When I was just a little boy . . .
For 3 weeks it had been weighing on my mind. I was trying to think how I could get out of it. I could call in sick. I could have someone else do it. I could say that we were not ready yet. So many options. I needed to have an out.
It was only for 10 minutes, but I still have to stand up in front of group of people and speak. I have already had panic attacks in other situations where I felt trapped, and now was I entering another one. In the words of Seth Godin, my Lizard Brain was on full alert and the fight or flight engine was just getting revved up . . .
When I was growing up, I was a little on the shy side. I was very comfortable doing things more independently and often by myself. As I grew, I became more involved with sports and other activities, which were more “social” by nature. I never gravitated to grabbing the spotlight, and I was more comfortable staying behind the scenes. I wasn’t a big risk taker and avoided situations that would would put the spotlight on me.
As I entered my teen years, girls entered the scene. To say I was attracted to girls was an understatement. In order to navigate this new world, I needed to change my game plan. Since I was not naturally adept at social situations, something had to change. That change took the form of smoking, drinking, and drugs. Drinking was especially helpful in letting down my guard. I participated in parties by dancing like Fred Astaire (or so I fondly remember), entering into conversations with other girls gracefully (in my own mind at least), and basically having the confidence in myself that I could never muster on my own.
From the age of 15 to the age of 40, drinking and drugs became a way of life. Then a miracle happened. I surrendered my life to Jesus and everything changed. I mean everything! I stopped the drinking, smoking, drugs, swearing, etc. that were a part of my life for 25 years. I have been free from all of that for 10 years now.
Because through most of my adult life, I was able to navigate social situations with a little help from the bottle, I now was on my own. In all these situations, I was now sober. I had never learned how to effectively do this. I avoided them. Now I am picking up where my 15-year old brain left off.
I have never had panic attacks, heart palpitations, or claustrophobic feelings before, but in the past 10 years, I have had quite a few. My brain had not been properly trained and when I entered situations that were new (to the sober mind), it went on tilt. In almost every way, the last 10 years have been the best of my life, but in this, it has been a struggle. Avoidance was not going to win forever. The last thing I wanted to do was make an a** of myself also. What if I had a panic attack in the middle of a presentation! Oh my gosh, I would be so humiliated! I could not let that happen!
So fast forward to my meeting the other week. I wanted to present. I had something to say. My mind was struggling. I wanted to be there, I didn’t want to be there. I practiced my presentation half a dozen times. I was nervous. I had someone do it with me, and I put a couple of things in place to help me get over my Lizard Brain. It was show time. I went to the meeting and made my presentation. Once I got started, I was fine. The nerves left and things started to flow.
One of the things that have helped me immensely during all of this is prayer. I pray, and I have Julie, my wife, pray for me before I have to present. I trust that the Lord is going to bring me through those situations and He is always faithful to show up just when I need it. He is never early and never late, always right on time. The only thing that is lacking is my faith that He will help me through. I have to exercise it each time.
I continue to believe that my mind is renewed and I am learning the things I never fully walked through when I was younger. The story does not conclude with a nice tidy bow wrapped around it. Our lives are like a line, not a snapshot. Maybe next time I will make an a** of of myself, maybe not. Where I am today is different from where I was yesterday and from where I will be tomorrow. I just know that the future is brighter and I can’t wait to be a part of it.
Perfection? I think I will pass . . .
When you are doing a task, do you feel if it doesn’t get done “right”, you aren’t going to do it at all? What does doing it “right” look like? Is it perfection? Diligent effort over a period of time will produce a high degree of effectiveness, not perfection.
Perfection is: “an exemplification of supreme excellence or an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence”.
I was thinking about this and how easy it is to be in one extreme or another on this matter. One extreme is putting in a half-hearted effort over a long period of time and having only marginal results. Never approaching anything close to what would be considered perfection.
The other extreme is what I want to focus on, putting in so much time into a project because you want to get as close to perfect as you can. This results in one of two things.
- Accomplishing very little, but what you do is as close to perfect as you can get.
- Not starting anything because you know you will not have the time to do it to your level of perfection.
The end result is the same, being ineffective and having minimal influence in those things you do. I work at a church where we have an awesome music department, a great T.V. department, and a strong web presence. I oversee our IT area, along with supporting over 30 websites with a skeleton staff. Our IT staff has shrunk over the past few years and we have lost some good web programmers. We have taken over the support of more of our Outreach ministry websites from volunteers who develop in their own favorite flavor of code. In order for us to accomplish this, we had to change the way we do business. We standardized on developing all our sites in Joomla, realizing we needed to be as effective as we could with the limited resources we had. It was a complete shift in traditional thinking, but it has worked out.
Below is a chart of what perfection should look like. As a co-worker of mine, Matt Leonetti said, “If it passes the mom test, it is good enough”. What does that mean? For those perfectionist out there it is this: If your mom can’t tell the difference between the product (music, video, or web) when you get to the “Sweet Spot”, or when it is done to your level of perfection, it passes.
Perfection robs you of being effective.
Perfection robs you of having an impact.
I am certainly not advocating grinding out shoddy work, but I am suggesting that you aim squarely at the “Sweet Spot” that produces maximum results without wasting time trying to gain a more perfect result, that for the most part, no one would notice. Ask yourself if you can relax your standards to get more accomplished, which in effect, increases your overall effectiveness.
