When I Walk Into a Room: This post is about me and the most interesting thing about me…

A also do cardio training (CT). Cardio training, short for cardiovascular training, is a type of exercise that primarily aims to improve the health and efficiency of the cardiovascular system, which includes the heart, lungs, and blood vessels. Cardiovascular training is sometimes referred to as “aerobic exercise” because it relies on aerobic metabolism, a process that uses oxygen to produce energy for sustained physical activity. The main characteristic of cardio training is that it involves continuous, rhythmic movements that elevate your heart rate and breathing rate for an extended period. Cardio training can be performed in various ways.

When I do resistance training I go to a gym. I live in a relatively large city and I have memberships at three gyms. When I do RT my goal is simply to move a million (1,000,000) pounds of weight a week. An example would be that I deadlift a 1,000,000 weight one time. That, of course, will never happen. It’s more likely that I would move a 100 weight 10,000 times. Actually, I wind up moving various amounts of weight a lot of times over the span of a week. The point is to get a million Rep/Lbs a week.  It doesn’t really matter how. Let me just add that I’ve been doing this for a long period of time.  Do not let this motivate you into doing something stupid like thinking this is easy and going out and trying to move a million pounds in a day. Disclaimer: Talk to a physician before starting any exercise regimen.

For my cardio, I generally do it at home. I have a stationary bicycle. The bicycle will tell me how many calories I burn while peddling. I have a watch that keeps track of my “steps” as I move. I get on the bicycle and peddle. I move my arms to generate “steps” on the watch. At the end of a period of time, say five minutes, I look at how many calories I burned by peddling and how many steps I generated by moving my arms. My goal is to get my heart rate up and keep it there for a period of time and to increase my VO2 max score. I recommend checking out the physician/author/podcaster Peter Attia for discussions about VO2 max. The number of calories I burn and the number of steps I do per week isn’t important. What is important is that I’ve reached a point where I know I’m not a slacker and I that I never, ever quit exercising and, at least every once in a while, actually impress myself by my one-day or weekly effort. Numbers matter.

Quantify, Quantify, Quantify.

MyRating: 100

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MINIMALISM: Official Netflix Documentary

This Googling of coffee started because I made myself a cup of coffee this morning in a way that I had never made it before. Now I’ve made lots of coffee in my day. I wasn’t a huge coffee drinker and I’m still not a huge coffee drinker but I’m a consistent coffee drinker. I like coffee in the morning and I like it strong.

Coffee and I go way back. As a child I was fascinated by the coffee pot. My grandparents drank a lot of coffee and since I spent the first 10 years of my life living with them, I watched a lot of coffee being perked in a glass coffee maker that set on top of the stove. It actually would go perk-perk-perk. It was cool to watch.

I never really drank the stuff until I was a working man. Never needed to. Never wanted to. As a working man, I needed a little help in my mornings to get going. There was nothing like a coffee and cigarette to give me a buzz in the morning to help me get out the door. Later, as a mature working man,  or rather as a somewhat mature working man, although still quite young, I added a newspaper to the mix. It was a habit I sustained for decades. Fortunately, I lost the cigarettes early in that period and, unfortunately, missed them dearly. It is, however, probably one of the reasons why I’m still able to write this in my mid-70s.

My relationship with coffee has gone through many stages and many variations in those stages. As a younger man the relationship was pretty bland. I bought a can or a bag of coffee and perked it. Later, when I matured, I started having instances that changed my relationship with coffee. I’ll detail three of those instances below.

The first was once-upon-a-time when my wife and I were taking a week-long Caribbean cruise. We had missed a connection on a flight to Miami to board the boat due to increment weather. It wasn’t our fault. I called the travel agent and she said that they woud put us up in the hotel at the airport and fly us out to the first port the next day and they would put us up at a hotel until the boat arrived. Sounded okay to me. While at the airport in Miami I went down to this little coffee bar in the middle of the airport and got in line with all these Hispanics to get some coffee. Once I got to the front of the line I got a little adventurous. I ordered a double espresso. I then took it and put way too much sugar in it and the next thing I know I’m buzzing out of my mind. This was good coffee. So good in fact that, for the rest of my life, I felt the best place in the world to get a cup of coffee was the coffee bar at the Miami Airport. This one double espresso changed my life. Double espressos became my favorite coffee drink for years. While I was a working stiff chasing the almighty dollar I used to stop at the local bistro on my way to work and the whole thing got to be so consistent that Cheryl, the lady who worked behind the counter and had a horrible attitude, would often have my double espresso and ham and cheese croissant waiting on me when I walked in the door.

