Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • Adapting to the Alpha Dog

      “Without the spur of competition we’d loaf out our life.” — Arnold Glasow

      We invited another dog into our home for the holidays, to help out a nephew who is away for a few days. The holidays are an interesting time to get to know a new dog, but she’s been a sweet pup in most every way. She is most definitely an alpha, and quickly established herself as such with our own pup. Our pup in turn learned to eat her meal immediately or risk losing it altogether to the other. We feed them in different rooms, but a girl only has to see her food eaten by another once or twice to hammer home the lesson. Live with urgency when your world turns competitive.

      I joined a new company a couple of months ago and have received phishing emails and texts from someone posing as the CEO a couple of times per week ever since. It’s easy to let our guard down in such circumstances, but we must always be vigilant. Those who would take all we’ve earned grow more sophisticated every day, and so we ourselves must learn and grow as well. A simple check with IT confirmed what I knew already: it was a phishing attack. The real CEO can still reach me if he wants to chat.

      We know that our true aim is personal excellence, but we still must keep an eye on the world around us. This world has always been competitive, and will be long after our last day in it. There’s always someone who wants what we want, so we must work harder to earn what we want for ourselves. And there’s always someone who wants what we have, so we must grow ever more resilient to protect what we’ve earned.

      It’s easy to get comfortable when we reach a certain place in our lives. The world in 2025 will surely be different from the years preceding it. We can’t just loaf our way through the changes, we must keep reinventing ourselves to survive, and maybe even to thrive. All of this reinvention may feel exhausting at times, but it’s simply personal growth hidden as work.

      That alpha dog visitor is still with us for a few more days. She’s been wonderful, but goodness she’s brought some changes to our home. It’s good to remember that our visitor is adapting to the challenge of living in a strange new home for a few days, full of creatures she doesn’t know all that well, and absent the people she’s grown to trust the most. We aren’t the only ones adapting to change. So reminding her that we’re equally invested in making it work is a good first step to growing together.

    • Light the Signal Fire

      “Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.” — Benjamin Disraeli

      There were days this year that felt pretty small. Those days working from home with a few scheduled Teams meetings were pretty ordinary. Some days the farthest I ventured was the top of the street walking the dog. Let me assure you that this is not a criticism of being home, but of balance. Everything has its time. We can retreat to the comfort of our homes when we are older, more frail and less inclined towards adventure. One day too soon we will lack the stamina for vigorous living. While we are healthy and vibrant we owe it to ourselves to be bolder.

      Now don’t get me wrong, the past year had a healthy dose of adventure. I’m grateful for the places we’ve gone, the projects we’ve completed and the long string of bucket list experiences that made 2024 one for the ages. Truly, many of those experience will be once in our lifetime. We can savor who we’ve become while still aiming for more.

      The thing is, we get a taste for living a larger life, and those days we settle in to the every day routine can feel, well, routine. We must spend the currency we have in its season, be it health, wealth or time, because some things cannot be saved for a later date. We must know when we’ve chopped enough wood. There comes a time when we need to stop chopping and light that fire already! To allow it to burn brighter, as a signal fire to the world that we are here, and to warm ourselves in the glow of memories in our less vigorous days to come.

    • Domino Days

      “I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.” — Françoise Sagan

      At some point in our lives we must turn our best intentions into action and do the things we claim we want to do. Otherwise we are adding our voice to the choir of quiet desperation Thoreau warned us about. Playing a bigger part in the play of life naturally leads to more things to talk about, which is nice in conversation, but it also leads us to a string of ever-larger dominos disguised as days. The thrill is in seeing how big we can grow our days, simply built upon the one before.

      There’s nothing wrong with lining up a row of our days of like size, one after the other, for a time that suits us. When we raise children, every day feels like the same-sized day of changing diapers, making lunches, helping with homework, driving them to practice, teaching them how to drive and suddenly(!) moving them to college. We’re simply helping them line up their own domino days, along with our own. It turns out those days are growing in scope too, we were just to busy to realize it at the time.

