Re-Set

Last week a dear friend of mine, Russell Jensen, posted this on Facebook:

Dear 2015, while I am eager to see you leave, I at least owe you some thanks. So thank you for the priceless lessons you taught me about living, which is really about about faith, family, resilience and gratitude. I like who I am and where I am today better than who I was and where I was a year ago.

Dear 2016, any chance I can get extra credit for 2015 so we can we just skip the whole lessons learned thing this year? Yes?

First of all, I loved this post. Yes, 2015 was a tough year for Russell and like many of us, I'm glad he is through it. I also wish that I could have done more to help him. But one thing this post made me consider was all of the thought we put into the first of the year. Like everything else, it comes with its good and its bad.

In terms of the good, many of us use this as a time to reset. In the next few weeks the gym I use will be absolutely packed with people who made a New Year's resolution to lose weight, or get healthier - whatever the goal may be.  This is a time to quit smoking, or any number of healthy challenges.  Like I said, it's a really good time to reset.  And  I hope that for everyone who sets a plan for the first of the year, this is the most successful attempt you've ever made.

But, and here comes the Jim part ... why is it that the first of the year holds such a magic? Why could we not use the 12th of April to think about things for the upcoming year? What is it about January 1 that has such a grip on us?

I've talked about will power and the fact that it actually is an exhaustible resource. The book I read talked about will power and self control as something you have a limited amount of. When you start using it - it will run out.  Then, it takes time to rebuild your reserves back up. The author explained that this is why diets fail. "Change is hard because people wear themselves out." We start strong and when our will power fades, we are right back where we started. It isn't laziness, he says - it's exhaustion.  (Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

So what should we do with all of this?  I have a thought and I think that it's a good one. I think we need to slice the time that we have into smaller segments and allow ourselves to see them as an opportunity to re-set.  Rather than just celebrating the beginning of the year, maybe we should look at quarters, or even months. Would it not be better to think about all of the good that happened and get rid of the bad in three months rather than a year? This really seems like something I can get my head around.  It makes the chunks that we are going to bite off less overwhelming and maybe I can set goals that I will be able to accomplish in a quarter, rather than run out of stamina over an entire year.

Think about it. What changes can you break down into quarterly segments. Would you celebrate those and then start something new? If you decide to join me, great, and if not, I will celebrate with you once a year and then have three other quarterly celebrations by myself.

Okay, so at the beginning I wrote that the first of the year was mostly good. But I have to share one with you that really just made me shake my head. I worked for a person at one time who saw the beginning of the year as the worst of times. Every January we heard the same rant - all of the costs of the whole coming year had to be covered before there was any opportunity for profit. Rather than see opportunity ahead, this person only saw the costs of the entire year. Like all of these came about on the first day of the year rather than across time. We were already in the hole and had to dig ourselves out. It was one of the most ludicrous ways I'd ever seen to think about the new year, and I was glad it wasn't the way that most of the world saw it. It really takes the fun out of a fresh, new year.

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you are ready for the New Year. It's already arrived, and as we all know, it will run by us at a staggering rate. May you all be happy and healthy during each quarter of 2016, and may you discover opportunities to re-set more often and feel good about the things you accomplish.

Programmed

At the beginning of this last semester, as I moved my daughter into her apartment, it struck me that she needed a basic set of tools. I went to K-Mart and collected every tool she might possibly need. A hammer, pliers, etc. - just the basics.  I even got her a bag to hold all of these items. When all was said and done, she was ready to go. I did all of this early in the morning before she was even awake. The funny part of the whole experience was when I got to the register to check out. A gentleman  probably ten years my senior looked over all of my items and said, "Someone starting school today?" Well of course. It was so obvious from the things I had purchased exactly what challenges were ahead during the upcoming day.

I flashed back to a time much earlier in my life just after Andrew was born. For those of you who've experienced having children, these are times with little sleep and a lot of unexpected things pop up that need to be accomplished.  So at eleven o'clock one night, I was standing in a cashier's line with a package of disposable diapers and some formula. We'd run out of these two essentials and there were no replacements in the house. And even worse, there was also no waiting for these items. Of course the part which made this funny was that the other three men in the line had the exact same items, and all of us looked as though we'd had no sleep in the prior seventy-two hours.

As you watch people around you  every day, it's amazing how much you can tell about the things they are in the middle of, or just the kind of day they're having. Sometimes it's based upon the place they are, or sometimes it's only based on the way they look.  My daughter and I like to play this game at places like the Iowa State Fair. We will pick a place to sit and then we discuss if people are really off the farm, or if they're just dressing that way to come to the fair.

