Your One Swing.

There’s this one thing that my Uncle Billy said to me about two weeks ago. It was after my grandma’s funeral. We were sitting on the couch, watching the game, eating chopped liver. We were talking about, I dunno, the Broncos or the chopped liver, probably. Doesn’t really matter now.

But somewhere along the line, Uncle Billy dropped this bit of life advice, and it’s stuck with me: “You get one swing.”

Uncle Billy’s 88 years old. He went to war, married a girl he loved, went fishing more times than anyone else I know, showed up for every birthday and bar mitzvah I can remember. As far as Great-uncles go, he’s been a pretty stellar one.

I’ve heard that bit of advice before, obviously. It’s there on fortune cookies. It’s there in self-help books. Hell, there are people at my office who’ve worn YOLO T-shirts before. (Ironically, but still.)

But none of that quite carries the weight that it does when it comes from someone like your 88-year-old Great-uncle, does it? (And at a funeral, no less!)

One swing. Just go for it.

Alright, Uncle Billy, here goes.

That photo of a golfer comes via Flickr’s Nick Jewell.

11/21/201311/20/2013

Thankful.

As this Thanksgiving comes around, I’ll say this:

I’m thankful for the chance to do the work. To have the chance to work with these people. To have the chance to build something awesome.

I’m thankful for all that. And for the year ahead. I’m thankful for the chance to make it something great.

That photo at top comes via.

11/18/2013

The Importance Of Little Victories.

A week ago, I was looking through my calendar when I realized that I hadn’t been to the gym in a month. Hadn’t run. Hadn’t gotten out for 20 minutes on the elliptical.

Nothing.

And this was after a breakthrough year for me in 2012 where I’d gotten out and really gotten excited about getting in shape. What happened to me this year?

So I got out of bed first thing on Monday and went to the gym. It felt good.

I got out of bed on Tuesday and went again. Back-to-back days. Really good.

And then Wednesday night, after work, I went again. And then the next morning.

Back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Suddenly, I felt like I had momentum. I went out of town for the weekend, and I brought my running shoes. Of course I was going to go running — I’d gotten going again, and I didn’t want to quit.

But it was more than just momentum. By Tuesday, just by going to the gym two days in a row, I was pumped. I’d gotten a little victory, and I was really happy about it.

And every subsequent trip felt like a little win. Running on the treadmill for the first time in a few weeks, making some time to actually stretch…. it all felt really good.

It’s not easy to keep going. But when you’re starting the work, a little win here or there gets you excited. It gives you a reason to believe that you’re on the right path.

Ultimately, you’re working toward bigger wins and bigger goals, but at the start, just feeling like you’re taking a positive first step is huge.

Photo at top comes via.

10/28/201310/27/2013

What Happens When You Add Up All The Work.

That’s a photo of me in 7th grade. I’m in the center, wearing the fireman’s hat. I was shorter then. When I went for a checkup in 8th grade, the doctor said I’d probably top out at 6′.

Then I grew 6 inches in a year. And kept growing.

But a funny thing about that: No one really noticed. Not my family. Or my friends.

Growing 6 inches in a year is a lot, but it happens incrementally. A quarter of an inch here, a half an inch there. The change happens so gradually that you don’t notice what it’s all adding up to.

So we didn’t notice anything — until some cousins from out of town visited, and noticed that I had obviously grown a lot. The news came as a shock to everyone I knew. (Even me, kind of — I had spent the winter complaining about how my entire body hurt all the time, but I wasn’t quite sure why.)

We go through these changes all the time. Little things and alterations that add up, tiny changes in the way we work and the types of work we do. Eventually, they add up to something big.

But when we wake up in the morning, we don’t feel like we’re making big changes. We don’t notice what’s happening all around us. We look at the little picture, and never the big.

Often, it takes an outside force for us to take stock of what’s been going on.

But if you’ve been doing great work, and you’ve been putting in a lot of work, you start to notice what you’ve been building all along. It could be something really great.

10/21/201310/20/2013

Celebrating The Big Moments.

I saw a show at Carnegie Hall on Friday. The band was The Lone Bellow, a really exciting group in the Mumford & Sons/Lumineers vein that’s just starting to get some national attention. The Carnegie Hall show was one of their biggest ever.

The band invited their family to the show. During a break between songs, they told the crowd that the first four or five rows were all family. The mandolin player, Kanene Pipkin, had her dad front and center, and he spent most of the set dancing and waving his arms and cheering.

The best moment of the show came during the encore. After the band had finished a song, the room went dead silent. And then we all heard the voice of Pipkin’s dad, turning around and loudly asking for one of his relatives.

“Dad,” Pipkin said, embarrassed, “we’re trying to play an encore here.”

It was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen at a concert.

And it was also a really amazing reminder: Getting to a stage like that isn’t easy. The Lone Bellow began as a side project. They played shows to tiny crowds, and a few years into their existence, they still haven’t broken through to a huge audience.

But on the night they played Carnegie Hall, they chose to share the evening with the people who’d supported them and believed in them all along. We don’t always take time to celebrate the big moments and breakthroughs, but it was pretty amazing to see the band do just that on Friday night.

They’re a heck of a band. Here’s to many more big nights for you and yours.

10/17/201310/17/2013

The Words You Need.

A few years ago, I saw Florence & the Machine in concert. I was getting over this girl, and I really wanted to hear Florence sing this song of hers, “You’ve Got The Love.” I wanted to hear her sing:

Sometimes it seems that the going is just too rough
And things go wrong no matter what I do
Now and then it seems that life is just too much
But you’ve got the love I need to see me through

I wanted to hear it, and know that maybe the door hadn’t closed on that relationship after all.

