Don't Cry Over Spilled Coffee

This past week has been really stressful for me.  To say I have a lot going on right now is an understatement and I was starting to feel like I was being pulled in a hundred different directions.  To add to that, every time I felt like I was getting things accomplished and making some progress, someone or something would intervene and put me right back at square one.  It was like spinning round and round on a hamster wheel and going nowhere.  I was trying not to let it all get to me but that was almost impossible.  By Friday, the issues were mounting, my blood pressure was rising, my patience was being tested, and I was starting to feel a little defeated.  Then I spilled my coffee…

At about 9:30am on Friday morning, I was just starting my work day and I got a phone call from a co-worker asking me a question about a project that I was working on.  As I turned to grab the file folder for this particular project, the phone cord hit the Styrofoam cup of coffee sitting on my desk, spilling its contents all over my laptop key board.  As the panic hit me, I frantically scrambled to sop up the coffee with paper towels and prayed that this would not be the rest in peace moment for my computer.  After I got rid of the liquid, it seemed like my laptop was still intact.  Programs were still opening and I thought I was in the clear. 

So I went back to work and opened an email to respond.  As I began typing, my computer began to type things on its own.  Pretty much, it was possessed.   I decided that I would try to the old reboot option to see if a quick restart would solve my problems.  No such luck!  All rebooting did was give me dark screens and the key board was still acting with a mind of its own.  Prepare the obituary because my laptop was dead. 

Now you could say that my computer drama was pretty much the crappiest way to end an already bad week but for some reason I didn't fell that way at all.  I threw a facebook message up asking for someone to come to my rescue and got a computer savvy friend to give me some expert advice.  He told me to put my computer face down in rice.  As I talked on the phone to him, it sounded ridiculous but I did it.  I went to the grocery store and bought the biggest bag of rice I could find (10lbs to be exact).  I put my computer in a box and covered it in the rice.  I even carted the box out of my office and home so that I could remove it from the rice the next day.  The whole time this was happening, I found myself smiling and even laughing about the situation.



My Box O' Rice



The moral of this story, besides that liquids and electronics don’t mix, is that when life gets to you take some time to gain some perspective.  Take a minute and think about the stress you are under.  Are you creating it?   Are you making things bigger and more intense than they have to be?  Are you fighting battles that maybe you should just let go?  Basically, I was just letting everything get to me.  I was taking it all personally and the truth was that I had to step back and realize that it wasn't worth the stress.   I think I needed to spill coffee on my computer and laugh my way though the ridiculous do it yourself remedy that would hopefully save it to realize that bad things are going to happen and stress is inevitable but how you deal with it is what will determine your mood.  There really is no sense in crying over spilled coffee.  Oh and in the end things tend to work out just fine and I know this because I'm typing this post from my resurected laptop.

“Stress should be a powerful driving force, not an obstacle.” – Bill Phillips

How Do You Measure The Life Of A Man...

How do you measure the life of a man?  Is it by what they do professionally?  Or maybe what they do on a personal level?  What about how they raise their families?  Is it what they didn’t do or could have done that will be their defining moment?  Or could it be the impact they leave on the world and how they are remembered after they are no longer here?   However you choose to view the collective life of a man, it is not just one chapter that should sum up their existence but their entire book.

It isn’t often that we see people turn down the opportunity for more money or a better job simply because they love what they are currently doing.  Rarely does anyone stay in a lesser position because they can do more good there rather than move on for more glory.  People are constantly putting their own personal growth and success first while helping others becomes a secondary priority often placed on the back burner or forgotten.  There really isn’t a better example of this out for number one mentality then in the world of sports.

When you’re young, coaches constantly tell you that it’s not about if you win or lose; it’s about how you play the game.  However, the further along you go up the sports ladder, the culture of the game becomes more about how much you get paid to play or even win at all costs.  Long gone are the days where people play purely for the love the game. 

Sports can teach us respect, dedication, and hard work.  They can show us how to treat others and how to live up to our full potential.  Overall, sports can be a vessel to teach children discipline and lessons that will inevitably shape their lives.  Every once in a while someone reminds you that sports and life are bigger than what you do on the field.  They are a shining example of how you play the game always being more important than what is going in the win/loss column.  Joe Paterno was that person. 

JoePa was many things but a winning football coach was just one of them.  He was a teacher, a leader, a father, a philanthropist, and an educator all wrapped up into one man masquerading as a coach.  In a time where college athletes are churned through the system and spit out after they have served their "purpose", Paterno sought to make these kids better than just workhorses and Penn State more than just a required stop on the way to the NFL.  He wanted his boys to be good people, not just good players. They were students first and athletes second.  He wasn’t coaching gods or individuals; he was coaching a team which was greater than any one person.  Beyond the field, he sought to teach all other students at Penn State those same lessons.  Through both time and money, he aimed to give all Penn Staters the support and supplies they needed to succeed and do it with honor.  He helped make Penn State not just a university but a family filled with pride.  Up until a few months ago, Joe Paterno’s Grand Experiment was revered and then came shocking news. 