New boots, new blue jeans, John Deere cap that had never seen the sun before? They didn't live on a farm. Either that, or they'd saved their Sunday best for just this occasion.

I was in Winterset this morning and saw the perfect example of just what I am talking about.  Really, here in Iowa, boots, jeans, and a black Stetson hat aren't what you would call typical. However, sitting in Winterset this morning I watched a man get out of his pickup truck and walk down the street dressed exactly like that and you could tell he thought nothing about it. This was the way he is suppose to look and there was nothing the least bit strange about it. I'll even bet if the right person is reading this right now, they know who this man is.  He's probably a fixture in the community and that attire is common for him. He is programmed to act and look this way.

The greatest thing about being human is that we have the ability to change or fight this programming. On any day, we have the freedom to get up and look at the world and the way we interact with it and make a change. I remember when my son decided he was going to be Andrew rather than Drew. That was a day he changed the way he was programmed and began to change the way others around him were programmed. He changed the way the world viewed him and the way we interacted with him. Honestly, I still have trouble some days with remembering he is Andrew, but I am one of the last holdouts regarding this change of programming.

I know for myself, there are a lot of things I have just always done, many of them without even thinking about it. As we wade through this last month of the year, and in to the New Year, with all of the resolutions which typically come along, I need to take a little time and see if there are things I should do differently.  Although everyone thinks about the beginning of the year as the time we come up with resolutions, there is never a bad time to take a good hard look consider things we can change, or upgrade.  This type of reflection is going to be something I do over the next few weeks as we work our way through  the holidays and the beginning of a new year.  

From my shop to yours, I hope you have a great holiday season and a truly blessed New Year.

Night Sky

Often as I think about the things around me, I have a tendency to look back, and today is no exception.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Iowa Great Lakes area to spend the weekend with a group of friends. As many of you know, I spent a lot of time there in my youth, so being at "The Lake" as we always called it makes me nostalgic. On this particular trip however, I didn't even get close to the area before I started thinking.

I can remember when I was a child and traveling anywhere at night was amazing. A lot of this was because the sky was so dark and the stars were so bright. This was long enough ago, that we were just at the beginning of the electrification of Iowa's rural homes and farms. In those days, many times the only sign seen as to a farm having electricity was the single security light in the center of the yard. This made traveling in the night very overwhelming for a child. This amazing darkness was also compounded because automobiles weren't nearly as reliable as they are today, and everyone had stories of breakdowns where walking was required. I remember when a trip either to, or from my Aunt Dorothy Dean's house, north of Keswick, Iowa, seemed as challenging as going to the moon (which obviously we hadn't yet done at the time).

But the stars. Wow. I remember sitting in the back seat of my grandparent's car, a huge auto, and leaning my head back on the seat and looking out the back window and seeing all of the stars that the universe presented. It was amazing. The other piece of amazement was that from a distance, you could see the glow of big towns - like Sigourney (population 2300). And then change happened and with REC's, electricity became easy to get and inexpensive by comparison. The countryside became much more well lit. Security lights on barns, lights in workshops and out buildings, and of course, homes lit up. The countryside started to feel like one sparsely populated, extended suburb between larger towns.

When we lived in Humboldt, we started to see this go the other way. We were just at the beginning of the roll up of the smaller family farms into larger units. To be clear, it was still family farming and I believe that much of it still is today, but I'll leave that argument to others. Anyway, I remember going to work in the morning and driving by an abandoned farmstead, still in decent shape and driving by the same place in the evening and it was gone. Everything was gone except for the water wellhead, the land put back into production to help drive the productivity of the enterprise. The countryside started heading back the other direction.

This is what I noticed when we driving to Northwest Iowa in the darkness a few weeks ago.

With one really notable difference. In the early days when you saw a glow over the horizon, you knew that in the next few miles, you'd come across a city. Not anymore. Now, the glow that you see is one of two things. It is either the hub for one of the larger farms that has been created in the rollup of the smaller forms, or it is one of the many production facilities in the state that supports the agricultural industry, or uses the products from the farm as their inputs. This could be an ethanol plant or a production facility that produces farm equipment. Either way, they are usually the glowing lights that you see in the otherwise dark sky of rural Iowa. The other thing that you see, particularly as you go Northwest is all of the red lights at the top of the windmills so pilots know where they are.  Otherwise, the night has gotten darker again and it is easier to see stars in the night sky.

