As I wrote about in Penguins Can't Fly, I am not a natural-born rule breaker. This may come as a surprise coming from someone who wrote a book about breaking rules. The obvious question is, "How did you go from being a shy boy who was afraid of new situations and spent an eternity in swimming lessons to a guy who makes a living speaking in public about breaking rules?” For years, I’ve tried to come up with a compelling answer. After all, it seems like some sort of magic was involved. I would often point to a moment when I imagined myself as an 80-year-old guy looking back on my life and wondering, "what if?" And yes, that was when I started to consider that the fear of regret might be more powerful than the fear of trying something new. Other times, I'd give credit to a retreat I attended after high school that had a profound impact on me. As monumental as that experience was, it doesn't fully explain the shy-kid-to-speaker transformation. The truth is, there wasn't …
Advice From an Astronaut
"It's Time To Dream Bigger" by Jason Kotecki. Digital. I recently got to see a real live astronaut. He showed us a video of what thunderstorms in Central Africa look like from above. (Answer: strobe lights at a night club.) Terry Virts is a former NASA astronaut and Space Station Commander who came to Madison to speak to schoolchildren about his experiences. My daughter Lucy and I had the opportunity to hear his stories and see his incredible snapshots from his 200-day tour of outer space. He told us that being in space doesn’t feel like floating, but rather like you're always falling. Because, in fact, you actually are. He showed us the little closet where he slept upright in a sleeping bag, and explained that because it costs thousands of dollars to transport a single bottle of water into space, it makes a lot of sense for them to recycle the water they use on board, including sweat and urine. (I wanted to ask him if this is how Mountain Dew was made, but never got the …
Building Sandcastles and the Meaning of Life
Why do we build sancastles on the beach? I mean, what’s the point? Eventually, the surf will swallow it whole and all the hard work will be for nothing. That’s what I was thinking as my kids were enthusiastically erecting a stronghold of sand on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. They worked fast. Built it high. And even added a moat for protection. That led to questions about life. If you’re lucky, you have eight or nine decades to work with, although most of us have much less than that. We busily build families, careers, and accomplishments to be proud of. It’s easy to wonder: What’s the point? Why bother? You know it won’t last. The surf will eventually win. It always does. So I started compiling a list of reasons: Maybe it’s exciting to see what you can accomplish before the clock runs out. Maybe it's to experience a feeling of pride in the little wins, no matter how fleeting, like when your makeshift moat holds off a surge of water. Maybe the enjoyment comes …
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What I Learned After an Eternity in Swimming Lessons
We went to Mexico recently. My youngest daughter spent the first hour in the pool at our condo on her tiptoes, bouncing around to various areas, repeatedly asking, “Can I touch?” When you’re little, and don’t know how to swim yet, that’s the only question that matters. “Can I touch?" It’s a simple yes or no question. The translation, of course, is “Can I survive here? Am I safe? Do I have anything to worry about?” Only Ginny was asking this question, as my other two kids know how to swim. Once you know how to swim, you don’t need to ask, because it doesn’t matter if you can touch or not. I can relate to this. It took me a long time to learn how to swim. Not because it was hard, because learning how to swim is actually not that difficult. (Especially when you define “learning how to swim” as “being able to float when you’re in water over your head.”) No, the reason I was in swimming lessons for what felt like decades was because I was afraid. I spent the longest …
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Boss Lady
"Boss Lady" by Jason Kotecki. 6" x 8". Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD. Limited edition canvas prints available here. This little bird is the boss, but I’m not talking about her title. I’m talking about her attitude, her fabulousness, and the way this winged wonder enters a room like she owns the whole building. You might be surprised to learn that she wasn’t always this way. She was shy, not all that confident, and cared way too much about what other people thought. She was a bird who blended in. Oh, she wanted to be bold, chase her dreams with unabashed determination, and let the birdseed fall where it may. But she wasn’t sure how. She wasn’t certain that she had it in her. Then she bought these glasses. As you can imagine, she gets lots of compliments on them, but she doesn’t wear them for the attention. She wears them for herself. While wearing them, she somehow feels more fun and adventurous, like a bird who doesn’t back down from fear, a bird proud of who she …
Enjoy the Climb