The next instance of how coffee changed my life was when I was on vacation in Italy. My wife and I were staying at a hotel somewhere in Italy while we were just kind of wandering around the country and I woke up one morning, it must have been a Saturday because the street in front of the hotel where they put us in the room at the front of the street where the hotel was located because we were stupid Americans, was alive with a market that just sort of sprang up overnight. I thought that wandering around a street market in Italy might be interesting so I went downstairs wandered through the market,  during my browsing I found this coffee pot, a metal coffee pot that I had seen used throughout Europe by Europeans making coffee and I bought one for $5. This is back in the day when I had to pay for it in lira. At that time it could have been some ridiculous number like a hundred thousand lira. I remember going to money machines and putting in more zeros than you can ever imagine to get paper money. I brought the little metal thing home and it was another instance where coffee changed my life.

The third instance came when I visited a friend who I had run around with in high school. We were great friends. We used to run around all the time. Sometimes we would even go out on double dates together with our girlfriends. He may actually have lost his virginity in the back of my car. Not with me, of course. We were roommates at various times while we were in college and he eventually went off to do some kind of mysterious work for the government and I would go see him periodically and hang out with him at his home for a few days. One morning I got up and went into the kitchen and he was grinding coffee beans with a coffee bean grinder. He was also heating water on the stove and he had this weird glass thing sitting on the counter where he would put in the ground coffee beans and eventually add the boiling water. He called it a french press. When I went home I ordered one along with a bean grinder and, again, my life was changed.

I’m an American. Americans have changed their relationship with coffee. They now get it out of a drive-up window to consume while they’re driving their cars way-more than they did when I was a child. Actually, no one ever did that when I was a child. I can also tell you that I have spent a little time in France wandering around in a car, sometimes with my wife, sometimes with my wife and some of my children, and sometimes alone. I can tell you that the French don’t drink coffee that they obtained in a drive-thru while in their car. At least not during the period when I was driving around France. It would have been sacrilegious. Now I’m saying this not having been to France in years and years. Most of my traveling in the last decade has been in Asia. France was one of the first places I went to when I started going overseas decades ago. I can tell you that I still remember the french word for to-go and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the only place I ever found that I could use that word when referring to a cup of coffee while in France was at a McDonald’s and as soon as I said it I could see the person behind the counter grimace. That’s probably changed but it would almost break my heart if it has. I used to say that it was easier to find a three-legged prostitute than it was to find styrofoam in France.

Today, I have numerous ways to make coffee. This morning, however, was a change. While I was boiling the water for the French press I put the coffee in the water and boiled it. I can’t remember ever having done that before. Now some coffee connoisseurs might almost faint if they read this. Not only that, but the beans weren’t ground fresh. I ground the beans at the store. I’m almost embarrassed to say that. Further, I blended some coffees. It wasn’t just Sumatra Dark, I added some vanilla coffee to make a blend.

I know. I’ve sinned and now that I’ve confessed I feel so much better. But the coffee was great. I’m even going to do it again. But, not this morning, I’m already starting to get a little buzz.

First off, let’s face it, the internet is a very very very deep hole. You can start off with one article and move on and on and on and on. I use the concept of ration to essentially tell myself, my ‘better’ self, that I know it’s really entertaining and all that jazz but maybe I should put a cap on it. Since I’m over-educated I tend to try to put a cap on it, not on it. So I realized that I just can’t keep going down that rabbit hole that winds up with me following clickbait after clickbait after clickbait. So, let me tell you what I do.

First, I need to tell you that I’m a Chrome user. Chrome is, of course, a Google product. Originally, I was a Mosaic user and the first search engine that I used was one called Alta Vista. Back in those days I was a newspaper reader. Actually, I was a newspaper reader long before I ever touched a computer.

Let’s face it, America used to get its news on one of three channels on the television. I was never a big news fan as a young person. I had other interests. I didn’t really start reading the newspaper until I started delivering it in high school. Later when I went to college my girlfriend got a paper route and we did it together to make ends meet in our little apartment in the student ghetto. We became somewhat successful at it and by the time my girlfriend was no longer my girlfriend, a couple of years later, I was deeply involved in distributing newspapers. At the end of my morning route I would go home, take the paper to my desk, light up a smoke, pour myself a cup of coffee and “News Out” as I liked to say. I did that for years, as in, over a decade.

I liked it. I really did. Well, I didn’t wind up smoking cigarettes that whole time, and I do miss the cigarette smoking with the coffee in the newspaper, but I’ve kind of moved on. By the mid-1990s I was starting to realize that newspapers were headed in a really bad direction in terms of the word longevity. They were going to become a thing of the past, as in terms of sitting down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and reading the paper. Hopefully, the cigarettes will disappear as well but I’m certain it won’t be any time in the near future due to the fact that so much of the world’s population has yet to enjoy the wonderful experience of nicotine addiction.

