What’s new and exciting?

I was inspired recently by a picture a friend of my posted on Facebook.

It made me think of a lot of things I’ve said that were similar before about your comfort zone. I’m constantly entering into new stages in life and this is going to be the title of my next one. “A comfort zone is where all the slackers hang out.”

I am all about having fun and doing new and exciting things and it just caused me to think about all the people that you and I know that are living in the same world as you with the same amount of time and have far less commitments or obligations. How is it that these people are not living life to the fullest and don’t have better jobs, careers or business’ than you? It’s the fate of those who linger in the comfort zone.

I’m pretty big on watching football and it makes me think of the football players that hang out in the cool zone. The Cool Zone is a big fan with an icy cold mist coming from it that they pull out on the hot days. Football players are wearing so much armor and a helmet that running around and battling your opponent out there on the field gets you really hot. When they come off the field they head to the Cool Zone. Thing is, what is that guy that really hasn’t played in the game doing in there?

People who usually stay in their comfort zone are that guy. He/she hasn’t put in the time, strength or determination towards the goal but he/she wants to relax and not do anything crazy. You don’t yet deserve the Cool Zone scary player. Get back on the field and scare everyone. Even yourself.

Let’s start today doing things that aren’t what you’d usually do, places you wouldn’t usually go , and ballsy things you wouldn’t say (all within reason of course). Without big risks there are no big rewards. The people taking the risks are not doing it in their comfort zone.

There’s a psychology term known as cognitive dissonance. For some reason people seem to equate where they are and where they think they should be and the further they see themselves from it the the more it starts to effect them. This is common human behaviour. I used to do this a lot until a couple years ago when I read a book that corrected my way of thinking (The Pursuit of Perfect). The problem with me was that I was trying to always be perfect with everything I did. I still believe in trying to be one of the best at whatever I do but to a much lesser extent than before I read this.

This perfection also changed the way I looked at reading. Most of my life I read books to get to the end.  I started a book by looking at the page number of the last page and set myself on a course to reach that page. Many TV shows showed cultures that believed that an assimilation of knowledge taken in a huge gulp made you a new and better being. Think: Borg from Star Trek, linking into the Matrix in the Matrix movies, and chopping off the head of a Highlander and you’ll gain all his knowledge in Highlander. This was my goal. The destination being the last page.

Life isn’t about being at the last page. The last page is the day of your death. Have you given any thought to the path to that day?

I rarely fell asleep during our long car trips when I was a kid. Falling asleep till you got to the destination made you miss the most amazing things along the way. Look at those cows and sheep! We never get to see those. Look at those mountains! Amazing what God has made. Look at the sun set on the ocean or a field of waving wheat. Amazing.

You’ll get to where you want in your career, your life, etc. Just stop and look at what you’re doing right now so when you get there you’ll have many great stories to tell about how fun that trip was.

Often I write a little bit about what’s going on with me or what I’m thinking about but today I’m going to take a little bit of a different slant. I’m going to tell you about me. See, my cousin Christelyn Russell-Karazin runs a great site called www.beyondblackwhite.com and she asked me to write a little something about ME. For some reason I’ll figure out in another post why I always procrastinate posting to my blog and forgot to look at the instructions while I’m away from home right now but here goes a glimpse at what makes me… me.

The computer guy that sits before you is a long story of a whole lot of work. Work on career. Work on marriage. Work on family. Growing up as a black man my father always taught me that if you work hard enough and smart enough it wouldn’t matter if you were blue. Also, that if you do what you love you would never work a day in your life. I am the absolute contridiction because I’ve worked extremely hard but yet have never worked.

As a kid I was really into computers and thus my dad being an electrical engineer helped feed me books. I was the kid that was always reading, talking and playing sports. By the time I finished high school I went to Cal. State L. A. and knew exactly what I was going into. Electrical engineering. Just like my dad. That’s where life got a little shaky. It was in my first month of school that I met my now wife. It was by my third month that she was pregnant and with all my unfocused college behavior that I decided I wasn’t taking all these hard calculus courses. I changed my major to Computer Science but was still just a little too overburdened by the time my first son was born.

I am not typical in anything and definitely didn’t want to be a typical dad. Now in many cultures this may be different but in the black community unwed fathers were unseen fathers. As I worked through college I was the opposite. I kept my son as much as humanly possible and had girls in the dorms watching him while I went to class or when I had to take tests.

School wasn’t the path I’d choose for many reasons. I ended up dropping out of school by my third year but not dropping out of my plan. My plan was to buy a house by 30 and be the Information Technology (IT)  director of a company by 35. I’m pretty open about the fact that I wasn’t feeling too much support in any direction except for my dad with what he could.

I won’t bore you with the Abraham Lincoln stories of reading by candle light but suffice to say there was a lot of it. Fill in the years with 3 more kids (all by my wife), a lot of reading on buses, metrorail trains, in parks, and late at night. Add in a lot of time helping develop my wife and kids into whatever they wanted to be. Sprinkle in a lot of mentoring to kids, family, coworkers and whoever wanted to listen and be the best they could be with me and whole lot of time with my family and you have made yourself the Phillip you see today.

The timeline worked out just right by the way. By 29 years old I was the IT director at then one of the countries biggest Post Production companies and also bought my house.

Easy? Not at all but like good exercise the pain in your muscles you feel is a good feeling because of the results. Mine is a story I tell to all men and boys because I juggle a very social life with all this work and family and it’s never that easy. It’s just what needs to be done the way I see it.

Combine as much as you can where you can. My kids have been regular faces at every place I’ve ever worked so that they’ll raise kids like my dad with me.

