I'm overdue on writing in this blog. I tell myself I should write, shame myself for not writing, then shame myself for not showing myself a little grace. It's been a rough couple of years (understatement of the decade).

As I've been grappling with everything from professional problems to familial disasters to health concerns, I recently had the epiphany that I can take negative things one of two ways: I can accept them and move forward or I can lament them and waste even more precious time.

In an effort to move my mindset more toward the latter, I've taken to daily gratitude exercises that I'm calling the Gratitude Haiku™. Even though it's not a traditional haiku, its structure is influenced by haiku. Every day, I sit down and reflect on the following:

3 – Ways that others showed me kindness today

5 – Things that I am grateful for today

3 – Ways that I showed others kindness today

There's no requirement for each of these items to be in haiku format (bonus points if you do), but I've found it to be a helpful exercise to both recognize all of the blessings in my life while also pushing myself to be that same force of good in others' lives.

I've come to the realization that I currently have absolutely nothing to look forward to in life (in the short term). Presently, this is a very ominous and depressing thought.

Nothing? Literally nothing?!

Nope. No travel, no family gatherings. Not even exciting weekend plans. the coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20?? has killed off any semblance of normalcy and left us all wondering what the purpose of life is without any of the traditional filler.

It's not to say the filler is a bad thing; in fact, those weekend jaunts to the cabin or pizza nights with friends often recharge us in ways that we haven't experienced in months. But the reality is that it's all still filler. I believe the true purpose of life is to do things beyond the self. Think about it: when was the last time you did something completely selfless for another person and didn't feel good afterward. Not a single instance comes to mind. And while lending others a helping hand is largely impossible these days, what is within reach—and the prerequisite to going beyond the self—is to start with the self.

Wait, what?

I know, that sounds incredibly contradictory. I just got done saying how we need to turn our attention outward to feel fulfilled. And while that's true, you can't give others 100% of your ideal self if you're not actually living as your ideal self. If you're a shell of the person you want to be, then the maximum you'd be capable of giving to others is that very shell. Inherently, to take care of others, you must first take care of yourself.

This doesn't mean the traditional "treat yo-self" mindset. Instead, it means focus on your soul or spirit to make sure it's in good, working order before you turn your attention outward. You wouldn't build a structure on quicksand; nor should you begin to assemble your life's works on an ego under liquefaction.

So,  if we truly are stuck in this isolating mire, and we all have a little (or more) work to do on ourselves, then this coronavirus crisis could, in fact, be the greatest godsend of our colorful, yet eerily succinct, lives.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the predominant reason you aren't where you want to be in life is due to lack of focus. And maybe that's not your fault. But it can still be the cause of a lack of progress toward a goal. The troubling thing is that there are TONS of great reasons (or excuses 😉) as to why you're not able to focus on things that move you toward your goals. Bills, childcare obligations, cooking, cleaning, home improvement. You name it, you probably have to do it. But it's distracting you from your goals.

And I get it, we can't avoid some of those things. If your heat goes out in the dead of winter, you've got to get it fixed. But you are in control of your other distractions. For many of us, these are things like social media or Netflix consumption. I do my fair share of participating in those time sinks. But limiting these types of activities is imperative to making progress in life. After all, most of the successful people you see in life are the result of optimizing toward a select few skills. In other words, they know how to say NO to things. Learning how to say NO is unbelievably important. The only finite resource we have in life is time. If you let other things monopolize this time, you'll never get it back.

One of the best ways I've learned how to say NO to things is to put together a list of everything I want/need to do and put a prioritization next to it. The easiest way to do this is to take a loose leaf sheet of paper and begin to write what comes to mind. If you choose wide-ruled paper, you'll have 26 opportunities; college-ruled comes with a slick 31 lines. Begin writing your short-term tasks. Ideally you won't fill the 26 or 31 lines with these tasks. These tend to be the 'must do' items. From there, fill in the 'wants'. These could be things like 'learn how to cook' or 'learn a new language'. Ignoring the 'must do' items, put a number next to each of the 'wants'. These longer-term items are things that generally take more time to plan and act upon.