I encourage you strive to be as effective as you can by putting in a consistent diligent effort at all you do, knowing that unfinished work benefits no one. Take the time to look at what you do differently and maximize your results without sacrificing the quality of your work.
An ounce of effort, a pound of results
I am constantly thinking about ways to improve the things I do. It bugs me when there is wasted effort. So much of what I do is because of expediency. “I don’t have time to fix it” is a common mantra. “That’s just the way we do it”, or “I have always done it that way” are also generally used. Do we ever slow down long enough to ask why we do the things we do, and why we do them the way we do them? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the ultimate goal? Maybe this is over-thinking the issues we face, but it sure beats the under-thinking that seems way more prevalent.
I want the things I do to matter. Is it more important to temporarily fix an issue, or back up and look at the root of the problem? Initially, there is more work and effort go back to the beginning and address the “big picture” problem, so ultimately there is much less effort in the long run.
In my garage, there are four bikes that need to “put away” in order for the cars to be parked. I initially put large rubber hooks from the rafter to hang them. I have to hoist them up to hang them… Nice! They are out of the way and issue resolved, right? Well, not really. While it was easy and it resolved one problem, another one still existed. The kids cannot get them down or hang them without my help.
Well, what I needed to do was to actually install a bike pulley system. But that means I have to go look for one, see how much it costs, and then install it. It sounds like a lot of work. Maybe it’s just easier to for me to always hang them and get them down.
Well, what really happens is that the girls stop riding their bikes because it’s too much hassle. I always have to be involved, so it is a double hassle. If I would have taken a little more time to look at the big picture, I could have resolved the issue right the first time. The end result would have been doing it once. Empowering the girls to take care of their bikes themselves. And finally, no wasted effort!
I am still on the journey, but I want to be purposeful in all that I do. Time is short and wasting precious time and resources is not acceptable. I don’t want to put in a pound of effort for an ounce of results. I want an ounce of effort to multiply into a pound of results.
Portable Email
I don’t know about you but I go through continual changes and challenges in trying to better manage my Email. I have a corporate account managed through Outlook as well as a couple of Gmail accounts that I manage through Outlook as well. I use a .pst for offline storage. I have one .pst for my “home” mail and one for my “work” mail and I access them through three different machines.
The challenge has always been on how to share these .pst files across all the machines. My standard method has been to store the “home” .pst on a portable usb flash drive and leave my “work” .pst on my computer at work. The problem is I would need to remember to bring the flash drive to work and then back home so I could access it from both places and my “work” one was only accessible from work and not from home
Since I work from home, I need access to my “work” .pst, so how do I do that? It is fairly large, so do I dedicate one flash drive for both .pst files? Since I did not have an elegant solution, I have gone without that access because I really never had a better way to address this.
Well now I do. I have a Dropbox account which allows me sync my local files online. They give you 2gb of space for free. Just download the software, it creates a local file folder and just drag the .pst files there. Point to them from Outlook (from both work and home) and the files will stay in sync without having to think about it again. Pretty nifty!
The only cautionary tale is that the file cannot be accessed at the same time from multiple machines. I just started this method and I hope it works as well as I think it will!
Marching Orders
Have you ever felt like the things that you were doing were just not quite right. Like the puzzle pieces just did not quite fit. While you work on some parts of the puzzle, you still have unfinished business in the critical areas of the puzzle.
Project planning is a lot like this. Too many times people are anxious to get going. They are not sure on the direction they need to take or what they are supposed to do, they just want to get moving. The result is having to do a lot of re-work and extra effort because they did not venture down the right path to begin with. It is expediency at the expense of planning.
I was thinking about all of this lately because we are venturing forward on a very large initiative and we had some core components still left undecided. I was feeling the pressure to get moving and get something going. I did not have peace about doing that because we were not in agreement with some of the foundational pieces.
I spent some additional time getting clarification on what the critical piece should look like. I was then able to get some ideas on how to implement what we wanted to do, then I was able to get agreement with others on it. After agreement was reached, it felt like the logjam had been broken. I now had direction. It was actually easy at this point because the work was paid for upfront.
We now had our marching orders. It is foolish going into battle unprepared. If you do, you will pay the price. It is easier to react, react, react. I am sure there was plenty of times when troops in battle were waiting for a decision to be made, or weather to clear, or other people to get into position. You have to discipline yourself to follow a process and do things in the right order. But when you do, you will have results that more fruitful and lasting.
So, take the time to slow down and plan. Then when you move, the momentum gained will not wane or be wasted. You will be setting yourself for success!
10 Things your IT guy wants you to know
I had this passed along to me and since I am a IT guy, I found some humor in it (truth sprinkled with humor). We deal with so many issues (most of them emergencies) on a regular basis that we have to find ways to be as effective as we can. Sometimes we can come across as a little “matter of fact” about those issues we deal with, but that is not always our intent. So seeing that other techies have the same struggles and how they would address “customers” was fun and funny to read. I thought you may in enjoy it also.
1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am ok with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not ok with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just cant always fix everything.
5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them, I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.
10. And finally, yes, I can read your email, I can see what web pages you look at while you are at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and I can tell if you are chatting with people on an instant messenger or chat room (and can also read what you are typing). But no, I don’t do it. It’s unethical, I’m busy, and in all reality you aren’t all that interesting. So unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t. There really are much more interesting things on the internet than you.