Rise and Shine

I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Get up and get going. I don’t know that I struggle with this. Yes, sometimes I fall back asleep a few times. Eventually I will get up. Having kids has a habit of making you awake before 8 a.m. Even if it’s a weekend and your kids are grown up. No matter how late I stay up, I still wake up at 8 a.m. I’ve started to adjust my nightly schedule to try and get more sleep and not stay up until the early hours of the next day. For work I’ve been flexible. Working from home I’ll usually wake up between 6:30 and 8:00 a.m. When I was commuting, I’d get up at 5:30 so I could beat traffic in. I did this for the military too. I would get up even earlier at 5:00 a.m. It’s amazing how much work you get done between 6:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. when people are just getting in.

No One Said It'd Be Easy

I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Good people do the honorable thing even when it’s hard. The other side of it is much easier. I’m starting to play golf a lot more. I find it a hard and rewarding game. I’ve been out four times now. My buddy has told me to pull things out of sand traps and other rough places because I’m learning. I feel dirty when I do it. Which is not often. Often I’ll tell him that I’m here to learn and grow and that taking the easy way out doesn’t give me the opportunity to work on the tough shots.

Same thing at work. The easy way out is to put the very minimal effort in. Being in security we’re often looked at for troubleshooting help. A lot of that is not because we have some special tools that give us more insight (that is some times the case. Often it’s not). Really it’s that we’re willing to dig into a problem and try to best understand it and find a solution.

Protect The Flame

I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Everyone has their own flame. It’s a vague stoic today. We must take care of our flame and let it flourish. If we abuse it, it goes out. What does that mean? To me it means living a straight path. Always doing the things you don’t want to. That may be the case and often hard to follow. I’d love to live as straight path. Without missteps or faults. That’s not possible for us. Maybe today’s stoic is about doing our best to protect the flame of our true inner self from the influences of the outside world. We should set our heart and mind on something and go for it. It’s not always easy. To me that’s okay. We let our flame go out from time to time and reignite it. We start again. Isn’t that what the stoics say? forgive ourselves and get back on the path.

Turn Have To Into Get

I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Today’s stoic is about opportunity. Changing the have to do list to a get to list. The best example I have is driving into work. I usually leave very early (around 6 a.m.) to avoid all the traffic. There’s a bottleneck leaving the suburb I live in and several more along the way. Without traffic it takes me 30 minutes to get to work. With traffic that can easily increase by 15-20 minutes. One morning I left at my usual time 6 a.m. I cruised through the first bottleneck only to suddenly stop at a highway interchange. Instead of getting upset, I saw it as an opportunity to meditate. So I did that. It was much more beneficial and productive than sitting there pissed off at the non-movement. Two hours later I was finally at work.

This is a concept I started to do for certain things. Now I think I’ll use it to refrain some of my thought process. I don’t have to go to bed now to get a new good night sleep for work. I get to go to bed, so that I get a good night sleep. Or on the weekend I don’t have to go to bed so I don’t waste half the morning. I get to go to bed so I can get up early and play with my kids. I don’t have to go to work. I get to go to work and contribute to a company that is doing good things or continue to challenge myself and advance my career. It’s quite a powerful reframe.

On Duty And Circumstance

I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Morality is complicated. The right thing is usually clear and intuitive enough to feel in our gut. This can be for easy choices or hard ones. I have had to take myself out of my comfort zone before to address issues I’ve seen or need to correct. I still struggle with it. Feedback is something that I’ve instituted with my team. It’s both positive and negative. I don’t feel I give enough of it. It usually leans towards positive because that is the more fun feedback to give. Negative feedback is not as fun and just as crucial to the success of the people working for you. I’ve been doing it for over a year now and I feel like I haven’t come close to using it effectively. I am pushing myself to apply it more and more though. I have a duty to put the people that report to me in the best position to succeed.