Knowing what you want is a blessing and a curse. If you know what you want, then you know the usual paths of achieving it. You can improvise along the way, but if you know you want to be a singer, doctor, lawyer, teacher, pro football player, screen writer, monk/nun, landscaper, etc. you follow a prescribed path for the most part. It’s a curse because a) someone can decide you aren’t good enough, b) you actually aren’t good enough, c) you weren’t born into knowing the right people, or d) you always seem to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Most people do not become world famous singers, athletes, novelists, or movie directors.
Not knowing what you want is also a curse and a blessing because you can drift aimlessly wondering where you belong and in what you might be phenomenal. You can be strong at many things but unless you know that you want to be an entrepreneur, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Martha Stewart, Dilbert, a world class surgeon, a lawyer, etc., what you end up doing probably won’t feel like a custom made glove. The blessing part of not knowing what you want to be when you grow up is that you never had a burning desire to be Lady Ga Ga, so you aren’t as disappointed when you roll out of bed and you aren’t her. The blessing is also that you can decide to like what you are doing and find ways to make a difference and change the world in your own little non Lady Ga Ga like fashion and still have people think you are pretty cool.
My son says he wants to be a soccer player and my daughter says (only recently) that she wants to be a singer. I’ll see if I can steer them towards being a soccer playing physicist and a singing doctor. I wonder how that will work. Despite our best voluntary & involuntary attempts at showing them the life of an entrepreneur is not laced with candy, they might be crazy like us and commit entrepreneur-icide.
I’ve seen a couple of movies recently that were really good and one of them got me thinking about how some brilliant people are very insecure and miserable. The movie that made me think about this was My Week With Marilyn which is about Marilyn Monroe, Colin Clark, and Laurence Olivier. Michelle Williams is a fabulous actress and seemed to really capture what was going on with Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was (and Michelle is) gorgeous and talented. Marilyn was portrayed as very insecure and needing drugs just to cope with the pressure. It made me think of Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Charlie Sheen, Owen Wilson, Woody Allen, etc. All very talented but some were/are miserable, neurotic, anxiety ridden, mean, and/or drug addicts, etc.
The other movie I saw was The Descendents with George Clooney. That was a very good, depressing albeit probably realistic movie. George Clooney is talented & handsome and so far the press hasn’t indicated his misery out loud.
The kids and I also saw Happy Feet 2 (good, happy, but unrealistic) about penguins who, with the help of other animals, get out of a death trap and Arthur Christmas (see previous parenthetical comments) about a modern day technology driven Christmas.
Thank goodness for movies. They let us escape our lives and get perspective by portraying the not so glamorous lives of other people.
I don’t know why but I really like the Bee Gees. Some of my favorite songs by them are Stayin’ Alive, Night Fever, How Deep Is Your Love, Don’t Throw It All Away, If I Can’t Have You, More Than A Woman, etc. I know it’s 70’s cheesy but oh well.
I love music and songs and lyrics because to me they portray the human condition better than any other form of artistic expression. It appeals to so many senses. Music helps us get through hard times and celebrate great times.
Here’s to Stayin’ Alive when you are faced with the things life throws your way…even when you are expecting it or half expecting it and are relieved or stunned by it.
I don’t’ have time to read many blogs these days, but I read about 98% of what Seth Godin writes on his blog. I keep meaning to buy and read more of his books, but time escapes me with the many things I’m juggling right now. I’m so glad he blogs!
I subscribed to his Domino Project emails. Watch this video. If you have kids. If you have a daughter. If you are a human being who has put yourself in the face of challenge and danger. If you want to know you are not alone, you must watch this video on Ted Talk. Sarah Kay is a “spoken word poet.” She starts with a compelling poem. She then goes on to discuss her loves of poetry and theater. She is young. She is beautiful and well spoken. Given her talent now, I wonder how she will sound after she actually has kids…or a daughter. Video is embedded below:
The Thanksgiving holiday just passed here in the US. It’s a time where we reflect on all that we are thankful for and, of course, eat turkey. I was thankful I was able to spend it with family (new and old). We had turkey and lobster which was a very nice combination.
I’m thankful for so many things and I, like others, lose sight of how lucky we are to live in the time we live, have the things we have, are for the most part healthy, etc. I think I need to record the things I’m thankful for and play them back to myself every day, because like so many I get caught up in the day to day stresses of life and forget to be grateful for what I do have.
