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Overheard on a local radio station:

This commercial-free hour is brought to you by (company name).

It is not really free of commercials, now, is it? It might just be me, but that statement seems ludicrous. Isn’t mentioning the hour’s sponsor a type of commercial?

I love to see how people play with words and meaning—especially in media and advertising. This reminds me of the slogan for shoes made of “genuine imitation leather.” At first glance you are thinking, “Wow, what a great deal.” Then, “Wait a minute. That’s not right!”

Mark Twain said:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

That sums up my outlook on life, and I am living the adventure. Of course, the “bowlines” in my case are the “typical” nine-to-five jobs, two-point-five kids, and two-car-garages that tend to keep people tied to a place, employer, or family situation. Though sailing away from the safe harbor has not been easy, it has been rewarding in so many ways. It is worth it!

Related: a recent xckd cartoon about adventures speaks to this same outlook. (Warning: the cartoon has an “R” rating for language.)

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. —Anna Quindlen

What is success to you? I often think about how lucky I am to be living my dreams. Some days I have to pinch myself in order to make sure it’s not that kind of dream.

Even so, I still struggle with the opinion of others about my life. There is also pressure to play the role that society wishes me to play. If I just do what others want me to do, that’s not success on my terms. That’s what the “feel good in your heart” is all about—it has to be your own success.

If your personal success is real and also happens to match the wishes of family, friends, and the world, then so much the better. But whatever you do, make sure that life’s successes are your own.

“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I have to catch myself when saying “That’s impossible!” when faced with challenging circumstances. This quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is great for reminding me that nothing is truly impossible. If I set my mind to it, I can do it.

I posted a short entry about God’s Debris in mid-December. My intention was to read the book and then share my impressions here. The reason it’s be such a long delay is that I decided to read the book again. I felt it was necessary to pay better attention to the various themes in the book in order to explain my reactions and thoughts.

The book is interesting in that it has different levels within the story. The gist of the story is a conversation between a very old man and a young man that arrives at his door. Their conversation makes up most of the book and creates situations that the author intended to make us think about ourselves and our world.

The superficial level in the book is the main characters’ experience as they interact. It is fantastical, yet believable, and weaves the other two levels together. The book wouldn’t quite work without the story line; but it would also be worthless without the thought experiment held within.

The second level involves practical advice for living. The young man gets solid counseling from the old man regarding love, relationships, friendships, luck, and success in life. This level is interesting, engaging, and useful for anyone that reads it. It is still not the main focus of the dialog, however.

Finally, the deepest of the three levels or themes is driven by the old man’s teaching of how the world works. Throughout the book the story line jumps between levels one and two but often gets injected with number three. This third and most important theme is a philosophical commentary about faulty, human-centric world views. The old man covers science, religion, culture, and many other issues within this commentary.

After the second reading of the book, I started to separate these streams into their own sub-books and ideas. This helped me to take away the good ideas and leave behind what I thought wasn’t as valuable.

The best part of the book, in my opinion, is that third and most profound level. It’s an analysis into our cultural framework that mirrors the thinking and reading that have guided my spiritual, mental, and emotional journey in the last four to five years. This thought experiment really caught me off-guard with how much it related to my own development.

For that reason alone I would recommend this book to anyone. Be prepared to see through the story and the practical advice, though, in order to seize the grains of cultural analysis that lie below. Adams’ purpose in writing the book is to cause the reader to think, and it did just that for me.

Read God’s Debris (free PDF download).

“TROUBLEMAKERS” by Malcolm Gladwell is an interesting read. If you’ve enjoyed Blink or The Tipping Point, then go read this New Yorker article. It delves into human psychology much like those two best-sellers do.

The tagline for Gladwell’s piece is “What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.” Dogs, pit bulls in this case, often get a very bad reputation through no fault of their own. In most cases it’s the negligence or purposeful intent of the owners that causes the dogs’ bad behavior.

The article explores the reasons behind aggressive dog behavior and why it has led to large-scale generalization and profiling of certain dog breeds. This in turn provides a great example of how we come to profile any manner of object, person, or animal.

Like I said, it’s a good read; it will make you think. I’ve already started to look at dogs in a different way.

Visit site.

[Tip: if you go to the Printable version of the article, it really helps with its readability.]

This topic first came up about two years ago, while I was working at an outdoor shop in Tucson, Arizona. One of my colleagues was living with a sports addict. Her boyfriend was a classic case, watching ESPN all day. If no major sports were on, such as hockey, football, baseball, basketball, or soccer – he would simply watch whatever happened to be showing: cricket, billiards, ping-pong, and such.

My colleague complained that her boyfriend would also listen non-stop to sports radio. Many times these activities would interrupt their conversations and time spent together. She wasn’t able to watch anything on TV that wasn’t sports! I listened to her stories, and decided to share my own experience with sports addiction. I explained that her boyfriend wasn’t a lone case.

