My kid poops at Sport Chek, and The Economist

Today I learned:
1. My kids poops at Sport Chek: I have taken my four year old to Sport Chek five times in her life and everytime she runs for the public washroom telling me she needs to poop. Based on today I now think it is ingrained in her, like some sort of Pavlovian response.  It’s better than prunes.  If the kid has any problems with regularity down the road I will just take her shopping.
2. The Economist: Since completing my MBA last spring I have had a bulls-eye painted on my forehead that every marketeer trying to flog a magazine subscription has been aiming for. With the unrealistic belief that I should now have lots of time for periodicals I have fallen for just about all of them too. It puts me in an odd spot – at work I try to stay as paper free, while my home is cluttered with magazine after magazine, and most get barely more than a quick glance. The only exception is The Economist. It doesn’t get read at all.
At then end of the day though, it is the only one I wouldn’t give up. I stream the audio version from my phone while driving and peruse the online version during lunch and at night.  If I had to pick one (and as soon as the renewal letters come I will), it is the only one I would keep.

The only thing my phone can’t do, and more Zig than Zen

Today I learned:

1. Love for my iPhone: By noon today I had read the news, checked email, sent a few texts, looked at the weather, paid two bills, bought a book, listened to the Economist online, updated my wine cellar, paid for parking, watched part of a show on Netflix, and turned off my TV. All from my phone.  Disappointingly it seems the only thing it can’t do is one of the things I need most – repair my ruptured ACL.

2. More Zig than Zen: I recently started reading the ZenHabits.net blog. This morning I reviewed a post by a writer named Jeff Goins. Some great stuff  – I am certainly onboard with his recommended 4 practices to “bring you closer to the life you want.” He suggests you: 1. Get up early, 2. Over-commit, 3. Talk to strangers, 4. Practice Generosity.  I agree on all counts. Ingraining these ideas into your life is a step in the right direction.

That said I strongly disagree with the idea that to get the life you want, planning and goal setting are unnecessary.  Living life like a pinball bouncing around aimlessly might work. It might even lead you somewhere great that you never expected. But it might not, too. It seems to me that marrying the 4 practices, with some goal setting and targeted effort is a better way to lead yourself through life. I guess I am Zig than Zen. To kick of 2012 I am working through Zig Ziglar’s Pick 4 book to help me make this year my best one yet.

Eating local and Is ‘Temporary’ pain worth it?

Today I learned:

1. Eating local: We stopped by a farmers market this morning and ran into a friend helping out with her dad selling locally produced sausage under the name Chef’s Natural.  I have to admit 99% of our meat and fish comes from places like Costco and Safeway, but today we bought a few meals worth to support a friend. Dinner tonight was exceptionally tasty, and with no chemicals on the ingredient list I even felt watching my kids chow down.  Surprisingly, it was not much more costly than the something similar from a big box retailer. A good lesson in eating local and supporting the little guy.

2. Temporary Pain: I spent a chunk of my day working on planning staff resources for 2012 projects. Realizing workload will exceed resources, I started thinking how I could utilize temps to offload some tasks.  This made me reflect on past experience and reminded me of a quote I wrote for myself one day last spring:

“Keep your enemies close, and the temps you hire to do menial tasks even closer.”

The motivation for that came from a day lost dealing with two temps hired to do a time sensitive task.  That experience taught me there are few things you can actually pass off to a temp to save your staff time.  If your operation is lean enough those tasks either don’t exist, or they are done more efficiently and with less supervision by those who already work for you.  A good reminder and an opportunity to rethink priorities for the year ahead.

I’ll never go to the bathroom alone again, and it’s never good when your daughter says…

Today I learned:
1. I’ll never go to the bathroom alone again: My problems in the bathroom are officially solved. No more awkward balancing of the laptop on my knees. All logistical problems have been flushed away. Now that we have an iPad I really can’t imagine going to the bathroom alone again. The only problem that might come up now is getting me out of there.
2. It is never good when your daughter says: “Daddy, you’ll never find your keys!” Today our pleasant little four year old was laughing and laughing while I madly searched the house for the my keys.  A fun game, apparently.

Fluent in Smurf and a LinkedIn Fail

Today I learned:

1.  Fluent in Smurf: It turns out my 4 year old is a whizz at picking up new languages.  I watched the Smurf’s movie with her the other day and tonight at dinner she asked me to smurf her a cookie.  At least she didn’t tell me to smurf off when I told her she need to smurf down her noodles first.

Trolling on LinkedIn: Every few weeks I get an unsolicited connection request from someone I have never met or even heard of on LinkedIn.  Typcially they have “Job Seeker” in the headline. Rather than ignoring these requests my response is always the same. I send an email back with the following:

Hello <name>,

I apologize, but I don’t recall if we have met.  Can you please refresh my memory?

Regards,

Darren

Prior to today, not one person has ever responded – not even a “Sorry, I was just hoping for an introduction as I am looking for work in your field.”  I finally got a response today: “Sorry, I think I hit ‘connect’ by accident.”