Thank you to all my loyal readers who have stuck around despite my inconsistent blogging and my often random topics. I am in the morass of a full life right now. I am still trying to find my way while at the same time helping two little kids find their ways… 🙂
How often can people do/experience all of the above? There are people who have changed the world (e.g., Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, etc.) who didn’t make a lot of money and we won’t ever know if they were truly happy, healthy or content. There are people who changed the world and made a lot of money (e.g., Oprah, Steve Jobs, Madonna, Lady Ga Ga, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, etc.) but we don’t know how happy or content they are or were. Oprah has been the most open about her struggles with personal satisfaction and her weight…the businessmen, not so much.
Do we have to deal with having one or two out of three? I think I can count on one hand the people who appeared to have all three but if you dig a little further… Check out a recent post on TechCrunch called 10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College. All very true, the second being “How To Be Betrayed,” which happens all of the time in business (and politics) whether you are a man, woman, or a duck. I clicked over to the authors (James Altucher) post on how to be lucky and it made me wonder if he had kids because he advises getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. every day and to bed by 9:30 pm with exercising and eating right in between. Maybe I’ll figure out how to do that when I’m 50 and the kids are gone. I guess that’s why some are more monetary successful than others…early bird gets the worm!
The saying “you can have it all, but just not all at the same time” must be true. So it seems the thing we have the most control over is how we feel: happy, sad, content, angry, etc. We can try to change the world but there’s no telling what numerous things will be thrown in our path. We can try to make tons of money, but a lot of shit happens (e.g., kids, health issues, the economy, marriage, divorce, love, hate, indifference, parents) trying to do that. But we will usually find ways to make enough to get by or we become comfortable with a lot of debt.
I was reminded during my recent trip to China that Buddha, who was born and originally spread his philosophy in India before his teachings were embraced by the Chinese, taught that at the root of all suffering was desire (for a person, place, thing, success, money, etc.). As I understand it, he said that if you gave up the desire for earthly things or status that would be the only way you could eventually achieve enlightenment. He certainly changed the world and was arguably content/enlightened but was not rich by American standards.
I guess it depends on what age you are, your genetic disposition, and what cards life has dealt you as to whether you believe you can achieve all three at the same time for a substantial length of time…
Woman in Beijing, China making dumplings for us in her house
There’s really no correlation between scooters and dishes. I got some scooters for my kids a couple of weeks ago and now they scoot around the house all the time. When they wake up, to the breakfast/dinner table, to the bathroom to brush their teeth, etc. I told them they could scoot around the house only if the scooter hasn’t been outside the house. We have a “shoes at the door” policy most of the time, so I figured it was fine for them to scoot around the house while the scooters were unblemished by the outside driveway or sidewalk. They seem more motivated to go places in the house on their scooters so that’s nice, and as long as they don’t run over my toes, I’m fine with it.
On another dishy note, my 9 year old son tried to the dishes tonight. He said “I never realized how tiring (hard) it was to do the dishes.” He only put around 4 plates in the dishwasher and he put my gloves on while rinsing the plates…so cute! I laughed. I always told him that when he was tall enough he’d have to do the dishes. He’s still a short kid and much water ended up on his shirt and on the floor, but I’m glad he appreciated that it wasn’t an easy thing to do the dishes! He and his sister like to help me cook and especially if I’m making mac ‘n cheese, but doing the dishes was a new thing and I’m glad my son now has a neural pathway in his mind about the “hardness” of doing dishes. 😀
I saw Paul Simon in concert last night at the Cedar Park Center. He’s 70. He was amazing! He is one of the top singer/songwriters of our time. Such talent. Simon & Garfunkel (even though they had apparently broken up by then) helped get me through my teenage years because many of their songs helped me process some of the things I was dealing with at the time. When he sang “Sound of Silence” during his second encore, most of the audience had their phones up recording him.
Why is it some people can discover their passion/talent, be good at and succeed at it until they are 70? While others, like many of us, seem to fumble around trying to figure it out? C’est la vie!
When opportunity knocks where will you be? I imagine I’ll be at my son’s soccer game, making sure my kid’s take baths, cooking, or I’ll be doing their laundry. How do we recognize when opportunity knocks? Entrepreneurs are supposed to create opportunities, right? But really, I think we see an opportunity and we try to take advantage of it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who can validate the idea are rare but those who can execute against those ideas to profitability are even rarer. It’s not easy to execute against most ideas or take advantage of most opportunities.
