My Favorite Podcasts

I am almost always listening to a podcast. It's constantly amazing to me how much high quality content is available on the web for free. Of course, there's a lot of crap out there too.

So, to help you avoid the crap, here's a curated list, in no particular order, of my favorites.

1. Against the Rules. Micheal Lewis, author of The Blindside, Moneyball, and The Big Short discusses the decline of referees in American society. I am listening to "The Seven Minute Rule", a show about student loan servicing companies screwing their customers. 
2. Hardcore History. Dan Carlin. Carlin does a deep dive into various historical periods. My personal favorite is "Blueprint for Armageddon", a six part series on World War I. It's over 20 hours of high quality content that I'd put up against any college level course on the Great War. Plus Carlin's voice is awesome.
3. Akimbo. Seth Godin. A quirky podcast in Godin style.
4. Daily Boost. Scott Smith. A nice first thing in the morning pick me up. About 10 minutes of self improvement. 
5. Day1. Short sermons. 
6. Focus on This. Michael Hyatt and Company. Setting goals, etc. 
7. Mom and Dad are Fighting. Slate Magazine podcast on parenting. I listen to a ton of business/leadership/self improvement stuff and I figured I should try something on parenting. The title grabbed my attention. 
8. White Lies. NPR. Seven episode podcast covering the murder of James Reeb, a Boston priest and civil rights worker murder in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Some of locals interviewed last year for the podcast still refer to MLK coming to Selma to "stir up trouble". 
9. The Minimalists. Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Milburn. Watch the Netflix show then listen to the podcast. Hard to believe, but we've got too much shit and businesses are trying to get us to buy more. 
10. The One Thing. Based on the principle in the book. Great weekly podcast on focusing on the "lead domino" and getting stuff done. 
11. Entre Leadership. Dave Ramsey Network. Yes, that Dave Ramsey. 
12. The Tim Ferriss Show. Tim Ferriss. Tim is the author of The Four Hour Work Week and he is an excellent interviewer. The show is long form interviews with thoughts leaders from across the spectrum. 
13. Blackout. Fictional radio drama about a power outage from an unknown source that sends a Maine town into chaos and anarchy. Rami Malek from Mr. Robot and Bohemian Rhapsody plays the lead. 

Any favorites you want to share?

The Psalms and a Spreadsheet. Working to a deadline

One of my favorite passages of scripture is Psalms 90. There’s a lot to learn there, regardless of your faith background. In it, Moses discusses time from God’s perspective.

⁴ For a thousand years in Your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes by,
Or as a watch in the night…

¹⁰ As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,
Or if due to strength, eighty years,
Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow;
For soon it is gone and we fly away.

Time ticks away for us but in the grand scheme it’s a tick of the clock or a passing night. In fact, according to Biomimicry.net if we compressed the age of the earth to a calendar year, humans appear on December 31 @ 11:36 pm.

And comparing the years of a life to Universal time is even more humbling. 70 or 80 years out of 13.8 billion. 0.00000054%.

But I digress.  The key message is in verse 12.

So teach us to number our days,
That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

It’s good to remember that we are all working to a deadline. Whether it’s close of business Friday or the end of a life, we don’t have forever. By recognizing and numbering our days (and hours and minute) we can appreciate how limited our time is and spend those weeks days hours minutes doing what matters most, so that when we look back on a life we have something we can take pride in.  

And I promised a spreadsheet, so here it is. I’ve mentioned before that I love a good visualization. I heard about this starting with an interview with Tim Urban, then his Ted Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator and finally his blog, Wait but Why.

This is his 90-year life in weeks. I added a few milestones of my own in gold. Moving overseas, first job, wedding, kids. Dark blue is the time that’s past. The grey at the end is unknown. Maybe I don’t make it to 90. Maybe I end up with a physical or mental ailment and I don’t have the quality or ability to contribute at the end. I don’t know. Nobody does.

The red stripe represents the almost full year this blog has been stirring around in my mind. After all this it’s not a big deal, but it’s been consuming my thoughts and floating around in my head as an “undone” all this time.

The (shrinking) light blue is the Future. There’s a lot of it and at the same time not very much.

Unknown. Potential. Possibility. Opportunity.

Oh Shit. At the End, somewhere, is the Dead-line.

Time in 4 parts

I’ve had several blogs on the subject of Time on my mind for the better part of a year, and now with 2019 well underway I am finally getting around to it.

Why the delay? Too many ideas. The pursuit of the “perfect blog”, whatever that is. My goal at the beginning of 2018 was 250 words, 2x per week, 50 weeks. I ended up with 27 posts. Not sure of the word count, and about 5,000 views (that was cool).

So now, almost a year later, I am getting back to Time and the bi-weekly blog goal.

I have three to four parts in mind:

• The Psalms
• A spreadsheet 
• Pink Floyd
• The Ten Commandments

Hopefully that’s enough of a teaser to get you back.

Tollie