Don't Be in a Hurry to Get There

 

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“We should move to Manderfield.”

I say it almost every time my wife and I drive to and from southern Utah. Somewhere around Beaver, as the freeway begins advertising towns most people have never visited, I start pointing.

Manderfield. Paragonah. Circleville. Toquerville. Kanarraville. Lots of -villes.

Dozens of small towns sit just off Interstate 15 in southern Utah. There’s something appealing about places most of the world drives past.

My wife and I talk about pulling off the highway and spending a day wandering through these towns to see what life is really like. I don’t know whether people in Manderfield actually live slower than I do. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they spend more time driving just to buy groceries, go to work, or refill their Charlie’s Market mug with Diet Dr. Pepper.

But I’ve become increasingly interested in places where life doesn’t seem organized around getting somewhere faster or doing something more efficiently.

Truth be told, though, I think what I’m longing for really isn’t a different town, just a different pace.

While my wife and kids dozed in the car on a recent trip to and from, I sat with that question for a while.

While in St. George, I decided to run the six or so miles from where were staying to my in-laws’ house. The idea sounded reasonable enough until I stepped out the door.

There are different kinds of hot in Utah in July. St. George seems to have a different kind of relationship with summer than the rest of the state. Triple-digit temperatures aren’t unusual, and stretches above 110°F aren’t uncommon. It was already 81 degrees when I left at 4:30 that morning.

The combination of heat and the extra forty pounds I’ve been lugging around my midsection quickly turned what I’d imagined would be an acceptable run into a long series of walks. Once the sun crested the horizon, the temperature rose noticeably by the minute.

At first, I was annoyed that I couldn’t keep running, but then something unexpected happened.

Somewhere on a long, winding “tributary” street to Washington Fields, I started to notice things I would have missed if I was just pounding the pavement. Trees I couldn’t name stretched over sidewalks and streets, providing welcome shade. Flowering shrubs and vines spilled over block walls. Male cicadas singing for a mate. The red cliffs that make southern Utah so unique and instantly recognizable radiated the morning sun. People were walking dogs. Couples stood on street corners talking to neighbors. Cyclists hurried past.

Neighborhood after neighborhood woke up in a way I would have missed if I’d been driving or running hard.

That’s when the thought hit me: I was only witnessing all of this because I wasn’t in such a hurry to get back to Grannie’s house.*

Had I been running the pace I’d planned or wanted, I probably wouldn’t remember any of it. I never would have noticed the hues of pink and green in those flowers or the din of the cicadas or street-corner conversations. I’m somewhat confident that what I witnessed wasn’t a one-off event in St. George. However, I had to slow down to even notice any of it.

Running has become another place in my life where efficiency tries to take over. Even at forty pounds overweight, I think about how much faster my per-mile speed should be. Every watch and app wants to tell me whether I’m ahead of yesterday or to “share my run” with my friends. It’s weird how I can go out and spend an hour outside without ever really being outside.

We’re always trying to get somewhere: graduation, buy the house, pay off the debt, get promoted, lose forty pounds, etc.

While we spend out lives becoming experts at arriving, we simultaneously become amateurs at noticing. We spend so much of life preparing for tomorrow that the beautiful things of today become unnoticed scenery that flashes by.

I’ll probably still tell my wife we should move to Manderfield. Who knows? Maybe we will someday.

Over the last 18 months or so, I’ve had a lot of realizations. I think the pull isn’t actually to move to some hidden, tiny Utah town where cows outnumber people. I think there’s a choice waiting to be made to stop treating every moment like something to get through on the way to something better.

I don’t really have to move to Manderfield to slow down. I just have to stop being in such a hurry to get there, wherever there is.

* To be fair, I was in a hurry to get back to Grannie's but my own physiological capability and the heat prevented it. In the words of Bob Ross, the realization was just a "happy, little accident".

To Be More, Do Less

 

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“Aaron works himself to death.”

It’s been a recurring theme throughout my career. I don’t know exactly when I developed the mental model, but somewhere along the way I became convinced that if something wasn’t working, the solution was almost always to increase my effort.

Over the last twenty-four months, I’ve gained nearly forty pounds. In May, I decided it was time to start running again. Rather than change the way I ate, I simply added running to my already bloated routine.

The results were impressive. I logged many miles and lost exactly zero pounds. What I gained instead were sore knees, aching hips, and another thing I felt obligated to accomplish everyday.

Naturally, my first instinct was to run more. It’s engineering by addition rather than subtraction. I do this everywhere.

Just over a year ago, I started a company. I believed in the product, believed in the team, and believed investors would arrive before our runway ran out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t, and the company ran out of cash. I let everyone go, myself included.

Except, I didn’t want the company to die. So what was my answer?

