Bloom where you’re planted

I got the chance to sit down with my friend Brent the other night. Our one-on-one visits are very few and very far between, but my brain would explode with all the magnificent goodies and knowledge I get from them if they were any more frequent.

Last Thursday was no exception. In fact, about halfway through our chat at Starbucks I realized I could (and should) have filled an entire notebook with the things we covered in just a couple of hours. Since I didn’t bother to even bring a pen, I promised myself to at least blog about one major take away from the time.

So here it is: Bloom where you are planted.

At first, I wasn’t sure where Brent was going with this. I mean, up until that point we had been talking mostly about our thoughts on Donald Miller’s (fantastic) new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and how we appreciated Miller’s focus to live life through the lens of a story that’s being told. We’re all characters, Miller explains, and the story of a good character involves something he wants but must overcome something else in order to get it.

What Brent was trying to get at was something we had casually discussed before about my career path and where I was headed. I had mentioned being interested in going back to school thinking it would be a good thing to accomplish.

“Man, that’s a staller,” said Brent.

“A staller? Since when is school a staller? It’s something that helps people move forward, not backward.”

Brent continued to make his case though the lens of story. A good story, he reminded me, is one that cuts out all the boring crap that has nothing to do with advancing the plot. So unless I plan on making a career out of my current position going back to school plays not part in my story and is uninteresting to anyone who reads it.

There’s a constant struggle between the person I am and the person I want to be. The person I am has certain strengths and talents that I just can’t help having and that just can’t help excelling in the places where they excel. The person I want to be, however, can change from week to week as I fall in love with and discover new things, whether it’s music, photography, architecture, activism, politics, or anything else my heart fancies. The problem is that our nature is already in the process of writing the story we’re living, even if we take lots of tangents to get there. Think about the career path and you’ll see a linear progression whether you like it or not—and how you thought it would be or not.

“So just bloom where you’re planted,” Brent continued. “Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’ve to shine then and there.”

How much more sense could that make? As long as we plant ourselves into a good storyline and try to bloom in all the places where the plot takes us, we’ll be living a good story.

And that was just a sidebar to the conversation.

Why I’m being such an asshole today

A woman who works in another department practically hung up on me earlier this morning. I dug into another co-worker for something annoying he does, told another person how much her last email frustrated me and plan on telling my boss a thing or two before I leave for the day.

“So why are you being such an asshole today?” you ask.

“You mean, why am I building so many awesome friendships?” I reply.

I went to bed last night with a hot head full of frustration from a few bad encounters that occurred throughout the day. It could have been an email that was a little snappy or a passive aggressive comment said in passing, but everything put together made even the smallest thing a big deal by the end of the day.

Normally I would brood over everything while making my wife suffer through the many ways I wished I would have responded or what I would like to say to them in my own fantasy land. But last night was different.

And now today is much different than most other days.

What I’m learning is that conflict and confrontation are necessary for healthy relationships and sanity. Doing a quick Google search on the benefits that confrontation has on friendships and working relationships made me realize why I haven’t done it very much in my life. Most of the crap we’re fed by self-help articles and books advise us how to avoid confrontation like it’s something to hide from when it comes lurking in the dark. Not only is it unhealthy to bottle in your fears and frustrations because of the stress it causes (have you seen or read Fight Club?), but it is also creating a generation of cowards.

And I’m definitely one of those cowards. Taking the steps to let others know about my frustration has been a a big step out of my hard shell.

As I’m learning to own my feelings and make them known to others, I’m also recognizing there is a fine line between productive confrontation and complete asshole that can easily be crossed. Productive confrontation, for me, is determining the frustrations and hurt feelings that will keep me awake at night and making a point to deal with those and those only. The end goal of any confrontation should be the ability to move past an issue and strengthen the relationship that’s being tested. Anything less is complete asshole.

So yes, that’s why I may look like an ass today. But trust me, it’s an investment in my relationships with co-workers.

Time for yourself

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me over the past few months, it’s that taking time for yourself isn’t just a good idea; it’s necessary. My infrequent blogging during that span is proof in itself.

I just haven’t been giving myself enough time to live life the way I was meant to live it.

And that’s not entirely my fault. Life does happen and sometimes we have to react to the things happening around us. So I do as I do and that’s just how I roll, right?

Well, no. There is something to be said for living flexibly and being able to adapt and react to things on a whim, though I don’t believe that’s the recipe for the good life. Life has to be lived intentionally in order to maximize our time, energy and talents.

Part of living intentionally requires that we occasionally withdraw from the things that put our minds and hands to work. Said more plainly, we gotta take time off for ourselves in order to recharge ourselves.

Sure, go ahead and tape the “Hypocrite” sign to my back. I haven’t been very good at giving myself the luxury of time. I could talk about the new house, how we’ve spent more weekends hosting people in it that living in it, the amount of stuff that has to get done at work, the after-work meetings that seem to come in droves or anything else that seems to take up my time to make excuses for how short on time I’ve been lately.