"Enjoy the Climb" by Jason Kotecki. 16" x 20". Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD. Prints available here. If you were to place your nose really close to this canvas and focus only on one of the goats, what would you see? A mountain goat on a snowy mountain. The environment around them is boring, plain, cold, and possibly treacherous. I was reading some old journals the other day. I was struck by how concerned I was about details of projects and initiatives that are no longer relevant to our current business model. Problems that needed to be solved, or else! Pitfalls that seemed like backbreakers. At first, I felt disappointment that I had wasted so much time on things that in the end, didn’t matter at all. But then I realized, that’s how life works. You struggle through, doing the best you can with the information you have. And hopefully, you learn from your mistakes, grow, and move forward. I realized that in ten years, a review of the journal I wrote this morning will probably …
Why You Shouldn’t Throw in the Towel Just Yet
When kids start to talk, they’re bad. Like, really awful. They’re mostly unintelligible and can’t even string more than two syllables together. Compared to a great orator like Martin Luther King, Jr., they should be ashamed of themselves. But they’re not. A grown-up sure would be, though. We chastise ourselves all the time for not being good enough. If someone sees our feeble efforts, we apologize profusely. Not kids. They just keep on going. Part of the reason we struggle so much with learning a new skill or implementing a new system is because we know what mastery feels like. We’re pretty good at doing it the way we’ve always done it, thank you very much. At the start of this year, I took the plunge into Bullet Journaling. It’s a system created by Ryder Carroll that has been embraced by people all over the world. Its biggest feature is that it eschews digital tools in favor of a good ol' analog notebook and pen. I decided to experiment with it for a few reasons. It …
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Hippoposterous!
"Hippoposterous" by Jason Kotecki. 20" x 20". Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD. Prints available here. This is a tiny hippo in a bowl of Froot Loops. Or is it a normal-sized hippo in a giant bowl of Froot Loops? I don’t remember. Either way, it’s preposterous. Most serious people don’t have time for the preposterous. They have much more important things to concern themselves with. Of course, there’s a good chance that these people are also riddled with Adultitis, make terrible leaders, and will never change the world. Consider the smartphone. It is a device on which you can look up any fact in the world or talk to your friend on the other side of the planet via video. And you can use it to order a hundred melon ballers that will arrive at your door by tomorrow. Just think of all the elements at play that make this thing work: microchips. The internet. Wi-Fi. Facial recognition. Speech recognition. Rechargeable battery. Unbreakable glass. (Oh, wait…) Now, imagine …
How to Use Your Imagination to Beat Fear
"The Greatest Showman" by Jason Kotecki. 16" x 20". Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD. Prints available here. The absence of fear is not bravery. The absence of fear is a terrible life. If you stay exactly where you are, and never try anything new, you may be able to avoid fear. Maybe. If you want your life to matter, however, fear comes with the territory. You’re going to have to figure out how to tame it. The good news is that our fear is never as ferocious as we make it out to be. Most adults don’t consider themselves to have a robust imagination; that's the realm of children and fairy tales. However, there is one aspect where most adults actually have an over-active imagination, and that’s when it comes to our fears. It doesn’t require any effort at all to picture our portfolio going belly up, our project crashing and burning, or ending up penniless, homeless, and living in a van down by the river while eating Spam out of a can. We can picture all of these things …
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Willing to Relocate
"Willing to Relocate" by Jason Kotecki. 24" x 24". Oil on canvas. Original is SOLD. Prints available here. When Kim and I decided to move to Madison after we got married, neither of us had jobs, or job prospects for that matter. I’m sure some people thought we were crazy. Kim and I didn’t have to leave home. It was fine and it offered opportunity. But we wanted an adventure to call our own, and suspected that the life we wanted to live would require a change of scenery. And so we were willing to relocate. We had to leave behind that which was familiar in order to grow into who we were meant to become. We picked Madison, but in our case, the need to move away from our comfort zone was more important than the actual location itself. Sometimes we have to be willing to relocate in order to make our dreams come true. Of course, that might mean moving across town, or across the country. But it might mean moving into a different group of friends. It might mean moving …
