Survive, Thrive, and Feel Alive

I enjoy reading. Reading is a great way to travel across time, cultures, and dimensions and stretch your mind with new ideas and time-tested truths that are sometimes easy to overlook in the hectic pace of modern life.

One of the things I hope to do in this blog is to offer up a few of my favorite quotes every week in the form of a brief meditation. Today's will be a bit "meta" since I'll introduce both the content and the format for the first time in the blog.

Quote

For each of the meditations, I'll start by stating the quote and the author. Like this:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect"

-- Mark Twain, personal notebook (1904)

Context

After the quote I'll have a brief overview of the work or speech or context from which the quote was taken (if applicable). In this case, the quote comes from a writer's notebook and is attributed to be from 1904. These "notebooks" were assembled by editors after Twain's death, and bits of journals, scraps, and essay or story fragments and ideas are all cobbled together. It's not clear if this was some thought that he had jotted down when thinking of an essay, working on a story, or simply reflecting on a humorous thought he wanted to capture.

Biography

After the context, I'll give a brief thumbnail biography of the person to whom the quote is attributed. Mark Twain was one of the most famous American authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He led a long and very colorful life, with careers in journalism, mining, river boats, lecturing, and literary fiction. Twain was born Samuel Langhorn Clemens in 1835 in the town of Florida, Missouri. Twain wrote hundreds of short stories and 28 novels, along with essays, lectures, and other writings. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are American classics, still read and taught in English and literature classes around the world today. The pen name "Mark Twain" comes from a term used on riverboats to announce a sounding (depth) of two fathoms or twelve feet, which means the water is safe for navigation. You can read more about Mark Twain on his Wikipedia page or hundreds of fan and scholarly sites that are dedicated to him.

Meditation

Finally, at the end of each "Meditation Moment" I'll provide a brief meditation or reflection on the quote. This will be several paragraphs of my own thoughts and how I relate to the quote. Others may have different opinions and that's fine. I don't feel like I want to teach in this blog, but just share some of my insights, ideas, and experiences. I hope there are some who will find them helpful, but in the end it's an outlet for me to do some writing that is a little more creative and philosophical than the dry technical communications I do at work all week. So without further ado...

Twain's comment is an observation about the dangers of "group think." This can wind up leading to dangerous or negative consequences in all areas of life. In organizations like companies, it leads to restricted and narrow thinking because "we've always done it this way." This can lead to everyone believing there is only one way and one solution and failure to see competitive threats in the marketplace from either new nimble start-ups or established companies entering new markets. One of the most famous examples of this in the last decade has been the demise of Blackberry as a relevant marketer of smart phone devices.

At the end of President Clinton's second administration, Blackberry was riding high. Vice President Al Gore famously said he couldn't get along without his Blackberry. This was a huge endorsement considering the popularity of Clinton's presidency and the booming prosperity of the late 90s. But just a few years later when Apple introduced the iPhone, the Blackberry was doomed because everyone at the company had drunk their own Kool-Aid for so long that they could no longer conceive of how a rival entry into the smart phone market could pose a threat. They were so wrapped up in the idea that Blackberry was the only viable smart phone option that they never saw the bus from Cupertino coming until it had crushed them on the pavement and roared off toward the horizon.

But it's not just companies that have to be wary of single-minded group think. Markets and societies need to be wary of it too. Recall the financial crisis of the last decade. In the middle of the previous decade the popular "wisdom" said that real estate was an asset whose prices could never fall. The only direction for housing prices to go was up, and nobody stopped to question if that was really the case. Banks were so eager to lend money to potential home buyers that they quit requiring documented proof of income, and investment banks were so eager to get a piece of the action that they created more and more elaborate financial instruments to fragment and package individual mortgages into leveraged security bundles that were so complex even the Wall Street wizards constructing them were not sure what would happen if there was ever a problem. But there wouldn't be a problem because it was impossible for real estate prices to ever fall. Right?

A decade earlier the bubble was technology. Five years after the housing bubble there was a bubble in natural resources, primarily oil. Mark Twain's observation on the dangers of buying into the majority opinion are applicable to many areas of life. If you start believing something is iron-clad unshakable truth and everyone you talk to seems to agree--it may be time to stop and reflect and see if maybe there isn't a different way of looking at the same thing.

So now it's your turn. You can respond in comments if you want, or you can spend a few minutes thinking about the following questions for yourself.

Are there opinions I hold that seem to be shared by everyone I know or meet?
Can I articulate my own reasons for holding those opinions without relying on the spoken (or unspoken) "everybody knows that..." argument?
If someone challenges my opinion on that topic, can I answer that challenge without sounding like every talking head I've ever heard?

Remember, it's not wrong to hold majority opinions on all things. Every major world religion teaches that murder and theft are wrong, as do all the national legal codes in the world. That doesn't make them wrong. But when you find yourself holding an opinion that matches with "everybody else," it may be time to stop and reflect. Failure to do so may be detrimental to you or your career or your physical, emotional, or financial future.

