Jebus and his investing profile, home networking, moving furniture, how eating gluten free will save you time at the supermarket, why mondays are meant to be a crappy day, why stairs are a silent killer waiting to strike, tetris, 1950's home making, sourdough vs french bread, why rainbows suck, unpaid internships, meditation
Not everything is Lollipops and Rainbows
If all we did was ate lollipops we would be nutritionally defunct, lack teeth and have a surplus of plastic sticks left over. Rainbows suck as well because it normally means it was just belting down with rain.
Blogs by nature tend to be of the positive nature. So when you read a variety of sources of information everything is going perfect - especially when it comes to training not often do you get to hear about crap days or weeks.
However in essence the crapiness of some weeks makes the good weeks more worthwhile. Last week for me from a training perspective was a gong show.
The positives;
> When I missed the last in a set of stairs I did not break my ankle
> When I dropped the gas valve from a propane tank on my toe I only drew blood and did not break my toe.
> I had a good Monday
Monday's Are not meant to be Good.
Maybe having a good Monday was a bad sign - as in reality who ever really has a good Monday. Monday's are traditionally the day of the week where you get the crap out of the way and focus on better things.
You Can only Control the Controllables
Can't find where this quote came from but when I google it the top ranking hit is about the Financial Jebus. Now I know that Jebus had an early portfolio is precious metals but beyond that I did not know that that he was a skilled investor as well. I suppose when your dad creates everything you get the first choice of real estate.
Side bar discussions about Jebus aside - last week I did a spectacular crappy job of doing this. Didn't really plan any contigency into each day and that was compounded by every task taking longer than it should have. A lot of this was a bit of bad luck but if I should know three things by now they are as follows;
1. Making changes to home networks or anything that involves cables always takes longer than planned. It shouldn't but it always freakin done. In the end you end up with a great although likely over engineered solution.
2. Moving furniture is not like tetris in that once everything is moved you just hit game over and everything is good. When objects are moved there is normally about 2 times as much effort in cleaning up the crap that was hidden around or in said objects
3. BBQ's always take about 2x as much prep time as the actual duration of the event. Heck - one advantage of being gluten free I suppose is that you don't need to choose between sourdough and french bread which inevitably saves you at least 5 to 10 minutes on every trip to the super market.
Add to the above needing to complete a movie shoot at the office on short notice (that's a whole other story) , stepping back to the 1950's to support the family and friends canning effort, packing up my desk at work for the transition to working at home 60% of the time which also involved setting up the home office and booking a desk when I am in the office.
What Lessons Learned Really Means
To be honest I hate the term or at least the general use of the term lessons learned. The Traditional Definition as at http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/lessons-learned.html
"The purpose of lessons learned is to bring together any insights gained during a project that can be usefully applied on future projects"
My believe is the true meaning behind the definition is more like;
"I/we screwed up and by calling it out ourselves before someone else does then we can position it as a learning opportunity and avoid taking the full blame"
Looking in retrospect it is no surprise the week turned into a bit of gong show. Stress even if of an abstract type creates stress and I think that is the one key lesson from last week. I didn't really account for that in my week plan and when stuff started to snowball (hence the name of this post even if it took me a long time to get to it) It was hard to stop the madness from being over whelming.
In the end this is my fault, not the supermarket's for selling both sourdough and french bread although I am still tempted to blame that for my downfall
I need an unpaid intern and other solutions
Asides from hiring an unpaid intern to use to undertake a variety of tasks in my day to day life (if any one does want to apply it would be an interesting gig I can assure you and I sense that you would learn a lot vs some of the gigs out there) in the end it is all about just about getting stuff done in a more prioritized fashion
Someone at the track last night mentioned meditation and I think that given my schedule a couple of reflection and meditation windows each week to reset and look forward may be in order. Just an opportunity to step out of the wake to sleep schedule that I enjoy but can cause some craziness as well.
In the end it is about finding a way to make sure that a couple crappy days does not snowball into a crappy week. That's what happened last week and in the end it is crap like that costs you in the long term. If I can get it sorted that it doesn't happen again then that will be a good thing.
Why Write this Post
Let's be honest, my writing compared to most blogs I read suck. however wanted to put this out there that not everything always goes to plan. in fact most things don't - its all about how you deal with the deviations that makes a difference. A did a crappy job at doing that last week and I suppose in itself writing about this is my meditation for the last week with a view to have a good week.
Good news is I had a crappy Monday with my third straight morning of having a migraine so that means the universe is back to normal and ready to smash it for the remainder of the week. Next mediation and reflection point will be on Thursday so we will see how it goes.
This week
No Movie Shoots, No BBQ's, No AGMs, No All day Workshops, No household tetris, No 1950's
Canning Support, No packing up desks, No setting up offices, No re-configuring networks.
No Excuses and No Snowballs
Life feels simpler already :)
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