      There are days when it feels like we’ll never topple those larger dominos, but each incremental day builds towards something more substantial still. Our unbroken string of days pays off with an ever-bigger life. It’s the gaps that force us to start all over again. Mind the gap, as the Brits say, and step into the next thing. Soon we’re really going somewhere.

      The blog you’re reading now (thank you) is a string of dominos disguised as daily posts taking both of us somewhere bigger than where we started. When we view our writing and our lives in this way, we begin to see that it’s all about building and sustaining momentum, thus increasing our contribution for the days beyond this one. Growth is inevitable in both our writing and our lives when we just keep pushing a little further along.

    • Time Is Our Treasure

      If I could make days last forever
      If words could make wishes come true
      I’d save every day like a treasure and then
      Again, I would spend them with you
      — Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle

      When I was younger, I felt that time flew by. Now my kids talk about how quickly time flies. One day maybe I’ll have grandchildren making the observation. Humans have been making this observation since our brains developed to discern such things as time and our place in it. Tempus fugit.

      We’re told to treasure each day, for each is the most valuable thing we can spend. Time is our treasure. Some spend frivolously, some frugally. We ourselves work to maximize our days, but still see too much of our time slip away. We aren’t meant to have it all, maybe just enough. All we can do is the best we can with it.

      Awareness seems to be the magic ingredient for savoring. We develop a taste for living when we view it all as buried treasure in the sands of time. What lies hidden from us is revealed day-by-day, captured in photographs and memories. Our treasure is as substantial as we make it.

    • The Experience-Collecting Years

      “We all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.” ― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero

      I saw an old friend at the local hardware store and caught up with him while juggling my handful of fasteners and domestic life enhancers. ’tis the season for stumbling upon old friends, as every errand seems to offer a harvest of good conversations with acquaintances from different parts of my life. When people get out of their homes more often serendipity offers opportunities we don’t get when holed up behind locked doors. Life is best experienced together, don’t you think?

      My friend in the hardware store asked me where I was traveling to next, thinking of me as a world traveller. In fact, most every friend I see asks me this question. Perhaps I overshare on social media, or perhaps they don’t travel much themselves. Who knows? I feel I don’t travel nearly enough, and that’s a driving force for more travel still. I view myself as a collector of experiences more than passport stamps, but the two tend to go hand-in-hand, mostly because if you want to experience something like climbing the Tower of Pisa or to navigate the labyrinth of the four quarters of the Old City in Jerusalem, you’ve got to travel to them.

      According to the Pew Research Center, only 11% of Americans have traveled to ten or more countries. I’m fortunate to be well past ten, and have a bucket list of countries I’d like to add to the list in my healthy, experience-collecting years. Once we’ve acquired just enough money and time to collect experiences (and it’s often a matter of prioritization), the only other currency to consider is our health. And friend, we aren’t getting any younger. With many experiences, it’s now or never. A Canadian friend, who travels far more than me, has a strategy to go to the farthest, most challenging places now, because when he’s older he won’t be able to do it. That seems pretty logical to me.

      We all have some idea of what a full life means for us. I admire people who are happy staying within the community they were born in, living a full and meaningful life within those borders, but for some of us that’s not quite enough. For we are nomads and adventurers, ambassadors and explorers. The experiences we seek aren’t meant to be for bragging rights at cocktail parties and local hardware stores, the experiences fill some void we feel within us, making us more whole.

      Our handful of experiences offers a return on investment in memories and perspective that is invaluable as we navigate the rest of our lives. In ten years what will the world look like? Will we even be able to cross certain borders? If we defer, will we be able to walk on ancient cobblestone roads or hike up icy trails in that evasive “someday, when”? There’s an opportunity cost to saying no to travel, just as there’s a financial cost to saying yes. I’m not advocating being irresponsible with financial currency, just don’t be too frugal with those health and time currencies. The best experience-collecting time is usually now.

