Month: September 2017

Tomorrow will be my first day in my new home office. For the last year and a half, I have been working from the couch, coffee shops, and the occasional co-working facility. As I picture how I will keep track of all of my projects in a visual representation on my wall, I thought about…

As I was watching my five-year-old today, I saw him react with surprise at his own success during an outdoor activity. We had driven 30-minutes to a state park in Georgia where volunteers had set up lots of outdoor stations. Canoe rides, archery, BB guns, rock climbing, fishing, and more. For my son, there seem…

Have you ever become hyper-aware of a particular muscle group in your body? I have. Around 8:00 pm last night I started being acutely aware of my forearms. Here’s what I have been doing differently for the last week: Typing more and using my mouse in weird positions until my office is set up again…

If we are focusing on intentional interactions with others, it is necessary for us to know what it would look like to succeed at intentionality and what it would look like were we to fail. Today we add the concept of The Crab Mentality. Crab mentality, sometimes referred to as crabs in the bucket (also barrel, basket or…

My wife and I were finishing up the last of our move from living with family to our new rental home just five minutes down the road. We ran out of boxes and were getting the last items by shoving them into black plastic garbage bags. On one of the trips out to the car,…

As I was searching for a way to trade services or barter with those in my community, I found a site called Simbi. The name is a reference to Symbiotic Relationships: Symbiotic relationships are a special type of interaction between species. Sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful, these relationships are essential to many organisms and ecosystems, and…

There I stood, electric hedge trimmers in one hand and a ninety-nine-foot extension cord in the other. On the ground in front of me lay a one-foot extension cord. At this moment I had three items that were essentially useless. There was the hedge trimmer which now had no power, and two wildly different links…

For this week’s Sunday Improv Experiment I will be taking sets of three random words from creativitygames.net, saying what it makes me think of, and then writing a bit of the story behind it. I will state word 1 + word 2 + word 3 from the generator and then = my first thought. Wish me…

I learned about GOTE in my freshman year of college as I was studying theatre. GOTE, which stands for “Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and Expectation”, is an acronym devised by Robert Cohen and was introduced as a way to approach playing a character and telling great stories. I took that approach and applied it to improvisation,…

When a company, team, or individual goes about creating a strategy, they like to have as close to a full picture as possible of all the details to give themselves the best chance of heading in the right direction. But what about times when you don’t have a full picture? When I am working, there…