Additional Reading

At the end of each meditation, I'll offer up some links to additional reading.


Paperback	Paperback	Kindle	Kindle

There's a common theme you'll find in this blog, and that's gratitude. I'll share more about my past later, but the fact that I have access to a computer that is connected to Blogger and lets me share some of my thoughts makes me grateful.

If that's all I had to be grateful for, then you might wonder why I should be grateful. And if you have access to a computer or smart phone or tablet that you can use to read this blog, then I will tell you unequivocally that you should be grateful too. Oh, you shouldn't necessarily be grateful you can read my drivel, but you should recognize and be grateful for the power and freedom and access you have if you are able to read these words online.

We live in an age where almost every individual has nearly limitless possibilities. But I don't care about everyone else's possibilities, and right now you don't need to care about theirs either. I care about your possibilities, and you should as well. More about that in posts to come. First I'd like to share a little about me.

Who am I?

I was born before there was an Internet available to the general public or to mere students in high schools and universities. When I was born, networked computers were the domain of government agencies, university research labs, and corporate skunk works departments. In fact, I was in college before I went to a computer lab on campus and someone excitedly told me about this fantastic browser called "Netscape" and before I received a 3.5-inch "floppy" diskette advertising something called America OnLine in the mail--the snail mail... from the post office. Yes, kids--there was a time when data really was sent on diskettes that way.

I was born to working-class parents of very modest means. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a horticulturalist. That's a fancy way of saying that he worked in a commercial greenhouse and grew plants for a living. He didn't own the greenhouse--he worked for the greenhouse owner. He supervised people and he was supervised by other people. There can be a lot of money in some commercial greenhouse operations, but most of them are commodity businesses that work on very thin margins and only work because of economies of scale. They are labor intensive and costly to operate. Thus, they require a lot of labor and they pay agricultural wages.

So that is to say that the "tribe" from which I come is not a tribe of privilege nor of abundance in material terms. I did have the privilege of growing up in a household where my parents remained faithful to their marriage vows until my mother passed away from cancer. I also had the abundance of a grandmother that lived close by and served as a baby sitter and coach in life lessons from the time my mother went back to work after my birth until my parents decided I was old enough to trust with a key to the house when I caught the bus to school in the mornings. I know that not everyone has that luxury, and I recognize it both as a privilege and as abundance, and I am grateful for both of them.

But in some ways, it took me many decades to realize just how grateful I should be for those circumstances in my formative years, and it seems that many who have achieved great things in life started from far more humble means and were driven or forced from an early age to create, to innovate, or to hustle simply to survive. Those skills learned in the early years of "survival training" then led them to seek more and more, possibly out of an unspoken or even perhaps unrecognized (at least in a conscious sense) fear of returning to that desperate state from whence they began.

Others who have achieved great things were born into abundance and had the first-hand example of parents or family members whose hard work and genius for creation or innovation had helped build vast fortunes. These achievers are not the ones who grew up always expecting things to be done for them; these were the ones who grew up with the realization that their own work and genius could result in even more amazing and impressive achievements.

Lies My Father Believed

But I largely grew up believing lies that were told to me out loud and without words about the limitations of people like my "tribe." One of my father's favorite sayings was "Your actions speak louder than your words," and neither he nor I realized for decades just how incredibly true that is. My father's words always told me, "You can become anything you want, Son. You can do anything you set your mind to." On the other hand, my father's actions told me that men of our "tribe" wear clothes until they literally fall apart at the seams, live paycheck to paycheck, drive cars that were already high mileage and high maintenance at the time of acquisition, put up with the demands of taskmaster bosses that pay meager wages, and never consider that there could be a future better than the present.

My father embodied and lived out that lie--and he did so because it's what had been drilled into him since he was a child and what he saw around him. He never pushed beyond the limits of his own experience because for every voice or promise or dream that there could be something more to life, there were a hundred or a thousand voices telling him that fate had chosen his path for him and he had better just learn to accept that.

Like I said, my father spent his entire life believing and being constrained by those lies. He died in an assisted living facility where he required 24/7 care for several months that I simply could not provide myself because I was too busy caught and in danger of being crushed by the same lies that had prevented my father from ever truly living.

My Uncle's Driving Force: Passion

Meanwhile, my uncle (my mother's brother), who had died just a few months before my father, had been born in the same year as my father, and had been raised by parents who were much the same socio-economic creatures as my paternal grandparents. But my uncle had fallen in love with music at an early age, and from the time he was able to legally drive he held a job playing music in churches. Music was his passion, and he turned it into his career. Now anyone who has ever been a church musician knows that like teaching school or being employed in commercial agriculture, this is not a path to fame, fortune, and riches. Indeed, in addition to his "regular" job, my uncle taught keyboard and voice privately and he also taught in schools and universities for decades. But again--this was a passion he pursued.