So today, it’s not a cigarette and coffee and a newspaper, it’s a cup of coffee and a web browser called Chrome. But before I open, well, actually right after I open the web pages for my morning shot of news, I set the timer on my cell phone for 10 minutes. I open the pages all at once because the Google Chrome web browser allows me to right click on a tab that I use to save my favorite news sources and open the pages that I designate. It opens them all up at once and I start getting my 10 minute morning fix of the news. I will tell you that my web browser has the following news sources which are listed in alphabetical order: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and NPR. Also listed are Google News as well as the four local ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates so that I can get a little local news. I give myself 10 minutes, which, as you can imagine, is simply enough time to go over a very basic scan of the top stories. Anything that I want to look at in depth I simply save the heading or storyline to a file I call Research. I may or may not get back to the story of the storyline, depending on my schedule for the day or week and how significant the storyline is to my curiosity. At the present time I am considering using some of the headlines or story lines to utilize as topics for my website BS wanderings.

Why limit myself to only ten minutes a day? Well, actually I don’t but I do limit that initial examination of today’s news to 10 minutes primarily because I think the news has become more of a deep rabbit hole and less of an informative source for the reality in which I live. Call me a skeptic but, I think competition for the almighty dollar, or rather competition for the shrinking attention span and expanding number of dollars, has become significantly more important than ethics or morality In terms of the information we are being fed by the ever growing fourth estate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t think we need the fourth estate and need them desperately. It’s just that it seems that the profession of journalism is becoming significantly less professional because it’s not necessarily good news that the public wants, it seems to me that the public is more interested in entertainment than ever before and the ability to become a pseudo-journalist is easy as simply writing a blog post.

Like this one.

At this point you might be wondering why I would include the Oklahoma City bombing as the opening of a treatise on the concept of success. It turned out that McVeigh was, and still is, the most successful domestic terrorist in U.S. history. While there’s no question that this gave McVeigh the status of infamous as opposed to famous, there’s no denying that he was successful and accomplished in what he set out to do, no matter how horrible that may have been. What it goes to show is that the measurement of success can be not only be applied to issues that are considered positive but also incredibly negative and brings me to the point of stating that it’s very important to be careful what you wish for. Did McVeigh ever regret his role in the bombing before his execution? It doesn’t appear so.

So, what is success? Success is, simply, a concept and is only one of the many concepts that fill this website. Actually, concepts, along with strategies are pretty much all this website is about. The vast majority of these concepts and strategies will be meaningful when talking about success. People may not care about the terms concepts and strategies but they perk-up when the word success is mentioned. People are interested in success.

Concepts are “an abstract idea” or “a general notion”, according to Google. Merriam-Webster states that a concept is “something conceived in the mind.” Dictionary.com defines a concept as “an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.” Notice that concepts are strictly structures of the mind. You can’t hold them in your hand but you can hold manifestations of a concept in your hand, assuming it will fit. Some concepts like a house or a car or a rocket are a bit big.

So what do our sources for the meaning of a word say about success? It is something that exists only in the mind. However, put into practice, words tend to take on meanings of their own. People understand what success means by the manifestations of the concept. Success is achievement or attainment of something. It can, literally, be any attainment or achievement. However, people tend to judge success based on the values of the society in which they reside. There seems to be a pecking order of success based on how many people would like to attain or achieve a particular instance of success. For example, virtually everyone in the world that lives in a society where money is used as a means of purchasing goods and services values money. Therefore, if you have a lot of money you are seen as successful. In areas of the world where leaders are elected, people who are elected to public office are seen as successful as they are able to influence the destiny of the area. People who are in charge of companies where a large number of people are employed tend to be viewed as leaders and are also considered successful. A lot of instances of success can easily be measured. You can measure success by dollars or votes or number of employees. As a matter of fact, you can measure success in a multitude of ways.

Who have been the most successful people of all time? According to The Week, a British tabloid, “With a fortune of around $400bn in today’s money, Mansa Musa I of Mali, the first king of Timbuktu, may not be a household name, but was by most estimates one of the richest people in history. Deriving his wealth from his country’s vast salt and gold deposits, which at one time accounted for half the world’s supply, Musa ruled West Africa’s Malian Empire in the early 14th century, constructing hundreds of mosques across the continent, many of which survive to this day.” Note that the article implies that Mansa Musa had half of the world’s “wealth” of the time which was in gold and salt. There wasn’t much economy practiced at the time. Much of the world was simply surviving. The next richest person was Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicholas II) of Russia who had an estimate wealth of “$300-$400bn in today’s money.” John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford appear next on the list. Wikipedia has a list of wealthiest historical figures that might be of interest. The interesting part of these lists is that all of the individuals on these lists lived in a time when there was little technology and nowhere near the “creature comforts” of today. The average twenty-first century person in much of the world lives in potentially more comfort than any of these wealthy historical figures.