The future will bring even more change. There was a very interesting article in Time magazine in the last couple of weeks talking about fusion. The fascinating thing is that they actually think it may be possible to accomplish in our lifetime. This has always been a bit of a pipe dream, but now with many of the world's most forward-thinking and wealthiest people getting into the middle of this, it would seem there really is a hope that this could happen, and if so it would be a game changer. It could well be the thing that changes the world, taking energy off the table as one of our biggest challenges. This would allow the reversal of climate change and would turn many industries on their heads.

I hope for two things with this. First, I hope that this discovery happens in a way that everyone will be able to participate in the change, and second, I hope that I am here to experience it.

Have a great week.

Stretch

I've had a great week in so many ways. A lot of projects moved forward, and  obstacles overcome, but as I consider the week as a whole, what I really thought about was stretching. This isn't really something that often comes to mind for someone in my age range when thinking about their occupation.  I think more often than not, when people reach a certain age, they settle in and very effectively accomplish their work for the rest of their lives. They do it without a great deal of innovative or new thought and without a great deal of change. I remember hearing that in the scientific community, almost to a discovery, all of the big things are discovered by those under 45 years of age. When I read this the first time, I remember not really believing it. I think maybe I am closer now.

This last year gave me the opportunity to start stretching again and now I am watching someone close to me do the same thing. In both situations it was due to a change in employment. As any of us begin something new, we are deluged with a constant stream of things that even if we "knew" them in a different environment, the differences of companies and individuals makes the whole idea seem alien.  With time and repetition we stretch and adapt and make these strange and alien activities part of what we know and what we can accomplish.

Sara started a new job and she has been in the throes of learning new processes and procedures. Finally, by the end of last week she had confidence in what she was doing. One of her teammates even mentioned that she was moving around the office and getting things done with a great deal more confidence. I believe her confidence came as a result of the stretching.

When we watch younger people and children, we often see this phenomenon very clearly. We even talk about "growing pains." You may remember, if you had boys, times when the growth experienced overnight was actually painful and would wake them up from a sound sleep. This is probably the most extreme case of this type of growth and change. We also get the opportunity to watch this through the educational process, most specifically when we have our children in college. They tend to go in with one idea, or thought, and at the end of the experience, they have changed the plan several times. All we can hope is they have something they will be able to use as they move forward. I've watched my daughter do this, starting with a degree in Biology and now as she moves to a degree program in Biochemistry. This came as she discovered her love for chemistry and her disappointment when she came to her final chemistry class. Her stretch came as she discovered a need to change majors so she could continue exploring through more chemistry classes. Interesting, huh?

Those of you who know me know I am committed to lifetime learning. I believe we continue to learn from the first day of our lives to the last. The thing I've found out about myself is there are times you may still be learning something, but the rate at which this happens is less than what we should expect of ourselves. When this happened to me in the past, I filled time with activities far from appropriate to get me moving forward again. One of the classic things I do is shop on Amazon and Ebay way too much. I developed whole collections of things which I sold later because I wasn't stretching, I was bored. So in order to not let this happen again, I am developing a personal list of things I will fill time with when I am not stretching. Hopefully, this will be a combination of things to move me forward at work and things which will just make me a better person. One of these items will be learning to weld. This is undoubtedly something which improves my life away from work, not at work.

As I end this thought today, I challenge you to ask yourself if you are continuing to stretch?  Whatever your answer, then you need to ask if you really want to.  Based on those two answers, decide what to do with this going forward. I hope you find answers which help you to find joy in your day to day world.

Have a great week.

Rolodex

Yesterday was a good day. It was a good day for a lot of reasons, but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to try to corral my thoughts around one issue.

I don't respond well to "cold calls." I know everyone has to do them, and I've had people I'm responsible for make a great many of them, but I generally don't have time to talk to people when they show up without prior planning.

A couple of weeks ago, a vendor show up in out of the blue, and I wasn't actually in the office. He left information, and honestly, I was never going to do a thing with it. Then he did something smart. He sent an email telling me he was going to be in Des Moines this week and asked if I had any time to meet with him. Now, although I can ignore a "cold call" with the best of them, if someone appropriately asks for time, I can't tell that person no.  So, I scheduled the meeting.

