I had this idea for a project, a thing to do. I was all excited about it, and I wanted to try adding video and a whole ebook on the side.
I started, and it was even better than I thought. I organized my idea, and had such a big epiphany while doing THAT I veered off and played with the epiphany for a good long while.

Man, this was good stuff!

Then I reached an impasse with the epiphany, and wanted to take it further. I was brainstorming about what the right medium I could use.

And I remembered my original idea. It seemed small and unimportant now. Hadn’t I outgrown it?

But then again…

Just starting the project idea led to an awesome epiphany.

When it comes to creativity…

When it comes to ideas…

When it comes to art..

There is nothing like getting my hands in the mud, up to the elbows in all the chaos.

I’ve talked before about the lure of the road not taken. The moment the choice is made, all other choices are excluded.

While I am deciding to do something, I could do anything!

Once I make my choice, then I am doing only that thing.

Of course, if I never take a step, all the anything I could be doing amounts to a big pile of nothing.

The lure of being able to do anything is strong. The only thing that is stronger is the fear of doing nothing.

No doubt whatsoever that in a world where all possibilities exist I could find something better to do with my time than the thing that is right in front of me. That’s why it takes courage to create, and something even greater to complete the creation.

I had to give Veronica some help with the ten’s place this weekend.

I don’t think the common core way of presenting the ten’s place works at all.

I asked her, “Veronica, you know about the ten’s place, right?”

I’d seen her homework. Ten’s place was all over.

Her reply “Mommy, that doens’t have anything to do with addition or subtraction. It’ s only lines of blocks.”

OH boy.

So, I went over how to carry the one, and then a couple days later, how to borrow.

She was Very Sure that all this was unecessary. She absolutely knew how to figure out 20-13.

Then she did. She got it right. and the next few problems I gave her.

She was sure I was an idiot and making her life unnecessarily hard.

So I gave her

22- 13

That she couldn’t  figure out. And she saw the power of borrowing the ten.

The concept was never the problem. The neccessity was.

I remembered arguing with my mom in a similar  way.

She and I are alike, quite a bit. I don’t think my mom had as much of a stubborness with teachers as I did.

But I can see exactly what she’s arguing against. I think I’ll need to make sure to double down on the extra lessons at home.

she likes math.she was shocked to learn that i use math at work.

I should see what she makes of binary.

Cross posted on YO ROCKO

“Coffee is for closers.”

In the famous line from Glenngarry Glen Ross, Alex Baldwin encapsulates the cutthroat world of sales. These desperate salesmen will do anything for leads, to get a sale. All the emotional manipulation and fact fudging is fair game when trying to get that sale.

Salespeople are not trusted, not those kinds of salespeople. But everywhere I turn I see advertisements on how to do the RIGHT kind of sales and marketing.

I have something to market and sell. I have my blog, and last year I published by fourth book. I’m so proud of it! The Russian American School of Tomorrow  is beautiful and brilliant, and I want to get it in front of readers.

But not like THAT, not with bait-and-switch slimy methods. There has to be a better way.

I found this free course online from Hubspot, an online marketing company, called “Inbound Certification.”

I didn’t even know what it meant, but I wanted to learn more about marketing and it was free. I have to say, it was really useful. Not hard, and it shed some light on the spam emails I keep getting. These “free ebook” offers and, “sign up for my mailing list of free tips on X” have a strategy in mind.

There is a revolution well underway, to leave behind that hard sell “Coffee is for closers!” culture. “Inbound Sales” means people come to you, because you draw them into your sphere by providing some value (a free guide, perhaps) or some service that the potential customer wants.

Inbound sales requires that the sales and marketing team know the life and story of the customers as they come looking for what the team is offering. They call it the “buyer’s journey”, and the goal is to provide the right sort of message, service and value at the different moments in the journey.

Each step matters, and it is expected that some customers—no, RELATIONSHIPS– will slip away and that a certain percentage will become paying customers.

Retaining customers is just as important as getting new ones, so the team pays attention to delighting the buyers even after they “close.”

This is all fascinating as I work to expand my audience and create relationships on social media and in real life for my messages.

Coffee is not just for closers.

All through these classes, I couldn’t help but think…Service and value and church words.

Relationships are the whole point when it comes to a worshipping community.

And when it comes to coffee, at church the coffee is always for everybody.

I look at how things have changed in the last decade, and some people have not kept up.

I still get offers for a free weekend in Vegas if I come listen to a presentation about a fabulous time share opportunity. It’s like a time capsule.

And for church–

I would like for the church to understand the value we have. Of COURSE we have inbound relationships all the time.

This way of understanding the journey–and what message and service is required at different steps along the way–is Christianity’s specialty. It’s okay to remember that, and not get buried under the committees and session meetings.

In this post-Christendom world, did the wider world just co-opt what we’ve had all along?