“Aaron works himself to death.”

For the last two months I’ve tried to rebuild my company while working forty hours a week somewhere else to keep food on the table. At the same time, I’ve tried to write, exercise, pay down debt, repair relationships, bury a family member, raise five children, launch a product that’s within spitting distance of completion, sleep five hours a night, and somehow become more present.

Looking at that list now, it’s almost funny.

Almost.

One of the reasons I became an engineer is because I love the scientific method. I love testing ideas against reality. Unfortunately, I’ve been running the same experiment for years. The hypothesis has always been the same: If life isn’t working, add more effort.

The data has been remarkably consistent, but somehow the hypothesis keeps failing.

Lately, finally, I’ve started paying attention to a deeper current through all of this. I spend a great deal of time thinking about who I want to become.

• Healthier.
• Smarter.
• Kinder.
• More grateful.
• A better writer.
• A better husband.
• A better father.
• A more devoted disciple.
• A better business owner.

Those are all worthwhile pursuits.

In paying closer attention, the thing that surprises me now is how many years I’ve spent believing that becoming more required doing more.

I even wrote a book on that very subject called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free. (You can buy a copy here.)

Apparently the author needs to read it again.

A few days ago, I talked to my brother-in-law about taking blocks of aluminum and subtracting material to make some things and adding material to make others.

Human growth, as it turns out, seems to have a lot less to do with addition than subtraction.

I’m pretty sure I underlined about 30% of Greg McKeown’s Essentialism. The frustrating part is that none of the advice is particularly complicated. Delete the time-wasting app. Turn off the notifications. Say no to the meeting. Eat the apple instead of the ice cream. And, for the love of all that is good in this world, just go to bed.

Here’s the problem: I know what to do, but I don’t do it. I don’t leave enough empty space in my life that the things that matter actually have room to grow.

The lesson I’m learning, but having a hard time implementing, is that becoming more is mostly the discipline of deciding what no longer deserves a place in tomorrow then having the courage to leave it behind today.

Doing less doesn’t necessarily mean lowering your standards. What it does mean, though, is removing everything that keeps your desired standards from becoming your reality.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bowl of ice cream calling my name.

Why You Need Self-Improvement and Self-Acceptance

 

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A few years ago, I ran two miles faster than I ever had. I crossed my own finish line feeling victorious for roughly seven seconds before I fell on my hands and knees and vomited on the grass behind some lovely South Jordan homes. I rolled onto my side and lay there for almost as long as it took me to run that sub-14-minute pair of miles.

In some ways, it felt like defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. I couldn’t do what I’d just done without becoming physically ill. But even as I lay there on the slightly damp grass that late spring morning (not in my own “output”), I found myself thinking about those superweight lifting competitions where someone lifts a seemingly impossible amount of weight, completes the lift, drops the bar, and immediately crumples to the floor. They exert so much force that their brains go into “Danger Will Robinson!” mode and shut down everything not required for survival. Their bodies decide, in a pretty dramatic way, that staying alive is more important than trying that again. At some point, pushing harder stops being strength and becomes risk.

In the Western world, we’ve been conditioned for decades to pursue competitive edge over just about everything else. We spend so much of our lives being trained to believe that more effort solves more problems. All you need to get ahead is more discipline, more grit, more self-control, more pushing, and more holding on. I’ve wrestled with this idea for more than two decades and, if I’m honest with myself, I still haven’t figured it out. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve written dozens of articles orbiting this same idea. Apparently I am still trying to learn the same lesson from dozens of different angles.

The basic idea is reasonable enough. Strengthen what’s weak and fix what’s broken or disappoints you. Improve the areas where you’re falling behind. Those principles work well in business, athletics, school, and lots of other areas of life. Where they become dangerous, however, is when we start applying them to ourselves in a “show no mercy” kind of way. Somewhere along the way, self-improvement, donning a referee shirt, picks up its clipboard and whistle, and starts keeping score from the sidelines.

Ann Landers said this:

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.

I came across that quote more than a year ago and it’s stayed lodged in my brain, surfacing occasionally when my personal referee comes into clear view again. I applied that quote pretty easily to jobs, relationships, and even difficult circumstances, but somehow it stayed in a blind spot related to myself until just recently.

Where self is concerned, this quote applies to situations over which we have almost no control, situations where we have almost complete control, and everything in between. We’re all faced with situations that drive us to keep score, hold on to impossible standards, and cling to the belief that becoming better always requires carrying more weight.

For most of my adult life, I’ve viewed self-improvement and self-acceptance as enemies. Accepting myself felt basically like surrender. If I accepted where I was, what motivation would I have to become something better? Improvement felt productive and like movement while acceptance felt almost dangerous and like standing still.