Another aspect of success is fame. Want to know who is famous, at least historically? Go here. You can find hundreds and hundreds of famous people, if famous people are what you are interested in. You can also check out a list of celebrities here.

But why worry about someone else’s wealth, fame or celebrity? Actually, why even consider wealth, fame or celebrity at all? If you just want to be a voyeur, well… Okay. If you want to envy people who have attained some form of status due to wealth, fame or celebrity then I’m here to tell you that you’re not only breaking a commandment, psychologically you’re starting to slip into a form of psychosis. There’s no one else on earth that I want to be or trade places with except may the fictional character Raymond Redington. He’s so grounded, knowledgeable and, well… practical. Don’t you think it might be a really good Idea to be grounded, knowledgeable and practical as well? For me, there’s a whole lot of adjectives I’d rather use to describe myself other than rich, famous and celebrated. Well, okay, being rich might not be so bad, but I’m certainly not looking forward to ever being famous and celebrated.

First, let’s talk about traditional success. Traditional success can be measured by the amount of wealth, power, fame and/or celebrity status that you possess. Granted that the only one of those characteristics that can really be measured with any real meaning is wealth and, yes, you can measure subscribers and followers but do subscribers and followers directly impact your bottom line in a measurable way? That can be hard to measure.

Wealth
Wealth is simply an accounting term meaning assets minus liabilities. It’s fairly easy to figure out. You take the sum of the value of the things you own and subtract any debts that you have and you arrive at your net worth, which gives a fair indication of your wealth. Net worth is actually a very important concept. If you are wealthy enough you can, if you desire, have a substantial portion of the hours of the day where you have no commitments to other people. Your time is your own, at least to some degree. Wealth is, generally, a good thing. It allows you the freedom to live the life you choose within the bounds of that wealth.

For people who have little or no wealth they must commit a large portion of their time to some occupation to gather revenue to buy the necessities of life. Usually that means getting a job to “pay the lousy bills” as some folks would say. If you’re lucky or reasonably astute, you can get a job that you really enjoy. Over time people tend to generally accumulate some wealth. In America and most of the more prosperous countries of the world, there are institutions in place which will provide most of the citizenry some form of income in their old age. Note that there is no real consensus on how much money it takes to become wealthy. If you live in California, the amount of money you need to live comfortably is significantly more than in some other states. Yet many people feel that California is the only place they want to live, regardless of the cost of living. There are many, many factors that go into the determination of where to live.

Power
Power can be the second type of success. There are a variety of different types of power. First there is parental power. Your parents had this power over you for several years and good or bad, you didn’t have a lot of choice about it. You could have also experienced sibling power while you lived with your family while growing up. Sometimes your siblings could and would exercise some form of power over you. When you started attending school you experienced the power of your peers and your teachers. In the twentieth century organizational behavioral theorists started coming up with all kinds of theories about power, particularly in the workplace. According to Mind Tools, a professional and personal development website, “In 1959, French and Raven described five bases of power: Legitimate – This comes from the belief that a person has the formal right to make demands, and to expect others to be compliant and obedient. Reward – This results from one person’s ability to compensate another for compliance. Expert – This is based on a person’s high levels of skill and knowledge. Referent – This is the result of a person’s perceived attractiveness, worthiness and right to others’ respect. Coercive – This comes from the belief that a person can punish others for noncompliance. Six years later, Raven added an extra power base: Informational – This results from a person’s ability to control the information that others need to accomplish something.” Apparently, social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven were on the ground floor of the research into organizational behavior when it came to research into power in the workplace. Dr. Nicole Lipkin also discusses various types of power in the workplace such as coercive, connection, expert, formal, informal, informational, legitimate, referent and reward in her book What Keeps Leaders Up at Night: Recognizing and Resolving Your Most Troubling Management Issues.

While workplace issues concerning power will be an experience that will be hard to escape, there will be other issues concerning personal power in your life. Your spouse, your children and your friends may well create issues with power dynamics in your life. I don’t always get to do what I want to do due to concerns from my wife, children and friends along with my concerns about them and my concerns about keeping our relationships as positive as possible. The power dynamics of relationships are interesting, to say the least, even when people aren’t particularly vested in them.