No Penn Stater will ever forget last November and seeing everything we knew being shattered when the horrible allegations of a sex abuse scandal rocked the Nittany Lion community and tarnished the iconic work of Coach Paterno.  After a 61 year career of preaching that sports were second to humanity and living a life full of integrity and high moral fiber, Joseph Vincent Paterno was now being seen by most people as a man who put football and winning first.  They called him someone who didn’t do enough.  He was a man who was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion as a failure because of his inaction. 

Suddenly, the old man who stood for everything good and right in the world, was the the symbol of evil.  He was no longer the exception to the morally bankrupt sports culture but a monster who was the leader of the most dangerous of all cults.  In what seemed like an instant, all the amazing work he had done was gone and forgotten.  Today, Joe Paterno is gone and while some people might question how he will be remembered, I say that if you total up his life, he wasn't a saint and he wasn't perfect but he was a man who did too much for so many people, a success with honor, and someone who can never be forgotten.

Great people aren’t great because they are perfect.  They aren't extraordinary because they are flawless.  People are great and extraordinary simply by being themselves.  They have passion, courage of conviction, and a belief that the world will be a better place not because they were a part of it but because they believe in all that it can become.  While these people will always accredit their accomplishments and impact on the world to something bigger than they are, in the eyes of others it is hard to imagine anything could have had a larger impact than they did.    

Heroes don’t wear masks or capes and you don't find them in movies or comic books. Real heroes walk among us and we call them legends.  The stories of their lives are not just short stories or novels but true tall tales that will be passed on for generations to come.  There is no need to distort their stories to make them any greater because it is already too incredible to believe at times that anyone could have lived that amazing a life.  At the start of his career, his father told him that if he was going to become a coach that he should make an impact.  Joe Paterno left the world a greater place then when he entered it 85 years ago, so if you want to define this man and his life story then say, he made an impact. 

"They ask me what I'd like written about me when I'm gone. I hope they write I made Penn State a better place, not just that I was a good football coach."-Joe Paterno  

I say without a doubt that you did just that.  THANK YOU!!

Writing My Story

Well it’s been a little while since my last post and the reason for that is simply because I wasn’t sure where I was going with this blog.  To be honest, I could write a 100 more entries centered around the power of positive thinking and the motivation I have lately but that was getting a bit repetitive, so I needed for find a new focus or a theme for this year. 

Last year I talked about changing.  I wrote over and over about setting myself up to become the best version of myself at the end of my "year of change", I felt like I really had come a million miles from where I started but was that the ultimate goal?  Do we stop our journey just because our deadline has lapsed?  Do we stop striving to be the best version of ourselves?   Personally, I think I can take all this even further than I have.

Basically, I do feel that the past year put me in exactly the right place mentally and being strong mentally is essential to success.  Your thoughts or other’s thoughts and opinions can derail you.  Everything I have done has really centered on changing my thought process and changing the way I view things.  I have taken the steps to strengthen my mind and eliminate outside impact on my life.  Overall my outlook is completely clear so it’s time to take that and all the momentum it has brought to my life and use it to help in my quest to become the best version of myself.

So what does all this mean for the future of my blog?  It means that while change is good, I’ve changed and now it’s time to leave that idea behind.  Last year I needed to figure out what it is that I really want and change who I had been in order to get to where I want to go.  Now it’s time to evolve and grow into whom it is that I determined I wanted to become.  In my first post to this blog, I said I wanted to stop living my life by everyone else’s rules and start writing my own.  Now that I know what I want, its time to start developing my own set of rules and writing my story according to me.

“You can never solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place.” - Albert Einstein

Become A Butterfly

A while back I bought a journal that had a proverb written on the front.  It said, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly”.   I bought that book not only because I liked the saying but because it also hit home for me at that particular time.  Today I look back at that book and those words and see it may have been a forcast of what was coming for me.

It was about a year before I started this blog that I bought that book.  I had never heard that proverb before but it sounded nice.  At the time, I was a little more lost than usual and that particular saying felt comforting to me.  I was a lot like a caterpillar.  I was at this turning point in my life and something was going happen, I just didn’t know what.  It seemed like my karma was shot and every road I took was paved with bad luck.  Everything I had worked for and everything I wanted seemed to be further and further away from where I was and I didn’t see myself heading in that direction at all.  Basically, like the caterpillar, I thought my life, or at least my life as I thought it would be, was over. 

Pretty much you could say that my future was on the line.  I could just roll over and let everything go or I could change and become something new.    So I started this blog, committed to the idea of accepting life as it was, focused on finding the greatness in what I had, and learned to be open to the unexpected.  Pretty much, my caterpillar days were ending.  I was becoming something different.  A new version of me.   At the beginning of this year, I bought a new journal.  This one didn't have any words or inspiring stayings but it was covered in butterflies.