The time came for the meeting and Ryan from Kraft Tank in Kansas City did the next smart thing. He arrived exactly on time. Not a great deal early, and not a minute late. He had now cleared the next hurdle with me. He respected my time. I invited him into my office and rather than attempt to engage in a great deal of meaningless small talk, he introduced himself and went about the purpose of his meeting. He started telling me about the company he works for and what they may be able to do for me. Okay, really? He just hit the trifecta of making a call on me, and honestly I think on a great deal of other people.

Since we'd reached the point where I actually cared about this person and what he had to say, the whole tenor of the meeting changed. I stopped the meeting and asked my fuel manager, Seth, and to join us so we could talk about some of the trailers we use in our over-the-road operation. We also had the chance to talk about a piece of equipment that we might want to sell. All of a sudden, there is the possibility now of  entering into a  transaction with Kraft for that trailer.

Then the most interesting part of the conversation happened. I started talking with him about who he knew in Kansas City and almost immediately discovered he'd worked with a couple of people in the MHC/Kenworth organization I'd really enjoyed when I worked in that market - Todd and Larry. I could almost feel Seth rolling his eyes as this conversation took off.

Seth is just beginning to truly embrace the power of a network. I have always cultivated a strong network, clear back to the days of using a Rolodex. Whenever I left a company, the one thing they most often wanted from me was my Rolodex - all of the contacts and information therein. I guess they cared about me, but they really cared about all of that info.

Anyway, after Ryan from Kraft Tank left, I felt the need to go one step further. I picked up the phone and called Todd just to catch up. It had probably been the better part of a decade since we talked, but as so often happens, the conversation took off just as though we had spoken yesterday. He even laughingly told me he'd told a "Jim Martin" story in just the last couple of weeks. Todd has done well in his career - now a Vice President with MHC/Kenworth. It was really nice to talk with him again.

I know we all realize the power in the contacts we have - the network that we've fostered, but the manner the world is interconnected is sometimes even beyond our ability to really understand. I have friends who believe I'm more connected than they are. I don't for a minute think this is true.  But maybe I've been more willing, deliberate, successful at identifying the many ways I'm connected to others.

Like I told Seth the other day as he was trying to decide if he should go to a networking event, "Get in there and figure out how you know these people."  It will do you good, and honestly, it is just fascinating to find out how connected you are.

You should try it too.  Have a great week.

Bravery

Let's talk about the most important things first today. My scraper is found. I knew it would be. I knew it was just misplaced and not lost. Of course, it was in a place where I had looked ten times before - between the pages of the plans for my roll top desk. Even though I'd picked the sheets up and rattled them, the scraper had not fallen out.  But it did, and now all is good.

Except. Now my favorite tape measure is missing. What is going on here?

I'm not sure if you are in the right age group to either remember yourself, or to have children or grandchildren that watched an animated movie called "The Borrowers." The premise of the movie was that there was a race of small people who lived in the walls of our houses and offices. They borrowed things from us to be able to make their lives work. Hmm, maybe I have "Borrowers" living at the Toybox?  No, there has to be a more logical explanation, like I dropped the tape measure and knocked it under something and haven't found it yet.  Yes, that has to be it.

I titled today's thoughts "Bravery," but this isn't the type of bravery we hear about in the press or we see in extraordinary situations. The bravery that I am thinking about today is the type that allows a person to stand up and be the person they want to be.

When I think of this, I think of my Grandma Jo. I know I've told you this before, but the story bears retelling.  In 1992, we went to Sigourney to see Grandma. She was solidly in her eighties at the time. While we were there she announced that she had come to a time when she was no longer going to pull any punches.  he was going to tell people exactly what she thought, all of the time. This was a women that had been an over-the-road trucker in the 1940s - she was one of a very few women on the road. She worked in the Keokuk County Engineer's Office for a number of years and when you talked to the engineers that worked there, they would all tell you that although she didn't have a degree, she could understand and work on everything that they did.  She and Grandpa ran multiple businesses in Sigourney, often times with Grandma running the business and Grandpa on the road. In short, she was a walking, talking example of bravery every single day.

Last weekend all of this came back to me in a very real way. Friends of ours invited us to ride the Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad for their dinner train on Saturday. In the event that you ever have a chance to do this, take the opportunity. It is really a great way to spend the evening. Good food and company, riding through the Iowa countryside on a train. To some, this may not be as much fun, but if you know anything about me, I am a train nut. I am the person that sees a train coming and slows down to get caught at the crossing so I can watch it pass.

