I recently got turned down for pro bono website work.  Technically it was “postponed” but one of the reasons was because my website didn’t display correctly in their browser and that translated to shoddy craftsmanship.  Talk about a whack on the side of the head and my ego spun like laundry.  I mean, my past and current clients love my work… work I take pride in; work that is highly valued in my field and I offer it for free and it’s turned down!  How?

For starters, I’ve been spending a lot of time doing Business Intelligence projects and my reputation for excelling in that spectrum has carried me along.  I enjoy doing web projects but all of the web projects I’ve completed have been for companies and individuals that I’ve worked with on other projects and they know me to be someone they are confident is up to the task.  In this case, I approached an unknown entity and asked them if I could help them out – because I am passionate about what they do (Nature Preserve and Extreme Sports Park).  They were initially interested and then it went south.

Apply a smile to your business and I bet you profit more.  I'm certain that it will work for your life in general also.  But let's look at my informal case study I've unofficially been conducting.  At a particular client site I'll often grab a sandwich from a Boar's Head kiosk that serves customers on two sides.  Each side is staffed with a two-person team that puts together your sandwich per your liking and direction.  It didn't take too many trips to realize that the team on one side was significantly more friendly and pleasant to approach than the other side and I quickly became conditioned to jump in that line.  We'll call that line the "A Team" and the other line the "I hate my job and customers are a major inconvenience to my day team" which I'll condense to "Team Sourpuss."

Let's take a gander at Team Sourpuss.  Both members radiate unhappiness.  The first member grabs your bread, meat, and cheese of choice.  She seems extremely stressed out by this responsibility and a sense of urgency overcomes you that you better make your order as simple and quick as possible or she may have a breakdown.  She haphazardly slaps your items together and shoves them over while constantly glancing at the clock as if willing the shift and subsequent torture to end.  The next dude takes over and adds the vegetables and condiments and in stark contrast to his counterpart seems brutally bored and moves dramatically slower.  I also get the impression that he'd like to hand us (the customer) a punch in the face along with our pickle spear (or maybe it's just me!).

Flow is one of those terms that are used in different contexts but definitions intertwined and misinterpreted enough to confuse the upside and downside, subjectively speaking that is.  To be in a state of flow is typically a grand state to be in where you become immersed in your actions, completely in focus and alignment with your activity.  Amazing things are created and accomplished in a state of flow.

Going with the flow has different connotations but can be equally positive or disastrously negative depending on where the currents take you.  Going with the flow is following the path of least resistance but sometimes that path isn't taking you where you want to go (or is it??).  I think the path of least resistance to where you WANT to go is brilliant but letting the current dictate where you end up... Well that's up to you and whatever excuse you want to have for not pursuing your dreams in life.

I haven't done the research to see if this is an original term but I am coining the phrase "flow jumping."  My definition of flow jumping is actively using your energy and resources to hop from a flow that is taking you someplace you don't want to go to one that is taking you in the direction of your dreams.  So instead of bouncing around the ocean in your rudderless boat hoping you don't hit the rocks, use your efforts to build an oar, or a sail, or a damn outboard motor to get yourself on another current, where you may resume more effortless flow.

I'm fortunate to have some interesting people in my life... adventurous, supportive wife, brilliant kids, and eccentric friends.  A number of years ago I met a dude that still fascinates me.  Maybe it's because he's an artist that creates new realities where I am an explorer that navigates my way around them.  We approach the world differently yet those differences compliment each other and enable us to help each other through the variant angle of our unique perceptions.  This dude is called Pancake, really.

Pancake is a renaissance man of sorts.  He is a painter and sculptor, a writer, a philosopher, a technologist, a videographer, a machinist, and avid tinkerer.  The thing that I admire most is that he jumps.  One day he told me that he wanted a life size dragon head.  So without going through all of the trouble of slaying a dragon, he sculpted one out of paper mache.  This may seem like no big deal but the dude had never paper mached before and he leapt right in and created an amazing piece of work.  The dude is not afraid of pursuing his curiosities.  "Hmmm... I think this dragon sculpture would look cool bronzed."  Hey, where did Pancake go?  He's at a bronzing workshop in Ohio.  Two weeks later he's got a bronzing workshop in his garage and is turning out amazingly detailed sculptures.