Instead, Florence closed with a new song, “No Light, No Light,” which went:

A revelation in the light of day
You can’t choose what stays and what fades away

Which was something I needed to hear. I didn’t want to hear it, but somebody had to say it.

The thing about music is, it has a habit of doing just that. You’re in love, and every song is a love song. You’re heartbroken, and every song reminds you of how hard things can be. You’re in need, and there’s a song to help.

Sometimes, when I need to find that center, I pull out the iPod and go looking for the right song for the moment. Maybe it’s not always what I hoped to hear. But some of the answers are almost always there.

10/14/201310/14/2013

What One Thing Would Screw Up Everything?

So a question I like to ask myself:

Could one single thing screw up everything I’m doing?

If a key part fell through… if a plan didn’t work… if the modem at my office crashed: would that mess with everything?

Right now, I’m dealing with Day 5 of an unexpected internet outage at home. It crashed, and the internet company sent a guy, and he kinda fixed it, and then it crashed again 24 hours later.

Of course, I’m still writing this — because after years of watching the internet crash at inopportune times, I wisened up and bought a backup 4G card.

What I’m saying is this: Plans go to shit rather quickly. And if one little cog in the machine can cause everything to stop functioning, that’s a dangerous thing. Having a backup plan really matters when you’re doing the work.

There’s no excuse for being caught off-guard by a small failure. Have a plan, and then know what happens when that plan goes bad.

09/23/2013

The Thing I Learned From “Lost.”

I was a huge fan of the show “Lost,” and still am. It was an epic show — 6 seasons and 121 episodes. But a lot of “Lost” fans are still mad about the way the show ended.

I always thought that was funny. I stuck with that show for six years. It started when I was in high school. It ended after I graduated college. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent talking about the show with friends, trading theories and sending email after email about it. For six years, me and my friends shared that show. It became ours. There are some episodes and characters in there that I count among my favorite ever.

Which is why I think it’s so funny that fans hate the show because they hate the ending. That makes no sense to me.

Did you enjoy the journey starting in season 1? I’ll ask them. Did you enjoy most of the stories?

Yes, they’ll usually say.

So why does a bad ending invalidate everything that came before? I’ll say. What does it matter that it didn’t close the way you hoped? You watched, and you enjoyed the ride. Isn’t that what matters most?

Yes, endings can be fickle and strange and not all that we hope for. But that doesn’t make the journey any less rewarding. The ride to the end matters.

09/12/201309/09/2013

Stop Worrying About Endings. Just Keep Going On.

A lot of things have been kicking around lately, and it started with this tweet:

Everything works out in the end. If it's not working out, it's not the end.

— Tim Van Loan (@TimIsHungry) September 3, 2013

And I thought: Well, that’s not right at all.

I don’t think about endings that often. I think about the journey a lot, and I think about the next steps, but I don’t think about endings. That’s for another day — somewhere far off, I hope.

But I do think about the journey. I think about the steps I take every day to get somewhere, and the goals I keep setting and resetting for myself as I go. There are a lot of steps — but no true endings in sight.

And when I read a quote like the one above, I think: What’s the flip side of that? If things are working out, does that mean this must be the end? And what happens at the end, anyway? Do I quit? Do I give up on the work I’m doing?

That doesn’t sound like much of a happy ending to me.

So that’s the first thing that’s been kicking around in my head.

And the second is this video that’s been on the internet for a long time. It’s from a Texas high school football playoff game in 1994. One team is up 41-17 with three minutes left in the game, and that’s when the comeback begins. There’s a touchdown to cut the lead, and then a recovered onside kick. And then another touchdown. And another onside kick recovered.

And then another touchdown. And another onside kick.

And then one final touchdown — from 41-17 down to 44-41 up in just three minutes.

Which is where the story should end. Which is where we want it to end.

Except… that’s not where it ends.

Because life isn’t about where it ends; it’s about where you go. It’s about what you do along the way. It’s about what you make of all of this — the good, the bad, the everything else.

We search for endings because stories must end eventually, and each of us is writing our own story. But our stories are not over yet.

We keep going. We keep pushing. We resist the urge to write that ending.

There’s still more to do.

That image at top comes via @_michelada44_.

09/05/201309/05/2013

My Computer Died This Morning, And That’s Probably Okay.

“Life is 10% how you make it and 90% how you take it.” — Irving Berlin

So I woke up this morning, and my laptop died. It died while I was in the middle of writing the daily email to BuzzFeed subscribers, and I tried to restart my laptop twice, and each time the screen came up with an image of a folder wrapped around a blinking question mark, and that was a pretty good indicator that was I screwed.

I’m not that happy about this, obviously. My laptop is non-functional, possibly even dead, and I’ve had it for less than a year. Gah.

But also, there’s this: My parents always told me that there were certain things I couldn’t control, and I shouldn’t worry about them. And I always thought that was kinda stupid.

Because of course I’m going to worry about those things! If my car breaks down, or my computer freaks out, of course I’m going to worry! These things are valuable, and I don’t own a lot of valuable stuff!

And yet, over time, I have started to notice that I worry less about the things I can’t control. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m mellowing, or if it’s just because I’ve got lots to stress about, and so when things break, I just move onto the next thing.

But whatever the case: I found myself not all that mad about the laptop this morning. It happened, it’ll get fixed, and things move on. So it goes.