Using this process, I've narrowed in on the few things that are most important to me, right now, to strive toward. I am constantly intrigued by new and exciting areas of life, but I now know to be truly great at something requires the diligence to say NO to a lot of the other fruit life has to offer. I'm still working on this every day, but I'll keep updating you on this blog with how this focus progresses.

There are two modes of life: producing and consuming. As a human being, you only ever tend to exist in one of those modes at any given moment in time. Producing is when you're creating something that you or others will consume at some point in the future. Consuming is when you use something that someone else or something else has produced.

I've found that I'm happiest when I bias toward production, as opposed to consumption. But the consumption mode is found everywhere: Netflix, Facebook, books, podcasts. So much of our lives are consumed…by consuming. This is part of why people crave creative outlets. Creative outlets are a solid way of switching into the production mode of life. Cooking, cleaning, writing, painting. Pretty much anything where you modify the environment around you is a form of production. And producing makes us feel good. Whether we're producing for ourselves, our pets, our spouses and children, or complete strangers. We feel good when we produce. But we don't generally feel as good when we consume.

Think about the last time you got sucked into Facebook or binge-watched Netflix for most of your Saturday afternoon. When you realize that your time is gone and there was nothing to show for it, it tends to create a pretty depressing feeling.

Now think about the last time you did some serious producing. Maybe it was playing an instrument or reorganizing the garage? Possibly sewing a quilt for a loved one or preparing a delicious anniversary feast? There exists a deep feeling of satisfaction after you create something and put a minor dent in the universe.

Because there's a clear imbalance between how producing and consuming makes us feel, I aim to do more producing than consuming in my life. But that's really, really hard. The news, podcasts, social media, and streamed TV all make it difficult to spend more time producing than consuming. If you find a way to close all of that off and spend some deep work time every day producing, I promise you that you'll feel quite a bit more fulfilled in life.

Eight years ago, I don't think I knew what the word procurement meant. Four years ago, I thought of purchasing merely as the process through which I acquire something in life in exchange for something else (usually money). Fast forward to 2020 and somehow I find myself a buyer at Volvo Cars in their Indirect Procurement group. It was an interesting path that led me to a role in procurement, but that's another story for another day.

When I started with Volvo nearly four years ago, I was in an engineering role and learned about this group called Procurement that would buy things on behalf of me, the stakeholder. At the time it was pretty baffling.

Why do I need someone to buy things for me? I buy things every day!

To this day, I feel like anyone can learn Purchasing. It's something we do every day, but with a caveat: most people aren't great at buying things. But they're not great at buying things because they're bad at facilitating the transaction. No, they're bad because they don't understand leverage, negotiations, economics, and basic price theory. Ultimately, most people don't understand that they have options. And options build leverage. Without options, you're stuck paying the price the market will bear. And if you're the only one buying the good and there is only one person selling it, you don't have a whole lot of leverage. If you don't have leverage, you have to find ways to generate it.

At this point in my Procurement 'career', I have a few favorite ways to build leverage. But all of them come down to options: a purchasing motivation without options can, in theory, lead to an infinite price if you have infinite funds. But as a consumer, you generally don't have infinite funds. With a company, that's a different story. Corporate pockets tend to be a whole lot deeper than an individual's pockets, which is why industrial goods are so much more expensive than consumer goods. It's also why the US is such a litigious society: the size of the prize is enormous.

What I find most rewarding about Procurement is that it is one half of the core of business: the purchase. The other half is the foil of Purchasing: sales. With Purchasing being so integrally tied to the fundamentals of business, there are an absolute treasure trove of incredibly important business lessons that I observe in my day to day work. Everything from understanding top line growth to the risks of thin profit margins. Overall, if you ever have a chance to participate in a formalized procurement process, I would highly recommend it. You'll get firsthand lessons in everything from leverage to pricing structures to negotiations. And it will make you a more well-rounded businessperson as a result.