Bottomline: Today I learned the name of one more person I will never hire. Good networking works. Bad networking keeps you unemployed.

Death of a resolution, and a bookstore

Today I learned:

1. New Year’s Resolutions: It takes about 4 days for the wheels to fall off. This occured to me as I was sitting on the couch questioning my twothings committment while drinking wine, eating chocolate and finishing off my daughter’s grilled cheese sandwich dinner (exactly 4 hours and one partial chew after it was first placed on the table).

2. The last Chapter(s) is near: I was given a book for Christmas that I have already read (the Steve Jobs biography) and today was return day for me at Chapters. I was given a gift card and despite finding plenty of books I would like to read I just couldn’t bring myself to buy anything.

Why?

Every book I want is cheaper on Amazon.ca. And with free shipping it makes zero sense to buy in store. It just feels like I am throwing away money buying instore. I decided to save the gift card for awhile but I know I better act fast. Unless Chapters can navigate what appears to be an attempt to transition to household items, giftware and other generally useless crap they won’t last long.

Lost virginity and directionless men

Today I learned:

1. Lost virginity: In reflecting on my January 1 post it occurred to me I lost my blog-virginity. Arguably losing blog-virginity feels more nerve-wracking and naked than losing actual virginity. At least with the physical kind you aren’t posting a record of it online for everyone to see and comment. Or at least I wasn’t, but with kids these days, you never know.

2. Directionless men: I actually read the directions. I read them for virtually everything I get that comes with directions.  This fact occurred to me today as I was unpacking a small blender, with only one button and exactly one two steps on operations in the manual. I think I may be decidedly unlike many other men in this area of my life.  I have read my entire D-SLR camera manual cover to cover (and it was eerily the same as the one for my previous camera). I also bought a second book to provide further information on the camera and viewed an instructional DVD. A couple months ago I spent about 2 hours reading the entire 118 page manual for the home network hard drive that I use. I read all the troubleshooting steps at the back too, just in case I have some trouble to shoot down the road.

It gets worse too. I keep a folder on my computer with all the pdf manuals I have amassed, just in case I need to refer back. There are 32 pdfs in the file.

No one else I know seems to do this. Instead they seem to always ask me how things work.  In my family I am considered some sort of tech-whizz and gadget genius. Nope, sorry to burst the bubble. I just read the directions. I think of it as trying to get the most out of everything I buy.  I don’t want to miss out on any features or tips.  It’s either that or I am just really anal.

Babysitting and Christmas Lights

Today I learned:

1. Babysitting: When my wife is out and I am taking care of the kids I still call it babysitting. Something doesn’t feel right about it, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that rolls off the tongue more easily. There are the obvious options, like “taking care of my kids,” but why go 6 syllabus when you can get your message across in 4? Admittedly this habit has a few detractors, including a Facebook group with over 400K members but looking through the comments there I see no one offering me up a viable alternative.  I suppose it’s easier to hit “like” and return to Farmville than to put some meaningful thought into solving an important problem such as this one.

2. Christmas lights:  Every neighbourhood has the guy that leaves his lights up year round.  Icicles hanging from the roof  and Rudolph sitting in the front yard in August. It’s just lazy. I am not that guy, and I have always looked down on him.  Now that we are into January our christmas tree is gone and today it was time to pack the lights into the garage until next Christmas.

When setting them up I run the power from the light socket outside our front door, so when I was done the last task was to put back the regular bulb. As I screwed in the bulb it occurred to this one bulb costs more than running 850 Christmas lights on 17 low wattage LED strings. For a fleeting moment I considered being that guy.  I mean, why not? It would save me a few cents a year.

Ultimately the need to stay organized won out . I just couldn’t be that guy, so I finished the job. There was still a lesson there though: I learned that guy might not just be lazy. He could also be cheap.

Restraint and the fear of shipping

Today I learned:

1. Restraint: When you publicly commit to start a blog on Jan 1, you should apply restraint on New Year’s Eve. Some lessons are learned the hard way. Some are learned after an evening with good friends sharing too many bottles of good red wine.

2. The fear of shipping is real: One of the motivations for this project comes from Seth Godin. Within his 2011 book Linchpin, he talks a lot about the concept of shipping, and the “lizard brain” that imparts fear in us and keeps us from starting anything that might be hard or potentially lead to failure. I won’t regurgitate his ideas here – I encourage you to read his book – but suffice it to say, the lizard brain is real. This insight comes from the knot in my stomach today. The fear of publicly committing to learn just two things a day (and to diarize/blog them for at least the first 66 days straight) is real, particularly when you have never made one blog post before, and you have never kept a diary. I had a sense this would be the case going into the project and I am hoping this exercise will help teach me how to quash that same feeling whenever I need to deliver something big or new.

What’s next for this space? Check out The Two Things Project and Bio pages for more info. Any guesses where my focus will shift through the year?