Hell Yes

In the past when I've done my resolutions as I start to write them out I've always asked myself "what else"? My approach to 2018 is different. 2018 is the year of the Hell Yes. Part of this line of thought is the usual December thoughts of wrapping up the year and thinking about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead. This year has an additional consideration; my looming 50^th in January. 

As an aside, I had to laugh last month when some co-workers received black balloons for their 30^th and 40^th birthdays. I suppose I’ll have dead flowers or something similar to look forward to.

But back to the subject at hand. When I started on my 50^th year goals, I thought about the number 50. Wouldn’t it be great to do 50 things in my 50^th year? Then I started to list them out and after I got past a few they were getting pretty lame, or they were things I wasn’t committed to.

And I continued to think about Essentialism, the book we read for our company book club earlier this year. There is a line in the book that says something like “if it’s not a Hell Yes, it’s a no”.

2018 is the year of Hell Yes (and plenty heck no). I am stripping away many of the items on my “50 List”. I’m cutting things off my to do list. I challenged my team to come up with their own Hell Yes for 2018 (at least one, no more than three).

And then commit, overcommit, to accomplishing the Hell Yeses. What if you spent the year executing the handful of things you are most passionate about? At work, what would be the impact on your organization if everyone found their Hell Yeses? And what would be positive side effects of all the supporting actions (or inactions) required to execute on your list? Imagine all the crap that would be eliminated.

Hell Yes. 2018 (and 50) is going to be a heckuva year.

The Last Supper

Came across this in a back issue of Plough. The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Salvador Dali.
“not a single philosophic, moral, aesthetic or biological discovery allows the denial of God.”

It's supposed to be a sanctuary

I know it's too soon, but here goes.

Twenty something killed during the church hour at First Baptist Sutherland Springs, Texas. No details yet, but odds are it's another angry white guy with easy access to guns. Same old same old. 

But this time it was in a church, and given the hour, presumably it was in the sanctuary during worship service. 

The sanctuary. Merriam Webster defines sanctuary as "the most sacred part of a religious building; a place for worship; a place of refuge and protection." Today, thanks to the proliferation of guns in our society, the sanctuary in a small south Texas church became the opposite of all that. It was a place for fear and mayhem and death. It's the worst mass shooting in a church. It's unbelievable that we can even have a data point for that, but we do. According to the Mother Jones mass shooting database, this was the 5th mass shooting in a church, with a total body count of 57. 

And the weak, impotent "thoughts and prayers" from our political class (Trump, Pence, Tx Gov Abbot, Paul Ryan) make me want to puke. In my personal image of God, he's pretty pissed too. He demands action. Each one of them holds the power to actually do something, but they won't. 

Death, prayers, nothing, repeat. And so it goes. 

Healthcare is hard.

Health care is hard.

My benefits annual enrollment period opened at work this week. I've always been fortunate to have a good job with a good company that offers employees a variety of benefits options. I have four health insurance companies to choose from with five plans each for a total of 20 choices. Premiums range from $600 per year to $20,000 per year for my family of 5 with varying deductibles, out of pocket maximums and choices of doctors. It comes with an 80 page "Benefits Buyer's Guide", webinars, modeling tools, and regular reminders to make sure we sign up. And I am extremely grateful to work for a company that helps to absorb the cost of my family's health care and tries to offer options that meet their employees' needs.

The choices are complicated and much of it boils down to knowing what expenses you are most likely to have for your current conditions and a gamble on whether you'll get expensively sick, along with how flexible you want to be with your choice of doctors. A somewhat informed roll of the dice. It's a heck of a way to run one sixth of our economy ($3.2 trillion or almost $10,000 per person).

It's complicated. And I'm a pretty sophisticated insurance buyer. I've been in the insurance business for 25+ years. I can't imagine what it's like for someone trying to navigate the process without the benefit of experience, education and the dedicated efforts of an employer committed to ensuring that all of their employees get the coverage we need.

As an aside, health insurance is not the same as the the property and casualty side of the business I've spent my career in. It's a combination of insurance, financing and incentives.

But many people enrolling through the ACA (i.e., Obamacare) exchanges are facing just that. A shortened enrollment period, along with deep cuts in advertising (90%) and funding for Navigators (41%) to help people figure out their coverage needs and options.