It was during those years that I encountered ideas like the ones in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He famously wrote something like habits are the compound interest of self-improvement and that if you get one percent better every day for a year, you’ll end up dramatically better by the end. Conceptually, I don’t disagree with him though he’s clearly not thinking about the reality of long-term compound math.

The inherent problem is that some of us will unintentionally (or intentionally) turn that “one percent better” into a daily punitive performance review. It doesn’t take a massive leap to move from small actions matter because tiny changes compound to if I didn’t improve today, I failed. Every day starts carrying pressure. Did I improve enough? Did I optimize enough? Did I do enough? Did I earn my rest?

Looking back, I’ve literally spent years treating self-improvement like a courtroom instead of a compass. Every missed run became evidence of failure. So did every pound gained. Every bad day became proof that I wasn’t trying hard enough somewhere, somehow. Improvement, in a weird way, became judgment.

Lately, I’ve reevaluated the relationship between self-improvement and self-acceptance. I’ve stopped seeing them as enemies and started wondering if they’re actually dance partners. Self-improvement provides direction while self-acceptance provides footing. One tells us where we hope to go and the other reminds us we’re allowed to stand where we are. Paradoxically, sometimes standing still is exactly what keeps us moving forward.

When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan without ropes, he didn’t attack the mountain with reckless abandon. He practiced the route dozens upon dozens of times and memorized every handhold and foothold. Inside of his remarkable, terrifying achievement, the thing that caught my attention was how often he stopped to rest and prepare. He slowed down a lot. Rest was an integral part of the climb.

The same might actually be true for the rest of us who aren’t Alex Honnold. We don’t have to let go of effort. We don’t have to stop trying to become healthier, wiser, stronger, kinder, or more disciplined. What we do need to let go of, though, is the belief that our worth is waiting at some imaginary finish line.

I still want to improve. I still want to run faster, become healthier, and continue becoming more of the person I hope to be. I’m just beginning to suspect that self-improvement works best when self-acceptance is willing to dance.

This Truck Lacks Moral Character

 

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Some months ago, I loaded up my entire team from work (all 5 of us at the time) and headed north to Idaho. We were going out for field training on the product we were building at the time.

30 miles from the north border between Utah and Idaho, traveling 80 miles per hour, my truck’s engine revved unexpectedly and the truck lost both speed and power. We had just enough “juice” to get to the shoulder of the freeway without getting clobbered by a semi before the truck died and refused to start.

It was only 2 years old with barely 30,000 miles on it.

We sat there, wondering what was going on; why a perfectly good truck was suddenly dead on the side of the highway.

Occasionally, I will curse my computer for crashing unexpectedly in the middle of doing “important work.”

On this particular day, however, I didn’t jump out of my truck, kick the tires, and curse it for being a stupid truck. I didn’t stand there thinking, “You disgust me. Why can’t you be more disciplined? Other trucks don’t have this problem.”

In fact, tens of thousands of trucks did have “this problem” but that’s a story for another day.

I studied mechanical engineering in school but I’m definitely not mechanically inclined. I opened the hood of the truck that day to make sure nothing was on fire, and to my untrained eye everything looked normal.

“Yup. I’m pretty sure that’s the engine, and that’s where you put the windshield washer fluid.” I closed the hood satisfied that my four female employees individually and collectively knew more about engines than I did. Again, a story for another day.

Let’s suppose you’ve got a truck that runs a little better than mine did that day. Suppose you’re driving along one day and notice the truck is pulling slightly to the right or making odd noises or maybe struggling on hills (like mine).

You, like I, probably wouldn’t curse your vehicle. You might, instead, say something like, “Something’s off.”

Then, you’d start making either mental, digital, or physical notes:

• Has it always done this?
• When did it start? What were conditions like when it started?
• Is it worse under load?

Then, you’d take it to a mechanic who would tell you that maybe it’s a problem with the alignment or transmission. They’d take it and perform fancy (and not so fancy) diagnostic tests.

You wouldn’t shame your vehicle in hopes it would correct its behavior. There likely wouldn’t be any moral language. You might be angry about the failure, but you’d be mostly curious about what went wrong and what needed to be done to fix it.

What’s weird, however, is that we come along and do stuff like this all the time to ourselves:

• “I’m tired.”
• “I’ve gained weight.”
• “I haven’t exercised.”
• “I can’t get myself moving.”
• “I’m grieving and can’t stop.”
• “My body feels weird.”

And within about eight seconds, we begin to pass judgment. All those things I mentioned above translate into one thing: “Apparently I’m garbage.”

The strange thing is that I don’t actually believe this when I hear it coming from other people, either about me or about them.

