You & Improved

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" 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 …

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"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 …

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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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"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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