Entries Tagged 'life' ↓

This whole Charile Sheen meltdown in the most public way (including his new webcast/video and Twitter) is kinda like watching a train wreck in slow motion.  You want to look away but you just can’t.  Wow!

It’s intriguing to watch a guy who seemingly has/had everything just go into a rapid spiral and become a laughing-stock in the biggest way (nothing like going viral on the internets).  One minute you feel a little sorry for the guy, and the next you just wonder how such a loser got to be so popular, ever.

Some interesting contrasts to be made between Conan O’Brien and Sheen.  One went into a spin after being badly dealt with by a large media empire, but somehow managed to take the high road and end up in a very different place.  In a media world, I don’t think it’s easy to play and win against the massive power these empires wield, even if you are just and right, and Conan is a very smart guy to have ended up just smashing it in their faces through his simple and focused Twitter stream which kept to the high ground on the issues.  His talk at Google is a masterful example.  You can’t help but love the guy.

Sheen, on the other hand, does not come across as either smart, loveable or anywhere close to being in the right, and the media machine and the public are enjoying thumping him like a big stupid pinata, and I’m sure there’s more to come because I don’t think Charlie is smart enough to leave the room quietly and come back later (after all, we’re quick to forget)…

I’ve actually consciously tried to avoid following too much of his story at all, and yet I find myself confronted with the ongoing saga everywhere you go on the net.  Good thing our attention span in the media world doesn’t go beyond a few weeks at the most.

… for winter!

These hot, humid days are very un-Perth-like. This is not fun anymore. I’m looking forward to some cold, rainy days.

That’s all.

I recently discovered, quite by accident, that the Google search for my name brought up my blog at the top of the list (which is kind of nice), but also revealed that somehow the description text accompanying the blog link was a bunch of spam crap relating to certain well-known pharmaceutical products which generally form the bulk of what resides in my spam folders.

The situation was a little embarrassing because the search was conducted by a work colleague who was goofing around looking up names, and came across my “fame”.

Can’t quite figure out how to get rid of it yet.  Somehow, something has been hijacked, even though I can’t find any evidence of it anywhere.  Weird.  Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Probably serves me right for not updating this blog much in the past year or so…

I’ve recently been following a bunch of stuff being written about the privacy debate raging on in certain segments of the media, and along with reflecting on my own “public” life, it’s got me thinking a lot about just how much you really want for everybody to know.

Some might argue that we’ve moved into a new space of laying it all out there for the world to see, but I’m not sure I buy that or want that, either for myself or others. I don’t have it clear in my head yet, but I’m beginning to suspect that maybe there are parts of our inner lives that are meant to exactly that… a personal space, not for public consumption.

Are you doing what matters most right now?

I hate that question, but it is such a critical question to ask and answer honestly.  Too often , the answer is “no”.  We fritter a huge chunk of our day away on absolute rubbish, activities which add no value at all to our lives.

I hate that question because I, like many people, have the incredible knack of staying busy and filling my day with a bunch of activity, but sometimes finish out a day and wonder what the heck I actually accomplished that would be worth writing home about.

So, how do you make sure that you’re being productive, and not just busy?  Here’s my best quick thoughts:

1. Plan out your day, don’t just let it unfold.  Just letting things happen as they happen is a sure recipe for being busy but totally non-productive.  It’s so obvious, but I’m amazed at how many people don’t start each day out with a game plan, a list of key objectives that need to happen.  Personally, I’m a huge advocate of 90 day goals, and creating structure in my life to stay focused on the big picture.

2. Constantly be asking yourself whether you’re doing what matters most right now.  I used to do some consulting work at a government department years ago where some of the folks would wander over to check out what I was doing, and there was an older lady there who was kind of like an old boarding school matron who would yell at them like kids and tell them to go and sit down and do their work.  I was always a bit shocked at how she kept them from being distracted, but they obviously needed it.  And sometimes we all need that…  and that question pushes us to go back to our desk and do what matters.

3. One of the great steps you can take to getting stuff done in your life is to intentionally stop doing some other things.  Sometimes our most important list isn’t our to-do list, but rather our not-to-do list, killing certain activities and habits which drag our time and attention away from what matters most.  And social media is sometimes one of our biggest enemies.  The key task in our age is to filter all the crud coming into our lives and figure out what is actually worth taking in and what is worth not spending any time on at all.

As with much of life, if you don’t take control of it, someone else will.

