I woke up the other morning, looked around my house, and it hit me, I’m a “ninety percenter”.  When I take on a project I go “all in”.  I work and work and work on it until it is almost complete.  Then for some strange reason, maybe boredom, maybe lack of funds, maybe because I just simply no longer want to, I stop.

About 16 months ago I bought a new house for Ethan and I .  The day we moved in the demolition started.  Night after night, day after day I worked on the house and to be honest, it looks great and has really come a long way but it is not finished.  I still have to replace the baseboards and switch out a few more electrical outlets.  Both are very minor details.  The house is good enough.  It looks great and it is more than live-able.  But the problem is I know that it is not done.  I know that I have loose ends that need to be tied up.  Because I know this, I can never really rest.

In my mind I have a list of all the work that needs to be completed and quite frankly, it is always there.  It’s like having  a “honey do” list without any of the advantages that come along with having a wife.  That list is a constant nag in my head.  If I watch a football game, I’m always looking around the room thinking about what needs to be finished rather than enjoying the game.

In order to defeat mediocrity, I’ve come to realize that I must finish what I start.  I must go the distance.

Are you a “ninety percenter”?  If you are, join me in making a commitment to yourself to tie up your loose ends and see all of your projects through to the end!  Your future self will thank you for it.

Have a great day!

  
This is too important not to share.  Healing the world starts at home and in our communities, we are all family. Be the light. Today I challenge you to do something selfless, kind and loving for someone in your life.  Have a great day!  Here’s the story. 
Family

A busy father was looking for a way to entertain his young daughter. He found a map of the world in a magazine and cut it into pieces. He gave the pieces to his child and suggested she try to piece the map back together.
After a very short time she came back to him and said she had finished. He was very surprised by how quickly she had done it. He asked her how she had managed to do it so fast. She replied, ‘I noticed when you took the page out of the magazine that on the back of the map of the world there was a picture of a man and a woman. I thought that if I could put the man and the woman back together, I could put the world back together.’ 

I was in my junior year at East Troy High School, taking a class taught by Mr. Sternberg.  Mr. Sternberg’s name said it all, he was muscular, about average height, had a powerful voice, slightly bald and in the twilight of his career.  I liked Mr. Sternberg a lot.  The class was a college prep class called “Novel 101” and the book that we were reading was called “The Lord of the Flies”.   Mr. Sternberg was passing out the results from the test that we had taken on the book, when he paused and held up my test results.  He then proceeded to tell the class that in all his years of teaching, this paper contained some of the best content that he had ever read on the book.  I swelled with pride.  That was very short lived, because they next words out of his mouth were, “unfortunately the paper is full of grammatical errors and since grammar counts in my class, the final score is a D minus 17”.

To some of you that read my blog on a regular basis, the fact that I make grammatical mistakes is not news to you.  In fact, grammar may be one of my greatest weaknesses.  Its not that I don’t care, I do!  I use all the tools at my disposal, spell check, grammar checker, EVERYTHING! But I still make plenty of errors.

For years I have wanted to be a writer.  I find it very freeing to put my thoughts down onto paper and I love having the ability to go back and read my thoughts from days gone by.  Unfortunately, poor grammar has kept me from writing since that day in my junior year of high school.

Part of defeating mediocrity is to face your fears and do it anyway.  When I decided to start this blog, I was doing just that.  I knew going in that I was going to make mistakes.  I knew that some of you would be frustrated by my improper use of commas, quotes, fragmented and run on sentences.  But I also knew that in order to get better, I’d have to start writing anyway.

We all have our own unique strengths and weaknesses, goals and dreams.  Some of us want to run a marathon but have yet to run a mile.  Some of us want the job of our dreams but fear that we may lose it all if we make the leap.  Some of us want the freedom that a career in sales can provide but are afraid of presenting in front of a room.  Whatever fear you have, remember to face the fear and do it anyway.  Before you can become a master at anything you have to be a novice.  The only way the novice becomes the master is through doing, failing, learning and doing it again and again.

Regardless of what it is that you dream of doing, I challenge you to put your fears and excuses aside and consistently do it anyway.  Remember, before you could run, you had to walk, before you could walk you had to crawl.  You will fail and you will make mistakes in the process but if you (and I) don’t give up and keep looking for ways to get better, eventually we will reach our final destination.

Have a great day!

PS- IF anyone has the goal of becoming a grammatical error checker, I know the perfect guy that would love to connect with you! 😉

This morning I woke up to a text from one of my business partners that stirred up some memories from my past.  Therefore I think it is the perfect time to write about what may be the biggest mistakes that I made as an adult and as a child for that matter.

That mistake? Seeking the advice of others and giving too much credit to their opinions.

