Everybody Say Ho

There are certain circumstances when acting with immediacy is necessary to ensure your desired outcome.  However, urgency is not always required, so it’s important to develop the ability to recognize when you don’t have to handle something right away.  

Personally I have a keen awareness of when I can put something off until a later time, and I have successfully employed this ability for much of my life.  For those of you who wish to replicate my methods, I am proud to announce my simple, one-question Urgency Test.  The question I ask myself is this: Are there benefits to me doing this now rather than later?  If the answer is no (which it almost always is), I focus my energy on something else until I literally can wait no longer.  My personal use cases for this Urgency Test are too numerous to count, but I will focus on one favorite examples in particular.  

When I was 15 years old, my mom went out of town for the weekend leaving my dad and I to fend for ourselves.  Out from under the watchful eye of my mother and comfortably beneath the usually-asleep eye of my father, I took that opportunity to spend Saturday night excessively drinking alcohol with some friends.  Since I was new to alcohol-consumption and unfamiliar with best practices when it came to drinking, the following morning I felt quite nauseated while eating my morning bowl of Life cereal.  I excused myself from the table mid-bowl, telling my father I needed to feed the dog.  What I actually needed to do was vomit up my breakfast, so I went in the yard (out of my dad’s line of site) and vacated the contents of my stomach directly into our swimming pool.  I kind of stared at what I’d done and wondered if I needed to do something about it.  To help answer my question, I gave myself the Urgency Test.  After identifying no need for an immediate clean-up, I went back inside and got ready for church.  

Had my mom been in town, I would have begun trying to cover up the evidence pretty much immediately, either by diving into the pool and retrieving every last bit of my mess or by setting the house on fire to create a diversion.  Since she was gone though, that sense of urgency was gone too.  My dad was going to be trapped in church just like I was, so there was no chance he could discover anything as long as were together.  I basically trusted that my vomit would be exactly where I left it when I got back - floating in the pool in a disgusting brown clump.  And that’s exactly where it was upon my return.   The next time you are facing an urgent situation, I hope you will employ my Urgency Test to help you decide how much time you have to act.  Because there’s no use in rushing if you could be spending time doing something else. 

Come visit me in my new home on blogger.  Don’t hate me for being a tumblr hater.  It’s just no place for long-form blogs :(

http://www.everybodysayho.com/2011/04/finding-inspiration-in-tragedy.html

Being able to laugh at yourself is one of the most endearing qualities a person can have.  It’s not going to stop people from making fun of you - not by a long shot - but it can help make the back-stabbing mockery somewhat less mean, and that’s important. 

I had to develop the ability to laugh at myself in college for one simple reason - I fell down all the time.  Just walking across campus, I would fall the heck over at least a couple of times a week.  I don’t know if my bookbag was overloaded and throwing my balance off or what, but it was happening constantly.  I’d be tromping to class with my head held high, and then lo and behold, I’d trip over a curb and go crashing into the sidewalk in front of a large group of people.  Unsurprisingly, they’d laugh at me and yell things to make me feel as terrible as possible.  Every once in a while I would get lucky and fall into some fat girl who’d subsequently fall down herself and become the subject of ridicule instead of me, but most of the time it was just yours truly hitting the pavement like a ton of bricks and about 40 jackasses pointing and howling about it. 

When this is your life, how seriously can you really take yourself?  Not very.  Over time, very few of my classmates hadn’t seen me trip and splatter on the sidewalk at some point, but I took those opportunities to prove myself as a class act by laughing along with them.  Not getting mad about being the butt of jokes made people know that I was a good sport and the kind of guy they might consider eating lunch with.  It goes without saying that the mixture of sympathy and goodwill I brought out in people really worked to my advantage. 

If you watch me walking around my office now, you will notice that I still trip a lot. Luckily for me the amount of people seeing it is a lot smaller.  But I am still able to laugh at myself and people appreciate this.  Nobody likes to be the only one laughing, especially when they’re laughing at your misfortune right in your fucking face.  So if you struggle with taking yourself too seriously, I urge you to let it go of it as soon as possible.  Nobody likes a person who thinks their too cool to laugh at themselves.

When you consider your most cherished skills, it’s important to remember how they were developed.  If you’re anything like me, most of your talents were born from painful experiences you’d just as soon forget.  This is precisely why it’s so important to remember their origins, however.  The terrible memories help you not take your talents for granted. 