Yes, we really have had guests stay at our new place more than we have on the weekends since we bought the place in October. My wife and I just looked at the calendar and gawked that we’re booked for the last three weeks in December and the first two weeks in January. I’m definitely not popular, but it sure does feel like it this holiday season.

I normally use this blog to talk about work and internet topics (and the occasional riff on Starbucks) so I promise to tie all that in. Besides, staying on topic is one of the strategies for a successful blog—or unsuccessful in my case.

Creating time for yourself is just as effective in your work like as it is in your personal life. We can easily get caught up with any task that is thrown our way or jump at the opportunity to own a project. Just ask anyone with Responsibility as their number one strength. I don’t have it, but my wife suffers with that curse, err blessing.

So with that, here are a few ways to know if you are not taking enough time for yourself:

1) You think about work at home

This is a no-brainer. If you’re away from work, you should be able to take it off your mind for a while. Yes, we all love what we do but you’d even have to take a break from relaxing in Hawaii in order to spend some quality time with the wife and kids. Since my wife and I work together, this is really hard for us, but we’re working on it.

2) Everyday things start to annoy you

Does going to the gym, taking a shower, shaving heading to church or grocery shopping sound like a drag? These should be as easy as breathing and you’re in a bad place if they stress you out.

3) Your fingernails are too long

This is something I’ve noticed in my own life. If I was to make a list of most important things to do an any given day, clipping my nails would have to be last on the list at all times. It’s unimportant. But if you never get to it and start to walk around like Edward Scissorhands, you’ve got a problem.

4) You hold off going to the bathroom

We’ve all been guilty of trying to finish just one more thing before we make a BM. Then we look up at the clock and see you’ve been holding it for two hours and have to run like a mad man to the bathroom. Nothing pretty about that. If you don’t have enough time to drop a deuce, you’re not giving yourself enough liberty.

5) Your RSS reader has accumulated 300 or more unread items.

Give yourself some time to catch up on your blogs. For some of us, it’s the only continuing education we get so taking time to read them should be top on your list.

6) You can’t remember the last walk you took around the block.

Not sure what your neighborhood looks like anymore? You guessed it, that’s a problem. Get out and be at one with your community.

If you’re gonna ask, you may as well listen

I don’t know what it is about having someone ask for your opinion, but it feels great. We spend so much time trying to get people to hear what we want to say that when someone willingly offers their unsolicited time to do it, well, it can be such a treat.

At least that’s the truth for me. I love it when people listen to me, especially when life gets crazy busy and I have a lot on my mind or when I have a customer service experience that has to be shared.

OK, especially when I have a customer service experience that has to be shared.

So you can imagine my delight when I get a phone call or email from a company asking for my feedback on a recent experience I had with them. This actually has happened a few times in the last couple of weeks since I’ve been spending more money than I make on the house I recently bought. I started to feel pretty popular because my phone was ringing a lot more than usual.

I know, pretty sad. But true nonetheless. Counting customer service follow-ups toward my popularity says a lot about my social life.

One of things I love about having a good friend is that when they ask you a question, they listen. They will set back, nod with you in agreement, show empathy at the right times and, best of all, not judge you at the end of a long (and possibly unnecessary) rant about the most trivial thing.

I can’t say the same thing about my recent feedback opportunities with Verizon, Charter Communications and my home warranty provider. Each of these companies must have surveys built into their service systems, requiring their employees to follow-up with all customers that call in and have inquiries. I say they must because each person that followed up with me sounded completely annoyed to be on the phone with me.In one case, I was actually interrupted and asked to be put on hold.

“But didn’t YOU call ME?” I asked?

“Please hold.”

If tone of voice is one indication that someone on the other end of a line is not actively listening, then the questions that you are asked is definitely another. In every single survey I agreed to take in the last couple of weeks, I was asked very direct answers and instructed to rate my experiences on some sort of sliding scale that suggested a was either “satisfied” or “not satisfied” with the company’s service. I was never given the chance to speak into the question to explain my answer.

Surveys can be a great tool to improve a business. For all the praise that quantitative analysis gets (particularly in the data-driven web world), qualitative surveys add another dimension to help a company truly understand how well they succeed at producing a positive customer experience. This includes allowing your survey participants to speak honestly and truthfully in their own words; not the words you made up for them and force them to use. What that does is change your qualitative analysis into a quantitative one.

I mean, as long as a company is going to ask they may as well listen as well. Especially if a customer is willing to spend precious time to sit and answer those questions for 10-15 minutes.

If I ran the customer service department for a company, I would not require surveys for every transaction we make. Surveys would be given at random and would use the sliding scale rating system that everyone seems to enjoy so much, but with an opportunity to elaborate on each selection if the participant elects to. Also, I would make sure my customer service representatives have the authority to fix problems on the spot and that the responses are used to adequately celebrate positive feedback and use constructive criticism to improve the way we treat customers. Easy as that.

