Building the Perfect Beast

"There is no glory in otustripping donkeys." Marcus Valerius Martialis

I wrote a while back about one of my personal and professional afflictions.

Pleaser’s Dilemma

One of the side effects of this affliction is the residual damage caused from the accumulation of weight while lugging all these “stones” around every day. The analogy would be small stones on the back of an ass. Each one is insignificant but there comes a time where the one you pack on breaks the back of the beast.

I had this happen the other day where a seemingly insignificant event sparked a meltdown that took me and, for sure, the people around me totally off guard. One of the problems with being a perpetual nice guy (yes, I really am a nice guy….really. No really) is when the dark side immerses no one really knows what to do with it. Me included.

So, I had myself locked in my cage for a couple of days in order to take everything apart, examine, clean and put back together with some reinforced pieces.

As I stated in Pleaser’s Dilemma I have no interest in changing the beast itself because it’s how I’m wired. See Hard Wired. But I do need to make the beast stronger as well learn to not pack on so many stones.

It’s funny, while locked away and tearing everything apart I was amused with how I knew the meltdown was close and actually made a weak attempt to bail out of the obligation that caused the spark that caused the meltdown. However, had I done that the meltdown would have only been temporarily delayed, not eliminated. Somehow I need to figure out a preventive maintenance program.

So, if you find yourself carrying too many stones, too often and too far and have found an effective way to both strengthen and reduce let me know the program.

In the meantime I’m going to test my new, stronger, reinforced beast by going back to the innocent bystanders that got blistered by my meltdown and offer to carry their stones around for a while.

One Year Later

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” Maria Robinson

One year ago today my family and my friends laid my wife Bonnie to rest at a little country cemetery in Southern Indiana. Interesting is that it's the farming community where I grew up not hers. But I think she always loved the beauty and serenity of the rolling southern Indiana countryside.

There's no proper adjective to describe the last 365 days. The lowest of lows, the darkest of dark, the coldest of cold combined with the discovery (and rediscovery) of the strength of family and friends and the human ability to heal and regenerate. The remembrance and regret, the fond memories and pain, the reflection and celebration all combine to paint a complex mosaic.

I walk into Year 2 ready to celebrate the past and embrace the future. Life is truly an adventure which means it's not a spectator sport. Bonnie was never a spectator, it's one of the many great lessons I learned from her.

Please see my post from last year, I still consider it one of my best.

Remembering Bonnie

They're cute when they're young

“Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own." Sidney J. Harris

By virtue of having always been in the technology business I have forever worked around young people. When I was young so was everyone else since the whole industry was young. Oh, I once had a boss who was forty, but he was an anomaly. As I grew older the young people, who now could actually go to school to be in the business, started packing in behind me and slowly me and my contemporaries became the minority as well as the ancient.

This has been good in so many ways. Young people bring so much energy and possess fearlessness that hasn’t yet been extracted from them. They bring new vision and new thoughts and new music and new language. They see things so differently.

Because of all this I’ve always felt younger than my age but I suppose many of us do as we reach “middle age”. But when you have to show up every day and work and hang with young people and then work for young people you get to make a choice.

Adapt and embrace or fight and fail.

I’m finding many of my old buddies slipping more and more into the fight and fail category. Not because they can’t adapt, not because they can’t keep up and not because they don’t have the juice anymore. See Old and Bold.

No, it’s mainly because they’re tired of having the exact same conversation on the exact same subject for the 9,487th time. Almost always with some Wunderkind who’s convinced they’ve found some problem so totally new and so totally different that no dinosaur from the age of mainframes could ever “get it”.

The problem is we “get it” too well since we’ve probably solved this type problem a thousand different times. So we tend to roll our eyes, sigh, give a 30 word explanation for solution and try to get on to other things. But Kid Wonder cannot accept that his totally unique situation can have such a straight-forward (and usually fairly simple) solution.

Arrogance vs. Apathy. And then the fight began

Part of the problem, as I’ve stated, is if you go back to our beginnings we were young but so was everyone else so we didn’t have the age barrier issues. Thus we never really adapted ourselves to young vs. old dynamics. Everyone was screaming at everyone else because we all, naturally, were right and we just had to get the others to shut up and listen.

So, yeah, we old’ns need to do a better job of catering to the ego of Boy Blunder. We need to frown and rub our temples, squint our eyes and proclaim that this, indeed, is a tough one and that we may need a few days to research and contemplate.

Nothing a week at Pebble Beach (on the company) probably wouldn’t solve.