The term 'bright lines' comes from a 2017 book entitled "Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free". The book focuses on setting 'bright lines' or clear boundaries that we do not cross under any circumstances. The book focuses these boundaries around eating and diet. However, I believe the concept can be applied to a plethora of areas outside of diet. Below, I've listed a few of the 'bright lines' that I've adopted to date. I'll revise the list as I adopt new ones or revise old ones.

1. One book at a time; only permitted to buy a new book after finishing another one.
   
   In the past, I've found that I tend to pick up a new book, read through it voraciously for a few days, then slow my pace to a crawl to hang on every word. Once the pace slows to a certain point, another book will catch my eye. Eventually, after the original book sits idle for a few weeks, my wife ends up shelving it. This is highly unproductive and stems from shiny object syndrome.
   
   
2. One task at a time; always drive a task to completion or a road block before moving on to the next task.
   
   Similar in principle to the last bright line, it's very easy to look at your laundry list of things to do and try to focus on all tasks at once. But if you work on everything at once, you won't be able to move the needle on any one task.
   
   We are serial beings and, as much as we'd like to think we can, multitasking is not a skillset anyone excels at. So why make minute progress on a handful of tasks when you can make true progress on a couple of items?
   
   
3. Only consume one caffeinated beverage each day
   
   This one is unbelievably hard, but I believe it's the right thing to do. Everything in life is best done in moderation, and caffeine consumption is no different. Every coffee drinker can vividly remember the last time they consumed too much. You were jittery, sweaty, and maybe a little bit irritable. Some is good, too much yield adverse effects.

This morning began as any normal Saturday morning does. I woke up, headed downstairs, and put on a kettle to make some freshly brewed French press coffee. I've been using Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee and a friend of mine recommended that I try out his ratio to better reap the cognitive benefits of the mushrooms (non-psychedelic, of course).

As the allotted time for the recipe came to a close and I pressed the plunger, I pulled out one of my favorite coffee cups: an ornate, gold leafed china cup from Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. From the start of the pour, I knew I was in trouble. The steamy coffee gradually creeped up the side of the cup, closing in the on lip. All the while, the liquid in the carafe was draining, approaching the bottom at a perceptible rate.

It became clear with less than a centimeter from the top of the cup that the coffee would be brimming. Now, this isn't generally the worst thing in the world, but I don't like black coffee. I prefer to add milk or cream, but there was no room and I can't drink blisteringly hot coffee to sip it down. While I waited on the coffee to cool, I added some cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and cardamon. As the spices floated on the surface of the brimming cup I made another startling realization: I can't stir the spices in because a spoon would displace volume in the cup, resulting in an overflow.

This left me no choice: I had to lean down and slurp all of the freshly sprinkled spices. A blend of powdered cinnamon and hot black coffee sloshed against the back of my palate; not the best flavor in the world, but also not the worst. Then came the biting flavor of the cloves and nutmeg, followed by the delicate, but overpowering cardamon. It tastes like a burnt, sugar-free cinnamon role dunked in a cup of black diner coffee.

After I suffered through the first inch or so of coffee and spice clumps, I finally had the room in the cup to add milk, drop in a spoon, stir the remaining spices in, and take my first enjoyable sip of the not-so-warm brew.

Sipping on coffee, I reflected on the events that had transpired. The whole twisted scenario felt a lot like life. Your life, your time, is the cup. There are essentially two constraining modes in life: empty and filled up.

1) If your cup is empty, you have ample opportunity to fill it up and to add things to a not-so-busy life.

2) If your cup is brimming, you can't add anything. If you do, it'll just overflow and run out of the cup. You might be able to add certain things to your cup, but it's at the expense of the things already in the cup.

