Over the years I’ve known several people that have more than their share of bad luck; I suspect most of us have.

I use the term “bad luck”, but it really encompasses an entire range of situations, scenarios, and circumstances that – through no visible fault of their own – result in bad things happening to those acquaintances.

My wife and I have started to characterize them as “drama magnets.” It seems that everything could be going along swimmingly, and out of nowhere, some kind of drama finds them.

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One of the problems we have as writers is feeling like we need to continually come up with something new to say.

The problem, of course, is that in so many ways there’s precious little that’s truly new, or that isn’t already being said by others. This is something that I had to face from the start with Ask Leo!. There were, and are, plenty of tech sites answering questions and providing information for the public — often about exactly the same topics I address.

What I learned is that as important as what you say is how you say it. That, in a way, makes it new.

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One of the issues I face periodically on Ask Leo! is that of what we colloquially call “conspiracy theories.”

Be it part of a question, or just a rant, I get comments from people from time to time that are absolutely convinced that there’s a massive government or corporate conspiracy to invade their privacy, steal their information, or worse. Usually it’s of the generic variety — “they’re after us all” — but I’ll occasionally see the more personal version as well — “they’re after me.”

This bothers me in part because these folks are choosing to live a life in fear that is generally unfounded.

What worries me more is that it often prevents them from doing things that would benefit them, or ironically, protect them.

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It’s frustrating.

I watch the scenario play out on TV all the time. People are given some information and accept it without question.

Right or wrong, true or false, intentionally deceptive or accidentally misleading. Blind acceptance from someone in a position of perceived power or beguiling intrigue.

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Some people hate email.

I love it.

It’s one of the best possible means of communication invented, as far as I’m concerned. And my reasons are very, very simple.

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I ran across an interesting statement in my reading this morning: “…school was taking up a lot of the time I would have spent on learning.”

The knee-jerk reaction to that statement is that it feels somewhat like an oxymoron — school is all about learning, isn’t it?

That very reaction, though, illustrates that even in this ever-personalized world we look for one-size-fits-all.

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There are no liberals. There are no conservatives.

There are only people.

Whe brought this to mind was this story of recent days: “GOP candidate charged after allegedly ‘body slamming’ reporter“, or more correctly the republican candidate’s response that included the phrase: “It’s unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene …”.

Whether not the journalist created the scene is debatable. But what struck me was the need to call him out as a “liberal” journalist.

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My parents spent World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland.

As you can imagine, I heard several stories of that time. My sense, though, is that I did not hear all the stories. The stories I heard were of successes, things that worked, hiding from the Germans, and some of the tricks my parents and grandparents used to work around some of the shortages, or prohibitions, of the time.

There’s one story, of which I certainly only have fragments, that almost always comes to mind when I think about them during that time.

The time my dad and his brother escaped from a Nazi prison camp.

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My attempt at a daily writing exercise is only one part of my overall approach to honing my skills.

Another exercise that I’ve adopted for some time now is about idea generation. I’ve now read about variations on this technique in several places, and have adopted my own variation.

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It’s a scenario I see repeated often: a group of people go to a restaurant to share a meal. At the end of the meal the bill comes and all chaos ensues. Relatively intelligent people become failures at basic math. Friends become adversaries. “Fairness” becomes a thing that’s hotly contested.

Let’s just say it’s one of my pet peeves. I tend to sit quietly by and roll with the punches, but still … it often frustrates me.

Sometimes I wish that people could let go of their egos long enough not to end a meal on a sour note.

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If you’ve used technology for any length of time you’re probably already acquainted with the cool things that are possible, and the new frontiers it can open for us all.

You’re probably also familiar with the excitement you feel when something works.

My take is that a) the excitement is real, b) it’s somewhat misplaced, though c) it’s also somewhat of a sad reflection on the state of our technology.

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At one point while at Microsoft I had an employee who had some interesting notions about communication. He was a smart guy, passionate about his work and the quality thereof, but when it came to getting his ideas across — particularly his opinions — things fell a little short.

I challenged him, to which he responded with words to the effect of “if I know that I’ve stated what I mean clearly then it’s not my fault if someone doesn’t understand me”.

Wrong,

Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong.

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All in all it was a pleasant way to do nothing.

I was sitting on a guardrail along the Seward highway a couple of miles outside of Girdwood, Alaska. The sun was out and felt warm on my face, the view was amazing, and I found myself taking a few moments just to let it all soak in. The only real downside was roar of the traffic flying by a few feet in front of me, and the fact that many of them weren’t really slowing down to avoid the U-Haul truck with a flat tire on the narrow shoulder.

The U-Haul that I was baby-sitting.

For me the day had also started out as eventfully.

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Ideas are only the combination of things which already exist.
– Todd Brison, The Creative’s Curse

I don’t remember why the thought struck me, but I realized the other day that absolutely everything is recycled.

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I’ll arrive at the airport today about three hours before my flight.

Yes, I err on the early side, much to the occasional frustration of my wife.

In this case, however, two hours are the traditional “arrive early” instructions from the airlines, which I simply incorporate into my travel routine. The additional hour? That’s best classified as “risk management”.

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We tend to throw a lot of blame at our elected officials when they take action contrary to our values. It’s often with a “how can they possibly support X”, where “X” is the incendiary topic of the day. (And there have been a lot of incendiary topics of late.)

Here’s the problem: if the system is working even half-assed the way it’s supposed to, it may not be their fault.

They’re just doing their jobs.

Exactly as the system encourages.

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If you read any self-improvement, time management. or productivity literature in recent years you’re likely to come across the Jerry Seinfeld story.

I was thinking about it just yesterday, and lo and behold, it pops up in The Daily Stoic as today’s entry.

Once again it seems that the universe is trying to tell me something.

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I was reminded this morning by an article in our local paper about a course being offered by the University of Washington: “Calling BS in the Age of Big Data”.

It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to call BS, and it’s not enough to consider just “big data”.

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I went to the hardware store earlier today looking for something. It wasn’t something specific — more like an idea I had for which I was looking for a solution. The solution could come from just about any department, but I’d know it when I saw it.

I didn’t see it.

But what I did see was something that sparked an idea.

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I’m not really a goal-setting kind of person. While I certainly have short term projects I want to accomplish — say six months to a year at most — I keep reading how I “should” have longer term goals. My approach instead has been to become more comfortable with just setting a general direction, watching for opportunities, and enjoying where life takes me.

And I have been enjoying it. 🙂

Every so often, though, I bow to so-called conventional wisdom when it comes to goal setting, usually because it’s positioned as some critical aspect of a self-improvement book I’m in the process of reading.

Apparently that’s where I found myself five years ago. The other day as I was revamping my usage of Evernote I stumbled into — you guessed it — a note written in 2012 outlining goals for five years hence. Aka today, in 2017.

I hadn’t looked at it in five years. It was an interesting, and surprising find.

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