Right, I’m off to get some stuff done… :-)

For the past 15 years or more, I have primarily been viewing the Church from the inside.  That is to say, I’ve been an insider, where my primary time, energy and relational connections have been within the boundaries of the Church.

Prior to that, I worked in the business world, and although I was heavily involved in the Church, helping to run youth groups, later involved in lay leadership, etc., my primary time and energy and a good many (not all) of my relationships were outside the boundaries of the Church.

As an aside, some might argue against my depiction of the Church having “boundaries”, given some of the newer paradigms of trying to understand the relationship between the Church and the world, but if you’ve spent much time at all within a church, you just know that boundaries exist, implicit and explicit.

Lately, since having stepped outside the boundaries of the Church and investing my primary time and energy outside of that sphere, and beginning to develop more relationships outside the Church, I’ve been able to view the Church from the outside, after a decade and half of viewing it from within.  And, I have to tell you, it’s not a great sight.

You know how it is with a messy room or a dysfunctional family?  The longer you live and breathe in that space, the less you notice the mess and the dysfunction, and a new kind of “normal” sets in?

Now, I want to be careful to say that nothing I say here is intended as a slam or criticism of anyone or (more specifically) my previous church, which I still love and have much invested in.  BUT, it has been disturbing to me to walk in the world these past few months and realise just how out-of-touch, irrelevant, even perhaps boring, the Church is to those who are not inside it.  And I’m not talking about any particular denomination or movement here…  the people in the world have a rather smooshed up view of all that.  They just have this weird overlapping and confused mish mash of tradition and weirdness associated with “Church”, but they certainly don’t have any attraction or interest in it.  This much is very clear, and to be honest, as I’ve stood with them and looked back into the Church, it’s disturbing to me.  We’re certainly not the salt and light Jesus talked about…  instead we’re gloom and bland, if not actually a little unpleasant to the taste.

I don’t write this with any huge answers in mind…  perhaps that’s a later post when I have my head around this, but it’s been bothering me a lot lately…  the Church from the outside is far too different from the Church I was looking at from the inside, and although there will always be a degree of difference for a variety of good reasons, mostly I’m disturbed at how big the gap is from where I’m standing at the moment.

PS:  I should just add that (to torture Twain) the rumours of my loss of faith are highly exaggerated…  :-)

I was in a business meeting the other day where a particular participant kept focusing on building a business so he could sell it.  He kept on repeating this idea, and it seemed for him a very strong motivator, this focus on the end point of his efforts, and it really got me thinking about this perspective a bit more deeply.

I know he is probably influenced quite heavily by classic business texts like “The E-Myth” by Gerber, where this view of the end-point of a business is strongly reiterated constantly as being one of the prime motivators for creating solid systems and structure, etc., but I’m not convinced it’s a healthy way to view the business of business.  In fact, I’m not even sure Gerber really buys into it when you read between the lines of his later texts more thoroughly.

Here’s what I think… it seems to me that anyone who builds a business with the explicit intention of selling it has profoundly misunderstood the true benefit of building a business.

And, I don’t think this applies just to building businesses.  It applies to a great many endeavours, where the means are often far more important than the intended ends, and indeed they often shape the ends and give them meaning in our lives in the broadest sense.  It’s a bit like someone being completely focused on their retirement, all the while forgetting that there’s a lot of life to be lived before that point, much of which might well change our experience and expectations of retirement when we finally get there.

There’s something about our busy age where the ends have become so important, and we have lost the importance of the journey and the way it shapes our appreciation of our destination.  Sometimes, we arrive somewhere and realise this is not the true destination, and that’s just fine…  part of our destination is surely growing and developing as a person, discovering more about ourselves and our world as we pass through it, and yet we seem in such a hurry to get somewhere.

So, perhaps the purpose of anything isn’t so much about its end-point as its mid-points…

So, I get this phone call today from a research group doing a little survey on a person I have recently done some business with…  would I mind answering a few questions about the person in question?

Well, the person in question was very helpful to me and I felt they went the extra mile in helping me out, so, no, I don’t mind answering a few questions about them…  especially if some good feedback would help them out.  No problems.

But then, this thing took a turn for the ridiculous when they asked me questions and I gave a good answer and then they started repeating everything I had just said SLOWLY as they typed in the responses.  After a couple of minutes, it was painful hearing them slowly garble my eloquent (!) responses into their typed efforts, not-so-behind-the-scenes.  Crazy bad!