One day I want to write a novel. I want to write a fiction novel and I’d like to write a novel about business. But right now I’m working full time, making sure my kids take their baths, watching their soccer games, going to swim classes, making sure they do their homework, doing dishes, and folding laundry. It’s certainly all great material for that novel I’m going to write one day which may or may not ever see the light of day. I recall my grandfather wanted to write a book. I think he started writing something, but he was too busy doing great entrepreneurial things, helping kids, hanging out with grand kids, dealing with a sick wife (my grandmother), and helping other people so he never finished putting down in words the wisdom that was in his head. He died of leukemia at the age of 82. I bet if he could have blogged, he would have tried it out. He was a brilliant, yet flawed man like most of us humans are.
Opportunity knocked and I went to China. Opportunity knocked and I found a guy who I used to work with, Brian Hurdle, to redesign my blog who just redesigned my twitter page. While flying to China, I read Little Bee: A Novel (about a refugee girl who escaped from Nigeria to England) and The Secret Life of Bees (about a White girl who runs away from her abusive father to live with a bunch of Negro women in the southern US in the 1960s). The first was written by a man, the latter by a woman. The overarching theme of both books from my perspective was “men suck!” Interestingly, little boys did not suck and they too needed protection from men, who ironically were at one point in their lives little boys themselves. What happens between cute, sweet little boyhood and manhood? I don’t know, but I hope my boy stays sweet, thoughtful, and caring. Of course both fiction novels were written for the female audience, which is kind of distressing. But as I was reading them, I thought these are well written novels. Not as superbly written as others I’ve read but well written overall. So after doing some calculations, I figured I need to be a millionaire by the age of 45 to even think of having the time, resources, and health insurance to write such a novel. I’m not too far away from 45….
I recently got back from a fabulous trip to China. I signed up for a 9 day tour coordinated by the Austin Chamber of Commerce. We had an aggressive itinerary and hit most of the major highlights in Beijing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. While I was there Steve Jobs passed away and pretty much everyone in China was talking about it too. I’m not sure why I was a little surprised, but there were iPhones and iPads in China despite access to Google and facebook not being allowed. What a profound affect Mr. Jobs had on the entire world, but in the end we still cannot avoid death. In his life, he accomplished more and touched more lives than probably any before him.
His death with the background of ancient China was sort of appropriate in some ways. The people who built The Great Wall, one of the 7 man made wonders of the world and visible from the moon, are not remembered but the Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who directed it’s construction is remembered. Although 99.99% of us won’t be remembered much past our life times, hopefully we will have a positive impact on those around us so they continue to spread our wisdom to future generations.
Today I ordered an iPhone 4S at a nearby AT&T store. Rest in peace Steve and may your entrepreneurial stardust land on a few of us left here on earth.
I am going to try to find time over the next few weeks to blog about my trip and include some photos.
I’m going to be taking a little journey to a place very unique and ancient. I’ll write more when I return. Life has been very busy, but in a growing, learning, and accepting sort of way. I’m still trying to make a difference to people, somewhere, here, everywhere, while making sure my kids know I love them and accept them for who they are in ways words can’t express. Pretty much like a billion people before me have tried to do. 😀
I’ve written a lot about love, laughter, and heartache on my blog, but not much about anger or fear. Those are hard emotions to write about. Most of us were taught not to let our anger show and that we should control it. But we’ve seen a few people in our life and on TV lose their cool. We’re told there’s no reason to be afraid. There’s no such thing as ghosts. There’s nothing under your bed. It seems to me that those two feelings/emotions have big hairy monsters in our minds associated with them. They can sometimes be more irrational than real because most of us are not being chased by sharks or big hungry bears, but when we feel these emotions, they feel so real! They can paralyze us. They cause stress. They cause health problems. They can make us think we are not good enough or not worthy of love and happiness.
Entrepreneurs and pretty much anyone who has a job and/or is a full time parent face these demons every day. It’s how we deal with it and how we treat others that counts. Compassion can alleviate fears. Empathy and encouragement can help people achieve things they never thought they could. Fear and Anger can make people get things done (e.g., dark ages, torture, and slaves who built the Egyptian pyramids) but it can make them sick and unhappy at the same time. It can cause a ripple effect on society, on their spouse, or their kids. If people are unhappy at work, it has been shown they are more abusive at home and don’t treat their co-workers well. I believe encouraging, loving environments create exponentially better outcomes. Is it because I’m a woman? I don’t think so. I think Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, many great business leaders, and Gandhi felt the same way. Maybe they don’t get as much media attention but go find the places in your city that are consistently voted the best places to work and you’ll see successful businesses with great leaders who care, trust, and believe in their employees.