We all do it.  We have an idea, a problem or opportunity to better ourselves and we immediately seek out advice.  We call our friends, our family, search google and read almost anything we can find on the topic before we make, what could be, a very important decision in our life.  On the surface, these activities seem like the proper behavior but are they?  Here’s what I found to be true.

1. I didn’t trust myself so I’d let someone else make the decision for me.
2. Most often I sought advice from people who were not experts on the topic I was researching.
3. I gave too much credibility to self proclaimed “experts”, on the internet, before thoroughly researching their qualifications on the subject matter.
4. I was afraid of making a mistake.
5. I worried too much about what other people would think of me.
6. I let my ego sway my decisions.

Looking back, these 6 “truths” have affected many major decisions in my life.  From asking a girl to dance as a teenager to deciding how to best support my family as an adult.  Since I don’t get to go back and relive those moments, the best I can do is to allow history to be my teacher.

From this day forward I promise to:

1. Listen to my “gut” and trust that I am making the best decision for me.  After all, It’s MY life.  I’m the one that has to live with the consequences of my decisions.
2. Only seek advice from credible sources that are veritably an expert on the subject matter.
3. Feel free to make mistakes.  Nobody’s perfect.  God doesn’t promise us that we will always make the right decision but God will always allow us to make the wrong decision right.

I hope that you will apply some of these lesson in your life as well.

Have a great day!

Not very long ago I felt “stuck”.  I had a lot of great ideas but for whatever reason those ideas never made it to the action stage.  Unfortunately, the more I thought about those ideas, the more “stuck” I felt.

Then one day while reading a book called “The Final Summit” by Andy Andrews, he gave a few words of wisdom that months later have changed everything for me.  The advice…”Do something”.  As simplistic as that advice seemed to be, I took the advice and it has changed my life.

In the last few weeks I have talked to many people that have told me that they are “stuck”.  The ironic part is that most of these people have one thing in common, they know what they should be doing and how to do it but none the less they feel “stuck” because they aren’t doing it.  In fact, some of the people that I have talked to are feeling depressed because they are frustrated with themselves for not doing what they know they should. The longer they fail to take action, the more overwhelmed they feel.  It becomes a dangerous cycle and leads to feelings of failure and frustration.

If you feel this way I would like you to commit to a few action items.

1. Write down a list of everything that you know you need to do.  By getting it out of your head and putting it down on paper, you will see that the list isn’t as insurmountable as you may have felt it to be.
2. Now organize your list.  For each item place a 1,2 or 3 next to it.  1 being the easiest thing to do, 3 being the most complex.
3. Start with the easiest item on your list and do it.  This may be something as easy as cleaning your work space or calling a friend to meet for coffee.  Whatever it is, just do it.  Once completed, cross it off your list and allow yourself to feel good about your accomplishments.
4. Continue this process over and over and over again making sure that you stay consistent in your efforts.  Consistency is key.

Think of this process like a snowball rolling down a hill.  At first the snowball is nothing more than a tiny ball of snow (your level 1 projects) but as it continues down the hill it pics up speed (your level 2 projects)  and before long, they momentum that you have created makes even the biggest task seem easy, that snowball is unstoppable! (your level 3 projects)

Trust me, this works!

Have a great day!

  
This morning I read a post on my friends facebook page.  It was memory, an exchange between him and his daughter from a year ago.  Unfortunately, she passed, unexptedly a few months later.  

As I read their exchange I can’t help but wish that they could live that day all over again.  That instead of choosing to do what they “had to do”, they had the freedom to choose to do what they “wanted” to do.  

In the text that my friend shared, it was a cold rainy day.  Neither of them wanted to go to work and they were both complaining about it.  His daughter, jokingly made a suggestion.  In her text she wrote, “leave work, I’ll make a fire and we will watch movies all day and eat Chinese food”.  

Today I’m going to allow their text exchange to serve as a reminder to me, that eventhough doing the “responsible” thing is sometimes not negotiable, if I have a choice, I’ll slow down and take advantage of moments like that.  I hope that you do the same.  I love and miss you Brittany.  

When I was in middle school I loved baseball and wanted to play on our traveling team.  Growing up I lived in the country and was surrounded by corn fields, marshes and creeks.  There were very few other kids to play with.  The friends I did have were farmers and worked very hard much of the summer.  So when it came to playing baseball, I had very little experience.  The kids that lived in town all knew each other and played together all summer long.  On top of all that, I was short, a little chubby and VERY slow.

I remember going to practice, day after day, I never missed one.  Most of the time I was the kid that filled a gap that existed where a “star” player was missing because he couldn’t make practice that day.  On game days, I would sit and watch the other kids play.  I never got in the game, never.  This pattern continued through 6th, 7th and 8th grade.  Although I had hit puberty, thinned out and grew like a weed, I was never considered as a real option at any position.

