How Much Do I Own?

I had a horrible meeting with someone. He was a total a**.

I had something to accomplish, but he continually and loudly resisted, was defensive, hurled obstacles. I couldn't get what I wanted done. I kept thinking. I kept trying different approaches, different explanations, a different posture. I couldn't make any headway. I tried. I really tried.

Hmmmm. It must be him. He must really be an a**.

I had several names on the tip of my tongue and they didn't have stars in them as I said them to myself. They didn't have stars in them as I shouted them in my car.

You think texting is distracting while you are driving. Try imagining that you are cursing and physically assaulting a person while you're driving. It probably is in the same bucket as texting.

But time and space took over and started winning my attention more and more.

Maybe he is an a**. But what am I? What could I have done or said differently? What WILL I say and do differently next time?

That is the eternal question I must ask myself. Because I regularly deal with a**es. And a lot of the time I am an a**. But I have work to do and I have things to accomplish. If everybody really is an a**, then I must learn how to prevail, or exist, but hopefully collaborate. That much I own.

Status Quo

Someday in the future I will look back on the early 2000s and reminisce how I survived it, how I lived through what seemed at the time the most tumultuous, blah, blah, blah.

Surely your parents or grandparents have done this in front of you much to your eye rolling. That's because it's part of what we do as we age.

We sometimes just sit around and wish we knew the thing today that we should be investing in, focusing on, and avoiding. Because, like Seth Godin says, "the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly... every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely."

The guy in The Graduate was right; "I have one word for you: plastics." But he was actually a joke that the viewers at the time laughed at.

So what is the one word, or two words, or more today? Pay attention. The signs and the advice is out there. The worst thing to do is cling to the irrelevant past or to think that good enough is good enough. What you do and think and how you do it are changing every day. Do not become irrelevant. Do not resist. Grab on and realize that principles remain, but your methods have got to constantly change or be demolished.