My Riffs

A park is a place where people of all different types can come together. It's a meeting and gathering place. It's an environment where people can relax and play, which are two important things to do in life. Maybe there is a correlation between the more parks in an area and the happiness there? Let our goal to build parks wherever we are, where people can feel welcome, comfortable and where they can let their guard down and just be human.

You can know for sure, the storm is coming. You can either prepare and at your peril ignore. Some form of a storm is coming to you or someone close to you. And if you're not in a storm right now, be extremely grateful. This isn't intended as a negative post. It's reality. And it doesn't have to be negative. These storms engage us and make us better. They seem to be a critical part of life. So you can try and go around the storm (won't work) or you can do your best to prepare.

Without vulnerability you get hypocrisy. Allow for vulnerability and be willing to be vulnerable. The alternate is bleak.

Identify your weaknesses. If you don't know where you're weak, you won't be able to do anything about it. It could be the thing that trips you up and causes catastrophe when you least expect it. If you don't have a "name" for something, you cannot fix it. So identify your weaknesses in order to "name" them. Identifying your weaknesses allows for a few things: - Fixing or at least making the weakness better. - Avoiding problems the weakness will lead to. - Allowing yourself to use other resources to compensate for your weaknesses. - Hopefully staving off catastrophe caused by your weakness.

Sometimes we think we're being strong, but really we're exposing weaknesses. Some things we do thinking we're being strong, or mistake as strength: - not crying or showing true feelings/emotions - not accepting blame - not saying sorry - not sharing our weaknesses - not making changes The opposite of these are strengths... It takes strength to share and show our feelings. It takes strength to accept blame and responsibility for something going wrong. It takes strength to say "I'm sorry". It takes strength to admit and share our weaknesses. It takes strength to make changes. (there are obviously times to hold our feelings back and not share our weaknesses and etc)

Sometimes we search so hard trying to find the problem. We will blame circumstances, history and people so often. What’s strange is, we very rarely assign blame on ourselves. People generally act in a way that they feel is best, so assigning blame on oneself is a difficult task. We feel like if we’ve been acting in ways that are best, how could we do something “wrong”. But how often should we take a hard look in the mirror, trying to find some blame there? Problems generally have more than one factor. What role have we played in the problem? Or better, what could we have done to alleviate the problem? Finding the problem may be done best when starting from ourselves and working outward.

It's easier to start over then we often think. Restarting a project. Restarting a program. Restarting a broken relationship. The keys are: humility, honesty and love. And the restart almost always starts with the words "I'm sorry...". You can always restart, it's what you're willing to do with the pride involved.

Information overload rules today. There is so much information out there, the challenge becomes sifting through the information to find what is true, valid, fair and unbiased. With information so readily available, we find ourselves in a  place where we can source or cherry pick the facts to support our pre-suppositions. And this is very dangerous. We no longer search for truth, we search for affirmation. Affirmation to support our pre-suppositions. This is a very dangerous thing. It means we can now go through our life feeling affirmed, when we may be wrong. It means that we can hide from the truth. The solution is to review all the facts and not cherry pick the ones we prefer. Cherry picking our data sets is intellectual cowardice, which is one of the worst forms of cowardice. Being intellectually honest means working through concepts, ideas and facts that we don't like and are uncomfortable with. But we come out in the end better for it.

Here's an interesting thought experiment.  Being as honest as you can with yourself... If you had your friends, colleagues and family write a one line summary of yourself, how would it read?

Once you embark on a journey to some place, or some thing, the journey will take an unexpected turn. There will be an unforeseen barriers or challenges. The landscape will shift and require you to adjust and possibly keep re-adjusting. During the journey you may feel lost and not know whether to head back to the beginning or to push forward, or maybe to end the journey. People will fail you. Tools will fail you. You will get lost during the journey. And it will be difficult to continue forward. But you have to remember why you started the journey and look forward. Why you started is the constant in the storm, it's the unwavering purpose. This goes for businesses, relationships, product developments, pursuits and journeys of all types. When you get lost, remember why you started and look forward and keeping looking forward until you see a flicker of daylight.

A broad horizon and perspective enables one to make educated, informed decisions and provides a solid base of thinking. Narrow horizons often lead to narrow and unreasonable perspectives. Open mindedness is a term that has gained a negative connotation. But true open mindedness means considering every side of a topic, and is a sign of strength, not weakness. Accepting a position without considering all angles is the true sign of weakness. Open mindedness means considering all angles, it surely doesn't mean accepting any and every position such as the term has come to mean. It's a position of strength to tackle something with an open mind. Broaden your horizons. It strengthens your foundation. Broaden your horizons in friendships, in thinking, in skill sets, in knowledge... But with the broad horizon, narrow your focus on what really matters. Narrow your focus on the highest value tasks. Ignore noise and pettiness. Using your broad horizons to accurately determine what's...