Like I said, it's hard, but we make it a lot harder than it has to be.

One of the many good things about the ACA is that it's changed the conversation. When Congress and the president roll out new plans, the CBO looks at the millions of people that will lose coverage and the thousands that are likely to die due to a lack of coverage and most people recognize that as a bad thing. Maybe now is finally the time for a conversation that begins with the agreement that more covered people is a good thing and broader access (ultimately universal) is the goal.

Meanwhile, go to healthcare.gov and get covered.

Stephen King and the Classics

For the last year of so I've been trying to tackle some of the classics I never read as a kid, but always felt like I should have. I've started Moby Dick, The Odyssey, and The Brothers Karamazov and according to my Kindle I've finished 66%, 36% and 11%, respectively. I just can't get into them. Meanwhile, I downloaded It yesterday and can't put it down. I've read at least a dozen Stephen King novels over the years and loved the 90's It miniseries with Tim Curry as Pennywise. There are too many books and life if too short to waste time plodding through pages you don't find particularly entertaining or enlightening. So I am sticking with Stephen for now.

Send a letter. The Post Office

My last summer in college, my roommate and I drove from Athens, Georgia to Alaska, with many interesting stops in between. Those stories are another blog for another day. While we were there, the local post office was our connection back to home.

We worked at a fish processing plant on the Kenai Peninsula, three hours south of Anchorage for six weeks that summer. This was pre-technology and collect calls back home were rare and expensive, so we took advantage of general delivery at the local Kasilof, Alaska post office. We could get letters and care packages from friends and family back home, even though our “address” was an open field near the river down the hill from the fish camp. Once a week or so, we’d walk or drive or hitch hike up to the post office to see what had come in. I’ve added a picture of the post office and it has not changed much in the last 27 years.  

The US Post office is amazing. For 49 cents, 34 cents for a postcard, you can get a letter from one end of the country to the other. Even overseas if you are writing to service-members or other Americans serving abroad. Last year the USPS delivered 61 billion pieces of first class mail, down from a peak of 103 billion in 2001. I don’t know what their success rate is but I have to guess it’s pretty high. I can’t recall of a single piece of mail I know of being lost, either personally or professionally, as sender or receiver. On one trip I mailed a card home and it still got here, even though I forgot to put a stamp on it. I got a letter from my son when he was on vacation, addressed in faint, 12-year-old boy chicken-scratch print. It still made it.

In a time when most of us spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for all our constantly available digital communicating technology, the USPS and the letters they deliver every year are remarkable for their value, reliability and simplicity. We’ll probably never write as many letters as we used to but maybe the decline is slowing and we’ll see letter writing make a return. I hope so.

#sendaletter

Send a letter. Postcards from Cuba

I love to get mail. The other day I got this postcard from my niece who was on one of the first cruise ships to visit Cuba after travel restrictions were lifted. Today I got a letter in the mail this afternoon from my daughter who is off at college. There is nothing like getting a hand-written, addressed, and stamped letter that someone took the time and the effort to send to you. Emails, texts and the like may be immediate, but there is a greater sense of permanence to the physical that gets stronger even as it becomes rarer.

In business, a hand-written thank you note to a prospective customer or a newly established contact in your network makes you less forgettable. If you are interviewing, it makes you stand out from other applicants and may help some minor hiccups fade away. I know there have been several occasions where I had a follow up interview with an applicant largely because I received a personal thank you note in the mail a couple of days later.

For family and friends, it’s a nice, completely out of the blue reminder to someone that you are thinking about them. This is especially true for our older generations who, even though they may be very comfortable with current technology, still enjoy receiving a postcard or letter in the mail. Several years ago I started sending postcards to homebound members at our church when I traveled for work. I would regularly get notes and comments from them or their family members, even the ones who weren’t able to take calls or visitors. And of course, a condolence card is always appropriate. I received dozens when mom passed away and I still have them and look at them from time to time.

So write a card or a letter. It just takes a few minutes. It will make you more memorable, you’ll feel good when you drop it in the mailbox, and it’s sure to brighten a day on the other end.

#sendaletter