Category Archives: Decisions

never hesitate

August 26, 2015 6:31 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I’m 4 years old and I’ve just been put in front of a thousand pound horse and I can’t wait to get on.  Five minutes later the horse slips in a gopher hole and rolls over me, nearly crushing me to death.  Let me try again.

I’m 22 and alone in the Colorado mountains.  I’m standing in front of a raging mountain stream that I have to cross to do an environmental report.  30 seconds later I’m being washed downstream banging against rocks.  I crawl out of the water and crawl to the road where some rangers find me and take me to the local hospital for cuts and a sprained ankle.  Two days later I’m packed and ready to head back into the woods.

I’m 27 and I’m wandering round a “bad place”.  Montrose was a no-go zone for suburban kids back in the 80s.  Where pimps and junkies would just as soon cut your throat as look at you.  Why go inside the loop when you have everything you need in the ‘burbs?  But by the mid 90s I’m hearing things out in the Richmond strip.  Stories about some clubs and restaurants inside the loop.  Around Montrose and Washington avenue.  So I lock my doors, roll up the windows and drive into the city in my Gold colored Saturn and drive round.  Still plenty of tattoo parlors but no drug dealers or junkies, no roving gangs.  Some of the boarded up brick houses are being renovated.  Just then a rock comes flying from out of the dark and dents the passenger side door.  I floor it and end up lost for the next hour till I stumble onto loop 610 and find my way home. For the next few years I would slowly begin exploring the inner loop one street at a time.

I’m 44 and standing in an overgrown wind tunnel about to try indoor skydiving.  The instructor warns me to be careful and not smash my face against the side of the tunnel.  Nothing happened.  I had a good time. Not all my adventures wind up as disasters.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t just automatically walk into dangerous situations just for the hell of it.  I’m not blind to the possible dangers.  I have hesitated at times before embarking on something new or potentially dangerous.

But overall I never find that hesitation is all that worthwhile.  For the most part I find hesitation in any part of my life has done me more harm than good and being bold has for the most part paid off.

I’ve hesitated about opportunities in life, about business decisions, about personal decisions and rarely has it paid off. You totally should hesitate when you find yourself in a totally unknown situation but if you find that you hesitate because of an imagined danger or what you think might or might not happens then I would strongly urge you to put aside that fear and try.

At the very least you’ll come out with a treasure trove of interesting stories.

Posted in: advice, attitude, decisions, interests, life in general, motivation, thought

decisions

April 2, 2015 6:20 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Cars aren’t a total necessity in Houston.

I run past several bus stops every morning and I see fair-sized crowds waiting for the bus that will take them to their jobs.  Houston has recently begun to slowly embrace bike lanes and cycling culture and from time to time they close off some streets near downtown and hold walking days on main streets.

So no, not a total necessity, except that they are.  Anyone outside the Loop (loop-610) knows the yawning distances that have to be covered to get anything done.  We’re not one of those compact European or even east coast cities that have to make do with whatever flat space they can get.

We’re spoiled with flat spaces and we’ve put them to good use.  So cars are for the most part necessary.

So I’ve taken care of mine for the past 9 years and I’ve loved my Charger.  We’ve shared many a long road trip, many hours commuting to the office, and just the every day grind of life.

But the fact remains that it has been 9 years already.  9 years and over 125000 miles.  I just realized this the other day when talking to one of my friends that I first met just before getting my car.  We were reminiscing and she brought up the fact that we’d known each other nearly a decade.  I thought to myself “that can’t be right”.  Then I remembered about my car and suddenly I realized how old my car was.

So now my mind begins to ask some questions.

What’s the mechanical state of my car?  Fairly good for a 9-year-old car.  The suspension isn’t happy about all the potholes in Houston’s streets and the upholstery has taken a beating, but otherwise in good state

What’s the resale value?  Not that great.  Somewhere in the 5 grand range and probably not going up.

Can I actually afford a new car?  yes and no.  I could buy one outright but I would rather not right now.

What if I keep the car another year or two?  Probably likely to have a breakdown or two.  I know I said the mechanical state is good but these things happen and when they do, most likely it will cost a bit to get fixed.

So do I wait or do I start looking for something new?

Posted in: Automobiles, decisions, driving

living with your choices

January 24, 2015 6:45 AM , Leave a Comment ,

32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 strokes.