There is also political power that needs to be addressed. Political power is one of the oldest of all forms of power. Once humans started living in groups, someone was always ready and waiting to assume power when the current political leadership started to show signs of decay. The political history of the world is extremely complex. You can make some sense of it here. People who obtain some form of political power always seem to receive deferential treatment and a variety of perks from some segments of society. Notice that people at the national level of politics rarely leave political office voluntarily unless it’s for a more lucrative opportunity. Somehow, it seems to me that it’s not an incumbent’s desire to continue in their selfless dedication to public service that keeps them in the election cycles. Call me a cynic, but…

Fame
Does everyone want their fifteen minutes of fame? No, I don’t believe so. But it’s also obvious that some people do and some people will do virtually anything to get it. Now I can fully understand someone being a little weird on a YouTube channel that makes them six figures a year. They don’t have a boss, they get lots of attention and they can often be very flexible about when they have to actually commit time to their channel. I’m not sure why some people seem to think infamy can be equated with success. I think it may be the old adage that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” in play. I think some people actually believe that. At least it seems that they must.

Celebrity
So, what’s the difference between a famous person and a celebrity? I’m not actually sure. Google says a celebrity is a famous person. Merriam-Webster says celebrity is “the state of being celebrated” or “a famous or celebrated person.” Dictionary.com defines celebrity as “a famous or well-known person.” Maybe I should just say that a celebrity is “officially” famous. That way there could be at least some difference.

This ends the section of traditional success. This is the kind of success that most people understand and want. Further, if most people are like me, just give me the money and “to hell” with any fame and power and celebrity status. That sounds like way-too-much work and responsibility. Plus, I don’t want a lot of people to know how totally irresponsible I can be spending all that money. It might make me look bad and that could get around, if you know what I mean.

Nontraditional Success
Now, It’s time to talk about Nontraditional Success. That’s my favorite form of success. To do the explanation of it justice I’m going to tell a story about a fictional friend of mine named Charles who is more likely to be known as Chuck or Chucky or The Chuckster or ChuckMiester or ChuckALuck by his friends. Chuck is about my age and we have similar stories, the only difference being that Chuck’s story is pure fiction, but very representative, like most fictional stories. Chuck was born into a family of misfits but he got lucky and had grandparents that took the boy under their wing a great part of the time when he was a child. They provided good role models, but hardly the best. As Chuck matured into a teenager he showed some promise. God had been good to the Chuckster. Unfortunately, it was the sixties when Chucky experienced puberty and there was still the issue of all the misfits in his family along with all the other misfits of the sixties in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Chuck enlisted in the United States Marine Corp but Chucky flunked his physical so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam and do his patriotic duty to his Uncle Sam. So, he dropped out of high school, got a low-paying manual labor job and partied a lot. Eventually, most of his close friends moved away to go to college or to find better jobs and Chucky decided that it was probably a good thing to move to one of the college towns and join some of them. So, he did. God had been good to the Chuckster. He had great friends from reasonably good families. Their only shortcoming was that they just liked to party a bit too much. You can’t have too much fun, right? So, Chuck got a job and started going to university part-time. Eventually, he started going to university full-time and working part-time for a Fortune 500 company. He did okay, not great, and he still partied too much but, hey, he was still young and he knew a lot of people and he had a lot of fun. Eventually, though, his friends started graduating and moving off and the parties Chuck went to started getting smaller. Then, one day, Chuck graduates. He gets a Bachelor’s Degree and the Fortune 500 company that he had worked for part-time while he was going to university offers him a job in sales in a city close enough to the university that he can still commute and take classes. Great, he thinks. So, he starts making good money and the job is incredibly easy, so he still spends a lot of time in the university town, especially on the weekends. All his friends have couches and enjoy seeing him periodically.