Everything Sports

It was fresh in my mind since I had just started my “recovery” from sports addiction a few months earlier. Luckily, ESPN’s cable TV programming wasn’t part of my routine, but everything else sports-related was fair game. I listened to ESPN radio religiously; I don’t say this jokingly – it was obsessive worship. Any time sports were on local TV, I was glued. I followed sports web sites to see scores, highlights, pictures, and read commentary.

Fantasy leagues were common in my life also – I did football, baseball, and basketball every year. Last but not least, I would open up any newspaper, skip the front couple sections, and go right for the sports page. Often that was the only part of the paper I consumed.

During spring and summer I listened to every Major League Baseball game that was broadcast from our local radio station. Exasperated, my wife asked me how I could possibly plan my day and week around a game on TV or radio, and I didn’t know how to explain it. It was then I realized she was living with a sports addict.

Stop the Bleeding

My decision to stop the bleeding came during one of the goal sessions that I share with my wife. We sit down at least once a year to discuss the year past and the year ahead. We share our thoughts, goals and dreams. I mentioned that I wanted to make a change. About the same time, I purchased a new computer and considered starting a web design business. It worked out well since the web design learning and projects took lots of time – time I could no longer commit to sports.

Why did I do it? My relationship with my wife, job, and other hobbies were suffering. That’s it, plain and simple. Like some things in life, however, I couldn’t just quit sports by weaning myself slowly off. It had to be a clean break.

I deleted my fantasy sports league subscriptions and refused further invitations to join. I stopped watching and listening to sports and related programming. If I saw a newspaper, I would read the Business and Culture sections instead. It worked well! These days I do occasionally catch a game or two – but I certainly am not as involved emotionally, mentally, and financially as before.

Sports as Religion

There are many correlations between sports and religion, especially in terms of adoration of stars and spending a full Saturday or Sunday worshiping. Spending the day enthralled in worship and adoration could be said of both fervent parishioners and sports fans. The ardor involved in passionately following a team or sport fulfills one’s need for something bigger to root for – a larger cause. For many it has ties to religion, patriotism, family, and geographic identity. The feeling of involvement in something larger than life is a very strong motivation.

There is also the reflection of a “warlike” mentality. In this mentality there is always a clear winner and loser, which reminds me of good versus evil; you are either for us or against us. If you are on the winning side, you are justified in your fanaticism and belief. This reinforces the adoration and worship all over again.

For myself it was all these things and more. Sports involved a strong geographic identity: I had bonds to the Buffalo Bills, Arizona Diamondbacks, University of Arizona college athletics, and soccer teams from France and Mexico. It was a means of connecting with friends, family, and millions of other souls across the world. As in religion, the more I invested in it, the more I got out of it.

Interested But Not Addicted

Don’t get me wrong, I think that it is fine to be interested in sports, even to be a dedicated fan… but it was very consuming for me in particular. It ate up a lot of time, energy, and a good amount of money too. As with wine, good food, and outdoor adventure, a balanced diet of sports is the key to not letting it get the best of you.

From AJ, I found out about a book by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. The book is called God’s Debris, and is 132 pages long. Even though the hardback version is available in stores, Scott has made a free PDF version available online.

This is not anything like Scott’s other work, which as far as I know, are all cartoons. This alone really led me to download the PDF and start into it. I had no idea what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. The book is a mind-bender in the tradition of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Ishmael , without the depth or length of either of those two. Adams introduces the book as a “thought experiment”, and it certainly is that.

If you haven’t read it yet, go get it! If you have, then stay tuned for my thoughts on the book (coming soon…).

I came across an interesting blog post on John Maeda “Thoughts On Simplicity” blog that speaks to teaching. The question is this: do you give a student all the answers they need verbatim, or do you send them to figure out the answers on their own?

I’ve learned in many different ways myself and recently I’ve found that the less I am taught, the better I learn. This is John’s perspective as well. He gives the example of a class he took where the instructor basically spoon-fed the answers to him. Then another course he took was the opposite: the teacher would answer questions with something like “go look it up, the answer is in the book!”.

In my own experience, I find that my first instinct is to ask someone to help me solve a problem (while I am hoping they will pretty much just show me the way step by step). In a few cases, like with my pal Aaron, I’ve learned more when he didn’t actually show me right away but waited for me to find the answer myself. So, like John Maeda’s view, I realized that the less I was taught, the more I learned.

It still seems like the opposite should be true, though…

In case you didn’t see or hear about the story, MIT has developed an inexpensive, crank-driven, laptop for distribution to children in developing nations. Read more at the MIT site.

One detail I was curious about, what OS will it use? Turns out that it is a variant of Redhat Linux. I found this out through an African tech news story.

Very cool!