1 stroke over from my last lap.  Have to reach farther with each stroke on the return lap.  I’m in the Memorial Athletic Club at 6 on a Saturday morning.  Outside it’s freezing and I’m the only one here swimming laps.  I’ve been assigned to swim laps by my trainer for the next 3 months.  Something that a few years ago I would not have dreamed of doing. Not because I couldn’t because frankly I just wouldn’t.

Sometimes you just have to do things for yourself.

I’ve had friends offer to set me up with trainers and recommend clubs and regimens to get fit but none of it seemed quite right.  I mean I’m sure the trainers were great and the facilities were top-notch and the exercises probably work but it never seemed to be quite right for me.

Still feel like a jerk for not taking what they offered but in the end it’s me that has to put in the effort, right?  I have to be comfortable with the choices I make and then follow through with them.

Return lap, I get a nose full of chlorine water, snort it out and keep paddling.

Another good example, I got into the real estate game last year and another friend offered up some contacts in the Sugarland real estate market.  Sugarland is a nice place to live, probably lots of good houses and opportunities and probably a good investment but I just don’t know the area.  I don’t know how the traffic patterns run, what the school districts are like or where most people like to shop and a myriad of other things.  Whats more I don’t have the time to research it all so I said thanks but no thanks and went ahead with an area I did know.

You’ve got to have confidence in your choices.

If you go in with confidence in your choice then you are much more likely to engage with that choice once you get involved and you are much more likely to make the best of it.  With a choice that you don’t have confidence in you will likely be tentative, you will be slow off the mark and lose time, you won’t get the full advantage of your decision.

Walking back to the locker room.  So cold.

So is it the old dictum of “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow“?

Sort of.  More like a “A good choice you can work with is better than a perfect choice you can’t live with”

Or something like that.

Posted in: activities, business, decisions, health, life in general, thought

Plans and goals for the new year

January 4, 2015 6:03 AM , Leave a Comment ,

2014.

I had a good year.  No doubt about it.  I had it laid out and planned and it worked.  Not to perfection, no.  But a good-sized chunk worked out for me.

Now how do you top that?  The fear, the doubt in the pit of my stomach is that you can’t.  I’ve been planning, dreading, stressing about this off and on since around October.  Before, during, and after my vacation I devoted a lot of time to this and finally round the end of December I got it all together in a master document.  Even typed it out, which I normally don’t.  Normally I write it all out in handwritten form in a notebook.

Here we are 4 days into the new year and already a couple of key aspects of the plan have been radically changed by events in the last few days.  Goes to show that you should always make plans and goals as flexible as possible.

Wouldn’t go as far as saying that things are wrecked but it definitely needs a radical rethink on my part.

Some things obviously will stay on track.

My health goals are going to move forward.  It’s weird.  In the last month I’ve met up with five people who I haven’t seen in over a year and they all remark on how much weight I’ve lost.  Gratifying, but I know that I have a long way to go yet and that I can’t let up.  If anything, this year I intensify. So that’s the most solid part of the plan.

But my career and financial goals need to be reconsidered.  I have to be vague here, sorry.  Partly because it is a private matter but mostly cause I haven’t worked out the dynamics of the situation yet.  I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten about 6 hours of sleep for the entire weekend and I’m writing this around 2 in the morning on a Sunday morning cause I couldn’t get to sleep.

I worry that if I don’t get this settled quickly that the rest of the plan will unravel. Writing this out in the blog helps me think though honestly no great pearls of wisdom have emerged thus far.  2015 could be such a huge success or a huge disaster depending on how things play out.  Maybe a more conservative strategy and hold some things off till 2016 or maybe “risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss” and see what happens.  Hopefully I’ll come up with some answers soon.

Posted in: activities, decisions, goals, plans, thought

just do it

October 6, 2014 6:00 AM , Leave a Comment ,

A mantra for a popular shoe company or an attitude to live one’s life by?

I was recently talking to someone who had a myriad of options to consider as far as their career including job options in Houston that weren’t quite what they wanted and career options on the east coast that were better but would involve uprooting their lives and moving.  They had been weighing the pros and cons all summer long and now some of the offers were expiring and they had to make a decision.

They asked my opinion.

