Free (audio) Books

Pre-COVID I set goals for the year around running (1,000 miles) and reading (5,000 pages, not including audio books.)

I almost always have a book going on my phone or on CD in my car, but I've never invested in an Audible subscription. $12.99 a month for one book that I am not sure I'll love seems like too much of a commitment, especially with other options available. So here's my 100% free 2020 audio book reading list, so far:

• Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power. Obama's UN Ambassador. Tells her story of growing up in Ireland, moving to the US at age 8 (about the time I was moving to Ireland from the US), serving as a war correspondent in Bosnia and finally being appointed UN ambassador. She covers the humanitarian disaster in Syria and her struggles with US policy in depth. From the Forsyth County Public Library. 
• Measure What Matters. John Doerr. Management book on OKRs (Objective and Key Results). We are adopting this at work. Lots of great case studies from Intel, Google, Gates Foundation and others. From our company e-learning platform, Percipio. The IOS app is so-so. 
• Sapiens. From the library, wanted like it, but just couldn't. 
• Finish. Jon Acuff. Short treatise on finishing goals. Acuff is an entertaining writer. He was one of our general session speakers at our customer conference last year. Very entertaining narrator of his own work. From the library.
• The Obstacle is the Way. Ryan Holiday. Holiday is a modern stoicism guru. Makes you rethink challenges that get in the way. “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” -Marcus Aurelius. I'll definitely read more of Holiday's stuff. From YouTube. You can get lots of fully narrated audio books on YouTube. 
• 1984. Orwell. A classic, now more than ever. Don't get me started on Minitrue. If you haven't read it, you should. This is my 4th or 5th time, I think. YouTube. This one actually has the text page by page so you can read along. The app is pretty good as long as you have data access. I use the free version of YouTube. 

While the library branches are closed right now, most have digital audio services. I just browsed mine and checked out Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) Never read it or saw the movie. 

So, if you are looking to read more, there are plenty of free resources for audio books out there. Enjoy, and please share if you have some good ones I've missed. Stay safe and healthy. 

First Coronavirus Blog

I was talking with a friend yesterday. His office is effectively closing. All staff who can work from home, must work from home, even if they prefer to come in. We all need to take this approach. If you have the ability to work from home (your company allows it, you can do your job, you have the right technology in place) you should. We owe it to all the folks who don’t have that same flexibility: first responders, medical workers, check out people at the grocery store, food service workers and on and on. And don’t forget about the farmers. My dad reminded me of them today. There’s a time to sow and a time to reap and the crops don’t care what else is going on. Hunkering down is the only way to blunt the spread of the virus and if we can we must. 

The Washington Post has a great visualization showing the impact of social distancing on blunting

the spread of the virus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/?itid=hp_hp-top-table-main_virus-simulator520pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

Most schools, colleges and universities are moving to online instruction. While online instruction is great, it has the potential to leave kids who are already behind due to lack of access to technology even further behind. And for many kids school is where they get two meals a day. The local schools in my area are working to get meals to kids, but the local food banks are straining under the pressure. Help if you can. 

I’ve been wondering. Is this what Climate Change will look like, with years and decades compressed down to days, weeks and months? Maybe we decide to listen to the science going forward. 

What will you do with all that time? I get 5 hours a week back from not commuting alone. Since I will spend much time video conferencing I have to look presentable, but only  from the neck up, so time saved there too. We can come out of this better than we went in. We can invest time with our families, learn, read, write, think, run and on and on and on. Or we can “Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.”

Speaking of writing, write stuff down. Start a blog or journal. I told my son today that people will be talking about this for a hundred years and more beyond. Keep up with what’s happening and what you are thinking about. I can see blogs and journals becoming a record of this time the same way diaries and letters home from the front were in the past. 

All we can absolutely control is how we respond as each hour and day passes. A great message from yesterday’s Daily Stoic. https://dailystoic.com/remember-you-dont-control-what-happens-you-control-how-you-respond/. Side note, this is a great daily email. 

Be kind and stay calm. Even (especially) when others aren’t. You can’t know what they are dealing with, fears, anxieties, family issues etc. If you’ve got your shit together at that moment, keep it together and hope that you receive that same grace when the time comes you need it. 

Stay in touch. Leverage all the tech or just pick up the phone.

Read the local paper. The Atlanta Journal Constitution provides excellent local coverage. I expect your local paper does too. And a good review of the daily newspaper can help prevent the urge to obsess over the news all day long. See above. 

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

Election Day 2018

We are less than 12 hours from the polls opening on Election Day 2018. This is my 6th general election in FoCo and I am thrilled to say that for the first time I have solid D candidates up down the ballot and I can feel excellent about voting a straight Blue ticket.

I've voted R in the past (though I confess it's been a while) but this time and for the foreseeable future I won't be doing it. I haven't seen or heard from a single Republican candidate or representative from dog catcher (ok, we don't vote for that) to governor who has given me any indication that he'll do anything other than march in lockstep right behind Trump and that's not the kind of community, state or country I want. I disagree with most of his policies and just as importantly he's a pretty awful person. What does it say when you would not want your son to grow up anything like the president and you would not want your daughter to bring anyone remotely like him home.

I also hope none of my D friends waste their vote for governor on Libertarian Ted (industrial hemp) Metz. Third party votes gave us Trump. Kemp would be as embarrassing for Georgia as Trump has been for America. For my right leaning friends, I'd encourage you to vote for him. Hemp not Kemp, I say.

So, down the line,
Abrams for Governor.
Amico. Lt Governor
Barrow. Sec of State.
Bordeaux. US House
Smith. State Senate.
Tucker. State House.

I'll be at the polls bright and early with Claire, voting in her first election. She turned 18 on Saturday. Seems like just yesterday my mother in law and I were welcoming Claire into the world and fussing at each other over the 2000 Bush v Gore election. Oh for the simple days...
Peace and good night all.
PS. I've become a fan of deleting comments I don't like. I'm all for free speech but I'm tired of arguing and I don't owe anyone a platform for stuff I don't agree with.
PPS. I love the ability to block the original poster of crap people share. That way I don't ever have to see the nonsense again, but I still get to see pics of your kids and puppies.

Thoughts on the Tree of Life

I attended a memorial service last night at Congregation Dor Tamid in Alpharetta for the Jews murdered in their sanctuary on Saturday at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Seated in the row in front of me was a Lebanese Muslim (coincidentally my doctor’s cousin) and Jewish lady who is a member of Dor Tamid. At the altar with the rabbi were imams, priests, Baptist and Methodist preachers and a Mormon Bishop. The crowd of a couple of hundred people were similarly diverse their faiths, races and national backgrounds.

It was beautiful service and I think it represented to best of what we as Americans can be. It’s sad that it takes something like this to bring us together. I told the lady sitting next to me how nice it was to meet her. She said the same and mentioned how terrible the reason we were meeting was.

For some reason, after events like the shooting on Saturday, I’ve often felt led to attend worship services with the targeted community. After the shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando my family and I visited Central Congregational UCC, an open and affirming church with an openly gay senior pastor. After the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, we visited Big Bethel AME on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta.

Of course, the problem is that it has generally taken enormous tragedy to get me out of my Sunday morning comfort zone; my nice suburban church with familiar hymns and a sanctuary full of people who look and live pretty much just like me.

My new friend from Dor Tamid invited me to come back any time, and I plan to do so, along with intentionally visiting some places of worship that will make me a little more uncomfortable than I am used to being on Sunday morning.

Peace and Amen