I just don’t get it…  surely a business based around phone interviews would simply record the interview and then transcribe the responses afterwards?  That seems simple, elegant, and far more user-friendly, especially if you’re going to form the interview around open-ended questions which don’t simply require a yes/no or number answer.

Sometimes, you just shake your head in amazement…

FROM THE PASTOR

Last week, while in Melbourne for a few days, I enjoyed a taxi ride from the airport to the conference centre where I was staying, and met the most fascinating cab driver I’ve chatted to in quite a while.

It didn’t take long for me to engage him in conversation, and I quickly discovered that this lovely older man of Lebanese background, with his wonderful Lebanese/Aussie accent, had a great many opinions on many topics. We had a wide ranging discussion on all sorts of things from the demise of local garages and corner delis, the GST, the taxi industry in Melbourne, his family, and a bunch of other topics. It was a 45 minute ride and we got through a lot of stuff! One thing that was quite interesting, and also quite funny, was that he somehow managed to attribute pretty much every disaster in his life to John Howard… in fact, after a couple of problems that led back to John Howard, I began to think ahead as we covered new topics to try and anticipate how John Howard was responsible for them too! And, sure enough, John was indeed responsible for them too… sometimes obviously so, and sometimes through some creative connections.

It was an entertaining trip, but it did provide two highlights for me that I reflected on quite a bit later on…

Firstly, it was amazing to me that this guy looked at the world through a certain lens which game him a certain perspective of life, in which sadly John Howard was responsible for almost everything bad. It was kind of funny, but also sad. Funny to me, because standing from the outside I could see how absurd this was, but not so funny to him. And I wondered whether I do this too, in my own way. We all have a lens through which we view life, and I guess those lenses aren’t always good or helpful. What a powerful thing to be able to view life from a variety of perspectives and to gain a broader sense of reality! I prayed right then and there that God would keep me from being close-minded and one-eyed.

But the second highlight was very sad for me… this taxi driver, in the midst of another tirade against the terrible John Howard, paused and told me that he was sad because his life was not the life he had wanted to live and it was too late now… he was resigned, he told me, to the fact that his life would never be much. It was over. He was a poor taxi driver in Melbourne, doing the best he could with what John Howard had left him. In that moment, in a taxi cab hurtling down a Melbourne freeway, I was very sad for this man and his loss of hope and future. And I was so thankful that I don’t feel this way, and that my sense of my life’s journey is much richer and deeper than feeling at the mercy of every swirl and storm of fate.

If there is one thing I am very convinced of, it’s that our God is the God of new beginnings and fresh starts, and it is NEVER too late to begin again, and in God there is always a future and hope of better things.

I’ve been really thinking a lot lately about whether the whole social networking space defined by tools like Twitter and Facebook are really worth engaging in.

Recently, just due to a very full-on schedule and lots of late meetings, etc., I found I went a few days without really engaging much with either Facebook or Twitter, and after an initial (and fleeting) sense of missing out, I got over that pretty quickly and realised that I could actually walk away from them without much loss.

There would, without question, be some loss, but the vast majority of input coming into my life through these tools is generally banal and fairly egocentric. It does not add value to my life knowing what yummy thing someone is having for dinner, or that they’ve just seen such-and-such movie, etc. I just find my thinking and mind cluttered by an endless stream of trivialities, and this level of distraction cannot possibly help one to think deeper and more reflectively about life and purpose. I want to be deep and purposeful, but I don’t think that’s really possible if your attention of dispersed in hundreds of shallow directions.

I used to journal a lot, and I used to post on this blog a lot. Both of these activities called me to think and think deeply. At least that was my goal, and I think it did help me to articulate important stuff going on in my head. And, I think I can pin-point the demise of those two disciplines to the period in which Twitter and Facebook became more prominent in my daily activities, and I don’t think I like the impact that’s had on me.

I know that a bunch of folks will accuse me of being flip-floppy on this, having been a big proponent of social technology and the benefits of “ambient awareness”, but I’m really starting to have second thoughts about it all. After having experimented and participated over a couple of years, I’m really starting to doubt. There are some positives, and I’ve enjoyed staying loosely connected with long-lost friends, and folks from all around the world. But, it’s been a trade-off, and all those loose connections have cost me something as well.

The biggest question for me in all of this is: Is it possible to be a purposeful and highly productive person, having a meaningful and significant impact in this world, while also spending a large chunk of time and attention on what is largely trivial and banal?