If a friend told me he was exhausted, overwhelmed, had gained thirty pounds, hadn’t exercised in months, was sleeping poorly, carrying grief, stress, and responsibilities he didn’t know how to shoulder, I wouldn’t stare at him and conclude that his engine block was morally compromised.

I’d ask questions and stay curious. I’d also try to help him figure out what was going on.

Why is it that I can remain curious and open about other people’s struggles yet be overly-critical of my own? In my mind:

• “I’m tired” becomes “I’m lazy.”
• “I gained weight” becomes “I lack discipline.”
• “I feel overwhelmed” becomes “I’m weak.”
• “Something hurts” becomes “I did this to myself.” (To be fair, sometimes this one is actually true. Read about it here.)

Lately my body has felt off.

I’ve gained weight. I haven’t been running as much. I’ve been carrying stress, grief, long workdays, too much Diet Dr. Pepper, and seriously enough emotional freight to qualify for my own commercial transport license.

Almost immediately I started doing what I’ve always done. I didn’t become curious about my own situation. I became judgmental.

Apparently my “truck” lacks moral character.

This will be a “well duh” kind of statement but I’ve never once looked at a check engine light and assumed that my vehicle must be ashamed of itself. A check engine light has never felt personal to me. I’ve always understood it as information, like something deserves attention.

It’s possible that fatigue and sadness work like that too. Maybe weight gain, lack of motivation, strange aches, and all the other things we spend years hiding and judging are a lot more like dashboard lights than we give them credit for.

Truth: I’m not very good at this. My instinct for most of my life has been to assume that every “strange noise” means something is wrong with me rather than something happening inside me. That distinction matters. A lot.

Truth: I’m also learning that curiosity about the world, other people, and myself is way more useful than condemnation.

Trucks don’t become “healthier” because we shame them. Turns out, people don’t either.

Besides, if my truck and I are being honest, we’ve both been carrying more than our recommended payload for a long time now. Turns out neither of us was designed to haul everything alone.

The Eggo Waffle Theory of Grief

 

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“Don’t wake me before 7:00 am.”

That was DeAnne’s rule.

We spent scores of weekends at her condo, sleeping on the hide-a-bed couch and watching movies that may or may not have been “parent approved.” DeAnne, my aunt, could never stay up as late as we could, even when we were young.

I can’t tell you how many times we watched Top Gun or the original Adventures in Babysitting after she’d gone to bed.

And we knew DeAnne wouldn’t be up and ready to make breakfast until 7:00 am.

I’ve been an early riser for more than forty years. I remember waking up and lying there beside one or more of my brothers, listening to the clock tick as the minutes passed while I waited for permission to wake her up.

The day she taught me how to use the toaster oven felt like liberation.

I could finally quietly slip out of bed and make two or three Eggo waffles while everyone else slept.

I was probably fifteen or sixteen the last time I spent a weekend at DeAnne’s house but I can’t see an Eggo waffle at the grocery store without remembering the not-really-that-comfortable hide-a-bed, the fun, the time in the condo complex swimming pool, walks to 7-Eleven, and the love.

DeAnne’s gone now. She passed away a few days ago. I lived by her side in the hospital for nearly six days. The night before she passed, I knew her time was drawing close. For nearly eight hours, I sat by her bed, holding her hand, reading to her, and singing.

2:30 am came and I slept for about ninety minutes.

I woke and she was still with us.

Sunday morning; Mother’s Day.

DeAnne was never a biological mother but that didn’t make her any less of a mother to her extended family.

DeAnne slipped from this life into the next at 2:22 pm on Mother’s Day. My three brothers, my oldest sister-in-law, my wife, my daughter, and DeAnne’s sister were in that room. That sterile hospital room became a sacred space for a few minutes as she took her last breath and was gone.

In the midst of planning DeAnne’s funeral and cleaning up the condo that holds so many memories, I keep thinking about Eggo waffles.

That sounds ridiculous even as I write it.

Grief does weird things with memory. You expect your mind to hold onto the big moments like final conversations, the hospital room, the last breath, and the sacred silence after someone leaves.

It does those things, but it also drifts back to toaster ovens, hide-a-beds, blue-bagged VCRs from Blockbuster, and waffles.

To the exhilaration of waking up and toasting my own waffles before my brothers could eat them all.

Maybe grief works that way because love also works that way.

Life isn’t really built from milestones and grand moments. Those are important, but when someone’s gone, you discover it was mostly built from ordinary Tuesdays talking to your aunt about Larkin lunches, strange little rituals, and toaster waffles before 7:00 in the morning.

Maybe that’s the Eggo Waffle Theory of Grief.

You think you’re grieving the ending.

But maybe you’re really grieving the thousands of little moments you never realized you were collecting.

The waffles were never really about waffles.