People do all types of things on the beach: they play corn hole, ladder ball, paddle ball, frisbee, swim, surf, sing, and sleep. Some curious folks spend hours combing the sand with metal detectors to turn up a few buried treasures. Still others walk the beach looking for shells and other treasures that the ocean yields to the shore.

On occasion a child exclaims, “I found a shark tooth.” That moment is special because of the scarcity of shark teeth rendered on the sandy beach, but really there are thousands of shark teeth. It is special to find one or a four leaf clover when you just happen upon them. The reality is that without choosing a strategy, finding these rarities is a long shot.

While at the beach, my niece found a shark tooth. She was looking for something fantastic sifting through the water cooled sand, and she found it. That was the only shark tooth that anyone in our group found. Then I saw a boy combing the shoreline and his hand was filled with a dozen of the little treasures. I inquired, “what do you have there?”

“Shark teeth” he responded. “I comb the beach all day looking for them and today I have found, ten, twelve, fifteen teeth.”

“So, you don’t boogie board or play frisbee with your family?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t find them if I was doing that stuff.”

Indeed. I guess this was the treasure that I was combing my vacation for. I needed that little nugget of wisdom. Right or wrong we get out of the experience the things that we are looking for. If you are looking to be a millionare, seek it, but know that to get those jewels, you have to sacrifice. Just as the boy had to give up the boogie board for the shark teeth, you sometimes have to sacrifice time with those people you love to earn the dollars.

In his commencement address to Princeton, I think Jeff Bezos illustrated this point nicely.

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck.

What shark teeth are you looking for? Are they part of that compact and meaningful story?

In his speech, I think Bezos hit a nerve with me when he asked: “Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?” Sometimes, it is so much easier to take the path of least resistance.

About a year ago, I set out with a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and an idea. What a nasty recipe. I knocked out some sheet rock, removed a few studs, and created a fine mess. The next weekend I walked into the bathroom and fiddled with a few things, but I knew and the bathroom knew that I didn’t have the vision to complete the project.

Worked piled up and the thought of the bathroom slipped out of my mind. I had torn the walls out of the bathroom and erected walls around the project in my mind. Over the course of the next year, we had several contractors estimate the work, but we never arrived at the “vision” of the project.

Vision is more than just a design. Vision is peering into the abyss of possibility and plucking out something that can be. Vision is imagining the impossible and being able to articulate what it looks like to others.

Vision is creative and spiritual. The act of creating is divine. Humans ultimately wither and our handiwork ultimately crumbles, but staring into that which is broken and commanding something beautiful is other worldly.

Victories are rich. Seeing that thing appear in real life that was only imagined is satisfying and empowering.

Not having vision can be problematic.

Setbacks are catastrophic. When you come across a snag and you have no vision, the obstacles become insurmountable roadblocks.

Endurance. What is the difference in running 5 miles and a marathon? Endurance. You run 5 miles for exercise. You run marathons to make a point. You have to have vision to run a marathon, or you will bail at the half way point. Vision is the fuel to see it through to the end.

Where there is no vision, the people perish… -Proverbs 29: 18

For the bathroom, it took about 8 weeks of hard work every weekend, but once I had vision I was able to see the project through to the end. Ultimately, we ended up with a nice bathroom, and my wife forgave me.

photo by @zerok

The basic premise to the game/network is to opt-in by registering your mobile device and adding friends by mining your networks Twitter, Facebook, Address Books, etc. Then, when you’re on the go, you broadcast your location for points, and social capital (mayorship, eventually king of the world) by “checking in:”

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in
someplace, we’ll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do
nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.

In short, you are rewarded for broadcasting to the world your location, patterns, interests, routes, routines, employment, and most other mundanity that up until now has seemed too egocentric to broadcast.

The brick and mortar retail use of Foursquare captures all the elements that retailers hoped Twitter would possess: location based service, customer identification, gratis reward structure, and incentivizing physical presence. And, quite frankly, it is fun to keep up with your friends and compete on the learderboard for the most points earned in a week.

