Creatives

In the last few weeks I have been amazed at the creative powers of many of our friends, as well as people across the entire world.  Now, I'm not really talking about people who make the really big discoveries, like curing polio, or cancer, whenever that happens.  Those people and their discoveries are phenomenal in their own right, no question, but I am talking about the creative people who are around us every single day.  The woodworker, the welder, the writer, the photographer -  these and so many others take normal situations and change them or see the incredible in them.  If you want to know what this looks like, take a look at Pinterest or a website like Wood Whisperer.  People are doing some amazing things.

This is one of the things I love the most about what I get to do each day for a living.  I live in a state where people figure out how to do things with a more "hands on" approach than other places.  We have our share of engineers, designers, and draftsmen, but I am continually amazed at how many times I visit a customer and they are upgrading a product in the shop.  This isn't necessarily through computer assisted design (which we do use) but through the tried and tested method of fitting something and then seeing if it works.  One of my favorite examples of this was during a visit to GE Commercial Credit a few years ago.  They had a machine that they lovingly called "The Rubber Band Machine."  This piece of equipment sliced all of the edges off an envelope, discard the envelope itself and orient the contents of the letter in an exact pattern.  Pretty amazing, right?  Well, the amazing part was that when the people there were talking about the machine, they admitted it had been created because someone wanted a machine to cut the end off an envelope.  The rest developed over time and with ingenuity as they continued to say, "Well, if it can do that, can it ..."?  What they ended up with was a machine that could do everything.

As I said above, I get to meet these people every day, and with almost no exceptions, they are the most down-to-earth, grounded folks I have ever known.  I remember meeting a man who developed a filtering system that would separate nearly anything, and the reason he had done it was because everyone told him there was nothing on the market that could do this.  He needed to accomplish this task, so he went after it and in the end had a system others couldn't believe worked.  Earlier this week, I had the chance to go to Iowa State and listen to some young creatives talking about their passion and what they were going to do with it.  Their plans were bold and audacious and I believe many of them will accomplish these plans.  In the middle of this comes the challenge that I have to take to heart, and if you are in my age group, you may want to listen as well.

I have reached an age where I have come to believe that I know what will work and what won't.  This is based upon years of trial and error and watching others succeed and fail.  And, I have a strong enough belief in myself that I really think that I know.  Yet really, in this time in which we are living - with all of the creative people and resources around us, there is no limit other than that which we set for ourselves.  I know this intellectually, however knowing this in my gut is sometimes completely different.  This is the challenge.  I have to stop myself from being the one who crushes new ideas and potential by telling some of these younger people that what they are trying to do will not succeed.  In the presentations I saw earlier this week, there are a couple of ideas that I don't think stand a chance of surviving, but there was a time when I probably would not have believed broadband Internet would exist in most homes or that you could carry computers around in your hand.  I am still a child of a time when a computer filled an entire room and was so hot that you could not be in that same room.  That wasn't so very long ago, either.

So my challenge, and I would invite you to join me if you can, is to support new ideas when we see them.  In meetings I will not be the one who says, "That won't work."  I will be the one who encourages new approaches and suggests that we should take a look.  Often times, if an idea is given some room and time to bloom, it will do just that.  There are so many people right now with fantastic and creative ideas that just need a chance to get going.  Let's do what we can to help these folks along.  Who knows, one of them may help to solve world hunger or global warming.

Everybody keep after it.  We need the new ideas and the willingness to chase them.

Digital Hermit

With all of the press about the NSA listening to all of our conversations or reading all of our emails, it struck me earlier this week that it might be really easy to proclaim that you were going to be a "digital hermit," living off the grid.  This would be reminiscent of the movie "Enemy of the State." The main character had in fact, learned to live in a manner in which he left absolutely no electronic footprint.  At the same time I was thinking about this, I ran into an article about an area in West Virginia, Virginia, and a piece of Maryland called the "United States National Radio Quiet Zone."  This is an area of the US, that due to the work at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been declared as an area with no high power transmitters and makes such things as cell phones and wi-fi connectivity a thing of another world.  You can still find a phone booth here since this technology is ultra-modern for its residents.  So, this area would be much closer to the idea of being off the grid than anything we know today.  Maybe the answer is to move to that part of the US.

But hang on.  Wait just a minute.  This would mean that I wouldn't be able to have multiple computers in my home all networked with Wi-fi.  It would mean that I couldn't have a smart phone, or even moving back a generation or two, a cell phone of any kind.  No on-line banking, no texting, no instant messaging, no cars with spark plugs.  Okay, this is just more than I can think about.  On top of that, my generation is only somewhat connected whereas I am sure that if I talked to my children about this concept, they would just quit breathing.  These are all things we have come to take for granted and thinking about going backward is probably not something most of us want to do.  I know it isn't really something that I want to do.  I don't need to hear again the sound of AOL booting up to send a message over a network that is tens of times slower than the phone I carry today.

I have a tendency to long for the simplicity of the past until I stop to think about all of the convenience that comes with the way that our world is today.  I think about the times as a child when I could lay on a hillside and watch clouds go by, enjoying the time for hours. I remember that in my hometown I could be gone all day long and nobody would think about it.  Would I like to have these things back to be part of my life, or my kid's lives today?  Absolutely, but, like so many things, there is a trade-off.  As I watched Andrew and Megan grow up, it amazed me at the size of their world compared to the one I grew up in.  They had friends from all over the world and had lived in six places before they reached high school.  Where I had not flown anywhere until I was in college, my children had flown enough that Megan could tell me that she liked the First Class seats because they were more comfortable.  They had been to Disney World twice. My first trip was with them on their first time.  All sorts of differences that came with time.

