This is despite everything that I know about managing change and everything that I believe about the utility of failure.

As often happens, the various media content and ideas that I have been picking up on lately have been helping to give me a better idea of why I might have failed in this new approach to disciplining myself.

A friend of my from my undergraduate school is currently in college again to become a counselor. Being that we are both interested in psychology, he often shares interesting links and videos with me that he thinks I might get into.

He’s usually right.

One article he sent me was especially salient and thought provoking. I could hardly believe how well this author was able to translate some complex and difficult psychological research studies into coherent, clever, and captivating prose, filled with vivid metaphors and juicy pop-culture references. It was not exactly Malcolm Gladwell, but somehow still in that same vein. His schtick seems to be pointing out how we don’t really know ourselves as well as we think we do, and that we often prescribe intuitive solutions for ourselves that turn out to be counterproductive. (Ding, ding, ding! You now have my full attention.)

I clicked around on this guy’s site, more and more impressed with each article that I read. Then, I noticed a little image linking to the official trailer for his book. Yes, he created his own video trailer for the book that he is about to release. Although he has a unique way of pronouncing the word “want”, I found myself nodding along with his insights and theories on procrastination and motivation. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, I’ve got yet another book to add to my growing list, but I can’t see myself not reading this guy’s inaugural opus.

In addition to that site, I also happened upon an amazing slice of the internet known simply as PSYBLOG. Ok, it’s not exactly the greatest name ever, and it kind of sounds like you are saying “cyborg” if you try to pronounce it. However… IT IS FREAKING AWESOME!

Apparently, good ol’ TPOS found the sight recently as well. She seems have quite impeccable taste.

The first post that caught my eye was regarding the suggestion to keep one’s goals secret. The title? Why You Should Keep Your Goals Secret. Pretty straightforward, right?

While I didn’t really agree with the certainty that the author offered for the wisdom of not sharing one’s goals, I appreciated having to think about the risks of sharing goals with others. While this may have something to do with my failing to reach my “early to rise” goal, I feel like the opposite took place during Ramadan. Without telling everyone about it and blogging about it each day, I honestly don’t believe that I would have been able to complete it. I give a ton of credit to the others that I shared that experience with.

Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe I need to form an “Early Risers” religion.

Um….. well, maybe a club would have to suffice.

I also happened upon an article from Fast Company entitled: 5 Things To Do Every Day For Success. Guess what the no. 1 item on the list was?

Correct.

Be early to rise.

And guess what? A bunch of people argued with the author about it! It became an all-out war between night-owls and morning larks. The author even had to publish a follow-up article explaining what she really meant in the first article. All very interesting to me. I’m not sure where I fall in all of this.

Finally, I listened to an intriguing podcast while mowing the lawn a couple of weeks ago. I have two regular podcasts that I subscribe to: Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and Freakonomics. This particular Freakonomics podcast started out by saying:

You know the bromide: “a winner never quits, and a quitter never wins.”

To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure? Sometimes quitting is strategic, and sometimes it can be your best possible plan.

I’m not much of an “always/never” kind of guy anyway, so my ears were finely attuned to the argument that followed. That and the fact that I had a lot of lawn left to mow.

I won’t rehash all of the points that were made, but I’ll admit that it left me with the feeling that we all quit a lot more than we realize, and it often leads to better opportunities in the future.

So while I didn’t think that I’d be giving up on my Father Abraham approach to discipline so soon, that’s exactly what I’m doing now.

I’ve got some ideas of what might work better, and I’ve already put some into practice. So far, it’s looking fairly promising. But maybe I should keep things like this to myself for a while.

Hmmmmm……

Just a random Abraham tombstone from the internet.

It’s not a perfect analogy.

Heck, it’s not even a good one.

But hopefully it does point out our tendency to judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves. However, is this always the case? Do we sometimes arrest, try, and convict ourselves with a jury of… ourselves?

Now, if you just answered my rhetorical question out loud, you are my kind of crazy. If not, let’s just give it some time and see if we can get there together.

If you think that you can pile up over 100 items in the 20-item or less checkout line, and nobody will silently or openly judge the crap out of you, then you are sorely mistaken. However, your act of trying to deftly slip triple-digit widgets across the scanner isn’t a matter of making a mistake. It’s a case of disrespecting others and deliberately deciding that the rules don’t apply to you. Yes, I know that it is extraordinarily unlikely that you are reading my blog right now (probably because you are still unloading groceries from your Pontiac Vibe), but I felt it was worth sharing, and writing in the 2nd person.

Before I was tasked by my wife to get some grocery items (tampons and a diet coke; no joke), I happened upon a new podcast whilst mowing the grass. I’m a big NPR guy, and I especially love the weekly quiz show: Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! But today’s episode had not been podcasted yet. Stitcher (one of my absolute favorite free iPhone apps) recommended that I try a new podcast called “Freakonomics”.

