Tag: self reflection

August 8, 2022 – Self Analysis 2019

August 8, 2022 /

Originally, I wrote this show outline in May 2019. This was about a month after I had left my job and there has been a lot of water under the bridge since that time. When I first started, I was writing topics ahead in preparation to build a podcast. I didn’t really ever get around to it. As I have started podcasting weekly, I have those old outlines in the queue for weeks when I need a quick win.

At that point, I was thinking that this endeavor was going to be called ‘Polymath Daily’. My focus was going to be a classically oriented approach where I was going to integrate freedom, history, business and leadership, and other things like I am currently doing. I do talk about things like this occasionally but the original idea required too much daily research.

End Your Programming Routine: The reason I chose this one to do today is that I think it goes along with my current string of deeper and more personal podcasts. There is definitely some self analysis that needs to happen as a result of all my personal events recently. I will take my own advice and give it some time. Right now, it is too raw.

April, 18 2022 – I Am Starting To Get a Picture

April 18, 2022 /

Maybe this will be ‘My Therapy Mondays’ . Just kidding, but I have been thinking a lot about how to identify my funk. Like I talked about last week, I know that it is largely about all the things I need to do but don’t want to and all the things I want to but shouldn’t because of the former.

What you are looking at is my path from the garage door opening into the interior of the garage. As I wrote about quite a bit in the fall, I expended a lot of energy getting rid of everything both in the garage and the basement. There are some obvious questions that come up. How did this happen? What are your waiting for to get started?

And, I suppose the answers are just as complicated. But, this is a delicate situation. For some reason, my wife has a constant need to buy new furniture and re-organize the living areas. It seems like a constant evolution of lamps, couches, rugs, chairs and other home furnishings. For instance, the bar stools in the picture were $800 a piece. It annoys me that they are replaced by some much less durable stools (one has already broken and it has been less than two months). I have accepted that the barstools will not come back but I feel like they are still well made and probably selling them could help offset the cost of the constant evolution. That means keeping them around and in my way.

I have made multiple trips to the recycling center in the last couple of months. Every one of the new furnishings show up with boxes and Styrofoam and packaging material. Not only is the process expensive but it is very wasteful. In our locality, the ability to recycle is pretty limited which means I have a large volume of things that cant fit into weekly trash can. For me, a minimum dump load is a full pick-up and trailer otherwise I am just wasting more money. So, I am holding onto that stuff until there is enough to make the trip.

I am not denying the carpet in the kids rooms were bad. They were bad when we moved in sixteen years ago. Along with the new carpet came new furniture, new beds, new linens etc. During the room clearings a lot of extra junk was identified as no longer necessary. There were clothes that will not be worn, garbage like old school work, toys that have been outgrown, etc. That all got piled up in the garage.

Also, in the back of picture you can see my son’s go-cart. He is actively working on it. My problem with this is that there are tools, cords and junk spread out everywhere. I feel like he does not respect the space or my stuff. I made him twice over the last weekend go and put stuff away. By my estimation, I think that he did about two thirds of it. And, when he is cutting and grinding, it is showering grit and stuff all over the furniture that is supposed to be donated.

There is also a contingent of items that came as a result of moving my mother-in-law into the small house in the back. By my read, they are also junk but then they are not my things to dispose of (yet).

End Your Programming Routine: I am starting to get the picture that maybe I have a marriage problem and probably a me problem. Of course I want my wife to be happy but I simply don’t want to be around all the things that I don’t agree with. I don’t want to have to climb over things and step on metal and move wheels out of the way to get to the freezer to get ready for dinner. I don’t know when or where this will end because this round of decorating is not done yet. This is the reason I haven’t started taking action yet. This will pass, in the meantime I am avoiding my garage and shop.

October 27, 2020 – Have I failed at unemployment?

October 27, 2020 /

I guess that you could say maybe I hit the mid-life crisis stage a few years early. I got the car (and sold it), I quit my job without a plan and I am still trying to answer that question succinctly. Last night, I realized bigger truth is that we are asking ourselves the wrong wrong question in life.

I believe the proper question is not ‘What’ but ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up’. As I grow older the wisdom of age starts to come into play. The reason things and a high paying career don’t bring happiness is because they really don’t matter. In fact, they do the opposite by cementing you into your unhappiness by propelling you to do things you don’t really want to do to have things that don’t change the happiness paradigm.

Photo by Diana Platonova on Pexels.com

It is not easy to go from associating a title and worth to an unknown. Let me give an example. Am I unemployed, retired, a struggling entrepreneur (or an idiot)? Last April when I left my job I told people that I was retired. I was mentally burned out from the years of brutal travel and being on the clock 24/7. While I was employed, my mental numbness was soothed by buying things like tools that there was no way I would ever use because I didn’t ever have the time to do so. I was sure that I wanted something different and controlling my own destiny would go a long way toward self fulfillment.

As time went on, I knew that I was too young to ‘retire’ from a financial perspective but I didn’t have any prospects. Of the interviews I did last year, some of opportunities would have paid a lot more to do similar activities. I briefly considered that if I made more money, the struggle and stress would be worth it. Fortunately or not, none of those opportunities worked out and I shifted to unemployed.

