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It’s days like today that make it really hard to stay positive about anything.  You work like hell and get nothing accomplished, you find out a client that owes you approximately $10 G hasn’t billed it yet to his client, and for some inexplicable reason about dinner time you become sullen and depressed.

Five months ago, my answer to a day like today would have been to medicate myself with a pizza and a bunch of alcohol.  Today I poured a diet ice tea and cooked a healthy, home cooked meal for my family.  Neither solution really fixed anything; however, tomorrow I will know that I finally made a correct choice.

I’m not writing this to say “Yeah Me!”, I’m writing this to say it could be you.  Too many people in our society feel hollow inside and try to fill the void with food, alcohol, porn or some other potentially destructive behavior.  What causes the void, I believe, is the realization that the person looking into mirror is not living the life that they thought they would.

Masks

When we are young, maybe high school or college, we craft this image of what our adult lives are going to be like.  The type of person we will marry, the kind of cars we will own, and home we will live in.  The people that take ownership of these dreams and pursue them relentlessly will realize their dreams.  Approximately 98% of the population buy into the lie promulgated by well meaning people of influence (friends, parents, mentors) that dreaming is for children and does not represent life and reality.  In an attempt to move on with our supposed path in life, we begin wearing “masks” that hide our true selves.

Mid Life Crisis

Some time around a milestone birthday, you know, turning 40 or 50 we wind up looking in the mirror and realize we are living a life we never intended to live.  I know when I turned 50 I looked in the mirror and saw a morbidly obese person, stuck in a profession I am bored with, and realized I wasn’t following my passion.  The funny thing was I could not for the life of me think of what I could be passionate about. The only thing I knew was I had to lose weight.  So four months ago I joined a program through a local physical therapy practice to turn the parts of my life around that I could control.  This was my form of a mid life crisis.

A funny thing happened along the way…I thought all I would accomplish would be losing weight, getting healthier, and feeling better.  But what happened is I am beginning to get to know me.  A by-product of the weight loss and exercise program was coming to terms with why I allowed myself to go from an athletic 200 pound man to a 310 pound guy with high blood pressure, frequent appointments with the cardiologist and more meds than a septagenarian. 

I found out what I really like to do is help people.  It is a driving force behind why I allowed my sons (Gregg and Glenn Hawkins), already successful bloggers, to talk me into writing this blog.  You see over the past 15 years, in an effort to understand why I have been conflicted with my path in life, I have read and studied a lot of self help books.  Everything from Og Mandino to Dale Carnegie.  But what I struggled with was defining my dreams and goals for my life.  I tried every exercise imaginable, like “What if time and money were no object” or ” Write a list of 10 Things to Have and 10 Things to Do”, but nothing really excited me.  It was as if I was putting down answers I thought I wanted to hear instead of getting real about what I want.  Sometimes the toughest thing is to admit you have been doing it wrong for too long.

Getting Centered and Staying There

I titled this post Staying Centered, because I have found it to be the most important thing I can do right now to change the course of my life. What do I mean by staying centered?  Psychiatrists talk a lot about “finding your center”, which to me always sounded like a bunch of bullshit.  I thought it was a clever sounding cliche that meant nothing.  What finding your center is is finding the one thing that you are passionate enough about that it becomes the thing your life revolves around. The interesting thing is it won’t be a car or a house at the beach, it will be something much deeper, more meaningful and quite surprising.  It will create that “light bulb” moment when suddenly things seem to make sense.

I started to identify my “one thing” by writing in a journal.  It started out rather disorganized…I was somewhat self conscious about writing in a journal (although I kept it private and away from my family and friends), but as time went on it began to take shape and my entries were almost like a free association with myself.  Periodically, I would re-read my prior entries and a pattern began to develop.

What Does This Have To Do With Weight Loss?

Once I began to understand what was lacking in my life, I lost the need to fill the void with food, because the feeling of emptiness was going away.  Now when I feel lost or empty, I fill the void by writing in my journal or making a post.  I feel better for having made a healthy choice, which boosts my feeling of control and ultimately results in a better mood.

I feel like this post kind of rambled on, but I needed to cover a lot of ground in order to set up future posts in these categories.  What I plan to develop is a series of related posts that look more closely at why we allow ourselves to be diverted from our true path in life and why so many people compensate with destructive behaviors or negative “mid life crises”.

An increasingly pervasive attitude with today’s managers and business owners is that employees are nothing more than tools or pieces of equipment that exist to create and enhance the entity’s bottom line. If the equipment’s cost of maintenance begins to rise or if the fixed cost of the employee (ie from pay raises or increases in benefits due to time in grade) increases and it begins to degrade the bottom line, then it is time to replace it with a cheaper model.

