally.  Through boredom I can gain space to think.  A lot of good thinking is done on long walks or long drives.  I think this is partially because they are boring.  These things can quiet your mind enough to allow you to have ideas come to you.  I don’t know the mechanisms behind this, but I know it works.  Have you had more good ideas come to you randomly or when you were trying to think?  For me that answer is definitely at random times.  The mind can only work on so many things at once,  being bored quiets the mind to allow it work in the background on any number of things you have given it. 

Since the mind can only work on so many things at one time, boredom can be a way to be more intentional about the things we have to think about.  By being boring in my everyday life, I don’t have to think about things.  I have autopiloted so many things in my life, which is boring.  I eat the same things for breakfast and lunch every day.  I wear the same clothes all the time.  I work from a library that is rather boring.  I don’t put energy into these things so that I can put that energy into things that actually matter.  This all works to put my mind into the best state possible for productivity.

Some of the best things I have accomplished in my life have been through being boring.  Graduating from college was boring, but I just kept showing up to class and doing the work.  There were many things that didn’t interest me, but I didn’t let these things being boring stop me.  I have written a book in the last year, well its kind of almost done.  There is still editing to do, but it has been super boring.  I barely like to edit my writing once, but I have made many editing passes on this book.  It can be extremely boring.  I don’t mind being bored though, because it is getting me to the point of having accomplished some cool things. 

Doing boring things might not be the chief reason for these and other successes.  I do think it’s a contributing factor.  Embracing repetitions and freeing my mind can’t be a bad thing.  I don’t know that I purposely seek out doing boring things.  I want novel and exciting things in my life too.  Boredom though is not an excuse to me anymore.  Boredom is not a reason for me to avoid doing something.  Boredom is not a reason to quit doing something.  I am finding myself having a better relationship with all that is boring.  It has grown my patience.  It has helped me finish doing hard things. 

How we think about boredom is a step in combatting boredom.  It is not a bad thing, it is just a thing.  In the end I must make the decisions I make.  I must not allow boredom to make decisions, because those are not good decisions.  Boredom is just a thing, and I can’t say that it is likely a very important thing. 

It is not uncommon to turn on the tv and see an interview with someone the host touts as a “self-made” billionaire.  The story is usually about how someone created some company or skill that earned them a billion dollars.  They did not inherit their billion dollars, so that makes them “self-made.”  Undoubtedly these efforts are remarkable, and a great display of effort.  The term “self-made” well I don’t know what to think about that.  Can anyone be a “self-made” anything?

The cults of personality like to build a myth around these “self-made” folks.  They say that they did it all on their own.  This person against the odds and without an inheritance did some great thing.  While this is true to a degree, I would say that none of these people did it alone.  While a lot of their success is due to their creativity, effort, and grit, everyone still has help.  Too often these cults of personality build up to the point where some “self-made” person is reported to have done everything on their own.  That they didn’t need anyone, they had it all within themselves.  These stories seem to me to be ego, legend making, and flat out lies.  I can admit being “self-made” does make a good story for a 5 minute television segment though, even if it is not true.

I can’t believe most people didn’t have help on their paths to success.  How is success even possible without help?  At the very least even if you are “self-made”  you had to have had some customers or clients.  At some point in time someone or a lot of someones had to decide to do some business with you instead of someone else.  These people made you, you’re not “self-made.”  Most businesses have multiple founders or some employees.  Steve Jobs wasn’t a “self-made” billionaire, Steve Wozniak made Steve Jobs, and Jobs made Wozniak.  Successes don’t happen in isolation.

People that are “self-made” and claim to have done it all on their own seem to be delusional to me.  They have lost touch with the true story of how they found their successes.  There could be a host of reasons for this.  Ego could be at play.  Narcissism could be at play at well.  They could also have just forgotten all the people that have helped them along the way.  Being “self-made” is a good story for the TV but its just a fairy tale.

Could believing this fairy tale lead us astray?  I am not a success, I have no money, and to become a success I must be “self-made.”  In some way I must be “self-made” in the ways people talk about being “self-made.”  I have no one from which to inherit millions.  I have no powerful friends that will drop success into my lap for me being a good guy.  I must be “self-made.”  My story of success must follow the path that many of these “self-made” people followed.  Believing the stories and legends though, that will lead me into places I don’t want to be.  I cannot believe I will do this success thing all on my own. 

I will never be a “self-made” success.  Thinking that I can do it all on my own is just poison.  There are too many people who have helped me already.  My parents have helped time and time again in so many ways, both profound and small.  At 35 years old, I am still getting constant help from my parents.  I have great friends that have shown kindness beyond anything I could deserve.  Before I was even born my grandparents were helping me by building and creating families that have given me so much support.  Being “self-made”, acting like I did ANYTHING in life by myself is a slap in the face to all these people.  I have been helped by so many people that I can’t even list them all or remember them all.  Taking credits for my successes, acting like I did them all, that is just something I can’t do.  There is so much credit that must go to others, I get so much help all the time.  Even if I could be “self-made” in any sense of the word, I wouldn’t want to be.

Even if I could make myself into something, into some sort of success all by myself, doing so would make me a moron.  I have so much help available to me.  I have great family, I have great friends, how could I not accept their support?  Their emotional support and friendship is of value beyond anything that could possibly be quantified.  Beyond that, there is so much help I could call on.  I could call upon others to be co-founders in a company with me.  I could go to writers groups where we help each other edit and shape our next books.  I could go to a coworking studio and bounce ideas off a hundred smart people.  Doing any of these things stops me from being “self-made.”  I can’t imagine wanting to be “self-made.” 

I think this thought can be transferred to other things.  Why would I want to be “self-taught” at anything when there is help available.  Yes, you can learn things on your own, and learning on your own is partially a part of the process.  There are resources and others available to you that will help you.  And even if you don’t use those resources, you still got help.  If you learned to program a computer, did you write the book you learned from?  Did you build the computer?  Did you smelt the iron to build the transistors?  Thinking we do things on our own, and that we are “self made” or “self-taught”  or “self-anything” what does that even mean?

Maybe thinking we did it on our own is a matter of ego.  Some people don’t want admit they had help.  Maybe we forgot who helped us along the way.  There can be a lot of solitude in our journeys, but that doesn’t mean we were ever alone.  We can play an instrumental role in our stories.  We can be the lead actor, but this is not a one man play.  Losing sight of that is to become something I don’t want to be.  I can’t imagine doing anything on my own or even trying to.  I can’t imagine how it is even possible.  I hope I never say I was “self-made” or let other people stick this title on me.  I don’t want to forget how things really happened.  Other people matter in my story.  My journey is not alone, and it never has been.