As of the turn of this year, I dedicated more effort into finding a replacement job. Little did I know that the Pandemic economy would change the business landscape. For instance, my wife hasn’t been in her office since March. Many of the large tech companies are decentralizing (locations), potentially forever. Social gathering and networking has been pushed into the virtual domain. More so than ever, job searching has become who you know, increasingly online.

My lack of success being unemployed had forced me to become entrepreneurial for better or worse. I think that it is still very much in line with my happiness. I don’t mind working longer from a timeclock standpoint as long I am controlling my destiny. The real problem is that this is emersion learning and commiserate earning. It will be take some years to become proficient and viable in the business aspects.

One of the reasons that I wrote about being grateful last week is that is a who statement rather than a what statement. Despite the title of the job or the salary attached to the title, knowing who you want to be can help shape your circumstance. Trying a litmus test, here are some characteristics that I think will make me happy.

  • I want a faith centered life to provide a framework of principles, decision making, accountability and redemption
  • I want to be a supportive husband, father, son, citizen. I want to be available without guilt to volunteer, attend functions and appointments to do my first duties first
  • I want to have meaningful relationships that help other people people grow into what they want to be or be safe to be themselves
  • I want to be a positive force where applied, wanted or needed
  • I want the freedom of creativity and choice, the scientist in me wants to hypothesize, test and analyze results.
  • I want the ability to learn from and influence my future based on lessons learned or perceived mistakes
  • I want merit based reward, not based on tenure or title. This keeps the incentive to innovate and strive for continuous improvement in front

From those things, what career would you say I should be looking for? There are a few things that are applicable to a job but many are not and none are specific. In my talks with associates in the HR field, their advice is that I am not specific enough in my approach, where I am looking or even my interviewing. The way I see it is that I cant be, that is the crisis and dichotomy that lead me here in the first place. I have subconsciously changed my focus to Who and not What and it seems to show in my job searching.

I am going to start wrapping it up. What I will do is keep pushing forward keeping my values in front, evaluating data consistently and things will fall into place. Just as promised in my stated goals, I want to be a positive force for others so I hope that you spend more time focusing on ‘Who you want to be’ rather than ‘What do you want to be’. If you ever get the Who licked then by all means go for it!

October 6, 2020 – What does Calculus and mathematical equations have to do life?

October 6, 2020 /

Today is a deep cut. To keep you reading, this post is an analogy not actually about math.

I have been doing a lot of soul searching these last couple of weeks. I suppose that you could say that life hasn’t gone exactly to plan or maybe the way I had hoped. Math is used in science to describe or model life and the natural world. I have been thinking about what I want to change and I thought how eerie parallels some of issues in life line up with mathematical concepts.

The Equation of a Line

When you have a plot with one data point, what direction is the line going? For all you non-math types you can’t have a line with one point. A line can go in infinite directions and slopes when you only have one point.

The metaphor for life is without experiences there is not enough perspective to determine success or happiness. The only thing that you really know is where you are currently. You can have an idea and maybe even a plan to create the next experience, but that doesn’t mean that you will like it or it will be right for you. Not everyone has a supportive spouse to let you walk away without an income for over a year.

For me, I thought I knew where I was going with my life when I went to college. Once it didn’t materialize the way that I thought it was going to go, life happened more without direct deliberation than with it. I cruised along twenty some years until I figured out I wasn’t happy with my line. The problem is, I just realized that I haven’t done anything different to change the direction of my line in the last year and a half. I just hoped that it would change by itself.

Derivative Calculus

Now it is going to hard. What is a derivative? I think that the simplest definition is calculating a change. In application, you can either calculate a point on a line where a change has a particular value or you can calculate the value of a change at a particular point. I might have lost some people already here. I know that in my academic career, this is where I started to struggle with math. I took this class twice to get a better handle on the fundamentals of calculus.

Let’s put it into practice. Looking at your experiences (your line) at what point does a particular change occur. When does your life go sideways or when did the focus or desire change. The straighter the line, the easier it is to calculate or even see on a plot. Unfortunately, life has a way of having our experiences not line up neatly. This is why you need complicated math like calculus to figure it out.

I am pretty good at getting the equation setup, I might even muddle into the answer. That is all kind of useless without doing something with the data. I remember from my days studying Latin, the teacher saying there is no sentence without a verb. Action is required to communicate a thought just as action is required to make change.

Integral Calculus

I think that this one will be simpler; calculate the area under your line. What do you want the sum total of your life to be? Just like in math, positive experiences are additive and negative experiences are subtractive to get the total result. If you don’t like how it adds up, you have to go back to the other steps and make changes. Figure out where you went wrong step two and aim for different experience step one so that you can be more satisfied overall, step three.

So, the truth… I have unknowingly hidden in my Toolbox Fallacy. I like to analyze my situation and pretend that I am planning my next steps without any real results or changes. I have been fearful of moving onto my next professional career steps without acknowledging or even realizing that I was already in one. I have been doing small jobs and handyman work without embracing this might be who I really am.

I wanted to build a lifestyle business because I wanted a creative outlet with practical business deductions and control of my output and life. I already have a lot of that. My fear of failing (or running out of savings) has caused me to not put out effort in marketing and working on what is already paying working. I like the work, I like the freedom,

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to build a lifestyle business. Just maybe doing handyman type work isn’t what I am doing in the meantime but another point in my line.