Alexandersmap

    Tag: New England Patriots

    • Applied Focus

      “Is it interesting or important?” — Mike Vrabel, New England Patriots Head Coach

      After a couple of days away from home, the cat is especially expressive, meowing relentlessly for attention. Attention given, she is quiet for a few seconds, then begins again. There’s no creative space for writing with a cat meowing for your full attention. But that doesn’t matter, does it? This is the time to write, and so the writing happens anyway.

      The world doesn’t care if we want to focus.

      Is it interesting that the Louvre was just robbed in 7 minutes? Yes, because the robbers changed the game by shortening the time between detection and response, which will impact security globally. When you think about things like security for a living, that fact is more than interesting, but important. It’s too soon for all the answers, but finding more effective ways to detect, delay and respond to future threats is what security professionals will focus on next, even as others search for the robbers from this event. It’s a tragic development for art lovers either way, both for the loss and for the potential restrictions to access it may create in an attempt to mitigate the impact of future threats.

      Interesting will distract us all day if we let it.

      Applying focus is how we take charge of our days. After giving attention, and food to the cat, she’s still inclined to meow into my creative space. Noise-cancelling headphones playing Mark Knopfler’s Wild Theme on repeat will allow me to finish this blog post, and then pay attention to the cat again. What’s important to her is not necessarily important to me in this moment. The dog, bless her, gives me precious presence but also space to think.

      We become what we focus on the most.

      How do we win the day? One small win at a time. The pets deserve some attention first thing in the morning, but after that, our priorities deserve a little attention too. What are the important tasks that must be focused on to make today successful? What can we do to enhance our ability to accomplish these tasks? Interesting steals from important every day. It’s up to us to focus on the right thing, right now.

      So focus on the important at the expense of interesting.

    • Something More Than Hope

      “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” — Jim Collins

      At a mass of remembrance recently, a Catholic priest, speaking on faith in the face of loss, said that there are two sides of the coin with regard to hopelessness: despair and practicality. His point was that, not surprisingly, we lose hope when we reside in despair, but we also do when we succumb to logic and believe that there is nothing that can be done about the matter. There’s a place for hope in this world, he suggested, and it requires the antonyms of despair and practicality: faith, confidence and maybe even a small but healthy dose of idealism.

      His words triggered a memory of the “Stockdale Paradox”, which Jim Collins explains quite effectively in the quote above. Faith and hope are great, but we have to be practical too. There are sometimes things out of our control that must be dealt with. When we balance those two sides of the coin, we might realize the optimal outcome given the circumstances. Or we might not, but we gave it a good fight. Life isn’t fair: We must reconcile ourselves to that fact and do with it what we can to stay afloat. The alternative is to sink.

      Surely, there are things we have no business hoping for. Sometimes the brutal facts make hope a frivolous distraction. Then again, sometimes we get so caught up in things like despair and practicality that we give up on hope too soon. The world is full of stories of epic comebacks fueled by faith in the outcome and decisive action despite ridiculously bad odds. Being from New England, I can quickly think of two favorites:

      “Don’t Let Us Win Tonight!” — Kevin Millar, Boston Red Sox, before the game 4 comeback against the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. The Red Sox were down 3 games to none and came back to win the series.

      “Let’s go, baby. It’s going to be one hell of a story.” — Julian Edelman, New England Patriots wide receiver, prior to the Super Bowl comeback from a 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons to win the Super Bowl.

      In both situations, the logical thing to do would be to sink. But each team flipped the script and did whatever they had to do to win in the end. Granted, sports aren’t life, but they represent the dynamic nature of living in a contentious, competitive world that doesn’t care about our feelings, only the results.

      Brutal facts are indeed often brutal, and mandate clear thinking and deliberate action. There’s no going through the motions in such moments. Unwavering faith may fuel you, but surviving and thriving require heightened awareness and strategic execution. And even then things don’t always go our way. But then again, sometimes—sometimes, they do.