On at least two different occasions I have filled out paperwork to volunteer at the B&SV railroad. In both cases I did the work and took time to explain that I really wanted to help in the shop - rebuilding and improving cars and locomotives.  Also, in both cases, the only information that I ever got back was an invitation to help with the crowds during the Christmas season and when Thomas the Tank Engine was there. This is not what I wanted at all. So as I was standing there the other night, I thought that maybe I should fill out the form one more time, even knowing that the outcome would probably be an invitation to help take care of crowds of people. No thank you.

But wait, I thought. The people who could get me to the right place were probably right here in this building, right now. Rather than just fussing about what happened in the past, I walked into the office and introduced myself. I told them that I was a woodworker and was in search of a way I could use my skills to help the railroad. I told them that that I had tried to volunteer before, unsuccessfully. And then a gentleman stepped forward and introduced himself as the President of the B&SVRR. He told me that he knew exactly who I needed to be introduced to and that he would make sure my information got to that person. He explained the way that they deal with people volunteering and why I had the past experience that I did. It was nice to talk with him and in giving him my business card, I felt that I really will be contacted this time. Maybe I have finally reached the point that my Grandma reached - deciding that I have nothing to lose and that I should just charge ahead. We will have to see if this is a change in my demeanor, or just what I needed to do at this moment in time.

A couple of things worth noting as well this week.

The desk I'm working on at the Toybox is beginning to look like a desk.

And I can hardly wait for my daughter to come home from working at Camp Foster.

The Iowa State Fair is about to begin.  Even though my family and friends aren't coming into town for the fair this year, I will be there, you can certainly count on that.

Misplaced

The strangest thing happened at the shop last week. I have a small bench scraaper that had truly become an item I use in a lot of ways, and all of a sudden, it is just not there. This caused a great search to take place, and before all was done, I had cleaned the shop and put all of the tools back where they belonged, but to no avail - the bench scraper has not shown itself. Now, I have another one just like it and there is no real sentimental value to this scraper, but I don't know about you - it drives me crazy when I can't find something like that.

I come from a family that had a very solid philosophy about this kind of thing. Mom taught us, from the earliest that I can remember that nothing is ever lost, it is just misplaced. This was not just a passing comment on something we couldn't find, it was a call to arms to leave no stone unturned and find whatever it was. I have to give you the best example. Sometime in the mid 1970s, probably 1975 as we were getting ready to have my high school graduation, we took all of the drapery in the house down to have it professionally cleaned. This was no small feat.  After taking it down, we removed all of the drapery hooks and put them somewhere that "we would be sure to remember." We took the drapes in, had the cleaning done, brought them home, and went to put them back up.  And to our surprise - no drapery hooks. We tore the house apart. After several days of searching, mom gave up and bought new hooks.

Now, fast forward, like 13 years. Mom died in February of 1988. When my sister and I were cleaning out the house, in the drawer that had always been known as the junk drawer, clear in the back in a couple of plastic bags, we found the misplaced drapery hooks. Jaye and I didn't say a word, we just started to laugh. And, at a time we needed a good laugh, it continued until we both had tears in our eyes.

That day, the universe had shown us the truth of Mom's words - nothing is ever lost, it is just misplaced. We also found out that at the most high stress times of our lives, things like this will happen to give you a moment to release some of the pressure that you are under. After all, it was just drapery hooks, but at one point they had driven us all crazy, and at another time they were almost cathartic, giving us a much needed release.

So - my bench scraper - it will show up sometime and will hopefully happen when I really need it, or when I need to be able to laugh about where I put it. I say that because I'm sure that wherever it is, I put it there to ensure I wouldn't lose it and would be able to remember where I put it. So much for that thought. I also know that there are things in your life that are currently missing/misplaced. Maybe it is a picture, or a newspaper article, or all of your stained glass tools. There is a reason and a place they have landed and it is just a matter of figuring it all out. By the way, if I loaned/gave my stained glass tools to you, please let me know. My cousin, Julie, has been good enough to give me hers, but I am really curious as to where mine went. One of those other things that is just hanging out there for me.

As for other happenings in the Toybox, I delivered a couple of chairs to Andrew and Lyndsey last week. Although I know they will add more furniture to their deck as they go forward, they really look good there now. And I have finally gotten back to a project that is just for me. I am working on an Alder and Maple roll top desk that I am very excited about. It will reside in the Toybox, but I have always wanted to see if I was good enough to make this project. Since the days up at the lumberyard, sitting in Pug's chair at his roll top desk, I have always wanted one. Well, that is about to come true.

Have a great weekend.