Here are my issues:

1. Abdication of Personal Autonomy. Any old-timer would say, “what the hell is wrong with you?” For centuries we have fought to protect our information from being collected and protected by governments and churches, but under the hipster sway of technology we gladly volunteer our personal information, freely.

2. Privacy Desensitization. Related to the previous point, we are choosing to blur the lines between private and public in the name of community. Privacy policies aim to protect the users, but with continual revision, one is essentially opting in to global, unfettered broadcast of personal information.

3. Building the Machine. In a culture that was once fascinated by algorithms, we are increasingly governed by them. Even the most well intentioned people trade humanity for quanitification. As people continue to plug more of their human patterns into the machine, the machine learns to act more like them, anticipate more like them, “think” more like them. The point of singularity seems like a farce to me (for reasons that are too lengthy to engage here), but conceptually the machine is built with data.

4. Where’s the Community. Twitter has been a magical community development tool. Without fanfare and proper billing, micro communities popped up built around common interests. Conversations that occur on Twitter, although truncated, foster idea expression, commentary, emotion, location, status, ergo community but simple location updates limit that communication to data points. It is fun, but it isn’t community.

5. Criminal Minds. I have posted a tweet or two about the possibilities of burglars “friending” you on foursquare. Social networked burglars are out there; aptitude is another issue entirely. I could see a situation where a burglar follows someone on Foursquare to confidently burglarize one’s home. Of course, such concerns are fundamental to all Web 2.0 participation.

I have been using Foursquare for six months and much more actively in the past months as its coverage became ubiquitous. I am an early adopter, or as I like to say a neophiliac, but pouring through Lanier’s work provides another lens to see our technological world. Web 2.0 holds many exciting opportunities, but coupled with that, the interfaces and user compromises should not be taken lightly. How does the old addage go? “you aren’t paranoid if everyone really is out to get you” or follow you at least.

Image used under creative commons license by skycaptaintwo

Of course, I live in the south, so the soft white snow doesn’t stick around long enough to turn into the road-muck, black of northern towns. The winter storm rolls through and softens the sharp angular edges of our world into soft, white contours. Virgin white that makes even the brightest white creation of man lack luster in comparison. Then, in a few days, the memory of the snow is dotted with only a few melting snowmen. Painless.

As the day draws closer, the “believers” gush with a little childlike hope of the 3, no 6, no 12 inches of the winter white. Safely tucked in their nostalgic gaze is fireplaces, families, snowballs,  snowmen, and of course play. Sometime between our twelfth birthday and midlife, we forget what it is like to play. School becomes increasingly important, grades, college admissions, jobs, wives, kids, houses, and play that once consumed our days, thoughts, and emotions is relegated to a basement of our responsible life. But the weatherman’s forecast rattles that basement door and awakes the freedom that we had as a child and have long lost the memory. The freedom that can audaciously sled down the giant hill because falling means that old man winter can gently catch you in his soft arms that blankets the harsh, dull earth. The freedom that has no agenda or appointment because time is frozen solid and you can run for 30 minutes or 3 hours making real the line, “since we have no place to go, let it snow.”

However, often in business we toil away with so many of the tactics that the “if only” strategy is seldom considered. Especially in small business/entrepreneurial situations, we spend all of our energy acting and very little thinking, which reminds me of an anecdotal story that I was recently told:

An astronaut was asked if you only had 10 seconds of oxygen, what would he do do? After thinking for a few moments, the astronaut responded, “I would think for 8 seconds and act for 2.”

So, whether you are the coach of a team, a small business owner, or an employee seeking to make your mark, I ask you to pause and think about your “if only” statement. What series of events if perfectly executed would bring you great success?

Hallerin even endorsed @jfloyd for the East Tennessee’s Best Tweeter award.

For your convenience, you can vote for East Tennessee’s Best Tweeter here.

In particular, I remember one event where my dad had created a raised bed in front of their house. My job was to create a “custom” edging around the mulch bed out of small timbers that he had cut. My job included:

1. Digging a small ditch around the bed.
2. Soaking the logs in a preservative.
3. “Planting” the logs in the ditch.
4. Use Bailing wire to tie the logs together.

