An Intro To “Musings”
Until recently, time is something I’ve always taken for granted. As someone who grew up with the deck stacked almost entirely in his favor - i.e as a straight, white, middle to upper-middle class, educated male born in the United States and who didn’t experience much in the way of tragedy through death, disease, divorce, or abuse - the consideration that, at some point, the proverbial music will stop has never really weighed on me. The seeds of scarcity fail to take root where the soil has always been sewn for abundance, so the idea of my own mortality has never been much of a consideration. That is, until recently.
If nothing else, time is relative. It’s the most precious, finite resource we possess, yet we’re often not acutely in tune with that reality. Having few real responsibilities in my early twenties, I can recall leaving work at 4pm on Friday afternoons and being struck by and completely overwhelmed at the notion of how I was going to fill all of that open-ended time until Monday morning. Now in my mid-thirties, with all of the added pressures of family, work, community development, and my own creative endeavors I can assure you the thought of not knowing how to fill time has become a completely alien concept. Whereas I used to watch movies to simply pass time, I now find myself practically begging my 8yr old daughter to watch the next episode of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or installment of The Mandalorian as a means of slowing things down. Weekends are no shorter now than they’ve ever been, and yet the cadence of that same 48hr period often feels dramatically accelerated, which is likely due to being spread, as Bilbo Baggins so eloquently put it in the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
In his outstanding book Four Thousand Weeks; Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman points out that the average life span of a human being in the United States is approximately 80yrs, which equates to four thousand weeks (hence the title) - sadly, that statistic has dropped to more like 77yrs since its publication due to the pandemic. 4,000 weeks. That’s it. That’s all the time we get on this earth to make our mark; to move things forward; to lead a life worth living. The math here may be simple, but the implications are anything but. For a visualization of what 4,000 weeks looks like, click here.
At 87yrs, Mother Teresa had just over 4,500 weeks on this earth. John Lenon, who died at 40yrs, had less than half that at 2,080 weeks. Jesus of Nazareth, who died at 33yrs, had just 1,716 weeks. All 3 of these individuals have had a profound impact on the arc of humanity, and while I think it’s safe to assume that neither you nor I are destined to make such a dent in the universe as they, the scope of what these remarkable humans managed to accomplish in their lifetimes is worth considering. At 36yrs I’ve lived just over 1,900 of my 4,000 weeks, which is approximately 2,600 fewer weeks than Mother Teresa, 180 fewer weeks than John Lenon, and 184 weeks more than Jesus. Interested in a sobering dose of reality? Map out where you currently fall in the chart. Here's where I'm at.
While some might find this morbid, I find it motivating. Age, like time, is relative, and though I still consider myself a relatively young-man, as someone who’s always had somewhat of a “baby face” I’m increasingly beginning to see and feel the impact of 1,900 weeks on my skin and in my bones. Time itself may be infinite, but I’m sobering up to the reality that for me it’s not, and so I’m leaning into a mindset of scarcity while recognizing that I’ve been blessed with abundance. I’m embracing the reality that I literally cannot do everything I’d like to do with the years I have left (which assumes I’m average🤞), and so I’m aggressively pursuing the things I find most important - time with family and friends; work that truly matters; developing deep and meaningful relationships; investing in experiences rather than material objects; and building things that make the world just a little bit better for others.
Which brings me to Musings. Throughout my life, I don’t know that I’ve ever truly excelled at any one thing. I’ve acquired a wide range of skill-sets across any number of fields, but as a result I’ve become somewhat of a generalist - a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” so to speak. And that’s ok. Honestly, in the rapidly changing, ever expanding world in which we live, where content information is increasingly ubiquitous due to new innovations, being a specialist seems to have less and less value in the marketplace. Yes, there are of course exceptions, but try all you want - you’ll never be smarter than Google’s Search or the emerging ChatGPT A.I., meaning becoming pretty good at a lot of things is, at least over the arc of the long run, likely a better plan than being remarkable at one. At the end of the day, in business specifically and in life more generally, the axis around which we all revolve is value creation, and it’s the folks who are successful at leveraging new technologies and then parlaying them into something else who excel in creating value. While I’m no technologist, I’ve managed to ride a few of these tech waves in my own modest ways, which in turn has helped me create value where I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Ideas, intangible though they may be, are tremendously valuable, and so Musings is a space I’ve carved out for sharing my thoughts, feelings, and experiences so that others may find something that resonates. It’s equal parts exercise in self-indulgence and catalyst for conversation. It’s both an excuse to get back to my love of writing and a mechanism for creating positive change. Recognizing that my time is finite, it’s a means to reflect on the past so as to create a better future, which I hope will in turn will help me to live more fully in the present.
As I reread those words, this whole thing sounds both lofty and idealistic (I’d better hit “publish” before my imposter syndrome sets in - more on that in a different post).
So how about this - Musings is my way of creating yet another tributary aimed at contributing to my larger purposes of 1) creating value for others and 2) serving those who seek to serve.
And so, I bring to you…Musings.
With gratitude,