Things get more interesting when you look beyond the fullness of the cup. I tried to add some spices to the cup. These would be things that could improve all of the substance in the glass. But if your cup is full, you can't add those spices. It's the same with busyness in life: if you're so busy that you can't add any spices to life, you'll forever be stuck with bland, black coffee.

Even if you have room in your cup for those spices, if you don't have a way to mix them in, they'll never be able to be integrated into the whole contents of the cup. You'll never have a homogenous mixture. Mixing in spices requires a spoon, but in life the spoon is a change of routine or structure. If you don't have the bandwidth to experiment with disrupting your routine, then it doesn't matter what spices you add to life; you will never be able to fully integrate them.

The final thing I added to my coffee was milk. Milk, cream, butter: all of these additions make coffee more palatable. The same is true of life: without the room in your cup to add something that makes the rest of the contents more enjoyable, you're stuck with bland, boring, black coffee. In life, milk would be the extracurriculars that make things a bit more exciting: vacations, new hobbies, intramural sports leagues. But the catch is that, even if you have the room to add the milk, you still need to have the room to add the spoon so you can properly mix the milk into the coffee.

While it may sound superfluous to conflate Saturday morning coffee with the concept of an overburdened life, the parallels are quite apparent. As I go into a new week, I plan to be more aware of how full my cup really is so I can make sure I have room for the spices of life, the milk that softens the acridity of life, and the spoon that enables you to mix the former into your very busy life. By maintaining a healthy fullness of your cup, you're able to pursuing crafting the perfect concoction of what life has to offer.

The Infinite Game is one of Simon Sinek's newest books. Sinek is probably best known for his 2014 TED Talk entitled "How great leaders inspire action" and his book on the same topic, Start With Why.

The Infinite Game starts out with a discussion on infinite games as compared to finite games. Finite games have a predefined set of rules that players are usually aware of when starting the game. Finite games have a finite start, finite milestones, and finite ends. An example would be a football game: it is made up of quarters, halves, a start, and an end. There is a defined goal (scoring points) and a set of rules governing how that goal is achieved. Once a finite milestone is met (in football, it is a time limit), there is a clear winner and a clear loser.

Infinite games are a totally different way of playing a game. Infinite games have no defined start and no defined end. The rules are an amalgamation of rules and the validity of rules can change by the hour, minute, or second. Infinite games are not winnable. The only way to win an infinite game is to continue playing it.

This concept reminded me of the notion of "The Game". The only way to lose The Game is to start thinking about the game. An infinite game is similar; the only way to lose is to stop playing.

An infinite game vs. a finite game, as Sinek describes it, seemed very similar in principle to a fixed versus growth mindset. A fixed mindset poses stringent limitations on the capabilities of the individual: you are only as good at X as you ever will be. An individual with a growth mindset, on the other hand, approaches each life situation with an open mind, ready to absorb new learnings.

While an infinite/finite game and a growth/fixed mindset aren't identical concepts, I do believe individuals who maintain predominantly growth mindsets are much more successful in playing infinite games. They aren't there to score points or to reach milestones. They are there to play the game. And if they happen to reach milestones along the way, it's merely cause for celebration. Growth-minded individuals may even set milestones or goals to achieve while playing their infinite game, but they by no means stake their self worth on achieving those milestones. They only use the milestones as an indicator of growth.

Another interesting concept from the book was that of 'being the best' or 'winning' or 'beating the competition'. These are phrases we have heard innumerable leaders of companies trumpet over the past decade. But to be the best, you need only position yourself such that you can keep playing in the game. If that is your goal, you can perpetually achieve it; but if you goal is to 'win' the game, you will never be satiated.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

By this, I mean nothing. Don't do any research. Don't understand the target demographic. A bad salesperson will ignore the buyer's background. They won't care who they are, what they do for a living, or why they may be a buy from you. A bad salesperson won't care about their needs.

Be pushy

A bad salesperson is pushy and all they care about is closing. There's a well-known phrase in sales: "Always be closing". They even abbreviate it as ABC. But the thing is, Always Be Closing only works if you care about the buyer's problems. A bad salesperson doesn't care about the buyer's problems, they just want to sling their product.

