The Purpose of Life

The purpose of life is to identify, understand and follow one's true nature and to help others identify, understand and follow theirs.

True Difference

Remember: It is what you actually do and not simply what you want to do that makes all the difference.

Make Wind Power: Not War

It is time to harness the energy of the wind and help fuel the economic conditions of the USA.

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Optimistically Speaking

I must admit that I am an unwavering optimist. When I look at situations, it is my nature to find a way to succeed and to thwart those that present the opposing view. I will gladly and willingly take their most dire fears and work to find solutions, but I can not join with them in their dark tunnels. That is not my way and never will be my way, because I hate dark tunnels.

The achievement of success starts with the belief that one will succeed. It is not rational or practical to think that success starts with the vision of failure. The way to ensure success is to take all of the possible failures and establish a way to protect oneself (or ones initiative) against them. For each failure potential that you plan or craft a solution for, you can do nothing but become even more adamant concerning your ability to succeed.

Anyone that says that pessimism is a hallmark of good planning should be cast into the dark tunnel of their most dreaded nightmares and only pulled free when they repent for having such an ill advised beginning. Take your fears and concerns and use them as weapons against their occurrence. Take your commitment and use it as a light to illuminate the path to success, taking careful aim at the snipers that attempt to darken your path.

Success is a given if the vision is clear, the team is skilled and the march to the goal is done with one step in front of the other, always keeping sight of the finish line.

Empathy as a Pillar of Leadership

There are many pillars that hold up the structure defined as leadership, one of which is a strange pillar indeed. When one thinks of leaders, it is often with the sense of setting vision, driving teams, resolving issues and giving inspiring speeches. However one of the most important characteristics of a leader is the ability to practice empathy: taking into account the feelings or thoughts of others.

When a leader defines a vision, they need to make it understandable for the team they are addressing. They can’t use big terms if the collective team has a limited vocabulary, and they can’t speak of advanced technology if they are equally limited in that area. Likewise, they can’t speak in simple terms if the team is advanced in vocabulary, technology or any other aspect where staying simple will reduce respect for the vision as well as the visionary.

When driving teams to reach new levels of achievement, it is crucial that the leader be able to sense the mood of the team and the individuals. It is not the same pep talk that will motivate each individual, so empathy of whom the person is, what they care about, or what you can help them focus on is critical. When pushing the team as a whole, it is vital to know what works for them in combination, as it will be different than what works for each person individually.

To make issues go away, to clear roadblocks takes a very analytical approach that is always spiced with empathy. Issues need champions and the wrong champion for an issue creates another issue. Therefore, it is important to know enough about the issue to choose the right person to solve it. This requires an empathetic eye towards who would meet the requirement of skill, concern and motivation to turn the issue into an opportunity for success.

Lastly, to inspire teams or individuals the leader needs to have empathy that goes deep to the core. To drive people to do mighty things means that you have to allay their fears and replace it with a strong sense of vision. To bring people and teams to a heightened level of accomplishment it is necessary to suspend what works for the leader, what gets him or her up in the morning, and they need to find what will get the team up and keep them going until they are successful.

Leadership without empathy is an empty room with the lights out.

Sympathy versus Action

In life there are choices we make every moment of every day. One of the choices that can seed a great number of other choices is whether we approach life proactively or reactively. In this vein the choice of seeking sympathy for our failures, issues, or trials versus taking action to learn from our failurs, resolve our issues, overcome our trials is integral to our view of whether we live life or have the events of life control us.

It is virtually impossible to seek sympathy from others and, at the same time, take action to resolve our problems. You can not do both at the same time.

Chosing to take action to resolve problems therefore eliminates the need to seek sympathy since the problem becomes a thing of the past. If a problem can not be solved after you've performed you best efforts to resolve it, then you need to take the experience and learning from that situation and feel comfort in your new found knowledge. Learn from the unresolved problem and consider that learning to be the success you seek. That experience should give you awareness of how to avoid that problem in the future, and in doing so, give you comfort that something good has been achieved from something not so good.

When the question is "Do I seek sympathy from others versus take action?" the answer should always be "Take Action".

Stadium of Angels

Many years ago, not sure if it was late 80s or early 90s, I had a vision that would later find its way back to me in the most amazing way. At the time I lived in Massachusetts and my two brothers had joined me there over the course of roughly 5 years time. We would often travel back to the upstate region of New York, traveling through Albany, through Little Falls, and on to Herkimer, as well as other towns in the region.

On several occasions, as we traveled west on route 5 through Little Falls, I mentioned to my brothers (whichever ones were with me) that on the west-most edge of Little Falls I had a vision of a very unique stadium for sporting events and concerts. What made this stadium unique was that I saw it being built overtop of route 5 from the hills on the north, spanning the road to the lower field to the south. The fields ran along the West Canada Creek and provided a beautiful setting for additional venues such as scenic restaurants along the water.

This stadium was to be the only one in existence, built in such a manner and people would come from all over to visit the stadium and attend the events held there, parking in the south side parking areas. They would get the thrill of sitting above an active roadway while watching the game or concert as it took place below.

They would kid me about it; ask me "what are you gonna do, build it", etc. And my reply would generally be that I envisioned that someday this stadium would be built, but at the time it was as if it already existed, and we would continue on to Herkimer.

