You Don't Get What You Deserve

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. - Mark Twain

Sometimes you have days where you exclaim what a friend of mine puts succinctly as "thank goodness I didn't get what I deserved." Two events reminded that today was one of those days.

First, I had brunch (yes, brunch.. don't judge) with a great friend and former professor who had made a large contribution in functionally saving my life a few years ago when I was (hopefully) a much different person dealing with the consequences of making much worse decisions than I do now.

Though we don't get together as frequently now (my fault), some portion of the conversation are dedicated to updating him on what I am up to. Because these conversations act as snapshots of my current life, we both reflected on where I was when our friendship began and the path to where I am now. I was humbled and reminded of the fact that there were a lot of people from '08-'09 willing to see beyond the scared, angry kid I was and instead focus on my potential and help me move from the former to the latter.

The funny thing about memory is how much of the total situation falls away to the point where you recall only a few fragments (usually the ones that cause the smallest amount of emotional upset). The other funny thing is how all the details come rearing back in vivid detail simply through conversation with the people that were there.

As we wrapped up our conversation and departed from the restaurant, I took stock of where my life is now and what it was just a few years ago. All of my relationships are fantastic (at least they are for me), I am awash with more opportunities than someone my age should be getting and have made enough progress as a human such that there are slightly more people who have nice things to say about me behind my back than those who feel inclined to say otherwise. Considering all the selfish, hurtful things I've done in the past, I am thankful that I have not gotten the full brunt of what I deserve.

This is what I was thinking about when I stumbled upon this:


That's right, a free skateboard with about 8 skateboard decks underneath sitting right in front of my apartment building. Double. Winning.

Life has a funny way placing things into motion such that your life works out the way it does. Sometimes you miss a deadline by a few seconds or make a wrong turn or you decide to have some agency and overcome that fear of making a connection with someone. All the little inches in life put you in place to give you the hand you have today. Everything that didn't work out (both good and bad) is giving you everything that is working out (again, both good and bad). The free skateboard I got today after brunch is a function of a desperate email I sent in November 2008. I didn't deserve it, but I'll took it anyway.

Some people may say that Karma is a bitch but I think that she's a pretty decent gal. I'm sure that if we look over our lives we'll realize that we a got a decent amount of good stuff and avoided at least 10x of the bad stuff we deserved through the same channel: serendipity ...or fate, if you are so inclined.

In either case, be thankful. Life is short. Continuously performing gap-analysis and complaining about how things "should" be is not good stewardship of your life. But if you must do it, then at least acknowledge the negative consequences that could have very well played out to make the life you have now a blessing.

Someday.

I hear a lot of kids in my age cohort talk about someday.

Someday they'll be on time to meetings. Someday they'll care. Someday they'll do things differently... when it matters someday.

I believe that they are right. Someday you will care. Someday.. when things matter you'll try to do things differently.

But none of that will matter because you won't have the capacity to survive when that opportunity comes. When you have been spending years practicing the art of 'just getting by', you get crushed by opportunities that require everything you have.

Not that there is anything wrong with mastering the art of getting by, in fact, I think that it speaks to the potential of human beings to get whatever it is they are committed to getting. It takes a highly optimized machine to get exactly the outcomes they are striving for. The implied heuristic here is that humans aren't broken - they are actually finely tuned. Aristotle makes this point best when he says,

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

I love how eloquently Aristotle states that we don't do things excellently because we are born with an excellence gene - we become excellent (at anything) simply by repetition.

This is good news and bad news.

The good news is that over time (some people say 10,000 hours/625 days/1.71 years) you can become excellent at anything. The bad news is that you can be excellent at anything.

You can be excellent at avoiding conflict. seeking conflict, just getting by, keeping emotional distance from risky endeavors of the heart. Fill in the blank.

So what? What's the next step?

The next step is doing. Simply doing. Again, Aristotle ('cos he's smart) weighs in:

"We become just by performing just actions. Temperate by performing actions. Brave by performing brave actions."

