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.

Grandma

I am a story teller, so some of you may have already heard this, in fact all of you might have, but at the risk of boring you, I am going to tell it again.  In 1976, at the celebration of her 70th year, my Grandmother announced that she had reached a point in her life where she no longer needed to hold anything back and she could be totally honest with people.  I remember thinking at the time that I had never thought of her as someone that held back. On the contrary, I found her to be extremely open with her thoughts; having very little filter.  She was never hurtful.  Actually she was very kind, but she was also quite direct, at least that was my experience as her grandson.  As we approach holidays, her words come back to me and I am struck by the notion that it must be something in the DNA of the clan, as even though I am far from turning 70, I think that I have hit the point of not holding back, sometimes to the chagrin of others.  So, I feel compelled to say a few things.

For all of you who are friends or family, thank you for sticking with me through everything life has thrown my way.  I am sure there are times I have been way too direct, and not known that I should circle back and correct the comments.  I spent a great deal of time thinking that having the "truth" on your side was an absolute defense for anything that might come at you.  I now realize this isn't always the case.  Sometimes there are things that are more important than being right and having everyone know it.  There are people's feelings to think about and the game we are in - life - is long term, not just for today.

For all of the engineers and developers in the world, thank you for all that you do.  There are times I think that I was born in the wrong part of the century and would have been better placed in the part of the century where steam was still king and large industry was the way of the world.  I was having lunch with a friend the other day and there was a show playing on the History channel behind him and it was all that I could do to stay engaged in the conversation.  I can be such a nerd that way.  But, even after all of that, when I look at the things we have today, and things that are coming our way, I am so thankful for all of the smart people who have figured out how to do things.  We live in an amazing world that continues to change at breakneck speed.

For all in the medical world, thank you for helping myself and my family to have a healthier lifestyle.  Once again, I believe we are living in an amazing time.  Medical advances are advancing at such a rate that often times diseases and situations which would have been deadly only a few years ago can now be managed for years, if not decades.  When I was born, some friends of my parents had a child born with cystic fibrosis. At that time, the average life expectancy was only a few years, but she lived into her 40s because of medical advances.  Today the average life expectancy of a person with this disease is 37.  That is a drastic change.  Keep up the good work, stay out there ahead of us.  We need you to do your job so that we can live our lives in the best ways possible.

Finally, thanks to all of the teachers and the teaching institutions.  There are times that I become frustrated with the world of education and I worry that we are not turning out thinkers, but rather people who will just take their place in society to do what they have been told to do.  But when I stop and actually listen to some of the things that education accomplishes at a time we keep taking funding away from them, it is pretty amazing.  You do not have to listen very hard, or go very far, to find a story of a teacher using their own money to buy supplies for their classroom because the school  district does not have the funding to take care of the basic needs of the classroom.  Thanks for all you do.

So, with all that I have to give thanks for, and the time seems right to do exactly this, I finish where I began, with my grandmother.  Where she decided that the time had come to be more open and honest with her feelings, I think that the time has come where I have become more cautious with what I think and feel, and how I express all of that.  So I am going forward more careful than before, or at least I am going to try.  We will see how that goes.

Happy Thanksgiving

Vapor Lock

If you don't believe that we are creatures of habit, put yourself in a situation that you have been in a hundred times, and change one important thing.

Two weeks ago, I went to my Rotary meeting, just like I do virtually every Friday morning, thinking that things were normal. In the blink of an eye, it became apparent that things were different.  What happened?  We started the meeting just like we always do with the ringing of a bell.  Everyone stood and as the president asked us to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, hands were raised to hearts in the way that we have all done for the bulk of our lives. As the first word came out of our collective mouth, it happened ... NO FLAG!  Now what should we do?  Well, as indicated by the silence, we had absolutely no idea.  Fortunately, the president had the presence of mind to tell us that we would go ahead and recite the Pledge without a flag.  We did just fine after that.

Like many things, this was really no big deal, but my mind became fascinated by how programed we really are in our daily lives.  Want proof?  When you get dressed in the morning, which sock do you put on first?  When you brush your teeth, do you brush the left or the right side first?  When you answer the phone, are the words out of your mouth typically the same?  If you can easily answer these questions, you are programmed.  These are all examples, and there are thousands more, of the things we have come to do as habit.

As we look across our world on a daily basis, I think this type of behavior is more common than we really think, or even recognize.  When I was at Drake, we had a situation that really pointed this out to me.  One of the years I was a Resident Assistant, we had two incoming freshman women who were from two regions of the world. Their countries were sworn enemies.  This would have been the equivalent of having members of both the Hatfield and the McCoy families living under the same roof.  Early on, tensions were really high. No one knew exactly how this should be handled.  And then, over time, an amazing thing happened.  Because of the environment that our hall provided, these two women got to know each other, and at some level even came to understand each other.  Because there had been such strong emotion around it at the beginning, I think they actually listened to each other more than they would have in a regular situation. Then, as time passed, they became friends, and in the end, they really had no sense for why their families and countries despised each other so much.  They found the way to overcome the programming that had happened with them and the generations that had come before them.  It was wonderful to watch this happen as an outsider.