One day during my freshman year of high school, the “star” catcher had detention.  The coach was mad because that was the day we were going to practice stealing bases.  Since he was not there and I was slow, no way I needed to practice base running, the coach decided that I should fill in as catcher.  My job would be to try to catch the fast kids as they attempted to steal second base.

As the kids started running towards second base, one after the other, I threw them out.  As it turned out, I had a canon for an arm and the coach took notice.  Three days later I was named the starting catcher of our JV team, a position I only held for my freshman year.  Once I tasted the field, i was unstoppable. I out worked a senior that was the starting catcher on the varsity team and the following year and I took his position.

It didn’t come easy.  I had to work for it.  I stayed after practice for hours every night as I’d practice blocking balls in the dirt. All the bruises, cuts and scrapes were worth it.  By the end of my sophomore year I was honored with the teams “golden glove” and “team spirit” award.

So why do I share this story with you today?  It’s because I needed to remind myself that in life we have a choice.  We can look at our circustamces and make excuses or we can look at them and find a way to “get better”.  Today I am going to challenge myself and you to take a look at the areas of your life that aren’t going the way you had planned and ask yourself what you can do to “get better”.

Today I promise myself that I will no longer seek an excuse, rather I will seek a solution.  I promise that I will do more than the mediocre person, I promise to be willing to get dirty, get bruised, stay longer and out work my competition as I pursue my dreams.  I hope you will too.

Have a great day

  
Today I am going to keep my post simple and quote something that I read this morning during my daily Bible study.  
“To answer before listening— that is folly and shame.”

‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭18:13‬ ‭NIV‬‬ http://bible.com/111/pro.18.13.niv

This is something that I definitely must work on.  

Have a great day!

Like most children, when I was little I had big dreams. I’d spend my days playing outside.  One minute I was an army man, shooting my bb gun and using a garbage bag as a parachute as I’d jump off the top of my jungle gym.  The next minute I was Evil Knievel and jumping my old Schwinn bicycle across the ditch.  Most of my days, however, would be spent riding my motorcycle through the fields that surrounded my house while dreaming that I was the best motocross racer in the world or playing baseball, by myself, in our front yard.  It didn’t matter what it was that I was doing, in my head, I was always to best! I had no fear and I never considered, not for a second, that any of these things were not possible.

Then as I grew older I started to realize that I wasn’t fast enough to play major league baseball, brave enough to jump over the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle and certainly didn’t have it in me to do anything associated with the military beyond shooting plastic army men with a bb gun.

If you think about it, reality is sad, VERY, VERY sad.  Once I began to realize my limitations, my dreams got smaller and much more “realistic”.  WHY???  As I am sitting here writing this I’m literally getting mad at myself, MAD!  Sure, my dreams were BIG and possibly unrealistic but those BIG dreams, while not completely realized, did shape the first half of my life.  I never played major league baseball but I did play for a couple of years in college.  I never became a professional motocross racer but I did end up as the sales manager for a multi-million dollar Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Sea-Doo franchise.

If my 9-year-old self had decided to be “more realistic”, would any of those amazing experiences have ever happened?  No, I don’t think they would have.  If I had been “realistic” as a 9-year-old, that chubby little kid, or as my Mom called me “husky”, would have put his baseball glove in the cupboard and never pulled it out again!  All the amazing lessons and experiences that  I had playing baseball would have NEVER happened to me.  What a tragedy that would have been!

So if all of this is true, then why should I/we be “realistic” with ourselves as an adult?  What if dreaming bigger and being slightly “unrealistic” is just a springboard to the life that is waiting for us to live?

From this point forward I am going to promise myself to dream about my future like I did as a kid.  I promise to dream big, dream of being the best and never again allow “realism” into the manifestation and co-creation of my future.  I realize that I may never become the person that I am in my dreams but I will become the person that God intended me to be.

I hope that you will join me and make your own promise.

Have a great day!

Here is the 9-year-old me after crashing on that motorcycle, breaking my elbow and having surgery… ahhhhh memories.

“No”, possibly the most powerful word in the English language, for when you hear the word “no” it has the power to change EVERYTHING .  By it’s very definition “no” is negative.

     How do you feel when someone tells you “no”?  Do you feel rejected, disappointed, sad, angry, frustrated?  When someone tells you “no” does it change how you go about accomplishing the goals in which you intended to achieve for that day?  Does hearing  “no” impact you so deeply that after hearing it you need a counseling session and for the rest of the day you find yourself calling your friends or business partners to tell them your “no” story?  If you can relate to one or more of these examples, you’re not alone.   For me, hearing the word “no” takes me back to the fear and rejection that I felt as a short, chubby, mullet sporting 12-year-old,  when the “girl of my dreams” said “no” to my request to accompany her to our school dance.