We are all flawed humans, but the thing that keeps us connected is empathy and love. Without that connection and belief in each other, we might as well be on an island alone or dead. We can start businesses and scare people to do what we think they should, but the best will leave because in the modern world they have other choices than to be beaten & downtrodden and to lay bricks while being whipped. You’ll end up with “yes men/women” who are too afraid to tell you what’s really going on because they are scared for their livelihoods. But you’ll be surprised at the psychology of some of us humans because a lot of us don’t realize our genius. I’ll leave you with a quote from Jeffry Fry’s daily email he sent out July 16, 2011 that’s still in my inbox and printed & pasted to the pillar near my cube at work:
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid.” –Albert Einstein
I used to like roller coaster rides when I was young and then some time in my teenage years, they started to make me nauseous and I didn’t like them. Many of my friends have told me that they experience more motion sickness in rides now than they used to. This may be part of the reason I’ve never taken my kids to Disney Land or I never went as a kid. I know, I’m un-American and deprived.
Well business people, entrepreneurs, and parents all experience ups and downs. The best we can do is count our blessings during the down times and make sure we don’t forget how blessed we are in the up times.
My life, personal and professional, is novel worthy. I just hope I’m not too sea sick when I actually have time to write that novel…
I get many people asking me to blog about their products. Some even offer to pay me. Most of the requests I ignore as I don’t feel the products are relevant or I don’t have much to say about them. But when the PR guy for the Robi Comb reached out to me, it piqued my interest. My kids got head lice for the first time last Spring and it was icky, tiring and awful. It seems like more than half the kids in the school got them. We did environmentally friendly, non-toxic treatments that took 4 hours and they had to sit around in caps until late into the night (i.e. past their bed times and past mom’s patience). Then my son got them again in summer camp. I was less mortified but still very annoyed. I remember getting them as a kid when I went to visit Sri Lanka and the stuff they put on our heads was kind of like kerosine. This is America, not a third world country, so as any American full time working mother would do, I freaked. The non-toxic treatment stuff they have these days smells like a caramel frappacino. I was tempted to make my kids smell something nasty so they could experience the same need to run around outside without stopping until the treatment was done, but I let them enjoy the smell of eucalyptus spray and coffee smelling gunk.
They sent me the following write-up (in italics below) and a free Robi Comb. I was hoping that I’d never have to use it as certainly my kids were done with that craziness, but lo and behold, it happened again recently. After asking my son who the heck he was hanging out with (because my daughter escaped them) and they take a bath every day, I used the Robi Comb on him. It had been sitting on the counter for several weeks and they were curious about it. My son said his head was itchy and I figure he just wanted to use the comb so he was making it up. I told him that he simply could not have head lice again. My daughter and I looked in his hair fairly thoroughly with a flashlight and saw pretty much nothing. Even the things we thought could be nits weren’t. He has brown hair so it’s easy to see nits and I figured I’d see any stupid lice crawling around. At his head scratching insistence, I used the comb and I was shocked to discover it found 7 lice. I swear I saw nothing and everything in my being did not want to believe him when he said he thought he had lice. I guess it was a good thing I listen to my kids most of the time because after running it through his hair several times and changing the sheets, he can go to school without a 4 hour treatment followed up by multiple combings and daily hair spray-ings because 7 lice do not constitute an infestation. But I decided to use the Robi Comb for a few days just in case and no more were found. I still sprayed his head with eucalyptus spray and made him use lice shampoo to repel them. I was impressed with how easy it was to use and how quickly it found them!
As back to school time approaches, so does the head lice boom. Lice, the ultimate creepy crawler, will find its way onto millions of children’s heads this fall. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that an estimated 6 million to 12 million infestations occur each year among children 3 to 11 years of age. However, with the recent increase in head lice breakouts this past year, it’s imperative that all parents be prepared to tackle this common nuisance. This increase has even prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to amend their “No Nits” policy regarding withholding children from public schools who might still have nits, otherwise known as head lice eggs, present on their scalp. The amended policy says that children with nits do not necessarily pose a risk to the rest of the schools population.