I was raised in what I consider a special family. Those that know us might just laugh at that statement.  My father was a polio victim as a child and walked with a cane his entire life.  Many of those who were around him considered it a handicap, or referred to him as a "cripple," but I was fortunate enough to have this help me in the way I look at people.  I was programmed differently than most.  I have never been enamored with the current trend or programming the world wanted to press upon me. I have always been this way. I am sure there are times when it has frustrated the dickens out of my family when as they wanted to follow the more popular route and I wasn't willing to be swayed.  But I look with pride, at the decisions that Andrew and Megan have made regarding friends and who they would support.  Some of the programming that came to me from the way I grew up has moved on to my children, and I hope that serves them well.

I realize that with more years, I have gotten a bit "crustier." I find that it is much easier to allow the world's programming come to the top and cause me to judge people and situations in specific ways without looking at the entire picture.  As I stood there, saying the Pledge of Allegiance without a flag, I thought about all of the assumptions I allow to come to bear and all of the times that I think about people in a certain way for an unknown reason.  I thought back to the mid 70's when I watched two women from around the world get to know each other as people, not as members of two different societies.  As we finished the words together two weeks ago, I found myself taking a different pledge: to renew the fight against things that attempt to program me in ways I don't necessarily approve.  All of this happened in the course of a minute or two on one single morning with a group of rather confused business men.

So, tomorrow just to prove that I am working on the things that I am talking about, I will put on my right sock first.

"Bye" Day

It may not come as a surprise to most of you and to others, here's the deal - I'm not much of a sports guy.  It is really just not that important to me.  I will watch a football game on occasion, or maybe one or two of the World Series games, or use the Super Bowl as a reason to have a party, but that is about the extent of it.  In the sports arena, my interests go to the more unusual, less seldom covered like luge, curling, and in the arena of motor sports, drag racing and tractor pulling.  Obviously I have sports tastes that run just slightly to the obscure.

But, there is one sports tradition that I like - the idea of a "bye."  In conversation with colleagues, I will occasionally hear that a team had a bye on a given week.  In thinking about this, I went to the dictionary and found this: A bye is a "situation in which a player or team is allowed to go forward to the next level in a competition without having to play against and defeat an opponent" (Merriam-Webster).  Well, obviously, what I needed last Sunday was a bye.  I needed to be able to go forward to the next day without defeating the current day.  So, I slept -  the deep and refreshing sleep of multiple naps throughout the day.  Every time that I thought I would get up and get going, another round of sleep would descend on me.  It was glorious and is something that only happens to me a couple of times a year.  This was one of my two.

As each of us go through lives that are so busy with all of the things we have to accomplish in a day, a week, a month, or a year, the thing that we tend to squeeze out is sleep.  And as we do that, it continues to get more and more difficult to do things that we need to do, much less the things we like to do.  There have been times when I've been in the shop, wanting to accomplish something and have been too tired to think clearly enough to be safe.  Because of the great mentors and instructors from my past, I have learned and believe that if you are not sure of your ability to focus, don't turn on the machine.  Another area that I have a problem with is falling asleep when driving.  My grandfather, who was an over the road driver most of his life, always told us that when you are tired, you should pull over and sleep, even if you are only a mile from home. There are all sorts of studies out there about the ills of sleep deprivation. It is absolutely critical that we rest enough on a regular basis that we can be safe and productive.

So, although I should get better sleep at night, I don't seem to be able to do that. This means that once in a while, I collapse like I did last Sunday. Fortunately, I had a very productive day on Saturday, so it didn't feel quite as bad.  I had gotten seven or eight cutting boards through several processes. When they are completed, they will either become Christmas presents or will be donated to organizations for holiday fund-raisers.  I worked on the landscaping project that Sara has me doing and actually made forward progress. I even cleaned the Toybox so wasn't embarrassing, which was terrific, because one of my best friends stopped by for some adult conversation.  Thanks Russell, that was wonderful.  All in all, a pretty successful day, and at the end, I had dinner with Sara and Megan at Rube's Steakhouse.  It is phenomenal to watch a college student get the chance to have really good quality beef.  In other words, I had a good day, got a lot done, and had a great dinner. All in all, Saturday was a success.

And now, in the words of Paul Harvey, "for the rest of the story." After all of the sleep that I had during the day on Sunday - maybe 5 or 6 individual naps, do you think that I could actually go to sleep on Sunday evening?  Short answer here is NO.  So, everything I hadn't done during the day, that could be done at night without waking Sara, I did Sunday evening and Monday morning.  At the end of it, I don't think that I got any more sleep than I would have, and I got just as much work completed.  But even so, I felt as though I had "won" by taking some time for no good reason, just for myself.  I would encourage everyone to declare a "bye" day once in a while, even if you immediately pay the time back.

It is one of those things that is just good for the soul and we all need those once in a while.  Happy napping to all of you.