Category Archives: Life

Two Sports for Lumsden

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Few of us ever attain anything close to elite athletic status.  Even fewer do so in more than one sport.  Bo, Deion,  and MJ are a few that come to mind, though most of us don’t count Jordan’s baseball days as much more than an experiment.  Charlie Ward and Danny Ainge are couple lesser-known athletes who collected paychecks from two different sports.  Google the name Jim Thorpe if you want to meet a true multi-sport star.

But what about Jesse Lumsden?

The CFL star, one of the most punishing running backs but also one who can hardly stay healthy for a season at at time, used his recenttly shortened season to knock on some new doors of opportunity.

If I gave you three guesses, you’d never get what his second sport has become.

Answer is HERE.

Review: “The Road”

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I don’t usually do book reviews–consider me compelled into this one.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy has all the makings of a successful book.  It says “National Bestseller” on the top, it’s being released as a Hollywood film in the near future–it even has Oprah’s sticker on it!  (I’ll let you take that last bit as seriously or sarcastically as you need to.)

But the problem is that this book was a nearly complete waste of time… and I bought it from Value Village for $3.

A bunch of big newspapers are quoted on the back cover, calling this “one of the best books of the year”.  I’d like to believe that the journalists who write such words are required to read an actual plurality of books in a given year, but I’ve got my doubts.

To be fair, McCarthy receives a lot of praise for his imagining of a post-apocalyptic world.  And I can appreciate that–he’s got an imagination, and that’s worth something.  Now if he’d spent some time on the plot and on the story that would actually unfold in this wonderfully imagined world… now, that would have been a book!  When my wife asked me at page 127 what was happening in my book so far, and I replied with, “Nothing,” that should have been my hint to bail out.  But I’ve got an anti-bailing clause in my book-reading mentality.  I broke it once, but I couldn’t do it again.  May have been my latest mistake.

Donald Miller’s latest book (one that IS worth reading) shares some behind-the-scenes ideas of how directors and producers go about converting written stories into movies.  One point I remember is that movies have to have action–the visual story happens through events and happenings.  That’s how the story moves.  With that in mind, I’m feeling a bit fearful for “The Road” as a film.  I mean, If a book is almost always better than a movie, then yikes!  Why would I pay even 99 cents at my local corner store to rent a movie based on a book that was bad enough to drive me to blog about it?  That said, the world imagined in the book could likely be depicted quite well post-blaze in a forest fire zone, so perhaps the film can make back its low budget simply from Oprah and her friends buying tickets.

I’m sure someone will read this post who LOVED the book and claims that it changed their life.  All I can say is I’d be curious to see inside such a life; perhaps I’d be enlightened.  But for me, this book just confirmed that there is a realm of art that I simply don’t get.  It gets praised as brilliant (and I don’t doubt the creators of such pieces are indeed bright), but it lies in a landscape so void of concrete meaning and shape that I just can’t grasp it.  This is, of course, assuming that there IS something to be grasped.  It seems to be wandering aimlessly.  And when a guy whose blog is “a disorderly pile of who-knows-what” calls out “aimless”, you can take that as something of an observation.

The image I just found to attach to this post shows that this book also won the Pulitzer Prize.  Did all the authors of the world take sabbaticals in 2006?!  Speechless–that’s all I’ve got.

Strategy

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NFL.

Two weeks ago.

The Arizona Cardinals played the Green Bay Packers.

Green Bay won, the final game of the regular season.

Last weekend, they rematched in the first round of the playoffs.  The Cardinals won.

HERE is a fascinating story of the coaching strategy and game plans from Arizona’s coaching staff during that two-week head-to-head.  Consider it a “behind the curtain” peek, and a fantastic illustration of “thinking big picture”.

For the Gold

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Rematch: Canada VS USA on Tuesday night.

You KNOW that TSN is smiling about this one.

Life Insights

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The last couple days have involved some it’s-nowhere-near-Spring cleaning.  This morning, I tackled my office.  In one pile of papers, I found a four-page leaflet titled, “Leadership Insights”.

Whether you think of yourself as a leader or not isn’t even relevant here.  A number of these are simply worth considering for any person who’s about to look back on one year and ahead to another.

Here are a few of the best bits from this long-buried sheet…

  • “How can you say what you are trying to say with 10% of the words, time, and money you are using?  This is a real fog-cutter in all of your communications, proposals, speeches, literature, etc.  Simplify.”  (Obviously, this is business-geared, but what are you hoping that your life expresses to the world around you?  And what could/should be stripped away to de-clutter and clarify that message?)
  • “Life is a constant struggle for balance.  Balance is a result of one word… schedule.  Typically you determine your own schedule.  Therefore, you schedule your own balance/imbalance.”
  • “Of all the things you have said you will do in the future… what do you ‘really mean’?”
  • “When you are doing something that someone else on your staff could do 80% as well, you are probably wasting your time.  Learning to delegate effectively is even more important in determining the size of your contribution in life than your native intelligence is.”  (Obviously, this isn’t specifically relevant to all of us, but something in there rings true regardless.)
  • Tom Skinner says this: “I spent a long time trying to come to grips with my doubts and suddenly I realized that I had better come to grips with what I believe.  I have since moved away from the agony of questions that I cannot answer, to the reality of answers that I cannot escape… and it’s a great relief.”
  • “Fun is ‘uninhibited spontaneity.’  Things that are inhibited and not spontaneous seem boring.  Think back to the last time you were having fun.  Why was it so much fun?  The activity was uninhibited and spontaneous.”
  • “You can learn 80 percent (approximately) of what you need to know about a a subject by asking the right 10 people the right 10 questions in less than 10 minutes each.” (Think of this as a guard against bogging down in unnecessary details.)
  • “Negotiating typically implies ‘more for me… less for you!’  Never negotiate.  Work toward a ‘triple win’ where all three parties involved come away ‘winning’.”
  • “Plan to ‘peak’ ten years from today.  And, each year on your birthday move it out a year.  On your 50th birthday, plan to peak at age 60.  On your 80th birthday, plan to peak at age 90!  Keep growing.
  • “You are God’s student, not life’s victim.”
  • “If you ask profound questions, you get profound answers.  If you ask shallow questions, you get shallow answers.  If you ask no questions, you get no answers at all.”
  • “A high percentage of all stress is caused by indecision or lack of control.  What are the three main things in your life that are out of control?   What are the three primary decisions you have to make in the next six months?  Focus on these areas and you will find your stress reducing.”
  • “Double the strength of the weakest link in a chain and you double the reliability of the entire chain.”
  • “God’s timing is perfect… even when it differs from our plans.”
  • “To turn an organization around in thirty days… hire one desperately needed person, fire one visible problematic person, stop something that everyone on the team knows should have been stopped long ago.  The bottom line may not turn around in thirty days, but the team morale will and profits should be very close behind!’ (I’ve never worked in a day in big business, but I love the “go after it” mentality of this one.)
  • “An activity is work… only when you would rather be doing something else.

Any favourites?

Any line there that could affect how your 2010 unfolds?