This amended policy has many parents nationwide scratching their head, as they do not want to put their children in any “unnecessary” risk by sending them to schools recently affected by an infestation. As evident by this policy’s amendment, head lice is not so much of a health or hygiene issue; however the way these pests are commonly treated is of greater concern. In the past, the only way to effectively treat head lice was with dangerous toxic shampoos, chemicals, gels or oils; many of which use Pyrethrum or Permethrin, the same pesticides found in household bug killers. Today more than ever, there is a growing concern of the health effects of putting toxins and chemicals such as these on a developing child’s head and the negative long term effects these poisons may have. Aside from being toxic, many of these “traditional” treatments have also been widely reported to not even work, as the lice, in most cases, have built up a resistance to the pesticides used rendering them essentially useless.
In the event your child brings home more than just homework this school year, the Robi Comb from LiceGuard is an ideal product for ridding their scalp of lice without the use of harmful chemicals. The Robi Comb is a non-invasive electronic lice comb powered by a single AA battery that detects and destroys lice on contact simply by combing it through dry hair. When the Robi Comb’s metal teeth touch lice, the lice get zapped, die and then get combed away. Unlike chemical treatments, the Robi Comb can be used as often as you like and can be used repeatedly by the entire family. The Robi Comb lets you know by an audible signal whether or not head lice are present, so it can be used to detect an infestation as well as treat it. In fact, many school nurses are now using the Robi Comb for exactly that reason. School nurses report that Robi Comb is able to find lice which they have missed when checking visually. More than 3,000 school districts in all 50 states are now currently using the Robi Comb. This innovative product is available for purchase for $29.99 at major retailers such as Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid, as well as thousands of local pharmacies across the nation.
What a great title and a really good movie. A friend and I saw Crazy, Stupid, Love this past weekend and it was really good. Steve Carrell (the Office) pulls off his character well. Even though it’s been out for a while, it was sold out at Alamo Drafthouse Village but had tons of seats open at Regal Gateway so unfortunately we couldn’t snack & drink while we watched the movie.
Marriage is hard. Life is complicated. Raising kids is rewarding but exhausting. Teenage kids are teenage kids. This movie makes the stupidity of love & marriage “funny” and acknowledges the imperfection of humanity. It reminded me of American Beauty but it was less dark. I’m amazed when people can stay married for over 25 years. I mean, what are the odds of picking the winning horse (or lets just say the horse you will back in sickness, in health, in bad behavior, in richness, poorness, in decency, in bad judgment, in affection, in rudeness, etc.) or them picking you 50 years in a row? I guess like there are few people who can win or finish the Iron Man Triathlon, there seem to be fewer marriages making it past their children’s graduation from high school.
So, what is love? It’s crazy, it’s stupid and it usually makes no sense. In the case of this movie, it means fighting for your soul mate (even if it’s teenager stalker like). It meant people admitting to and owning their mistakes. It comes down to communication and listening. When I was a teenager, I believed in soul mates. As I got older, not so much. According to How Many People Do You Have To Meet To Find Your Soul-Mate, you have to meet 23 for a 50/50 chance of finding them. If you do happen to find them at some point in your life, chances are they will be unavailable.
A guy I once knew told me that “men fall in love; women settle.” He told me not to think about it too long, because I would realize it was true. I guess the biological clock or other familial or economic necessity is stronger than the desire for a soul mate. Plus, if you found him or her and you had babies they’d probably be messed up, kind of like with inbreeding. 🙂 Yuck! That certainly would explain a lot of literature.
(about a refugee girl who escaped from Nigeria to England) and 
(about a White girl who runs away from her abusive father to live with a bunch of Negro women in the southern US in the 1960s). The first was written by a man, the latter by a woman. The overarching theme of both books from my perspective was “men suck!” Interestingly, little boys did not suck and they too needed protection from men, who ironically were at one point in their lives little boys themselves. What happens between cute, sweet little boyhood and manhood? I don’t know, but I hope my boy stays sweet, thoughtful, and caring. Of course both fiction novels were written for the female audience, which is kind of distressing. But as I was reading them, I thought these are well written novels. Not as superbly written as others I’ve read but well written overall. So after doing some calculations, I figured I need to be a millionaire by the age of 45 to even think of having the time, resources, and health insurance to write such a novel. I’m not too far away from 45….
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