Firstly this is one of those things I hate opining on as I didn’t know all the ins and outs of this person’s, what their deepest desires are, how they really see their life shaping up and all those other fine details that really make a difference.  So I took a middle of the road approach.

I told them to just pick one and go.  Didn’t really matter which but do it.  Of course they asked what if they chose wrong?  I told them it didn’t matter.  Making a decision was better than no decision when it comes down to it.  Standing around paralyzed with indecision was the worst state to be in.

So they chose to move.  Will it be a good decision?  Yes and no.  I’m sure that there will be ups and downs along the way but this person is young and still has time to grow and learn.  But sitting around and waiting for things to be decided for them, that’s worse.

Whatever you do, take charge of your own life.  Be the one that makes the decisions instead of letting life decide things for you.

Posted in: attitude, decisions, goals, life in general

A rough start

March 16, 2014 7:18 AM , 2 Comments ,

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my 20th anniversary out of school.  It brought back memories of that December graduation in 1993 and the events thereafter.  It also made me think how that time frame went a long way towards shaping the next 20 years of my life.

My last semester in college and you’d think I could just cruise through it on auto-pilot.  Not hardly!  If anything it was the most challenging of all my semesters.  I was taking the most advanced research and computer classes I could before graduating.  I knew that my financial situation would not be great after school even if I landed a job immediately so I wanted to be current as possible before I got out into the big bad world.  On top of that I was taking elective courses like civil engineering surveying and environmental sciences to cross train as much as possible and have a wide range of knowledge.

I wanted to be a rabid football fan but I just couldn’t spare the time that fall.  I spent as much time as possible buried in books and classes that I had to give up much of my social life too.

Besides all of that I was worried about what all college kids worry about.  Finding a job.

I was in Colorado the previous Summer at a field camp doing some geology classes.  We were all sitting around in a beer garden one night after class when I had the realization that this was it for me as far as formal school.  That final vestige of childhood was being stripped away from me and for better or worse I was going to be fully on my own.

I took advantage of the school’s placement resources when I got back to campus that Summer and all through the Fall.  I wrote up a resume as best as I could and taking all the counselor’s advice and used the school’s print center to run off as many copies as I could.  Among other disadvantages, I would be without a computer or a printer.  I wouldn’t have a personal computer again till 1995.

So we skip ahead to finals week.  I had my classes well in hand and I was boxing up my apartment.  My lease was also ending so I had to be packed and ready to leave.  I had applied to get a refund for my utility and rent deposits.  The resumes I had sent out so far had yielded no results yet.

The registrar verified I had no outstanding loans or library books and cleared me to graduate.  I stepped out of the office and sneezed.  That was a sign of things to come.

I made my goodbyes to my friends.  I was much more socially awkward back then and really didn’t know how to handle such things.  In particular I bid goodbye to one young lady I really liked.  She still had a year to go in school.  We promised we’d write and we did for a while but I think we both knew we’d never see each other ever again.

The night before graduation and I’m deep into packing up.  I’ve got a raging headache, it’s unusually cold for early December.  I’m feeling even more miserable.

My parents show up.  They want to take me to dinner but I beg off and go to bed.  The next morning I can barely get out of bed.  My sinuses are pounding and graduation is an hour off.  My parents and other family members are waiting for me.  I take some cold medicine to keep me going an somehow I stagger to the graduation.  I’m dizzy, nauseous, coughing, and miserable.

Michel Halbouty, a legend in the Texas oil industry, hands me my diploma and shakes my hand.  I barely notice him.  It’s all I can do to keep from falling over.

After graduation my parents realize just how sick I am.  They pack up the rest of my stuff and drive me back to Houston.  I spend the next 2 weeks in bed with the flu from hell.

So I started my adult life after college in a sick-bed with a couple hundred bucks from deposit refunds, a car that was on its last legs, no girlfriend, and no job.

It would in fact take me six months to land my first job.  I had several false starts with recruiting agencies and want ads in the paper but I finally landed the job I would have for the next 8 years.  I got the job by walking in and asking for it.  And it wasn’t due to my degree or my work experience but by trading on my “computer expertise” and working for a small consulting company whose execs knew even less than I did about computers.

I started at 6 dollars an hour and felt like the biggest failure ever.  This is what I went to college for?  Over time of course that improved and my job skills would expand and my responsibilities would make me a more valued asset at the company but it was difficult to see the upside back then.

