The Doug

Lakshmi has tagged me.  The challenge is to define my life in 6 words, and then to tag 6 others.

Unaccustomed as I am to following directions as given, I will describe my life in 4 words (reserving two for future use) and tag two others.

OK...I pass this meme on to The Educated Fool and Hurricane Hetta.

From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.  He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses.  He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts.  And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller.  He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events.  He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet.  I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling. 

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right?  Working in the unknown.  Creating something nobody has seen.  It's going to be a struggle.  Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.

I just signed up for an account on eLance.

I have tons of projects in my head.  I'm going to get some of them going.  Anything I can't do right now, either because of talent, or time, or both, or whatever...I'm going to outsource.

This will be fun.  I will choose my first project tomorrow.  How cool, to spec out a project and let somebody else build it.  I used to feel I had to do everything...now I'm very excited about finding talented, passionate people who enjoy working on projects.

It also makes me focus on how much I believe in a particular project.  Is it worth spending some money on?

Imagine yourself in the following scenarios....what's your first step?

1. Just as you're starting to get on top of your financial situation, both your cars need repairs and your home's heater  breaks, for a multi-thousand-dollar tab.

2. You build a website and you are having trouble getting traffic.  Just as it is starting to get any kind of visitors at all, a hacker from Turkey takes it down.

3. Your boss tells you that your recent work is terrible and she wonders (in a staff meeting, in front of the whole team) how you ever got this job in the first place.

What's your first step?

I believe the first step is that, like it or not, your brain (or heart) assigns a meaning to the event.  One of the first things we learn in this world is cause and effect, and it's natural for our brains to try to determine causes for the effects that are happening to us.

I believe you can exercise your ability to assign successful meanings to anything that happens to you.  You get the option: you can choose meanings that wear you down, or choose ones that build you up.  If it's not natural the first time you do it, it will become more natural with practice.  And whenever you would normally feel the sting of what went wrong, you can replace it with the power of how you see it.

It's not denial--it's a matter of a valid opinion that you are successful!

So--multiple choice time.  Two options for each scenario.  Which meaning do you assign to the event?  (Of course you will have your own, but you get the idea...)

1A: Nothing I do will ever change my situation.  I'm doomed to financial disaster.
1B. I've overcome challenges to get this far.  I'm going to get over this, too.

2A: Yeah, I knew it.  I can't get these kinds of things to work.  I shouldn't have tried.
2B: Hey, I'm in the big leagues now.  I'm gonna get this thing up again, make it safer, back it up more frequently, and get more traffic.

3A: I am falling behind in this field and my career is basically over.
3B: I evaluate my own work and I am a success.

3B (alternate):

April 25, 2007

My Dad went into surgery for "benign" (as determined by needle core biopsy) tumors in his pancreas.

I went down to be with him and my family that day.  It was a Wednesday and my plan was that I would talk to him that night when he woke up from the surgery, I'd be back at work on Thursday and Friday, and go back down again for the weekend.  In that way, I could save my leave time for the recovery.

My family and I waited all day in the waiting room while he went through the Whipple Procedure, a risky operation that removes a lot of the digestive system along with damaged parts of the pancreas.

Around 3:00 we got a call that the pancreas was not in good condition at all.  In fact, it was riddled with cancer.  They couldn't complete the procedure as planned because they were getting too close to arteries in their attempt to clean it up, so they would just finish up as it was.

I think it was around 5:00 that we sat in the small discussion room with the doctor, as he explained over and over that we just need to take it one day at a time from here on out and we kept asking the same questions, which basically came down to "what??"

"How much time does he have?"
"Well, we can't answer that question"

I didn't get to talk to my Dad that night, or the next day.

On the day before, my Dad sent out an email and said "I will probably be in ICU for a day or two and then in the regular hospital for another week to 10 days."  Actually, he didn't even wake up from the surgery for 11 days, and he only left ICU when all medical hope was lost and he came home to be in hospice care.

The answer to the big question was: about two and a half months.