I found myself rather unnerved this week which is unusual for me. I had a client that took me to my wit’s end with no reward. I’ll go back and explain my problem.

In the TV show Star Trek in the 1960′s James Doohan played a character lovingly referred to as Scotty.  Scotty was the head engineer on the starship Enterprise that was the biggest baddest ship in the known universe. Seeing as how every week the Enterprise or it’s crew were put into a dangerous situation Scotty’s character was always asked to do something miraculous. If the repairs were assumed to take 5 hours he’d only have 3. If the crew was stuck on a planet in danger Scotty was desperately asked, “Beam me up Scotty” even if all known physics said he shouldn’t be able to. The problem with Scotty is that he made the unthinkable happen so much that he wasn’t a focal point of the crew. His miracles became background noise to the plot of other things going on.

As a computer guy that works in a lot of stuff I am suffering from the Scotty effect.  I’ve done things at companies in the past and present that have made people almost faint with awe. I’m the person that just knows I’ll find a solution. The company in particular that I went to has seen too many miracles happen. Therefore when I pulled off something that I couldn’t even find enough Google results to help me I had to pat myself on the back for once. Went to his office expecting praise only to be met with disappointment at why it took me as long as it did when even his internet provider told him that maybe it was possible but they’d never even been asked for that. To make it even more miraculous, the client of theirs that this was supposed to be for thought it was space age stuff they’d never heard of.

I’m calmer now but I guess it all comes down to real grattitude. It’s the cheapest fuel for the human soul that gets the best results and your local miracle worker is running out of gas. I grew up even hearing the story of Jesus being at a wedding and being asked to turn water into wine. I picture even this person patting him on the back and just walking away while Jesus stood in awe of what his own hands had done.

I have recently come to the realization that what I do I have been undervaluing. Often when I’m asked by my wife and others, “What are you doing right now?” I hesitate for a moment. Pull my hands away from the keyboard, piece of wire I’m holding, or drop my pen and think. This is something that’s causing me time to figure out myself. How am I going to tell this person exactly what I’m doing? I think to myself, “You’re good at explaining things. Go for it.” As this would be true, I’m capable of explaining everything I’m doing to a 6 year old but it might take a minute and I’d paint a picture in the air with flashbacks to previous work that would rival Picasso.

Should I draw it out on a piece of paper? Well, usually I’m on the phone so that would get lost in translation. All kinds of ideas float through my head in what seems like hours that are only milliseconds. It doesn’t matter though, in due time I realize that I will probably bore them or they don’t see the passion that goes into everything I do and get turned off by the enthusiasm I put in it. They may also, find it to be a rhetorical question in the first place so that we can just get back to them and their issues.

So in the end what do I say I’m doing? Nothing.

I was talking with my wife tonight and I was talking about people that are just exceptional. On that immediately came to mind was a player on the TV show “The Apprentice” a couple years ago. His name was Randall. A tall dark skinned black man that was and still is the most magnificent competitor to play the game. He was a good speaker, kind, a gentleman, and amazingly brilliant in all of his choices, decisions, and leadership.

One thing about him though is that in all his education and business success he did not forget where he was from. Humble beginnings in a common middle to low income black home. He didn’t forget because in all the things that he did he still seemed to bring out this style of speech that would remind you of a country farmer reminiscing about a wild day on the farm.

I am also that guy. The problem with that is that sometimes you need to give a little background.

In common black homes you had two things Cherrios and Koolaid. They both required one thing: Sugar. Let me give you a little of this street knowledge. When thinking about storage. I was recently working on a problem with the Postfix mail server that reminded me of a problem I used to have with a server. The other stuff was on the same partition with the email server so if it filled up then the email couldn’t come through. When been start getting messages saying your email address doesn’t work then they will start deleting your name from their email list.

Don’t use the sugar for the Cherrios… Use it for the Koolaid. This relates to my delema because if I used the hard drive for other stuff then when dinner comes I wouldn’t have “Koolaid” as a refreshing cold drink.

When doing network or other resource planning always decide what needs the resources the most and give it a whole lot more than you think it needs. Always better to be too safe than too sorry.

When I was a child I was very good at playing the guitar. Well, that’s at least what everyone else believed except me. In the early 80′s I remember that two people were the best at guitar in the world. Oddly enough they were Charro then Eddie Van Halen. I idolized these guitar saints. I remember reading once that Charro (who was just know for saying “Couchie couchie coo” on TV and having big boobs) practiced guitar 8 hours a day. When I actually heard her play it was like music from heaven. I wanted to be that kind of guitarist. I was always the best musical student. I still hold it over my parents heads that they never paid a dollar for my training because in the 3 years that I took lessons I was always deemed by the music school to be the best and thus won their scholarship every year. I was also inspired to play guitar because of this girl at my school that could play great but graduated the year before I started.

Why, you may ask, do I think I wasn’t that good? The missing part of the story is my guitar teacher’s pleas. He was a great guitarist. I was very fortunate that I had him because he was in a very famous 70′s rock band as the backup guitarist and toured sometimes. Throughout my 3 years he would tell me that I learned my guitar very well. I practiced sometimes as long as 8 hours on the weekends. I bought sheet music of all the popular songs and I’d learn them and come back knowing them by Monday. I could play classical, rock, R&B, and Spanish at the drop of a hat. That was all great but I didn’t practice what he kept telling me to learn. My scales. He constantly told me that learning my scales would allow me to play by ear, make my own music, and improvise.

I never did get my scales down because I didn’t practice them enough. I knew the rules and instructions but I couldn’t play the game.

The same is true of so many people and so many things. College, for example, barely teaches our children the rules of many careers. I no longer just want to know the rules I always want to play the game. I learned this a long time ago.