Posted in: career, decisions, future, illness, jobs, life in general, school

Decision trees in our lives

March 2, 2014 6:29 AM , 2 Comments ,

I was going through my newsfeed the other day and a link came up for Huffpost live.  It was a discussion with Crispin Glover on the message that media puts out in some movies.

Interview

First of all I never realized that Crispin Glover was that deep a thinker honestly.  He’s apparently quite perceptive and insightful.  This discussion got me thinking on a different tack about how decisions affect our lives.

(by the way, this is one of the reasons that I love cinema.  You can derive so many themes, ideas, and visions from a movie that it’s astonishing)

In the above movie that Glover references (“Back to the future”) his character, George, makes a bad decision at a young age that affects the rest of his life.  He has been making bad decisions based on fear all of his life but this one really affect him and his future wife.

Basically he allows his future wife to be raped by the neighborhood bully.  This event victimizes both of them and they live in a spiral of hopelessness and shame leading them downwards on a dark path of despair. George takes a menial job and allows his tormentor to continue to harass him.  George and his wife end up trapped living a life that is neither satisfactory nor fulfilling.

George’s son goes back in time and intervenes causing George to make the right decision and this in turn affects the rest of his life.

When the son returns to the altered future he finds that his parents have been emboldened by the correct choice that George made and their life is a success in every way.  The same two people, the same town, but totally altered by one seemingly tiny change in the past.

Plugging all this back into the real world, how have the decisions in our past affected our current life situation?  You make that initial bad decision back in kindergarten and twenty years later you’re working in McDonald’s rather than going to Harvard.

A gross overstatement to be sure but I don’t think that the average young person gives enough weight to these seemingly innocuous life choices.  Go out and party on a Friday night or study, burn through your weekly paycheck or save it, stand up for yourself or let someone else walk over you.

One or two decisions you can probably bounce back from.  But it’s when you make bad decision after bad decision and they pile up on you and suddenly you find that your options aren’t that open anymore.  Suddenly you no longer have a good or bad option, suddenly it’s bad option or even worse option.  What’s more, the more you make these bad decisions the more you become accustomed to the penalties attached to them and even grow to expect them as a part of your daily life.

How do we break this downward trend?  Is it even breakable?

Well yes of course it is.  We can hope for an outside agency to intervene (like someone with a time machine or a crazy millionaire philanthropist willing to invest in you) but that rarely happens.

Most of the time it’s going to happen by making a hard “right” choice some time and following it up with even more hard “right” choices until you climb back to where you want to be in your life.

That’s what makes these early choices on your decision tree so vitally important.  Once you bend that stalk in the wrong direction it takes a mighty effort to turn it back the way it should be going.

Posted in: attitude, decisions, goals, habits, movies

The narrative version of life

February 28, 2014 7:07 AM , 2 Comments ,

Recently someone in one of my Facebook groups posted up a funny little graphic that asked in part “what if we were all characters in a book”

That got me thinking, what if we looked at the problems, goals, and challenges in our lives as if we were writing them for a novel?  Could it help some people to think about these aspects of their lives in different ways?

So if you have a problem with a person in your life you write a little scene describing the problem, the other person, the way that you feel.  Your describe how your character might deal with the problem.

You set up a scene in which both characters come together and have a dialogue to resolve the problem or maybe the problem doesn’t get resolved.  See where the story takes you.

Then comes the important part.  You sit back and re-read the little story you just wrote and really analyze it.  Would you really say this?  Would the other character really do that?  Why does your character do what they do?  What’s their motivation?  Does the re-reading of the scene give you a different perspective on the issue?  Does it reinforce your beliefs?  Do you now have some insight into the other person’s point of view?

All of us can sometimes get so wrapped up in the moment that we lose perspective.  It’s human nature and it has its uses.  This type of dedication and focus helps us ignore the distractions of life and really devote our efforts to one thing.  In this way it helps us get to the next level.

But sometimes factors outside of your immediate attention are taking place and you can’t notice them if you’re inside the action.  Sometimes it takes an outside eye (whether it’s your eye or someone else’s eye) to really see what is going on.

Whether you take this particular approach or not, sometimes it helps to detach yourself from the situation and look at it as if you were an unconcerned spectator. You might spot things that you would otherwise miss while you’re in the moment.

Posted in: decisions, life in general, writing