Here is the text of the blessing:

John and Laura,

May you be blessed before God and this company,
May you be blessed with the riches of your hands and wealth of your hearts,
May the discovery of one another be an exquisite lifelong pursuit,
May your plates be full, your cups overflowing, and fruits bountiful,

May the Doors of your home be the gateway to hospitality and tranquility,
May you spread joy like a familiar fragrance to those who meet you,
May your souls always entwine to keep a fresh sweet elixir,
May you see your children’s children,

May you be poor in doubt;
rich in faith;
weak in pride;
strong in grace

And when your feet have tired,
your hair blown heavy,
your face sun kissed,
And the work is done,
the bills are paid,
and the kids are on their own,
May you look one to another and know that the best is yet to come,

Now we raise our glass and toast to these blessings, this marriage,
and vow to speak blessings and not curses over you for the duration.

Before the wedding, John told me a story. Crowning the hill near his parents’ home, a nice house was built where a rather successful couple lived. After spending a lifetime collecting “stuff,” the man recently died and the woman moved into a nursing home. After their children picked through their stuff, they had a flat top dumpster delivered to their house to haul away all of that stuff. Their lifetime collection, scattered in the landfill. How apropos; of all of the “stuff” we collect in life, our words and stories endure.

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.

Despite a little hit to my ego and the fraction of a second it takes to type or utter these two words, it doesn’t really cost anything to say, “I’m sorry.” Not saying them, however, can cost thousands even millions of dollars, split up marriages, drive wedges in families, and result in years of litigation.

It seems to me that as a culture we’ve adopted a hard stance against the two words, and when someone humbly utters them it’s newsworthy. Last week Jim Joyce made headlines when he apologized to Armando Galarraga for blowing a call, which instantly destroyed Galarraga’s perfect game. He said the magic words, I’m sorry-I screwed up.

Somewhere between little league and the big league we get out of practice of apology. We build better justifications, bigger blame, and less frequently simply say sorry.

Goodbye to the old. Hello to the new.

After using the same theme for several years, I couldn’t maintain the swagger of “Now With 20% More Attitude.”

Please make welcome “between you and me.” My blog started as “Discovering Community,” and after a bit of a hiatus for me to think about myself, I am back to community and conversation, between you and me.

As always, feedback is welcome.

I remember a great leader that I once worked for at Lowe’s. Dale was the COO of the store where I worked in college, and he went on to have a hugely successful retail career. He recounted his quick rise through management to me one day. Dale was hired as “the lot guy.” He was at the bottom of the leadership hierarchy, but as he told the story:

In my mind I had a six figure job. I was the first and last impression that our customers had of the store. I took serious my job to make people thrilled to come or go from our store. Although I had a business degree, it was a great honor to keep the parking lot clean of trash and buggies, and when I pushed the carts back to the store, I did it with my head held high.

All too often, we are proverbially “the lot guy” and we have a bad attitude about not being used to our potential. So, the effort that we put into the job is what we are truly worth.

One of my greatest professional pet peeves is to hear someone complain that they are not paid what they’re worth. They don’t take on responsibility because they are not “paid” for it. Get over yourself. If you have the mind of a six-or-seven-figure CEO, then bring that mind to your five-figure daily grind. You will most definitely earn your worth before it is all said and done.

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.

We’ve seen tidal waves decimate villages, flood cities, and kill hundreds of thousands, but big wave surfers still seek to drop into these monsters for the ride of a lifetime. There is something beautiful about leaning into it. These monster waves  tower more than ten stories tall and carry the destructive punch of an eye wall. Nature in all its furry carrying millions of gallons of water draws creatures deep into the sublimity of its wake, and there are those that are daring (and stupid) enough to venture into the massive wall of the wave.

Watch as Laird Hamilton takes on monster waves.

It is terrifying and beautiful to watch this man take on the ferocity of nature. Here are a few observations:

1. It is clear that he is in the water for only one thing, to surf.
2. Despite the strength and terror of the waves, he must lean in.
3. Fear may be palpable, but he must show skill and strength.
4. When the world seems to be crashing in on itself, there is opportunity regardless of the seeming impossibility.
5. Timing is everything. Big waves appear a few days out of the year, so being in the right place at the right time is critical.
6. The goal is to make it out alive. You can’t plan for everything.
7. Surf the big waves, and people talk about you.
8. Oh yeah, have fun.

For the entrepreneur, the risk taker, I think there are lessons that we can learn from Laird. Most importantly, not all of the busy-ness is your business. When you lean into the area of opportunity you will neccesarily avoid and lose all focus on other aspects, and if you are lucky you will create something truly amazing.

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.

So, what’s a Bluegill you may ask? On their website you’ll see:

…Bluegill is an integrated marketing communications group serving clients in a variety of fields including healthcare, business to business, finance, real estate, and non-profit. We represent clients throughout the country with local, regional and national marketing, advertising, and branding initiatives. A small fish that thinks big.

I, however, like to think of them as a great group of friends.

This merger was not conducted in a stuffy conference room with mind numbing lawyers. Instead, the relationship between our two companies has grown over shared projects, and over beers and brainstorming. The right people have written the success stories independently, and now together the right people are going to take Bluegill to new heights.

Together, Bluegill will expand its already vibrant digital portfolio to include  internet marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, analytics and reporting, mobile marketing, and custom application architecture. In addition, Eluminare’s lead generation techniques will add new assets in the areas of inbound and outbound telephone center setup, customer relationship management (“CRM”) software setup and administration.

Social media strategy and social media policy creation have become important consulting areas for Eluminare. This experience and legal expertise will prove valuable to many of Bluegill’s current customers.

Bluegill’s rich branding experience and expert design skills in both print and interactive, will richly enhance Eluminare’s current client base.

This marriage of the our two companies provides the perfect consultancy for businesses looking to expand their current market share by refining core values and purpose development and applying creative roadmap creation.

I look forward to the future, and I invite you to join me. Stay up to date by joining the Facebook group or following @bluegillcreativ.

Wish me luck!

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.”