    • Survival Skills

      “That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      “A ship in a harbor is safe but that is not what ships are built for” — John A. Shedd

      I met with several old work friends for lunch yesterday. We haven’t worked together in years, because I left their industry to try something completely different and never looked back. As with old friends we picked up right where we left off, caught each other up on other people, and stepped back into our present lives as we separated. I remember the uncertainty of leaving the industry I was in with those folks, and the climb that lay ahead of me in the industry I stepped into from there. Life offers us plenty of opportunities for growth, we just have to be bold enough to step into the unknown.

      As it turned out, later that evening I went to a holiday party with my current coworkers (I’ve been there a month now). One veteran asked me how it was going and was confused when I said I was still drinking from the firehose. It never occurred to him that my move to this new company would be full of massive change for me, because he’d been comfortably doing the same thing for years. He’s reached a level of expertise in a company that he wants to be in until he retires, and kudos to him for reaching it. I’m inclined to leap back into the unknown now and then. Call me a risk taker or reckless, but for me life is best experienced just out of my comfort zone. As soon as I get comfortable I get bored.

      That doesn’t mean that leaps should be haphazard or foolhardy. We must acquire and then leverage the survival skills we’ve developed in our lives or we’ll sink into the abyss after our leap. Organizations don’t hire people without the skills they need to fill a gap, but they take a chance on people who may have a gap in their experience but otherwise have the skills. Too often it’s us who lack the imagination to see that a gap isn’t a chasm. We may grow into the next version of ourselves simply by leaning into it. The people who stumble are usually looking backwards too much.

      Our lives up to this point have been an accumulation of survival skills that allow us to function and thrive in the complex environment we choose to live in. Where can we sail our ship next? Writing and travel are my personal call of the wild, and the small steps I’ve taken with each are merely an accumulation of skills. You might have a different call of the wild and other skills begging to be tested. The thing is, we’ve heard the call, and we’re often we’re more ready to answer it than we give ourselves credit for. Is that safe harbor really enough? Asking the question usually reveals the answer that was awaiting our attention.

    • A Path to Better

      “Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.” — Seth Godin, This Is Strategy

      If you’ve ever been to the American Southwest you may have been warned about flash floods. It might be beautiful right where you are, but a downpour elsewhere upstream takes all that water that can’t seep gently into the hardened earth into a flow to the low. That in turn creates a rush of water into stream beds and rivers, which turn the clear water muddy and confused. And then the water begins to rapidly rise, sweeping anything or anyone caught in it into the confusion. The only thing to do in such an event is to climb up as high as possible and hold on to something solid.

      There are different kinds of grind. The positive grind is working hard at our craft with a healthy dose of hustle and focus. We know what needs to be done and we get after it. Writing this blog post is one expression of getting after it for me, hopefully the first of a string of positive expressions towards making the most of the day.

      The negative grind is often felt on Sunday night when you know you’ve got to go to a job you hate the next morning. We go through the motions, follow the rules and generally become conditioned to stop caring. The negative grind is a complete surrender of agency. There are millions of people suffering through their days right now—we must not let it be our fate.

      It’s not easy to tear ourselves away from a negative grind when we don’t have a clear path to something positive. The trick is to scramble out of it to something better. This isn’t always easy when we have bills to pay and a routine that locks us into place, but we’ll be swept away with all the rest if we don’t climb immediately. Grab a lifeline and hold on until we find our footing, then take another step and another until we reach higher ground.

      That lifeline is found in positive anchors like writing, taking a class and exercise. It’s a lifeline to agency, which leads to that foothold to higher ground. When the grind begins to feel less clear, when the stream begins to get muddy and confused, we must feel the urgency to take control of our own situation. Ignore the apathy of the compliant and find a path to better. Knowing that we must keep climbing or be swept into the abyss.