Part of me writes this blog for myself.  I want to remember where I’ve been, see how far I’ve come, and document my own journey.  The other reason I do it is because I want people to see that it is possible to be something else.  If you want to change badly enough or think differently about yourself, you can.  I did.  As I sit here high on my own triumph, I also see that a lot of people around me are caterpillars.  Life has thrown them one too many curve balls and they are a little down on their luck.  Overall, they are struggling with life how they wanted it to be and life how it’s going to be and to all those caterpillars out there, you can choose to let your world end or you can change.  Become a butterfly. 

Goodbye 2011

A little over a year ago I asked myself the question, can you really change yourself if you aren’t happy? I thought it was possible and I had nothing to lose so I committed to change and embarked on a one year journey towards becoming who I wanted to be. A few weeks ago when I hit my deadline, I asked myself, have I changed? Did my 365 day experiment really accomplish what I hoped it would? As I pondered that question, I thought I am happy therefore my process must have worked; however, I didn’t realize just how successful it really was until recently.


Let’s rewind a few days back to New Year’s Eve. It was the last day of 2011 and I was ready for what I hoped would be a wonderful ending to a pretty great year for me. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday for December in the Northeast, a long weekend off from work, and I was headed to a great party to ring in 2012 with some of my favorite people in the world. Basically, life was good.

When my friends started to arrive at my house to get ready for the party, I began to see that some of them were as eager to celebrate the beginning of this new year as I was. As we discussed the past 365 days and the upcoming year, I noticed that we wanted the start of 2012 for completely different reasons.

Ultimately, a new year is the perfect time to start over.  It's a time to reevaluate your life and the direction it is heading in.  Last year, I saw my current status as not exactly where I wanted to be in the bigger picture or where I thought I would be at that time of my life but I decided I had to stop looking at things that way. A year later, I can safely say that I am really happy where I’m at. Great things are happening for me now and I’ve chosen to look for them rather than dwell on the what might have beens or how things aren’t. As 2011 ticked its final few seconds away, I watched people say good riddance to a year they would rather forget as I said goodbye to one that I hope I will always remember.

For the first time in a long time, New Year’s Eve wasn’t about wiping the slate clean but rather it was about keeping momentum. It was about taking what was an incredible year for me and pushing forward to make the next one just as amazing if not better. Instead of seeing a new door or another chance to get things right, I saw opportunity and possibility to continue building the life I had already started working on. I have never been this optimistic about life so I guess that is the best proof that my little social project was a complete and total success. And the craziest part about all this is that nothing about me or my life dramatically changed in 2011 but I changed my mindset and that completely changed everything else in the process.

"You create your own universe as you go along." - Winston Churchill

New Year's Wishes

When I was in New York City a few weeks ago, we made a stop at a small exhibit set up to pay tribute to the one and only crystal ball that we see dropped every New Year’s Eve in Times Square.  While in the tourist center that holds that exhibit, they allow you to write something on a piece of confetti that will eventually be released over the city when the clock strikes 12am on January 1^st.  As I thought about what to put out into the world for myself for 2012, I got to thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions.

Each year at this time, we all think long and hard about what we want to do in the upcoming year and how we want to be, which inevitably leads us to our New Year’s Resolution.   Some of us will promise to get in shape in 2012 or shed that extra 10 pounds that has been plaguing us.  Others might make an attempt to get their finances in order, reconnect with old friends, spend more time with family, or quit some bad habit.  Whatever it is that we decide to make the focus of our 2012 selves, chances are that most people will have broken those promises or forgotten about them before the calendar flips to February.   So what’s the point???

Personally, I hate New Year’s Resolutions because I think that people set unattainable goals.   What they constantly fail to realize is that in order to have a resolution come true, you need to put some blood, sweat and tears into it, which tends to lead people to abandon ship on their New Year’s promises.   That is why this year I say make a wish not a resolution.

Close your eyes.  Make a wish for something you would really like to see happen in 2012.  Maybe it’s not in your best interest to get crazy with your wish but just think of something that would you like to do and make it something you feel confident that you can achieve.  Spend 2012 going for that wish.  I made my wish on a piece of confetti that fell down from the ball when it dropped last night.  It may or may not come true but I am going to hold on to that wish throughout this year and believe that it can happen.  I guess we can judge the results on December 31^st, 2012.

"Make a wish and place it in your heart. Anything you want, everything you want. Do you have it? Good. Now believe it can come true. You never know where the next miracle is going to come from. The next smile, the next wish come true. But if you believe that its right around the corner and you open up your heart and mind to the possibility of it, to the certainty of it, you just might get the thing you’re wishing for. The world is full of magic. You just have to believe in it. So make your wish. Do you have it? Good. Now believe in it, with all of your heart." – One Tree Hill