A Reading from the Gospel of Gordo....

"When we find something emotionally difficult--odds are -- the situation is bumping against personal fears and challenging our self-image. True confidence arises from acceptance of our own performance not the capacity to dominate the performances of others."
- Gordon Byrn, taken from http://www.gordoworld.com/gblog/2008/05/fear-self-worth-and-performance.html

Whenever I don't have much to write about--sometimes when I do--I check out Gordon Byrn's weekly installment of insight. He usually has something that catches my attention. This week, the aforementioned quote caught my eye.

While working in public accounting as a younger man, I met MAD on an audit engagement. I was still wet behind the ears, but MAD had about 2 years of tax experience and was participating in an audit rotation. We didn't have much support for our senior auditor, and it seemed like MAD was just picking up on everything and knocking it out of the park. At one point I asked him how he was picking it up so quickly and he said, "Don't worry. It'll come to you."

He might not have said exactly, but that is how I remember it. It was a very powerful lesson that I didn't start to understand until three years later. Performance is relative to each individual; in the long-run, the only way to make true progess is to focus on yourself, put the ego aside, and work with focus. It's not always easy, but that the formula that has seemed to work for me. Good instruction is important as well, but you can get their without it.

In my current position, as well as with swimming, I have been able to let things come to me as I work. It probably has to do a lot with being more comfortable in my own skin, and having a much smaller ego than I did at 22. Beat downs aren't always fun, but they taught me an important lesson: The bigger your head is, the easier it is to fill your shoes.

To address Aunt Shelly's comments from last posting, I didn't allocate any cash to shoe polish as it is inexpensive and I already have a large supply of it at my current residence. But I did decide to allocate some of it to buying a deep fryer, so I can make french fries in the tradition style of Belgium.

Namaste

Back from Idaho

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
- Jack Kerouac

Last week, Aunt Shelly wrote me an email and told me that she wouldn’t have a clue what was going on in my life if I didn’t get my haircut so often. Clever line. She has the writing gene as well. From what I understand, Grandpa McGill was a fine writer, expressing his thoughts mostly to family and friends through letters. Sometimes I wonder what he would have written via email if he were alive today.

This past week I was up in Idaho on business. As a younger man I spent some time working in a similar community in California. Going in there, I thought I was going to take a business trip to Mayberry—a place where people are nice, want to you to sit down for “a spell” and shoot the breeze, and invite you to their home for dinner. That town was the complete opposite of what I was expecting. So going to Idaho, I was a little concerned about how things would go over, and what type of people I would be meeting.

My concerns about the people of Idaho were completely without merit. Everyone I met up there couldn’t have been nicer. I wasn’t invited into anyone’s home for dinner, but I did have lunch with a different people within the organization every day. People shared stories over lunch about their family, favorite activities, and their hopes for the future. It wasn’t quite Mayberry, but it was close.

Like any community, there are quirks that aren’t visible immediately. Usually when people first meet, there are a few questions that people will ask each other to sort of feel each other out. A few examples are: “Where are you from originally,” “Where did you go to school,” etc. Up in Idaho, they would go through these questions as a primary sequence, but after these had been answered there was a secondary set of questions that went in this order: “Do you have any kids,” which is then followed immediately by “Are you married?”

I’m not quite sure about this—given the state of things in current society—but I was always raised to believe that you get married, then have children. It would make sense to me that the sequence of questions would be opposite in order than they were up in scenic Idaho. Then again, maybe I just give off a, “I am a man-whore” vibe.

One of the other things that I noticed about Idaho is a focus on the quantity of food that a restaurants serves seems to take priority over the quality of the food that a restaurant serves. On several different occasions people said, “They give you a lot of food their” about each restaurant we went to for lunch. Each place did give you a lot of food, it wasn’t always up to par on my scale. Now maybe I have been jaded by watching too much Top Chef—and becoming accustomed to using the phrase “flavor combination” in a sentence—but I don’t think that a reheated hamburger patty with two Kraft singles on top, doesn’t make a great cheeseburger. It may be a lot of food, but it was barely edible on most occasions.

After asking around, I did find a couple good places. During that process I had some odd experiences. While getting lost in the historic district, I stumbled upon a Chinese restaurant, and ordered beef with broccoli. Now I’ve eaten a lot of beef and broccoli, but this didn’t taste like beef. I don’t want to fall back on stereotypes, but I am almost wondering if this was dog. I stomached the entrée, but probably won’t be going back there any time soon.