Now, I read and loved the book Freakonomics from a few years back. I’ve recommended it to a number of people, and I’d like to go ahead and recommend it to you as well (unless you just got done unloading your groceries). It’s very Gladwellesque, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Stephen and Steven take the somewhat dry (in my opinion) theories of economics and apply them to a number of wet (not the best antonym) and interesting stories and concepts.

One of their most noteworthy and oddly compelling theories involves tying the dramatic decrease in violence in New York City to the passage of Roe vs. Wade. Yes, because the newfound access to abortions for the poor, violent crimes in New York City (and across the country) trended sharply downward in the subsequent generation. It’s one of those things that so crazy that it just might be true, but we can’t fully know for certain.

If your interest is piqued by people thinking this way, then you just might like their podcast.

I decided to try the 29-minute episode from July 21, 2011, and I was not disappointed. Without giving away the farm, I’ll just say that I walked away extremely impressed with the final conversation from the story. It’s a tale of mistakes made, and mistakes examined. The key player in this podcast just completely inspired me with his approach to mistakes and an abnormally high commitment to honesty.

I’d love to discuss this with you further (unless you are still trying to come up with a suitable excuse for nearly crushing the checkout counter today). Why don’t we just pick it up in the comments? If you’ve listened to the podcast, would you be so kind as to let me know some of your thoughts below? You know, I think that I’d appreciate something like that.

Last week, I put up a video of Malcolm Gladwell speaking at TED.  Much like his books portray him, he is articulate, funny and engaging.  He can make something as silly as spaghetti sauce, riveting.

Currently, Bill Simmons is touring the country in promotion of his new book “The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy“.  I stumbled across a interview he was doing for ESPN about the book.  Check it out:

Something with it just didn’t seem to work.  I know that the first time I heard his voice, I was stunned by how dissimilar it was to the voice I has assigned him in my head while reading his articles.  I won’t criticize him here, because he is still a superb writer and I appreciate the thought process he goes through when creating his work.  Let’s just say that he helps to prove the idea that good writers are not necessarily good speakers.  It’s interesting food for thought if you are trying to become one, or both.

Gladwell illustrates the lessons from his story about Howard Moskowitz pretty darn well, so I won’t add much.

I too often find myself obsessed with universals and trying to discover the rules that govern the way that all of us behave.  The idea of variability and diversity is very intriguing.  In truth, there may only be a handful of universals amidst a sea of beautiful diversity and variables.  It seems to me that a large proportion of our conflicts and wars are due to leaders mistaking a variable truth for one that is universal, and then attempting to impose it on the masses.

Even attempting to give something as universal as “freedom” to another culture can fail based on the variable understandings and perspectives on freedom.

The older I get, the less “black and white” the world gets.  While I always knew that “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s”, I didn’t extrapolate that principle to many other areas of my life.  There always seemed to be a right way to do this, and a wrong way to do that.  The more I understand about my own perception, the less faith I have in my ability to discern things that are ALWAYS right or ALWAYS wrong.

Since taste seems to be obviously chock full of variability, where does that principle end?  What is universal?

Malcolm Gladwell

They talk about sports of course, but its how they talk that intrigues me so much.  They illustrate their points so vividly.  They can pull sports and pop culture references up and use them to defend or counter some argument or principle that is being discussed.  I understand that they see life principles at work in all the various aspects of life that they observe, but I’m so impressed by how they put it down in written word.

Bill Simmons

With the technology online growing ever more sophisticated and helpful, Simmons has transitioned some of his writing into audio podcasts.  In fact, the email exchange was originally suggested to be a phone conversation that would be converted into a podcast.  Gladwell thought that it would be more fun to write their thoughts down, rather than discuss them together aloud.  This gives them even more to discuss, as he chides Simmons on responding to his emails so quickly, while Gladwell himself takes several hours to give his written responses.

This has me thinking (which is a good thing).  What is the difference between being a good writer and being a good speaker?  Both are the results of thoughts in our brains.  Some speakers write their speeches down, then memorize them or come close to memorizing them, and soar.  Other people flounder when speaking this way and it is obvious that their oration was written.  Sometimes with writing, I can create something great after tweaking it several times, tinkering with all of the possible ways to communicate something, and finally settling on the best way that I can write it.  Other times, I can just sit down and the words seem to just flow from my hands, in the exact right order that I would have put them in, would I have tweaked them.

I’m still trying to figure all of this out, because communication is paramount in relationships.  Our intentions are not always discerned by the people we have relationships with.  What we mean is not often what is heard.  I’m a lot less arrogant when I consider that what I say is not what was understood by my listener.  Therefore a reaction to something I said is often times just a misunderstanding.  That tends to make two way communication more rich than one way communication.

And I’m sitting here writing a one way communication to you.  Oh well.  It’s all a journey.  I love it.