Day: March 6, 2019

Shaq O’Neal is heralded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He grew up squarely in my era, being only a few years older than myself. I was able to watch from the perspective of a young (clearly less physically gifted) athlete as he grew into a phenomenon. Shaq didn’t make it because he was big. It was a factor. An equally sized factor was the fact that Shaq did not give a fuck. That is the one thing he had going for him that I never caught on to. He didn’t care what others thought or how his actions ‘played’ in the wider world. Shaq is and always will be unapologetically Shaq, and for that I give him thanks. I finally figured out that it’s the secret sauce to being successful.

I care what people think about me. I walk around my job like a ghost because I don’t want to have to encounter people who have thoughts or feelings about who I am and how I operate. It needs to change, and I am making those changes starting with the acknowledgement of how and why that happens. Part of it has to do with how I established relationships. I was everybody’s friend–the social chameleon type who wanted to be in on the conversation. That never seemed like a hinderance until the tide shifted and people started to look at me more as a liability in some circles than a boon. I started getting tugged in different directions and the emotional tide pulled me away from the reasons and habits that formed my early success. I became the fodder of whispers and trash talk and that absolutely hurt me. I cared and I was sad and for years I wanted to quit. That emotional low affected the effort I put into the job and straight up made things worse.

Over time I found friends and a group/purpose within the school that made me proud. However, that too began to conflict with what was at the core of my life and I ruined that in the course of time.

I should’ve been more like Shaq.

I should’ve done me and been 100% unapologetic about doing me and wanting to do the things that both make me happy and create an environment where I feel at peace and where I explore the things in life I want to explore and achieve without any fucks to give about what other people think. Shaq did.

10 days and 10 chapters into the process I finally think I am starting to get my shit together. It is about deciding to live a life worth living. I think somewhere in the darkest recesses of my irony driven psyche I am still convinced that the moment I completely have it together I am going to drop dead–never having enjoyed being on the top of my game. Morbid, I know, but I gotta go sometime (sadly), and I might as well go out on top.

So, what does it take to get there? Dedication, focus, less stuff to do? All of that helps, but I think the key for me is manageable tasks that build towards a goal. I always take it back to Steinback who wrote, “When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” So I write 1000 words and then another. I find the kernel of a thing and build from that. In coaching I learn one skill and then another, knowing that they all come together to form a matrix; knowing that all the words coalesce into a story.

Another part of it is sleep. I actually get some. Not enough, mind you. There are multiple days in a week where I’m not with my partner and thus have no reason to retire and instead lie there consuming bad TV and playing Apex Legends long into the night. On a whole though, I’m doing pretty good with the sleep cycle.

I’m also doing much better with delegating. I used to feel responsible for everything. I used to manage all the housework. Now I manage far less at one location, and conversely far less than I should at the other (I am fixing that part posthaste).

The key I see when I consider all of these things is the concept of balance and manageable tasks. I’m old. I can’t write a novel in two weeks like I did in college. I can’t stay up for three days like I did in high school. Those moments and actions shaped me into who I am, but they also set false expectations of what I can achieve in ‘normal’ mode.

So, if you’re reading this then you ought to take away one thing: Set small goals that you can manage and that build towards a larger ideal. Do enough of these things in the areas of your life that are important and don’t overdo it.