One of my most amazing skills is my ability to kill a carpenter bee in flight with nothing but my bare hand.  When you read that, you either didn’t believe it because it sounds impossibly difficult, or you weren’t impressed because you don’t think it would be that hard (a sure sign you’ve never tried it).  There is also a third option: that you’ve somehow deluded yourself into thinking you’ve done it yourself at some point, but let’s just go ahead and agree that that scenario is highly unlikely.  You probably dreamed you did it during childhood when you went through that phase where you wanted to be the Karate Kid, but we both know it didn’t actually happen.  Anyway, all you need to know is that I can kill a carpenter bee with only my hand and I’ve exploited people’s disbelief of this ability to win money on several occasions.  So obviously it’s a very valuable skill. 

As valuable and impressive as it is though, I wasn’t born with this magnificent ability.  I developed it through a painful childhood marked by loneliness and isolation.  You see, having no siblings my age and being forbidden to watch TV during summer days meant that my mom would just up and send me outside.  Send me outside like a damn dog to either entertain myself or seek shelter some place.  In fact, the actual dog was out there too since my mom didn’t want to have to talk to him either.  I never wanted to stray too far from the house in case my mom let me back inside (another great skill I’d developed, this one learned from the actual dog himself) so I spent most of my time as close to the house as possible.  Lucky for me, some carpenter bees were eating a hole in the side of our house, so to pass the time I would try and swat them with nothing but my bare hand.  It was pretty tough at first, but I was determined to become great at it, and I had plenty of time on my hands and few other sources of pleasure. 

After spending several hours a day for weeks at a time swatting at carpenter bees, I got pretty good at recognizing their flying patterns and popping them out of the sky at just the right time.  This might sound sort of mean to you but you know what’s really mean?  Making your kid stand in the freaking yard all day with the dog.  So I did what I had to do to keep from going insane.  And over time, it paid off.  As I mentioned previously, I’ve won money from several people who bet me I couldn’t execute bees on command when they were flying around looking for trouble.  I proved those people wrong every time, and won up to five dollars on each occasion.  That’s right, my skill was born out of unspeakable torture, and yet I have been able to triumph by monitizing it.  It almost makes all that time spent in the yard seem worth it for the money-making skill I developed, but I’m careful never to forget why I’m so deft in hand-to-hand combat with bees.  When you think of your most valuable skills, I urge you to consider how you came to hone them.  I’m willing to bet it was something horrible and the pain alone is reason enough not to ever let your skills go to waste. 

If there’s one thing I rarely appreciate or listen to, it’s criticism.  The reason for this isn’t because I think I’m too good to get criticized, it’s because I have an intense dislike for critical people. 

I’m no mathematical genius (in the traditional sense), but I’ve developed pretty much an airtight theorem regarding the nature of critical people.  From my experience, the frequency/intensity of a person’s criticism is inversely proportional to the amount of things besides criticism said person can actually do.  I realize this theorem is highly technical and difficult for the layperson to understand, so please allow me to further explain it.  If somebody isn’t much of a critic, it’s probably because they are very ambitious and do a lot of stuff.  In other words, they don’t pick everybody else apart because they have a working knowledge of how hard shit is.  Conversely, people who are quick to criticize typically spend their time doing little else.  It’s easy for critics to pick apart the actions of others because they aren’t doing anything except for sitting on their damn butts all day thinking about how they would (theoretically) fix problems that aren’t theirs.  Now that I delved deeper into this subject, I trust that my mathematical criticism theorem (MCT) makes a great deal of sense to everyone. 

If you are reading this and thinking that it’s pretty ironic that I’m criticizing critical people, I’ve just got one thing to say to you: shut up.  It’s a necessary evil and a byproduct of my doing the Lord’s work aka spreading the truth, so there’s no way around it.  Besides, I’m not just criticizing into a vacuum like some naysayers.  I’m making this issue a matter of public record by incorporating it into the annals of Everybody Say Ho: the most trusted source in unsolicited internet advice.  Obviously that’s a much more constructive way to handle it.  My advice for today is to take a hard look at yourself and try to determine whether being critical is the only thing you actually do or are any good at.  And as a side note, for those of you who know me personally and might be wondering if I authored this blog about you, the answer is yes.