I guess that where I am right now is that I value all of the wonderful things of the past, and I also love the things that are in the here and now.  I have wonderful memories of times and of friends that I had the privilege of knowing from before we started to school until after we graduated.  But at the same time, when I left for college, even though I was going to a small university, I was headed to a place that had more people than the community I had grown up in.  Long and short of it, there are pluses and minuses to everything.  I know that my children are more worldly at their age than I was then and I know that they have drug me along the road of "modern," sometimes screaming and kicking.  I must say that I appreciate the help.

Oh, a few last things worth remembering: the snow was always much deeper, and it was a 10 mile walk uphill to school when I was a child and I am sure that this was real and not just the way that I remember it. 

Well, off I go to wrap gifts with Rotary so some kids will have a better holiday.

Have a great week.

Launched

As many of you know, I love the author, Seth Godin.  His words have helped me think through a lot of different situations over the years and given me moments to really stop and think about what I was doing.  I believe he has helped me to be a better leader in my professional life and now, I think that he may be one of the factors that is helping me to move forward in my personal life.  

One thing Seth talks about time and time again is that you have to "ship."  This means that you have to gather your courage and take whatever it is that you have done and put it out there for the world to see.  Honestly, it has been the encouragement of some of you, and the idea of shipping that got me to write this blog in the first place.  I had thought about it sometimes, even taken a crack or two at writing something, but I had never found the courage to put what I had done out there for the world to see, and honestly, to critique.  And then, on April 7, 2011, I was able to find the courage to actually publish the first of these blogs.  If you go back and look at what I thought this would be early on, we have traveled a great distance from that, but I am still putting myself out there, and you are still reading what I have to write.  Thanks so much for that.

 

Well, again with encouragement from all of you, I am jumping to a completely new level.  I have opened an Etsy store to let people know what is available from Jim's Toybox Woodworking.  So, to use Seth's verbage, I have shipped.  I have told you that I have actually produced something and I am holding it out for public scrutiny.  Just writing the sentence causes me to be just a little queasy.  

In the middle of all of this, I keep thinking about the television commercial talking about big changes later in life.  Well, this is certainly one for me.  I ask that you support me in this venture and if you know of anyone who might be interested in the work that I do at the Toybox, let them know about all of this.  Along the same lines, if you need, or know someone who needs something built to their specifications, remember that I am out here working on the weekends and in the evenings - making sawdust and beautiful finished products.  

Ditch Digger

Sometimes we have a tendency to forget the things that we were programmed with as kids, and then along comes something that smacks us right in the face.  This was the case this week with a note I found while going through some other things.  Some of you may recognize the handwriting, some may not, but this was my mom's penmanship. She wrote this little note about career and kept this on the wall behind her desk. I suspect this gave her something to think about during those times her career wasn't all she wanted it to be.  I read this and then I remembered words my father said to me on more than one occasion.  He told me that he would rather have me be a good ditch digger than a lousy attorney.  Obviously, I ended up as neither of those, but I think that the meaning is something I have tried to carry, sometimes more successfully than at other times.  As an example, I remember going to my ten year class reunion and found myself almost apologizing for what I was doing for a career.  Looking back on it now, that career provided a good living and let me live comfortably within my means. What more can any of us ask?

Tuesday was a long day here, work did not go well and I left in foul humor - just ask Sara or anyone that I interacted with.  If you check with my team, they will tell you that there was some residual left by the time I arrived at our Wednesday morning meeting.  To finish Tuesday off, on her way home from class, the truck Sara was driving stopped working and wouldn't restart.  The good part was that she was safe, the bad part was that we ended up sitting at a Casey's for about an hour waiting a tow truck to take it to Jack's so that it could get fixed the next day. 

That isn't the point of the story. In the middle of all of this, I met a person who was a true joy. His name was Kenny, and he was the driver that the folks at Crow Towing sent to take care of us.  He was the consummate professional, showing the same care for a Ford F150 with almost 160K miles that he would have shown with a just-off-the-showroom-floor Corvette.  All the time that he was doing the work, he also communicated with me as to what he was doing and why, and how things had changed over the years in his business.  I can tell you for sure that if I had needed brain surgery, I would have gone someplace else, but to take care of our truck, you could not have found better care or someone more helpful. 

In dealing with Kenny and our truck, I was reminded of a man who worked with me at Payless Cashways on Hickman Road a bunch of years ago.  His name was Jack.  He came to work as a yard/warehouse person and struggled with the concept of staying busy.  Early in his time there, if he didn't have something to do, he would just stand, or lean, against a bunk of lumber.  I remember working with him repeatedly, helping him understand that there is always something to do, and when people see you standing around, they wonder what value you bring to the organization.  Jack became a very good employee, and a nice person just to be around.  I remember the day he came to tell me that he had gotten another job, a better job in his eyes.  He was going to work at Iowa Methodist as a janitor.  He was the happiest person I had ever seen, and I would almost bet he is still there today. 

I know there are times that I haven't necessarily been happy with what I was doing. There have also been times I wasn't proud of what I was doing. But in hindsight, I do believe that focusing on the career/job and doing the best I could has always been the thing that made it possible for my family to do everything we wanted to do.  I remember my boss telling me one day that if I focused on the current job, and did the best that I could possibly do, the next job would always take care of itself.  Thus far, I've found that to be true. I've watched others who were always chasing the big career and could never quite get there.  I guess that whatever you are, whether it is a lawyer or baker, carpenter or author, sales guy or CFO; being productive, effective, and happy are the real important things.  It helps carry us through the hard times, along with some of the tremendous people that we get to meet along the way.

So, I will go to work tomorrow and remember the words that my mom thought were important enough to put over her desk.