I caught myself thinking today about what I wanted to do...to the point of actually saying it out loud.  So I started going through a mental tick-list of all the things I've done to see if something jumped out at me.  It was in this moment that I realized that the major things that I like to do now - rock climbing, motorcycle riding, Linux computing, web programming - were things I really never considered wants until after I did them.  Conceptually, some things sound fun, like rock climbing and motorcycle riding, but I didn't realistically pursue either until I was given nudges.  

If Karina Beck didn't see my North Face tee-shirt at a festival and hand me the email and phone number of her husband the climbing guide, I'd probably not know how exhilarating it is to be hugging rock.  If Pancake didn't roll up to my house on his motorbike all the time, constantly hounding me to get a motorcycle and taking the time to teach me to ride, I wouldn't have pursued it.  As a sales guy back in the 90's, I bought a book on HTML so I could update the company website from a marketing perspective to help me sell.  Through perceived necessity, I learned programming and went on to start my own web design business.  A network admin gave me an Ubuntu disk that I put in a drawer for 6-months before running it on an old desktop just to get a feel for Linux before rolling out some Red Hat servers. I've since fallen for Linux and run Ubuntu on all my personal computers.

The point is, we often don't know what we want until AFTER we've experienced a thing.  

Photo by EpSos.de (flickr)

I'm afraid of falling. I'll admit it. When I'm clinging to the rock and I'm at my limit with a possibility of falling, my heart races, my palms sweat, and every bad thought you could imagine involving my body being pureed on the ground enters my head. I'm certain that at the precise moment my feet or fingers slip off the rock, my belayer is going to get stung in the genitals by a bumble bee. But this is why I love climbing- because it provides excellent training in facing fears.

So I was talking sports commentating with a friend (don't know how we got on the subject) and I was recalling Steve Stone that used to commentate with Harry Caray for the Cubs. So I Wiki'd Steve and while reading through I saw this quote from him the year he won the Cy Young award as a player:

"I used to try not to lose before," Stone said in 1980. "Now, when I go out, I go out to win every time, and I'm certain I am. I try to envision myself literally walking off the mound a winner. I allow no negatives in my thinking. When certain ones start creeping in, I erase them and make it like a blank blackboard waiting to be filled in with things like, 'The team is going to play well, is going to score some runs, I'm going to throw strikes, I'm going to win.' "

This experiment was a fun one but it took the self-evolution that occurred over the past few years to enable the open-mindedness to do it. You see, prior to 30 I had never been willing to give rap a chance; I'm pretty sure I'd rather listen to squirrels mate. In the background music of my life, rap was stuck in solitary confinement only to be heard at those moments stuck in traffic at 38th and Post. I don't remember exactly how it came about but the seed got planted somewhere around the time I stumbled onto a Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson interview on the radio that caught my attention. Getting bored with my typical genres I added the hip-hop station to my Jeep presets and popping through the buttons one day landed me on Jay-Z's “Empire State of Mind” which was catchy. Somehow this experience of actually liking a rap song justified inviting myself into a rap conversation with my buddy Brian. Being the good sport that he is (and an avid Jay-Z hater... “What rapper goes on Oprah?”), he had the suggestion that I listen to only rap for a month and then post it on this blog. Brilliant idea, Brian, and there isn't much else to do in Indiana in February. So Brian and Bob lent me a boatload of rap and the expedition began.

Photo by Daniel Morris (flickr)

“So, the problem is...” WHACK! “Ouch, what the hell, Nick?” “Find another way of saying it.” “Saying what?” “That sentence.” “The problem is?” WHACK! “Yeah, don't ever say that again. Find a less negative way of saying it. I'm tired of hearing that talk from everybody. It's unbelievable how often people start their sentences with that phrase. I'm going to hit you every time you say it.”

Photo by Jeremy Brooks (flickr)

I’m not that interesting to myself.  That statement, as it ran through my head frightened the daylights out me.  This came about when I received an email from a friend asking for an “obscure or unusual” fact about myself to add to a trivia game he was organizing for a holiday party.  I thought I had a fairly interesting life until that simple question presented itself so plainly, yet so bold and beautiful.

What is an obscure or unusual fact about yourself?

At first glance, I thought, “wow, to pick one out of so many!” But as I started to tick through my mental list I realized that there wasn’t anything there that qualified (to my subjective definition) as obscure or unusual.  Is it possible that I have lived a plain ol’ ordinary life?  How in the hell did that happen?  After all, our family creed that my wife wrote and stuck on the refrigerator ends with, “We French’s live for experiences, not things.”  One experience!  There’s got to be at least ONE experience that exceeds the norm!