One day, Chucky stops at a restaurant for breakfast. There is a nice looking female, a bit younger than Chucky, who serves him breakfast and they kind of hit it off in a sense and for the next few weeks Chucky stops in to have breakfast more often and only when Diane, the waitress he hit it off with, was on duty. One day he asks her out to a movie and, a few months later, Chucky, who had never really been interested in making commitments to the more-than-a-few females he had dated over the years, married Diane in a ceremony performed by her brother at her parents house. Something had changed in Chucky. I’m not sure what it was. Some people simply refer to it as the-cycle-of-life which implies that there seems to be this cycle of events in most people’s lives that eventually results in a couple committing to a relationship for more than a few months. I had run around with Chucky a bit in our younger days and I was surprised when I found out that he had gotten married. Over the next couple of years Charles and Diane had a couple of children, a boy and a girl. They bought a house and Diane was a stay-at-home mom until the kids got a little older and then she went to work at the same Fortune 500 company where Chucky worked while Diane’s mom watched the kids. I would see Chucky every year or two at a get together with some of our old friends and he would fill me in on what he was doing. Life was good for Chucky. He and Diane were happy together, well, at least reasonably happy and the kids grew up without any major issues. The family had found a church that gave them some spiritual support. Chucky and Diane had kept working for the Fortune 500 company and moving up the corporate ladder. The kids had graduated from high school and had gone on to college. Over the years I had seen less and less of Charles and Diane. It was that cycle-of-life thing. I found all this out when I ran into them at a funeral for one of the “old crowd” that had passed away prematurely. I had gone out to lunch with Charles and Diane after the funeral and we had a great afternoon catching up. I asked them what their plans were for the future and they said they were going to retire in the near future and do a little traveling. Both of them had been lucky enough to have been able to get vested in the company pension plan before the Fortune 500 company stopped offering it to new employees. They had also been there when the company had initiated matching contributions to a new company perk called a Simplified Employee Pension Plan Individual Retirement Account. This meant that, when they retired they would have a total of six checks coming into their bank account each month. Chucky and Diane would draw their company’s retirement plan money and they could start taking money out of their SEP-IRAs and they would each draw their Social Security. They said that the house would be paid for by then, they had managed to get the kids through college and the kids, who had delivered a couple of grandkids to them were still living close by so that they still got together frequently. They were both in good health and they planned to do a little traveling and pray for more grandkids. I told them that sounded great and when we parted we promised to keep in touch.

Now the above story is fictional. There never was a Charles or a Diane. But Charles and Diane were simply fictional stand-ins for other people in my life. I knew a lot of people in my younger days who liked to have a good time and, over the years, got married and seemed to settle into a somewhat typical middle-class American existence. They had two cars which they parked in their two car garages on their three bedroom brick homes, assuming the garage wasn’t full of junk. They had kids and tried to “get-by” and prosper. With a little luck they stayed married, got the kids out of the house and looked forward to a bit of retirement.

The key question here is whether you feel that Charles and Diane as well as hundreds of millions of others throughout the world that mirror their story to some degree, are successful. I like to call this Nontraditional Success even though I’m not sure you can actually classify twentieth century or twenty-first century perceptions of success to have any traditions to them, at least not in America. You certainly might be able to make the case that some societies, in particular societies that practice or have practiced primogeniture as a custom or even as a legal doctrine, can be said to have traditions that tend to define success or the lack of it. Yet America, which has, in the past, been known as being anti-monarcial and, for all practical purposes, a country where meritocracy was the rule of the day. Meritocracy tends to preclude and supplant many traditional paths to society’s perceptions of success. Do you consider people who lead reasonably “good” lives worthy of the adjective successful? Yes, I do understand that, any way you slice it, the concept of success is incredibly subjective, at best. Yet, in principle isn’t the concept of being a “decent human being” something that should be worthy of at least a consideration for being something of a success story? Of course it should.

But, I have an even better way of deciding what constitutes success. But before I do let me tell you another story, this one actually being one that is true. I have, at various times over the past twenty years, gotten together with one or more friends I have known for as many as fifty years or more. Further, it was not uncommon for there to be some alcohol or perhaps even some illegal substances (none of which I have imbibed for almost fifty years). Once, during one of these sessions someone asked me what my claim to being successful might be and I thought about it for a moment and I said “Well, I’m sure-as-hell more educated than anyone in this room.”, and I was right. I was. Later I would dwell on the issue of what makes a person successful and I realized that the question of what makes a person successful may have been answerable, but whether someone believes that they, or anyone else for that matter, is successful isn’t something that is set in stone. Bernie Madoff was the perfect example of my generation. Who had a better reputation and was more credentialed than Bernie Madoff? Yet, when the truth came out, who was more evil? Another prime example of success gone awry was Anthony Bourdain. He may have led the “high life” on all of the major continents of the world but in the end he was the epitome of the troubled soul. Success is, well… subjective and very possibly, momentary. It can be gone at any minute. Another interesting aspect of super-successful people is Bruce Jenner. Having graced the cover of boxes of Wheaties during the late 1970s, his/her new persona, Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair in 2015. How do you understand success with some of these dichotomies playing out. Am I confused about such issues? I am.

Fortunately, I slowly arrived at a conclusion over a period of time. Who should be concerned about success? Well, in a sense we all should, or at least we should be concerned about our mental and physical health. No one, well, I’m assuming that the rational way to look at life is that no one would want to be depressed or have to deal with a form of mental or physical illness. Don’t we all want to feel good about our lives or at a very minimum not feel bad about it? Sure, life has some trials and tribulations, but what I want on a personal level is to feel good about who I am and how I am leading my life. This led me to start looking more deeply at the question of whether or not I was successful and perhaps focus on changing my overall paradigm to one of asking the question of whether I believed that I was successful or not. Ultimately, if I were asking others if they thought I was being successful it would simply depend on what some other person might believe about me. That perception would be closed by their own preconceptions about what success “looked like” or some other value judgment that depended on the norms of society.