By the time my uncle died he had visited all 50 states, taken trips to four or five continents, owned and restored modern and antique luxury cars, and lived very comfortably. As a result, he was active and enthusiastic and always looking forward to the next adventure even up until the day he collapsed and had to be rushed from his house to the hospital for the final time, just a few days before he died.

I am grateful for my father and grateful for my uncle both. I am especially grateful for the contrast in their lives that allowed me to look at the differences in how they both lived as I reflected on my uncle's death and prepared for the inevitability of my father's passing.

The Accidental Mentor

While I have so many reasons to be grateful to so many others, I'm going to end this post by saying I am grateful for someone else as well: for a man of whom I only became aware about 18 months ago. He's not a blood relative and he's not someone who presented himself as a salesman or a life coach or a guru or teacher even. But he is a man whose life experience has led him to share the importance of gratitude with the world through many channels. This man's name is James Altucher. And while neither James nor I realized it in January of 2014 when I first saw him speak at a conference in Miami, Florida that I paid to attend virtually, seeing and hearing his talk was a turning point in my life.

You see, several years before, back as early as 2009, I had begun to realize that a better future really was more than a pipe dream. I had internalized the lies that my father and I both had swallowed hook, line, and sinker for so long that I was utterly blind to the reason my uncle had not succumbed the same way my father had. But I could not shake the sense that the future could be better than my present if I could only figure out how to bridge the gap. But a whole set of other lies had put blinders on me that kept me from converting the idea of "pursue your passion" into action.

When I heard James speak at the Miami conference, a light bulb clicked on. He mentioned a free podcast that he did weekly, and I quickly bookmarked it and subscribed via iTunes. I began listening to this podcast and I began hearing these amazing interviews with incredible people that had all decided the "real world" wasn't good enough for them and so they would go invent their own path in life.

On his podcast, James has interviewed Silicon Valley billionaires, venture capitalists, social media celebrities, and world-renown entertainers and authors. And all of them have similar stories. The path from "there" (wherever you are and whatever your circumstances when listening) to "here" (wherever the life of the interviewee has taken them) is not nearly as complicated nor as rare nor as reliant on the fickle finger of fortune as everyone popularly believes. There is luck involved, yes, but only when you understand the true meaning of the word luck: preparation meeting opportunity.

Do the preparation, and the opportunity will appear. Do the preparation and the opportunity will appear. Do the preparation and the opportunity will appear. This is the message from every single episode of James's podcast.

And that message finally made everything click into place and finally started breaking down the lies from my past, and like the climactic scene in that classic Pink Floyd movie, it utterly and completely exploded the wall separating me from pursuing my own dreams. You see, popular mythology that we tell ourselves in the United States is merely another kind of lie. We call ourselves the "Land of Opportunity," as though opportunity is the whole sum of the equation. But opportunity without preparation is merely fantasy. Opportunities abound, but what we lack is a fundamental cultural understanding of the need for preparation. Without preparation, opportunity is meaningless. Without preparation, there can necessarily be no luck.

The secret--and it's one that many successful people, and certainly one that every unsuccessful person has never truly internalized and fundamentally understood--is that we CREATE our own luck. We bring it into being. It's not some cosmic happenstance; it's not some random chance. By doing the preparation, we are ready when the opportunity arrives as it inevitably and necessarily must.

So I'm dedicating this post to James Altucher, and in gratitude for what I've learned from him, I want to share that same opportunity with you. I'll give you two links to his podcasts, and two links to books of his that I've found incredibly helpful.

Pocast links:

Biographical sketch:

James Altucher on Wikipedia

Web Site:

JamesAltucher.com

Book links:

Choose Yourself

This book is all about biographical and autobiographical lessons that James learned from his own experience or that of others which helped lead him to the place he is today and the opportunity he has to share what he has learned with the world.

The Power of No

This book, written by James and his wife Claudia, reminds you that it's OK to say No. We are brought up to believe that Yes is always the right answer, which means a lot of times we say Yes to a lot of the wrong things--or things that ultimately are harmful or destructive to us. Learning to say No and learning when to say No are sometimes difficult habits, but can help you focus on what is most important: you!

If you have the money I highly recommend buying these books. If you don't have the money, then at least listen to his podcasts. Those are free, and the inspirational stories you will hear from James' guests and his unique interviewing style just might help you realize that the dreams you had given up as fantasy aren't so far-fetched after all.

More to Come

I said briefly at the top my purpose in writing this blog is to try to share some of the things I've learned from some amazing and inspiring authors. You'll find stories from my life in this blog and stories of successes and failures I've experienced. You'll also find a number of links to free resources online related to the summary. And when I recommend a book or an author, I will provide links to the web site as well as links to Amazon.com where you can purchase the book if you wish.