In fact, the most important question to ask on a survey is the only one you really need: how can I help? It doesn’t get any more powerful than that.

The bottom line is that if a company is not able to listen to a customer like their best friend would, then contacting them for feedback is a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

Making the list

I’m really enjoying Twitter’s new list feature. The feature has slowly been rolling out to everyone since last week and I was (I guess) lucky enough to be in the early batch for some reason or another.

Creating lists is just a new way to organize the people you follow. Group like-minded tweeps together and you have a simple way to catch up on tweets on your favorite subjects or from your favorite people.

And don’t worry. If you’re embarrassed to admit you created a list of all your swinger friends, you can simply make it private and no one (technically) has to know.

Launching the list feature is a small, but significant step for Twitter. Whereas the social site used to be a mini-sized soapbox for people hoping to amplify their opinions across the masses, this moves Twitter toward a true social networking tool, plugging users into neat and tidy groups and creating little niches like a high school courtyard. The difference, however, is the ability to share these groups by making them private and searchable thus providing a greater ability for people to find new connections around the interests they care about.

Combined with ther recent announcement that they’ve secured new major search deals with Google and Bing, Twitter is in a position to score big and prove those who doubted their profitability to be dead wrong. Should be an interesting story to follow over the next six months or so.

Just find someone with a list that’s discussing it. Bound to be somewhere.

Get to the source of it

Lunchtime is popular around our office because (among other things, like food) it means our team gets to hang with each other like friends instead of co-workers. Some of us pack lunches, some pick something up and others just tag along but the point is pretty simple: meet in the conference room over TV and conversation.

Thanks to technical difficulties, we often resort to popping in TV on DVD and we’re currently stuck on Arrested Development. For those who missed it while it was on the air, shame on you. The rest of us have already learned a good lesson from the dynamic relationship between the main character, Michael Bluth and his mother, Lucille.

She lies.

He believes.

Awkward situations arise.

He figures out the lie.

The episode we watched this afternoon was no exception to this exchange, but it triggered a lesson that sometimes we jump to conclusions before knowing the full story.

It’s the co-worker who tells you what the boss told her.

It’s the friend who told you what another friend is going through.

It’s the cable news network personality shouting an opinion about health care.

It’s the mother telling her son what his brother thinks about him.

Hopefully the last point is only relevant to the Bluth family and not your own, but you get the point.

It’s easy to mistake speculation and hearsay for real news, especially in an on-demand culture where we expect real information to come at us in real time and send it to us via text message. But make no mistake that the best information is the stuff that comes when it is delivered in a complete package, with all sides and angles attached.

The problem is that getting close to the source often costs us, whether it’s personal (an awkward confrontation) or business (paying for real-time stock quotes). The challenge for us is to recognize when we are given only partial information and learn to not overreact or take it as Gospel when we hear it.

Not easy, but it sure does make for a great sitcom. Even if it was canceled.

Guitar zero

I’m just getting caught up on some reading after a chaotic couple of months, so I’m quite late on the news that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is making his video game debut.

I’d almost rather pack up a house and move all over again than learn that Guitar Hero has reduced a rock icon into a horrific fraction of the glory he once was.

There are not nearly enough words to describe how truly horrifying having Cobain in this game. For those who know as little as I do about the Guitar Hero series, musicians come in two classes: lockable and unlockable. An unlockable musician allows a player to use him to sing songs he would not normally sing and perform in ways he would not normally perform. In Cobain’s case, he can be unlocked to perform Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name” while onstage next to a bikini-clad bassist with angel wings and a skeleton for a drummer.

Nirvana’s “Rape Me” now takes on a whole new meaning.

This whole mess is further complicated by a he-said, she-said argument between Cobain’s surviving widow, Courtney Love, and the maker of Guitar Hero, Activision, over who is responsible for the shameless act of debauchery. If Love hadn’t pulled down her Twitter account, you could follow the disaster in real time.

Before I’m tempted to map out all the moral and ethical misgivings involved in this, I’ll bring it all full circle to say that, as far as marketing goes, Activision is the real loser here. Some things in life are simply too iconic in our culture to make a buck. From Bugs Bunny and Joe DiMaggio to Abraham Lincoln and the Hollywood sign, there is a fine line that, if crossed, will tick your audience more than the possible number of dollars it could possibly bring in.

Love him or hate him, Kurt Cobain is on that list and putting a price tag on his likeness is more likely to upset more people than the number of games sold.

That’s a bad bet in my book and probably why I’m just as disgusted by just the thought of the same thing happening with Michael Jackson.

Did he say it or not?

There’s nothing wrong with an f-bomb or a good ol’ fashioned finger in the face. But to hide those angry feelings into a secret message isn’t just passive, it’s weak.

The Governator would have been better off saving himself time and tax-payer dollars replacing the final “Sincerely” with what he really wanted to say instead.

It’s a lesson in communication, copywriting and marketing as much as it is about etiquette and politics: just say what you mean to say.

(via SFGate.com)