Thank you to the artist, Propaganda, for the thought behind this post. There is something beautiful in and through pain. Something about it unmasks the individual and you often get raw, authentic humanity. The mask and pretending can be dropped. I don't think we need to always try to bury and hide our pain. It's part of life. Why pretend everything is okay, when it isn't? Pain usually leads to growth. There's something beautiful about that. Scars carry a certain beauty, showing you survived and grew. They show you've learned something and in some way become stronger. Struggles and pain are part of humanity , pretending they don't exist robs us of some lessons and beauty. There is much to learn and much to gain in going through the struggle and the pain. It may never be fun, but if we learn to embrace the opportunity for growth, the pain will be less. Beauty isn't in pretending or hiding. Beauty is in being real and coming out the other side of the ...

Every human comes with imperfections. It's what makes us human after all. It also is what equalizes us, making no one better than another. It's the great equalizer. Knowing that that person next to you or even that person you look up to came with essentially the same amount of imperfections as yourself, can by a huge relief. They may have figured out how to overcome the imperfection(s) though, and so can you. Let's drop the pretences that we're better than someone else. Let's drop the pretences that we have it all figured out. Let's drop all the pretences and accept our humanity, and accept others humanity. Thinking someone is less than you, only marginalizes yourself, not the individual you're attempting to marginalize. (Obviously we shouldn't accept hate, and other evil things that come from people with problems, but we can still accept their humanity through it. There are unfortunately bad people in the world and we do not accept the bad thing...

This isn't by any stretch an original thought. Life requires balance between three key areas: work, rest and play. If your life balance is super deficient in any of these three key areas, the other areas will be negatively affected. So, take time to rest. Take time to play. And naturally, work. If you're unhappy, tired or burnt out, chances are there is a deficiency in one area or another, or even multiple areas.

Why do we put barriers up? Generally it is to protect us against some harm. Why do we put barriers up between us and others? What are we protecting against? I think it is generally for reason of pride. Pride can come from thinking we're too good. But also... Pride can come from thinking we're not good enough. This pride is the same in that, we don't want people to think any less of us, because it hurts our pride. Barriers between people kill and destroy. There are very few legitimate reasons to put barriers up between people. We need each other and we need people with contrasting ideas, thoughts and skills. We need the diversity to create a strong community. There are times and places for uniformity, but usually diversity is much better. Let's not cut people off because they are different than us. Let's join together and become stronger. Pride is a terrible reason to put barriers up. We each need to take ownership of our pride and not allow it to be a...

It's an unfortunate truth that we all have inconsistencies in our lives. It's part of being an imperfect human being. The point here? Let's have mercy on those whom we find inconsistencies. If someone is hypocritical and dishonest that is one thing. It's likely best to distance yourself from a person like that. I'm speaking more to when we discover an inconsistency in someone's life.  Let's not judge too quickly or harshly. Because we have them too. When you discover an inconsistent in someone's life, you haven't discovered anything special, only that they're human.

This is a direct copy + paste from Seth Godin's blog. It was too good to not share. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/07/the-flip-is-elusive.html For a generation after people realized that smoking would kill them, many smart, informed people still smoked. Then, many of them stopped. After discovering that an expensive luxury good is made out of the same materials as a cheaper alternative, many people stick with the expensive one. And then they gradually stop going out of their way to pay more. After a technology breakthrough makes it clear that a new approach is faster, cheaper and more reliable, many people stick with the old way. Until they don't. And inevitably, it doesn't matter how much people discover about their favorite candidate, they seem impervious to revelations, facts and the opinions of others. For a while, sometimes a very long while. But then, they assert that all along they knew something was amiss and find a new person to align w...

The really valuable questions are the hard ones. The easy questions can easily be answered because the answer is essentially already provided. The hard questions require us to go somewhere new. Without going somewhere new, the questions and answers do not provide the same value. It's the hard questions that push for more value. Easy questions allow us to think and answer as we always have. Comfort. Crippling comfort. Read more in my previous post about this subject . We can ask hard questions of others and gain a much more valuable dialogue. But, if we can ask ourselves honest, hard questions, the amount of potential is boundless. The tough part though is being willing to abandon the easy, automatic questions. To abandon, if only temporarily, what we believe, to see if possibly there is a better answer. This also requires the highest intellectual honesty. Leave rigid thinking behind. It harms the rigid thinker yes, but also harms those in their sphere of influence. ...

Nobody is 100% right. Realizing that, you cannot be so sure of yourself and what you know. I've had "sure things" in my mind completely turn around and be unsure. Truth, learning and wisdom is progressive. We never "arrive" as I have previously written. I think it is important to always keep in the back of our mind that we have to be wrong about some things and to keep an open mind as to what things we could be wrong on.

All human beings are incomplete. We all lack in some areas and need help in some. And that is okay. No one person has it all together. It is okay to admit a weakness, there's strength to gain in that. It is okay to fail, there are lessons learned in failure. It is okay to be wrong, there is nothing to be ashamed about in being wrong. It is okay to make mistakes, this is one of our most prime learning opportunities. Nobody is perfect. I am not. You are not. And that is okay. Let's be authentic and vulnerable with each other and not act as if we have it all together.