What I came to realize, what conclusion that I drew, in other words, my personal paradigm shift was that I needed to reframe my posture on success to one of whether or not I believed I was successful. In the end, that’s the only thing that should really matter. I shouldn’t give a rat sass about whether anyone else was successful. What difference did it really make to me? I decided that my only issue with success should be whether I believed that I was successful or not. Ultimately, it wasn’t very hard to make the transition from asking what success was and did I meet the criteria for being successful to asking myself if I believed I was successful.

I was lucky in a sense. I did that a long time ago. It was good. For me, there are so many things that can’t be answered in a truthful manner because they are either subjective to the whims of society or no real answer is known. I call those Divine Mysteries. The issue of success is one of the Divine Mysteries, which are something I’ve labored with far too much in my life. I have a section on them on this website and my advice to someone about them is deal with them if you must but I often say to myself that they are best left alone as they can consume you.

My Perspective on Success
It’s your life. Live it the way you want. I’m going to, at least as long as the rest of the world will let me. I do not want fame or celebrity. I don’t need or want a lot of people wanting a slice of my time that I might not want to give to them. I don’t need power, other than the power to lead my life on my terms. I don’t want to be a leader. I’ll leave that to other people who need to experience leadership a lot more than I do. I do enjoy having enough money to be comfortable, which for me is fairly close to the comfort range of the average American. I like central heat and air conditioning, hot water, flush toilets and plenty of electrical outlets along with any appliances I might like to utilize. I like being able to work when I want and having enough wealth to be able to spend months or even years without working if I so choose. I like having enough money to pursue my favorite hobby of traveling around America and overseas to see the natural wonders God has manifested for us and the creations of my fellow human beings. I have sought and still seek understanding. I have sought and still seek the truth. I feel like my path in this world has been a good one. I believe I am successful. You don’t have to feel successful to enjoy life, but it’s nice if you do.

So, what would you like to experience? This would be a good exercise to actually undertake if you wanted to understand your own personal feelings about the concept of what you believe about success. One way to determine your feelings about success is to determine what you want in life in terms of relationships, materialism and spiritualism. After all, you are one of the most important, if not the most important, person in your life. You should know how you feel about success and write it down for reflection at a later date. Believe me, those perceptions can change.

If you want to understand success, you should do it on your own terms. Create your own definitions of success, even if someone has created those exact definitions before. Live life on your own terms but, just as one final commentary that I need to make, no one, in all probability, wants you to become another Timothy McVeigh.

Freedom is also a paradox. On one hand we all have it all the time and on the other hand, we never really have it.

Allow me to talk about the first part, the part where we have it all the time. First, the ultimate freedom would be for me or you to kill another human. There’s no question in my mind that I could do that, at least I could physically do that. With the advent of modern weaponry, it becomes almost effortless. You just pick up a loaded gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger. It happens daily. Amnesty International claims that five hundred people die every day from gun violence. That’s about one person every three minutes of every hour of every day. Perpetually. That’s a lot of violence. That’s also way-too-much-freedom.

You also have lots of other ways to validate that you have freedom. How many males in the world abandon their children? How many women have abortions? How many spouses have consensual sex with another partner at the risk of destroying their marriage? How many humans physically or emotionally abuse their children or other members of their family? How many people allow that abuse to continue to themselves or others? How many people quit their jobs on the spur of the moment? How many people accumulate significant debt by gambling? How many people steal? How many people have serious drug addictions? How many people turn a blind eye to some really bad things that are happening to others? How many people work incredibly hard to accumulate ridiculously large fortunes and ignore the plight of people left homeless through no fault of their own?

Hey, I could go on and on and on and on.

The point is that God gives you the right to do any damned thing you please, at least if you are capable of doing it in the reality in which you find yourself.

Also, you need to understand that society takes a lot of those rights away. Or, at least makes actually practicing certain freedoms somewhat scary if you get caught practicing them. Like rape and/or murder.

I’ll talk about the first point first. You can’t really do anything you want whenever you want. God may give you that power but God gives you that power within the realm of God’s reality and your current ability to understand it. That is, as an example, you have to be able to do certain things within the realm of physical possibility. You can’t simply make yourself invisible whenever you want no matter how bad you want to. You can’t, literally, walk on water. You can’t simply will yourself pregnant or not pregnant or skinny or beautiful or ridiculously sexy. Yes, you can walk on water with the right equipment. Yes you can be pregnant or not pregnant or skinny or beautiful or ridiculously sexy, but that involves something to happen that involves something more than simple will power or twitching your nose.