Why Engineers Make Lousy Managers

Being an engineer and having worked for a wide variety of organizations over the past 27 years, I have come to believe that as a rule engineers make lousy managers. It is not because the engineers that get promoted to management are not smart people or they do not care about the health and welfare of the company, it is because usually the ones that get promoted are highly productive and have a very high utilization rate. As a result, they are more concerned about billability and production than they are about nurturing relationships. It takes time to build tight client relationships and usually much of that time is not billable or accounted for in project budgets. As a result, employees are told to stay off the phone, stay on task and bill, bill, bill.

Every Business is a Relationship Driven

During my orientation with a prominent water resources engineering firm for whom I managed an office, the senior VP who was my direct supervisor made a point of telling me to never forget that ours was a relationship business. The company had been built on strong client relationships that had stood for over 35 years. This group really GOT IT! It was a result of this philosophy that during my recruitment the top brass had seemed concerned over the number of jobs that I had on my resume. The majority of the decision makers had been with the firm for 25 plus years. They wanted someone who would be committed to building and maintaining long-term relationships. This company really understood that close client relationships meant they saved money on marketing. When an existing client called with a possible project, virtually all of the time spent with the client was billable from hour one. The only instance when the time was written off to marketing was when the project did not proceed further.

What Precipitated This Post

Today I just found out that one of my neighbors was laid off. But they were not laid off in what I would consider an honorable fashion. My neighbor was a regional manager for a company that operated in several states. The premise was he was going to be elevated to a more regional level and his company hired a lesser paid person to take over his territory. My neighbor even trained this guy! My friend was being asked to move his family to Washington so he could concentrate on the states of Oregon and Washington…areas that were weak for this company.

After submitting his weekly reports after an extended business trip to the Northwest, my neighbor’s boss asked if they could get together to discuss some things. The meeting happened on Monday in Gilroy, California (about 3 hours from Bakersfield). At the meeting, my friend was given a severance package and told he was laid off.

Management did not have the balls to give this loyal employee an inkling that something was up. They let him train his successor, put his home on the market (in a depressed real estate market, no less), and then summarily discharged him like a piece of equipment that had outlived its useful life in order to save a few bucks. The company was arrogant enough to think my neighbor’s contacts and his client relationships belonged to them. What they will find out is that once a trusting relationship has been created, it will survive almost any circumstance. The bottom line will temporarily improve, but over the long haul his old company will be the big loser.

Relationships are a company’s most valuable asset and the people who create them are indispensable.

Is it just me or does it seem like effective listening is becoming a lost art? Just plain listening to what someone says has gone by the wayside. While my family seldom eats in a restaurant, at least once a week we get take out from a local establishment. I have completely given up trying to call in an order and arrive just in time to pick it up. The reason is the operator or serving taking the order over the phone either cannot hear you over the kitchen or bar noise, or they just absolutely lack the mental capacity to listen and write at the same time. Just getting the name on the order correct has become a crapshoot. My name is Steve….not exactly an uncommon or difficult name! However, at a local steak house, two times in a row, I clearly said my name was Steve (I had to repeat it several times too) and yet both times my order was in the name of Dave!

In my darker moments I swear the whole world is “blonde” and I am speaking German. However, I think the real problem is that today’s society has become so fast paced that people do not take the time to listen. They are too busy trying to think of the next thing to say than to listen to what is being said. It’s not like people have become non-conversational, it seems to me that due to the bombardment of noisy information 24/7 from TV, Radio, ipods, etc. most folks cannot allow a moment of quiet contemplation in a conversation. It’s like if there is a moment of silence, then someone is not keeping up their end of the conversation.

I once took a history class in summer school that focused on the period in US history from World War II to the present time. The teacher used some interesting tactics to make the material interesting. The most memorable was he had developed a montage of television commercials beginning from the 50’s through the late 70’s (I took the class in 1976). In the 50’s the commercials were live, were a full one-minute in length, and were geared to providing meaningful information about the product being advertised. As time went on, the commercials got shorter, the pace of speech increased, and the information was being delivered at the staccato pace of a machine gun. By the end of the class that evening everyone in the room was visibly agitated, just from the pace of the ads we watched.

Today TV ads are approximately 20 seconds long and they cram anywhere from 4-6 into a commercial break. The ad content now consists of just sound bites. Advertisers understand that the purchasing decision makers of today (people in their 20’s to mid 30’s) don’t think in complete sentences. Next time you talk to your son or daughter (or your friends, if you are young and reading this) pay attention to how many sentences just trail off with the phrase “…uh and yeah, ya know”. Most young people do not finish a complete thought, because the greatest influence in their lives growing up, television, presents information in sound bites or incomplete sentences.

