1160. Time/Date Stamp

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I’ve long been enamored by products that offer a clear timeline of when to expect success. Novel in 90 days. Better Basketball in 21 Days. 30 Minutes to Better Sex. Okay, maybe I made the last one up, but it could exist. There is a market for books that offer clear and time delineated instructions on self-improvement. That market exists largely as a result of a goals-oriented culture that stresses the reward over the journey. We are all children of Phil Jackson who once said, “It is not how hard or much you train, but how smart.” I am paraphrasing here as the precise words are locked away on a network stream that only functions freely 20,000 feet below me. Yet as I cruise the skies on the way to my destination I am struck by the truth of his words. We work smarter, not harder, which is supposed to be the mantra of the generation just behind my own. I suspect this mantra is flawed. How about work smarter and harder. How about we take full control of the hours we have between birth and demise to make the best possible product of ourselves that we can in the most efficient, driven, fashion imaginable?

I’ve been reading up on coaching youth soccer. I head coached for the first time this past spring and while the teams did very well, it is clear that any failures they had as a team were a direct result of my coaching. I could have instilled the principles above in these youngsters, but I didn’t work hard enough or smart enough at my end to do so. The beauty of summer break is that it gives you time to reflect on these failures and come up with a solution to it. My solution is to begin fashioning my on ‘Better Coaching in XX Days’ structure in order to count down to the new soccer experience I will be undertaking in August. My methodology isn’t so pat as these proven authors. It is also untested, so my timescale is entirely predicated on the amount of time I have left to get ready. I think the key is that I’m developing a plan and giving myself time to do so. I teach writing as a process and I believe planning and coaching are the same. I’ve answered the call to my journey, and now I’ll embark on all the steps along the way.
Some Thoughts:
  1. …. I won’t talk about work. I won’t talk about work. I won’t talk about work.
  2. One way I’ve exorcized my kid drama is to write mental hate mail. I address the letters to my kids and pretend I am writing to their grown selves and expressing what giant, stress causing pains in the buttocks they can be. Lately it is just the middle one. That could be because the baby is off on vacation with Mom.
  3. I really don’t care to hear one more story about Kim Kardashian. She is not a metaphor for the average American. She doesn’t represent me or mine any more than Kanye West does. At least I can feel the message of his music. The only message she sends me is, “Capitalism requires no skill to execute flawlessly.”
  4. Flying to Minnesota i’m looking down over the earth and realizing that some clever tosser got it in their head to make their crop patches look like Pacman eating a row of green dots. Well done, farmer. Well done.
  5. I’m calling this one false advertising. The Jay-Z commercial seems to strongly indicate that mega-producer Rick Rubin (The dude with the uber cool zz top beard) is somehow involved in Magna Carta Holy Grail. He is not. The commercial was little more than a listening party collecting today’s top producers in a room with Jay-Z to check out what he’s working on.

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