On another occasion, I went to a local burger stand as I was told they had something called “Taco Spaghetti” which was supposed to be amazing. So, I ordered the Taco Spaghetti, which was pretty good, but they covered it with cheddar cheese. As one of the judges from Top Chef might say, it was a questionable flavor combination.

As Idaho isn’t exactly a hot-bed for night life, my evenings weren’t exactly wild. My night usually consisted of going to the local gym, getting on the rowing machine for 30 minutes, finding food for the evening, then going back to my hotel room where I would pour myself a Scotch whiskey and shine my shoes. It might sound odd, but it passed the time.

Memorial Day is tomorrow and I have the day off of work. I spent most of yesterday running errands: dropping off and later picking up dry cleaning, depositing a tax refund at the bank, buying some new plates and bowls for the house, cleaning out the car and, lastly, doing laundry. It was a good day and I got most of my obligatory chores out of the way.

As I said, I got some money back from the US Treasury in the form of a tax return. Now the question becomes, what do I do with it? I think part of my formal training in accounting is that I’m always trying to figure out how to use my money for the highest and best use. That might not always be the case from a rational perspective though. Sometimes the highest and best use means a new bottle of Scotch whiskey for the collection. Sometimes it means funding my Roth IRA or paying off credit balances. Regardless, I am almost always playing a game in my mind, trying figure out what to do with excess cash, instead of just letting it sit in a saving account. We’ll see what I end up doing.

Off the Reservation....

"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."
- G.K. Chesterton

Move Slow

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.”
- Douglas Engelbart, co-inventor of the computer mouse

I don’t know if this is solely my perception, but it seems like most people that I encounter in public—at the supermarket, at the coffee shop, driving—are multitasking or participating in something that takes their attention away from what they are doing. Today while driving, the man next to me was holding a bag of what appeared to be Chinese take out, and talking on his cell phone. Additionally, he was going 10 miles over the speed limit. Maybe there were some set of dire consequences that made such behavior necessary, but I am hard pressed to come up with a scenario that incorporates all these actions.

When was the last time that you ever heard of someone just going for a drive? From the stories that I have heard, people used to just get in their car--sometimes by themselves and sometimes with others--and just go for a drive. Open road, clean air, no agenda, clear your head, and come back home feeling better--this is what people would do from time to time. The only thing is, the roads are becoming more and more conjested, I won't even talk about air quality, and it takes an awful lot of work and planning to get to a place where you can create the time and space not to have an agenda. Some would say that this is due to an overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to each day. I won't disagree. But the root cause of extreme multi-tasking hasn't changed for centuries, maybe eons. When you get right down to it, you have create space and time to move slow.

Part of me is writing here because I saw a person operating a car while holding a bag of take out, breaking the speed limit, and talking on a cell phone. When I saw this I was shocked. The other part of me is writing here because I wanted to give myself space today to process what's going on around me, and let myself feel what moving slow is like again. It goes against the grain of what I would say is typical of day to day behavior. And that is exactly why it is so important.

I wonder what MAD would say that he does to reconnect with "moving slow" or how he just enjoys some of his time when he is not working? Hopefully he will tell me some time this week.

There are a handful of things that I do with some regularity which help me to reconnect with my own internal rhythm: writing, sipping a well crafted Scotch whiskey--which sometimes goes hand in hand with writing, shining my shoes--preferably while sitting outside on the steps of house I live in, and ironing.

There will never be a replacement for sipping Scotch whiskey, but I often times have my shirts cleaned, or will get my shoes shined at the barber shop. I think that there is something very precious about doing basic and menial things for oneself. It does take time, but by taking time a person is forced to reconnect with how to move at their own pace. I could actually see a bestseller here: "The Power of Shining Shoes." Maybe in a few years when "The Secret" is passe, this will be the new thing.

Also, today is Mother's Day. For the most part, I think it's a holiday that Hallmark invented to boost there card sales. On top of it, I hate those Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, so I have made a solemn vow to boycott the companies products all together. So, my mom won't be getting a card today. I hope she forgives me. Instead, I'm going to go and have dinner with her and spend some time with her without an agenda. Hopefully, it will be quality time--as long as I don't start calculating the number of hours of sleep I need to be rested for work and get antsy when it looks like I will only get a solid 8. So, we'll see what happens.