Follow up (too) often

Bad sales people follow up often. So much that you haven't even had a chance to read their previous sales communication. To be a truly awful sales person, send an email on a Friday afternoon, then follow up again on Monday morning and inquire as to whether the prospect has had a chance to read the previous email.

Send impersonal emails

If you're trying to be bad at sales, be sure to send an impersonal email. Cold emails are inherently salesy, but they don't necessarily make you a bad sales person. To be bad, remove any personal elements about the recipient from the email. Personal touches like addressing the recipient by name have got to go. Don't ask them any questions. Don't comment on any of their background or past successes. Just launch straight into your sales pitch and you'll certainly be bad at sales. If you'd like to be really bad, be sure to BCC the recipient and address them as "Hello" or "Dear Valued Customer". These (im)personal touches are the hallmarks of a bad salesperson.

Don't negotiate

Bad sales people don't negotiate. In fact, they think their offering and price are so good that it's an insult if the buyer wants to negotiate. If you want to be bad at sales, start the conversation by saying "If your payment terms don't match XXX, then we won't be doing business together".

View your customers as cash cows

If you're looking for a good way to be bad at sales, view your customers as cash cows. That's all they are anyway. They're a bank account you debit from via profitable projects. Bad sales people lead a conversation with, "See Mr. Prospect, we're really looking to partner with customers who can give us XX millions of dollars per year in revenue." Bad sales people do this; good sales people don't. It's a great way to make your prospect feel marginalized and nonessential.

Be entirely transactional

People who buy things are, first and foremost, people. And if you buy stuff, you want to be treated like a king. Like you matter. Like you're the most important person to the seller. If you want to be bad at sales, don't do those things. Don't ask the person about their problems. Don't discuss options or pricing. Don't be flexible. Express your will and exert it onto the buyer. Make them bend to you. And above all, make everything as transactional as possible.

Smile like you (don't) mean it

Most people feel good when you smile at them. If they feel good, they tend to buy from you. A genuine, well-placed smile can do wonders for your top line. Don't make this rookie mistake. If you don't want to be good at sales, be sure to never let a Duchenne smile reveal those pearly whites. Do just the opposite. Either don't smile or fake smile; dealer's choice. Not smiling will definitely turn off a prospect, but a fake smile is even more sinister. It makes people squirm with discomfort and they'll likely recount to their colleagues about how much you looked like the Cheshire cat.

Below, I've written up a few of my thoughts on business. This is a living post and I'll update it as new thoughts arise. Over time, some may begin to contradict one another, but I'll do my best to limit the cacophony.

There are two main types of businesses:

• Products
• Services

Product-based businesses offer a one-time purchase of a good. This good is something that is priced according to market demand and the existing supply chain.

Service-based businesses offer a service that is priced based on market labor rates, market demand, and existing supply of said service.

Both types of businesses create and deliver value to the buyer.

Businesses solve problems. People pay to have you solve their problems because problems take time to solve and time is money.

To make money, you must solve a problem. If a product does not sell, it means people are more willing to either solve the problem themselves or leave the problem unsolved/unresolved.

Not all problems demand to be solved.

Solving problems is the only ethical way to do business.

What exactly is contentment anyway?

To me, contentment is a matter of being at peace with the current moment or situation. This peace comes from the understanding that once a moment is here, it has already passed. If moments perpetually pass us by, then we have no control over things in the moment. And if we have no control, we should not busy our minds with worry. This lack of busyness of the mind results in contentment.

Apathy is the other side of the coin. When you are cognizant that you have little control over the moment or situation, but still wish to control it, the resultant feeling is a sort of desperation. This desperation, if left unaddressed, culminates in the individual giving up and feeling apathy.

To remain content and prevent feelings of apathy, one must relinquish control over the moment. When you do that, you find an inner peace that cannot otherwise exist.