My co-worker just broke up with his girlfriend. He was devastated, even though they both realized it was time. They were going to get married next year! He’d been saving his money for it and everything.

He is 20.

I had known of his plans before they were shattered. I didn’t say much. And I was thinking, No. You don’t know who you are yet. You both still live with your parents!

Things change. We change. All the things we know and take for granted when we are young will be converted and rearranged.

One way or another. As they were for my young co-worker friend.

What can we be sure of, really?

A few things. And what those things are become apparent. How? By passing the test of time.

My young friend didn’t have time. Not much of it.

I have more time than he. And I am wondering about that question.

What am I sure of?

What am I doing because it just follows from other things I did earlier?

I’ve been paying attention to internet advice givers: What is you? What have you wanted to do all your life?

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a talk for Oprah about how she learned that this sort of question doesn’t work for everyone.

It certainly doesn’t work for me. I wrote not long ago about facing forward. I liked a lot of things when I was 10. And then when I was 20. If I didn’t have something new to learn and be excited about I start to wilt.

Is that the thing? Is that my thing?

It’s part of my thing.

These pieces that I write every week have no kind of theme. You beautiful people, you readers of mine, you know that. You know when you click on this email you don’t know what you are going to find.

Except you kind of do.

It’d going to feel a certain way. IT’s going to be thoughtful and interesting. It’s going to be enthusiastic and compassionate. When it’s written by murphy, it’s going to be a true story and it’s going to be accessible. I’m not ever going to try to pull one over you. This is me, writing for you to understand and have a new way of seeing.

There are those who are experts on one thing. God Bless them! I would love to learn from them and know all about their thing.

And I do not want to be one of them. I want to move on to as many new things as I want to.

I found my super elusive thing, which I’ve been doing for a long time before I could put a name to it. And I’m so grateful to you all for coming along for the ride.

I would like to know, what do you think? What would you say is the essence of the Weekly Wonder? Did I miss something? What do you see?

Please hit reply and let me know. I’d be so interested.

So the kitchen is now an empty room. A crew of people are helping us put it back together.

And we also had our windows restored.

We’ve got a 65 year old house. 65 years ago, they made kitchens and windows differently.

I find the 65 year old kitchen needs to be fully redone. But it would be a tragedy to get rid of the pinewood double hung windows.

This is the sort of thing that is interesting only to people who are interested in this sort of thing. I remember I had a friend who came over to my house all the time, and from time to time I would point out some little renovation I had done to the house. She was happy I was happy, but it mostly was not important to her.

Then she became a home owner and suddenly every nail and blade of grass was fascinating. Questions like “How do you…?” started being asked.

It mattered now.

I’m not the kind who hires someone and then thanks them when they are done. I put on my work clothes and do the work too. THe parts that make sense for me to do.

I’ve restored three very large pieces of furniture in my life. And one very small house.

I like the way it feels to take off the ugly and non functional surface covering–paint, fabrice, finish–and get down to the form and texture of the original piece. What potential is here? What beauty does this piece have? What does it remember? Where did all it’s parts come from and what did they see and know?

Yes, it is anthropomorphizing. And it makes me happy, to see the seams and the nails and the design that someone put in place. That I get to really know what the wood in the floor and the plaster in the walls are made of.

It’s makes me feel really good to get into the crannies to clean and repair and fix.

It’s restorative.

This morning was no better than the last four. I couldn’t stop yawning in my last meeting. I left 5 minutes early, so I’d have enough time before my next meeting to pour a cup of coffee.

The coffee machine was being repaired.

The small comfort, the little bit of something I’d told myself would get me past the unpleasantness–denied!

I do love my comforts.

This makes me think about the British Empire and their obsession with civilizing the environments they travelled to. Perhaps in the story they told themselves about how their day–their life– would go, they required that all the people around them wear a certain type of pants.

I was pretty sure that I needed that cup of coffee. I was pretty sure I deserved that cup of coffee after all I’d been through.

I was entitled. These last four days I’d spent emptying the kitchen in my house. I had signed up and paid a lot of money for the privilege of having my kitchen destroyed. Then rebuilt. Of course.

Given time.

The space between the dis- and the comfort holds an abyss.

It’s the little things, right? Particularly the absence of them.

Food is pretty basic. I’d spent four days boxing up all the things that I had collected, the things I used every day to make sure I had what I needed to take care of myself.

Boxing and storing all my comforts for later.

It sounds overdramatic as I say it. But at the time, it was nothing less. I feel a glimmer of sympathy for those starchy British expatriates.

It’s going to be weeks of discomfort now in my house.

At least the coffee machine at work is running again.

“How are you feeling?”

Chris had to stay in bed, because he was sick. I had to do the things he would do. I took Veronica to school and picked her up from school. We had dinner and did homework and walked the dog.