Someday is NOT some state of being that you wake up to one morning somewhere in the future. Someday does not announce itself with you walking in slow motion through smoke. Someday does not arrive after a montage with the latest Kanye West song playing in the background.

Someday is right now. The choice you make every morning to play for keeps or 'do what you can with what you have'. There is a huge difference between playing to win and playing to not lose.

Because when that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities arrives - when you see that wave forming on the horizon- your ability to simply get on and ride is a product of how you chose to ride every other wave in your life prior to that.

And in that moment, when you are put to the ultimate test of doing something you've never done before when it really counts - getting married, building a company, offering forgiveness - how you decided to live your life 'when it didn't matter' is going to be the difference between getting smashed into the rocks or making history in the narrative of your life.

The Road Not Taken

As this is the first official post of "All the Difference", I will be sharing my favorite poem, written by my favorite poet. The poem and the quoted commentary below it are referenced at the end of this post.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all he difference.
-Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"We must interpret his choice of a road as a symbol for any choice in life between alternatives that appear almost equally attractive but will result through the years in a large difference in the kind of experience one knows."

I have had a lot of choices in my life, and like Robert Frost there are times in which I could have traveled both roads at the same time. Sometimes I have been blessed with a choice in which one alternative is clearly better than the other. But what about the ones in which the alternatives are in relative equality? I think about what my life would be like had I never left Utah for California. Had I never returned to Utah from California. Had I never made the mistakes that I have. Had my mistakes been timed differently or made different mistakes altogether.

One of my favorite parts of this poem is that statement of how "way leads on to way". Often in my times of quiet, ususally on the night drive home or when I park in an area that overlooks the valley, I think about how I got to where I am. Which events lead to another that were critical in providing me with the cards I currently have in my hand. I certainly feel like I'm being guided along in the journey of my life. At times its a strong sense of direction, and complete helplessness during others.

But the difference has been the way that I approach my reaction to life's events. Do I let it teach me? Or just surrender to sadness and try to cast blame on others? I have been fortunate enough to have parents and other sources of influence in my life constantly instill a sense of "fight." I am of course, referring to the animalistic fight or flight approach to any event. I strongly believe and have witnessed in my life as well as others, the power of "fight" inherent in any individual.

Reaction is a matter of choice.

And it is one of the few things in life that make all the difference.

Most of my biggest victories have come at the end of a path that began during a moment of crisis, where my reaction would be the very thing that made all the difference... because the course of direction was mine alone to make.

I feel like I have fighting all my life and the mistakes that led to times of crisis in my life is when I decided to retreat from the issues at hand: those things that are crucial for me to master before I can move on to the next chapter of my life. Oddly enough, the failures and crisis -products of path commanded by a chose to run away- have eventually forced me to fight anyway.

This is not to be mistaken as some morbid approach to life, where you suffer and then you die. It's endurance-training. John Maxwell said in his book The Difference Maker that you can judge the strength and character of someone by witnessing how much strife one can take before they start to become unraveled. I feel that each time I choose to "fight", that decision becomes easier to make as problems (opportunities in disguise) present themselves.

As I close this post, I offer a challenge. For a challenge will be offered at the end of each post, something to carry with you into your daily tasks and duties. My challenge to you is this:

View every problem, every situation in which your decision requires you to choose one path among many as an opportunity. Rely on your strengths and talents to influence the outcome of your chosen path, even though you may not know where it leads. Take the road less traveled, opt for an opportunity to trully grow- to take a step (or two) closer to who you were designed to be. It will be uncomfortable. It will be uncertain. But adventures are not lived out in a snuggie or at the bottom of a bottle. They are lived out on the rocky paths less traveled by. Your decisions at the various tailheads of your life will make all the difference.


Arp & Johnson. Perrine's Sound and Sense. 10th Edition. 2002. United States of America. pg 88-89.