As for society, God may give you the right to do anything you want any time you want within the constructs of reality but society takes that away, thankfully. I don’t want to be walking down a sidewalk and come upon you defecating in a fountain in a park alongside that sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon in front of a dozen or so people simply because you want to exercise your “God given rights” as a free human being. Have a little decency, if not intelligence. Even though some people might want to see that and even applaud you for doing it, the vast number of Americans simply don’t want to take in that vision.

Freedom comes with a footnote. My belief is that the footnote for freedom should emphasize that a particular freedom should be exercised judiciously, or, if not, the exercise of that freedom should at least call into question the social value of disallowing or disavowing that freedom.

Let me give you an example of that.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, while seeking to create a government to insure the inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as stated in the Declaration of Independence, just happened to legalize de facto slavery, that is, the human bondage of other humans, in the United States Constitution with the infamous section of the document which stated that “three fifths of all other Persons” should be counted when deciding how many competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males should comprise one of the esteemed bodies of that government. At the time, many disavowed the institution of slavery, but due to the needs of certain interested parties to compromise to create the United States, some political issues, such as the right to own another individual, were often disavowed by many, but not disallowed by any.

In 1865, seventy-seven years, about three generations later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery as well as involuntary servitude with an exception for the punishment of a crime. At that point the ownership of humans as chattel was disallowed as well as officially disavowed from a legal, moral and ethical standpoint. The freedom, or right to own another human being and take away their right for freedom, became law in the United States. Society had spoken. Or, at least a new generation of competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males had.

In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the freedom to exercise their right to vote, another huge and long overdue step on the road to political freedom performed by a bunch of competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males. There were no black males in Congress at that time.

At this point you might wonder if I have some kind of liberal political axe to grind. I do not. I just believe that, of all freedoms, political freedoms are the most egregious and for all the rhetoric about the greatness of the founding fathers, I know of no example of any of them ever espousing any form of universal suffrage. In their day the “acceptable” political sentiment of the day was that women, as well as slaves and other social “rabble”, should not have the right to vote. Granted, it was the mood and fashion of the times. I’m not questioning that. What I am questioning is whether, in the twenty-first century, we should be disenfranchising our fellow citizens of the freedom to vote for elected officials who will make the laws that govern them. To me, legally disallowing someone to vote because they are “ungodly” or have different beliefs than we do is one of the most significant sins that someone who gives “lip service” to liberty can commit. Of all the freedoms that we have, I believe that the freedom to vote is the absolute essential prerequisite for defining America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” for without the vote we are not free and we certainly are not brave enough to hear and bear what others are saying with their vote in the political arena.

Okay, maybe it’s time to get off my political soapbox and reflect on some more important aspects of freedom.

First, I need to point out that I’m only going to address freedom in terms of what it means in the United States. There’s a little thing called national sovereignty that implies that any country can make and enforce any law that it wants no matter what the citizens of any other country have to say about that law. Most people never stop to consider the implications of that statement. I only make the statement because I’ve probably been to a hundred or so more countries than you have been to and I have experienced the implications of that national sovereignty firsthand. For example, if I go to a country where the predominant religion is Islam the first question I am often asked by an average male on the street who speaks English and wants to have a conversation is “How many wives do I have?” Interestingly, I’m never really sure if these individuals are trying to impress me with the number of wives they have or if they really do wonder how many wives I have, being too naïve to understand that my wife’s attorney would never allow me to have more wives. This should drive home the fact that national sovereignty can dramatically impact one’s freedom. Wikipedia has a really interesting article on Women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and I could go on and on and on about the suppression of rights in other countries but that’s a really, really deep hole. It’s bad enough in America. I think everyone who has any thoughts at all about freedom should first understand that freedom is a function of the geographic location and year of your birth. Those two factors affect your freedoms much more significantly than any other factors you can name.

I’ll have more to say about freedom in further posts but for now let me just say that freedom is a non-starter with me. You’re as free as you think you are. Anyone can take away that freedom with the pull of a trigger or by running a stop sign while you’re going through an intersection. You can also lose your freedom by living a lifestyle that a more prudent individual would consider to be a bit on the ludicrously risky side.

Then again, it’s your life and God gave you all the freedom anyone could possibly want. Just remember that God gave that same freedom to everyone else as well and all those cliches about freedom are just that – cliches. Use your freedoms as judiciously as possible.

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