Gen X and Gen Y (and whatever my kid’s generation is called) have been raised in this frenetic environment. So it is no wonder my twins cannot have a conversation where one waits until the other is finished to share his thought. They continually talk over one another until someone shouts “shut the f**k up and let me finish”. My sons are 20 and it is their peer group that are taking our orders at restaurants and fast food outlets. I am a firm believer that this current generation is so unused to listening that they are functionally incapable to take a simple dinner order. Their mind wanders because of the lack of auditory stimulation.

If anyone who reads this think I’m nuts, I challenge you to go to a Starbuck’s and sit within earshot of a group of young people having coffee. What I think you will find is they can sit there for hours, talking over one another and NOT SAY A DAMN THING WORTH REMEMBERING! They will gripe about their boyfriends, their lives, whatever, (which youth of all generations have done when hanging out) but most of the time they just make noise so there is not a void in the chatter.

Maybe this is just the rant of a middle aged man whose has become as intolerant as I used to accuse my father of being, but I don’t think so. Let me know what you think.

Welcome to Simple Philosophy! This site is dedicated to presenting simple, straightforward information to help you improve the quality of your life and identify and define your dreams. In keeping with the theme of this site, please visit my about page to find out about me and my motivation for developing this site. The thing to remember is my vision for this site it to become an online community of persons that have realized there is more to life than just existing in a mundane day to day existence. Therefore, I encourage honest, vigorous comments on the content posted here. If you disagree with me, then let’s hear it. If you agree with me please respond; however, I ask that you share with the community your personal experience that causes you to feel this way. If everyone agrees with what I post, while it will make me feel omniscient and important, it will not improve others. I have found over the years, that everyone has something of value to share…that your personal experience may be the key that unlocks a mystery for someone else.

A quote from Benjamin Franklin has always resonated with me. Franklin once said, “A rut is merely a grave with the ends kicked out” (I may have paraphrased a bit). He also said, “Many men die at 25, but wait until they are 65 to be buried”. What Franklin is talking about are the habits we adopt of living in our comfort zones and being afraid to enter the unknown realms of change and living our dreams. There is always risk involved with living our lives in accordance with our dreams or in the manner that God has intended for us; however, settling for just “good enough” and “getting by” is the same as our spirit and souls dying young and existing in our physical shells until it just gives out from overuse or just plain boredom.

Personal Responsibility

A real hot button is the tendency for our current society to continually make excuses and not take personal responsibility for their actions. There is a common used axiom (usually spoken by those who should take heed) that states, “Excuses are like a**holes…everyone has one!”. How many times have you heard a child, co-worker, spouse, fill in the blank say, “It’s my fault, but….”? What comes after the “but” is the excuse (they would argue reason) why it really was not their fault. The person thinks they are taking responsibility; however, what they are really trying to do is shift the blame to someone else. In politics the Republicans are always blaming the Democrats for expensive social programs, and the Demos are always blaming the Republicans for the deficit. What everyone keeps forgetting is the current situation, whatever it is, is the end result of personal decisions that were consciously made by someone or a group of people.

Therefore, let us get something straight. Whatever your current situation, be it either good or bad, it is the result of an accumulation of prior decisions or lack thereof. Remember failing to act is a conscious action. In the case of inaction, a person is either unsure or afraid to act. So instead of potentially making a mistake, they opt to do nothing, in which case others make the decision for them. How many agree that other people will generally make decisions that will not be in your best interest? So a failure to act will result in a bad or undesirable circumstance.

In the popular book The Secretby Rhonda Byrne she states, “Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts.” When I read this it hit me like a ton of bricks! The implications are that whatever my financial, marital, work, etc. circumstances are I am responsible by virtue of my past thoughts and actions. It caused me to retreat to a Starbucks (to effectively look at your life, I believe you need to get away from your normal environment) with my journal and take an inventory of my life so far. Some things I liked and a lot was pretty disappointing. The important thing is to take ownership (another word for responsibility) of the things you do not like and fix it! While you cannot un-ring the bell, a person can take control of their thoughts and actions and move forward with intentional action.

Life must be lived intentionally! I will leave you with a word picture…a living vital salmon is always swimming upstream to spawn and perpetuate the species, and a dead fish will always be carried downstream by the current. If you hear yourself responding to the questions, “How’s it going?” with the answer, “Just going with flow!” STOP and ask yourself if you are going to live a vital, intentional life or just be a cold, dead fish. Whatever the answer, step up and take ownership and be responsible for the answer!