What we didn’t do was disturb daddy.

But I did have to check in.

He looked blurry. “I stayed in bed all day. I found episodes of NOVA to watch. I had to be careful to find ones that wouldn’ t upset my stomach.”

“That shouldnt’ be hard.”

“You’d be surprised. It turns out that during WW1, plastics and fabrics hadn’t advanced as much as now. Do you know, they had to fill Zeppelins with smaller bags of hydrogen, and them put that inside the big hull? The best thing they found was cow intestines.”

Wow.

“It took 250,000 cows to fill one. They took all the cows, and it was even illegal to eat sausage in germany at that time. All the cow intestines went to the war effort.”

“I hope you’re feeling better.”

“I’m still pretty tired.”

My life had come to a point: If I didn’t leave my husband I would be abandoning myself.  The pain of trying to abandon myself for the sake of this marriage had left me a whimpering empty vessel. My whole upbringing told me that I did not have this choice.

Upon close examination, I did have the choice. But the choice was to step away not only from my husband, but from everyone.

When I chose that, the whimpering vessel shattering into a million pieces of pain and loneliness.

That was all a long time ago. This is not a story about my divorce.

This is a story about looking at the future.

After my divorce, I didn’t know how to look at the future. I had never conceived of a future in which it was possible to make my own decisions. I lived out of books, and I had a superstitious impression that I was doomed. Like Madame Bovary and every other “bad girl” I figured there was a cost—probably death—for choosing myself above my obligations.

The Future was so inconceivable I had trouble making plans for the weekend.

Except in other ways, I was starving for what I wanted. I’d been postponing it long enough.

I enrolled in college classes. Would I really have a chance to get a bachelor’s degree? I didn’t know if I would make it that far, but as long as I drew breath I knew what I’d be doing for the next few months.

I would be doing the homework. One step at a time to get a little closer to my big goal.

A small signpost in the impenetrable fog of my future.

“This way.”

Ok. I will move that way.

Big dreams are like that. Full of small actions with an eye past the horizon.

I heard an inspirational speaker telling me this week to look toward the future.  She said “You can’t change the world from the rear view mirror.”

After my divorce, the present was drowning me. The future was barely better, but I was pulling towards it. I stumbled and found it.

And it found me.

Facing forward is where it happens.

I am reminded of this when my inner critic tells me how I’m doing it all wrong because I haven’t properly finished all the things I’ve started.

That I have some work to do before I can do the things I really *want* to do.

It’s a big job to change the world. I don’t know if I’m up for it.

And yet…

I want to change *my* world.

Some of the tired old projects can wait.

Or maybe they can face the future too and help me understand how to move it forward.

I am done with the past. There is so much more that is ready to happen.

17 years of my life I spent as a videoconference professional. Back when I started it was a bigger deal than now. Now, decent quality video conferencing is available on your phone.

Among us professionals, it was a widely acknowledged truth: the most important part of a videoconference is the audio.

The image of the person is all fine and good. A smile or a frown tells you something. But if the video is great and the audio is choppy, it is unbearable. I might see a frozen image of your face, but if your voice is clear, we can have a conversation.

It’s not something the salespeople tell the CEOs. But we all knew it. Things aren’t always what you expect.

I’m not a video conferencing professional right now. In my new job, a whole lot of my co-workers are into video games.

I have not spent much time becoming good at video games. This Christmas we bought our daughter a Nintendo, and I spent some time revisiting how bad at video games. I regret my lack of expertise.

I talked about it with co-worker Steve, who hosts his own streaming channel devoted to video games. I asked “Since you’ve been playing these games so long, don’t you want to get involved in making them?”

He said no. But since I asked, he told me the three considerations for judging a game. It has to have a good story–naturally the part that fascinated me. It has to have good graphics. I argued that point, for a bit. Wouldn’t a good story override the quality of the graphics?

Then he dropped a Z-axis into my roadmap:

There has to be good gamesmanship.

What is THAT?

This is a whole new way of looking at the world.

Coincidentally, this weekend was spent reading The Hunger Games trilogy. These books are not great works of prose. And yet I could not put them down.

Because of the game. I know exactly what the author was doing. She told the game, and like all the audience in the fictional story, I was riveted. I had to find out what would happen next.

Unlike Steve, I found myself wondering if could concoct a game story like Collins. I want to get behind and make the thing I love–stories.

The ancient Greeks–no strangers to the excitement of games! –had two kinds of drama stories. They divided it up into Comedy and Tragedy.

Tragedy ended in death and Comedy ended in a marriage. Those were the rules.

Every game has rules.

I wonder. Maybe all the stories are telling how the game was played. All the little puzzles, the obstacles that must be overcome and resolved, this is gamesmanship.

So perhaps all the world’s a game. And we are merely players.