You stole my keys and you said I can't drive
Now I'm on the road doing one thirty five
You tried to break me down
You tried to break me down

You slapped my face and you called me names
I'm done with you and I'm done with your games
You tried to break me down
You tried to break me down

Ohhh...you tried to break me down
Ohhh...you tried to break me down
Ohhh...you tried to break me down
I'm standing tall and I'm holding my ground
I'm standing tall and I'm holding my ground

You've got the perfect hair and the stunning face
But the way you act is a bitter disgrace
You tried to break me down
You tried to break me down

Ohhh...you tried to break me down
Ohhh...you tried to break me down
Ohhh...you tried to break me down
I'm standing tall and I'm holding my ground
I'm standing tall and I'm holding my ground

Did you think I would crumble and fall?
Did you think that my heart was so small?
I know I let you hold me down for a while
Now I've thrown off your chains and I'm living in style

You tried to break me down
You tried to break me down

When you complain about a situation, you ensure your victim position with each utterance.  The instinctual goal--which I've engaged in many many times--is to take a vote; to surround yourself with so many people who agree that you have been wronged that, just maybe, you might start to believe it yourself.

My new approach is more proactive, and it applies both to situations that are working and those that are not.  For every relationship I'm involved in, every project I'm working on, I ask myself two questions:

1. What do I want?
2. How am I going to get it?

The first question involves being honest with myself and with my feelings.  I ask the question with no limits.  If everything went the way I wanted it to go, what would I be getting out of this?

The second question is where the reality of the situation comes in.  The world doesn't just hand you every thing you want on a silver platter (and I wanted a platinum platter anyway).  So: I know where I am.  I know where I want to be.  What steps do I take to get me one step closer to the goal?

Abraham Lincoln was a master of this.  You may think that, as President of the United States, that he would finally be in a position where everybody would just go ahead and do what he said.  But of course that is not the reality of it.  He had to work even harder to maintain the trust and loyalty of those working for him.  He had to continually find new ways to motivate and align his staff and his generals.

He could have continually maligned a lot of these people, and be justified in doing so.  Instead he encourages those who failed to carry out his orders, and even those who worked against him.

I'm listening to his letters and speeches through books on tape as I commute.  As I listen to each track, I ask myself: what did he want?  How was he going about getting it?

I find that he wants more than just having people do the jobs he needed completed.  He wanted to build working relationships with people, and to maximize the productivity that comes from walking together down that portion of the two life paths that overlap.

Actions of questionable nature undertaken by this nation are often defended--by the common man, if not officially--by the declamation "but we're the good guys."  I hear often of the goodness that America adds to the world, and that if our enemies dislike anything about us, it is that they hate goodness itself--they possess a bitter hatred of liberty, honesty, and happiness.

Taken in a global context, it is immediately obvious the failings of using "we're the good guys" as a justification for any action.  If we agree on this maxim as an international law, that any action undertaken is approved only if you believe you are right when you undertake it, or that it is wrong for others and right only if you have the moral authority...well, then, that would indicate that it is a correct action for the whole world, because even the worst liberty-hater must consider himself right when he uses whatever means possible to further his agenda.

Furthermore, it would seem that the right to punish an offender of this law would belong solely to the side in power, and that they would then be punishing the perpetrator for following--rather than breaking--the law of doing what you believe is right with no other considerations.

For this reason it becomes quickly apparent that for a law to make sense, it should have some element of universality--that it would be wrong for any to violate it.

A nation that says "all are innocent until proven guilty" and follows that with "except..." would be reverting to a law of personal judgment rather than a law that spans humanity.  To say all have a right to a fair trial, unless we've captured you at wartime, is to make nonsense of the very principle that inspired the law.

This country started with a similar contradiction, noted in the written words "liberty and justice for all," and "all men are created equal" and yet containing an unwritten "except for slaves" clause.  The impact of that "except" still resonates today, more than two hundred years later.

My concern today is the recent shift in this country, from being opposed to torture--at least in words--to being opposed to torture "except...."

Now, let's be clear about something.  Waterboarding is torture.  It is the intentional infliction of great pain and discomfort upon somebody who cannot defend himself.  The popular description of it in the press is "simulated drowning."  This makes it sound like a display at a science fair.

Waterboarding is not simulated drowning.  It is killing somebody by drowning him, but stopping just before death actually takes place...only to resume the painful process.  It is no more "simulated drowning" than a back alley stabbing is "simulated surgery."

The leap from saying the we stand for human rights and therefore allow no torture under any circumstances, to saying we allow torture under particular circumstances defies what this nation stands for.

Is the stance now that we believe that all nations have the right to torture captives as they see fit?  I certainly hope not.  Is the stance that we alone can do it because we are the good guys?  Besides the argument I've already made for the impractical--if not nonsensical--nature of such an argument, I wonder how the "good guy" status is expected to remain in light of the fact that we--like so many of our enemies--apply human rights only to those humans we choose.