    • A World Full of Curiosities

      “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” – Lovelle Drachman

      I’m at the tail end of a good book, the kind you can’t put down for the progress you might make reading just one more page. The kind you mourn the finish of as much as you celebrate it. The feeling that passes over me when I finish a great book is similar to how I feel the night before a long vacation comes to an end. You’ve loved the time spent on something worthwhile and expansive, but feel a bit melancholy that it’s over too soon. I suppose life gives us that lesson over and over again.

      Awaiting the finish is a stack of books all vying for my attention. Shall it be more fiction, or back to history, philosophy or science? It’s like going to the buffet line with a tiny plate—there’s only so much time and so much to read. And competing with reading are the holidays, a few movies and series I’ve meant to get to, and the ever-present call of the wild beckoning me to do something altogether bolder with my time.

      Being curious, and not judgmental is more than just a clever way to chat up a darts opponent (Ted Lasso), it’s a way to navigate life in a more enthralling way. Who doesn’t want to be enthralled by life? We ought to put the boring chapters aside more often in favor of the page-turners. Our time goes by either way, shouldn’t it be delightful?

      That brings us to this particular chapter of our lives, which may be fraught with as much boredom or enthrallment as we can handle as any of our previous chapters. Life is what we make of it, as we so often hear. We know that this world is full of curiosities that are simply awaiting our engagement with them. Who are we to ignore all of that by plodding along with blinders on?

    • A Dusting of Adventure

      If the goal is to heed Henry David Thoreau’s call to rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures, then we must remember to embrace the adventures when we come across them. It’s snowing as I write this, and the walk outside with the pup was a thrill for her, and a departure from the norm for me too. We haven’t had a snowy morning in a long time, and even if it doesn’t amount to much, it’s a dusting of adventure to start the day. The paw tracks are already accumulating.

      Snow changes the landscape immediately, and our expectations with it, by changing the rules of the game. Things like traction and cleanup and commute time come into play. These temper the thrill of the snow globe this morning, but what if instead we simply enjoyed the spark of different the dusting brings to the day? Oh, the delight that offers.

      Henry looked at every day as an adventure, he most definitely delighted in each encounter the universe presented to him, and depending on what you feel a productive day looks like, he was either wildly successful or underachieved in his lifetime. I think he got out of life what he wanted from it, achieved a level of infamy with his work and did it all the way his way. Isn’t that success?

      I’m not sure what the rest of the day will bring, but I do what I can to make the first few hours shine. We can’t very well expect every hour of our days to be magical, but we ought to influence the course of events that unfold as best we can with a proper setting. How can we possibly top a delightful start to the day? Isn’t it a thrill to try? In this way we are leaning forward into life, and making adventure more than just a dusting.

      The Morning Paws

    • Adding More

      “If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.” — Fred Devito

      These are challenging times, to be sure, but there’s opportunity on the other side of those challenges. We may either face them and continue to grow or cower at the sight of them and shrink back into what might have been. We are what we put into our days, and really nothing more than that but a bit of dumb luck and random chance. Luck and chance will only take us so far—I like the odds of growing into our potential instead.

      Challenges can be thrust upon us, like losing a job or getting a diagnosis we weren’t expecting, or it can be incremental, like increasing the intensity of a workout each time we do it. Each challenge offers an opportunity for the mind and body. Is this my limit, or can I go further? We have a choice in how to react, as Viktor Frankl pointed out, to any challenge. The freedom of that choice is profoundly ours alone.

      We can choose to add more challenge to our days, with a goal of growth and change. Adding more changes us profoundly: Reading and writing more, more intense workouts, more challenging work, more focused conversations with people of consequence. The word infers increase; let that increase bring us in the direction in which we want to go.

      Remember the old expression, pay me now or pay me later? There’s a price to be paid either way, but whether good or bad those choices compound over time. There will come a time for less. Today is not that day. There’s just so much to do in a lifetime and we only have now to work with. We may choose to accept the challenges as they come at us. Let this serve as a cattle prod to complacency. Decide what to be and go be it.