For this bed that was about 150 square feet I had probably 150 logs to place, but it felt like 1500 trees that I had to debark and chop. I had a process. I understood the objective. I improved the process with scientific efficiency. Yet, I had no “vision” for the end result. I saw one log after another with no concept for the completed project; I invested my sweat to adhere to my paternal directive–and not for the vision of the beautiful work product.

All to often we issue commands to fulfill our own vision without taking the time to “plant” vision in the actors. In turn, they work hard to toil away and placing logs instead of creating beauty. When everyone shares in the vision, they make it beautiful in their own way, and they own their part of the success. Otherwise, it is just quid pro quo–in my story it was “build the edging” for “not getting an ass whoopin’.”

Great writers and comedians explore the nuance of mundane life. Seth Godin can observe a Cranium game placed in Starbucks and Seinfeld can exaggerate the pain of saving seats for others in movie theaters. They came to these observations not while looking at iPhones or making voice notes about the other, they observed the skillfulness by observing, pausing and thinking.

This word is squarely my admonition to myself. If I could spend more time with my fingers still and tongue silenced, the quality of my work would increase dramatically. I, of course, love to do, so thinking is a nice luxury. But, more time thinking makes the doing so much more productive. Some people, on the other hand, could write a post about more doing and less thinking, but I will let them think whether or not to do that.

As I drove home from our weekly family gathering the other night, I gazed off into the ornamental decor and noticed this one beautiful grouping of three trees that were perfectly cone shaped. I am sure that you have seen these decorations. lights fill thin bands of plastic, so that when you erect the decoration it appears as a tree although it is nothing more than twenty feet of coiled plastic and lights.

In many ways, I believe this decoration is an excellent symbol for this season. We erect decorations that are apparently beautiful from a distance but are hollow and lifeless.

I started participating in Advent several years ago and since that time have found the season and celebration to fulfill a deep desire for the Holiday.  Many of Doug’s excellent meditations have helped me to realize the significance to viewing the Holidays through the liturgical calendar.

The story is a magical celebration of light. In a dark world a child is born, and he becomes a light so bright that he changes all of human history. His birth indelibly marks our calendering system and brings a story that is the ultimate viral sensation. This one sneeze is still being shared through cultures encircling our globe. The story of love and grace and the ultimate sacrifice. As Doug so well articulates:

If we are not rescued, we will die in our grief, in our sinfulness, in our unforgiveness, in our suffering and sorrow. The only way out of the valley of the shadow of death is through death. So we look to the king who has conquered death. And now finally we may discover that Advent is both a season of the year and a season of our life.

As we reflect this light and share this story (or sneeze) we create conversations about the stories. Often we create symbols in these conversations for illustration and celebration. We have the Advent candle, which symbolizes the light in the darkness (the hope in exile). Sometimes we fill our homes and yards with symbols in celebration of the story: presents, candles, mangers, decorations.

More often we have conversations about the symbols. The story becomes a subtext (and even lost) in the conversation. We invent metanarratives like Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer to celebrate Christmas. These creations are not tied to the story but become second generation stories that are rooted in the symbols, which originally were conversations about the story.

As people struggle to get into the “Christmas Spirit” they are seemingly looking to the symbol to satisfy their needs instead of looking to the story. They are looking for the Christmas Spirit they knew when they were children that hoped for the impossible and fantastical Santa Claus who knew their hearts to deliver their retribution for good or bad deeds. As we grow older and lose hope in the story, we forget about the magical workings of the light of the world.

The symbol will always overpromise and underdeliver; it will disappoint; it is hollow and void of light. The story about the light of the world, however, will always underpromise and overdeliver. The Christ child was a spark in a land of exile. He brought a story about life in a lifeless world, and he provided meaning to a meaningless life.

As we celebrate Christmastide, think about celebrating life in the darkest, deadest season of the year. Happy Holidays!

note: At the time of posting, I was having some uptime issues with Squidoo, so if it doesn’t load the first time, try, try again.