Well this passed with time and the trips stopped and the vision faded, as most visions do.

In 1994 I met Tracy Lee on-line in AOL when I became CEO of an on-line company called the Virtual Office Complex, which never really took off. However the relationship between Tracy and I did, and we began planning how we might someday meet. I would often say that I could envision angels coming into a stadium at night, filling in the open seats, though they remained standing, with each carrying a lit candle.

It was my view that they were coming into the stadium to pray for us, that we would have the opportunity to some day meet. This vision grew stronger as the days passed, and more and more angels flooded the stadium until is shown like a bright star that could be seen from the heavens.

We did meet, in a story that is too long to tell with this one, and I ended up moving to Hawthorne, NY to live with Tracy Lee and her two children Keith and Chelsea. One day, a month or so after I moved in, we were out for a walk, and I told her the story of the crazy vision I had during my travels through Little Falls with my brothers. She looked at me as if she had seen an angel standing behind me.

I asked her what was wrong and she proceeded to tell me a story that occurred around the same time as my vision story. It was during a trip with her previous husband and Keith and Chelsea as they were returning back from Lake George, north of Albany. As they reached the NY Thruway, Tracy said that she wanted to go west to a small city called Little Falls. When asked "why go there?" she said because she wanted to bring her husband and her son to a baseball stadium that was the most unique stadium anyone has ever built. They were baseball fans and she thought they would be excited.

Laughter filled the car, because they knew there wasn't a stadium in Little Falls and they were as serious as Tracy Lee was in her thinking that there was one. She won the argument and they went west on the Thruway to the obscure city of Little Falls. Tracy spent an hour driving all over the city looking feverously for this unique, famous stadium, but to no avail. There was no stadium and there was only laughter greeting her on the long drive home to Hawthorne.

This story was confirmed by Keith when we finished out walk, who remembered it like it was yesterday. "We thought she was crazy, looking for a stadium in Little Falls."

Was there a stadium or was it a vision shared by only two people who would one day meet. Crazier things have happened, but this one happened to us - invoked by something supernatural. Maybe the angels were beginning to fill in this unique stadium long before I saw them. Just maybe.

Diving in Head First

Yup, that's right. At the ripe young age of 11 I started diving off heights that are considered by many to be insane. At the age of 12 I took my first dive off of Butts Bridge in Herkimer, NY. A mere 45 feet from the bridge's cement railing to the 15 feet of water below. It required that you curve your body once you entered the water or you would sink your hands and head into the muck of the bottom of the West Canada Creek.

This might seem less nuts, but the problem I had was that I wear glasses because I am near-sighted. That means that I can't see anything at a distance. So ... when I'm preparing to dive from 10, 40 or 70 feet, I can't see the details of where I'm diving. To make up for this physical challenge I would drop a rock or stick or pebble and time how long it took to hit the water. That would show me how long I was to keep my dive before I brought my hands above my head to break the water upon entry.

If I didn't break the surface of the water correctly, then I would break my neck at heights of 50+ feet. I would lock my left hand around my right wrist and, depending on the hardness of the water or the height of the dive, my arms would get ripped along my body because of the intense impact.

Diving takes skill to know whether to do a swan dive (arms out to the sides with an arched back) versus a jack-knife (holding my ankles) as I dropped to the water below. In each dive style it was necessary to bring my arms into a locked position just before hitting the water. Luckily I'm a born drummer, so timing was never an issue.

I remember one time I was attempting a dive, at Trenton Falls, NY (1st hole) that required that I clear roughly 10 feet of cliff rock to make it to the water about 30 feet below. Everyone said I was crazy, but I just hooked my sneakers to the edge of the ledge I was on and used every bit of body strength I had to push off in hopes of clearing the rocks. To add a little distance to my dive I did a jack-knife so that my legs were further into the dive than if I did a swan. I missed the cliffs with about 5 inches to spare and made the dive. Needless to say, I didn't see the need to prove that one twice.

Another crazy dive was at the Train Bridge in Herkimer, NY where the river was usually on 5 feet deep near the abutment that we would jump off the 28 foot bridge into. We wore sneakers because as soon as you hit the water you were making hard contact with the rocks and had to push off to bounce back up into a standing position. When it rained this water got to about 7 feet deep with a massive current that brought the muddy water slamming against the bridge structure, making these near perfect, but insane conditions to dive off the bridge.

To dive into this small (2 foot wide) slot you had to move several railing poles to the right, on the bridge above to get the correct angle. Then I would dive into the water in a racing dive (sort of) and make sure that my hands were in front so I could push off the rock bottom to keep from smashing my head and becoming a West Canada Creek floater. That's one dive that took a lot of skill and confidence to do without ending up in the hospital or the morgue.

The reason I'm relaying this is because these dives took skill and confidence. We weren't crazy. We never drank or did anything to blur the mind so we could stay focused. The one thing this taught me was that if you combine skill and confidence you could achieve the most amazing things. I have used this same approach throughout my many years in the software industry.

I don't take on a project or start a company unless I know that I have the right team/skill. And it is through that team and the vision I develop of what we're doing that makes/keeps me confident that we will be successful - and to date we have always been able to achieve what others have thought was an act of a crazy person.

Enough said on that topic.