Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. I thank those of you who’ve stopped by my blog while I was away for the last couple of weeks grading research papers, doing a research paper, and giving and grading finals for the semester. My first semester as a student teacher made me think a lot about the nature of effort, which was reinforced by a picture that my fourth grade teacher posted on Facebook a few months ago. It was a picture from our class play, Rampunzel (I grew up in Richwood, “The Ramp Capital of the World.” If you don’t know what ramps are, they are the onion’s wild, stinky cousin, and if you get too close to them, they will stain your hands a purplish black, almost like ink. I’ve never eaten ramps, because quite frankly, the smell alone made me sick to the point that I feel a little queasy thinking about them.), an adaptation of Rapunzel.

A Leading Man?

At the time of the play, I was 4’3, ten years old, and thanks to puberty, even most of the girls in my fourth grade class were taller than me. However, I’d developed a bit of a reputation from class sketches and Christmas plays in my hometown, mainly because I was really good at memorizing my lines. We were told that we could write down the three roles we wanted for the play, or if we didn’t want to act, we could opt to be a stage manager. I opted to audition for Spencer, the male lead; Sam, the second male lead; and one of the lumberjacks. The auditions for Spencer came first.

Our teacher, Ms. Barrett, gave us the script, and a one-day warning to read two pages of the script and learn our lines for one of the scenes. She read the lines off stage (there was no stage, per se, at this stage, so we stood in front of the class), and we were basically acting the scene out by ourselves. I was one of the last people to audition. However, when it came for my turn, I did something that absolutely no one else before me or after me did when it came time to audition, which I surely thought someone would would do.

I fell.

On purpose.

In a classroom with a very thin carpet and no padding.

Why would I do something like that? I did it because at the end of the scene, Spencer was supposed to climb a tree, but he fell trying to reach his lady love, the title character of the play. I pantomimed climbing, and when I got to the line, “If I could just get to the next step, the rest of the climb will be easy,” I fell like a rock. My best friend at the time, Eric, told me that he was amazed that I actually fell when the script said to. A lot of other people said the same thing. The next day, I found out that the part was mine.

I’m not saying that I necessarily won the part because I was the best actor, but because I was the one person completely committed to getting the lead role, to the point of falling flat when the script called for it. This audition taught me something that has served me very well over the last 21 1/2 years: you must always do your best. You might not be the best, or have the natural qualities that others do, but if you outwork someone, you will be surprised what you will accomplish.

How have you succeeded beyond expectations by giving your all?

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Hi, everyone. I hope this New Year’s Day finds you in a good place. This is a time for optimism and looking forward to meeting your goals. However, most of the New Year’s Resolutions end up being broken by February. So, what should we do about it?

I think that this is an opportunity to make this the year a year of personal development. If we look at this as a time to look at insight from those who know how to set goals and make them happen, our New Year, and every new year, will be a time where we remind ourselves that goals are something that are not meant to be broken.

So, with this in mind, I would like to make this challenge to you: let’s make 2011 the year for personal development. If you are interested in joining me in this challenge, I have the place to start. Looking back at Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective People, you will see that the first habit to developing the life you would like to lead the life you want to live, “Be Proactive.”

In this habit, Stephen Covey talks about taking responsibility for our actions and decisions. He considers the main problem of a lot of behavioral studies is that they are based largely on studies on animals that show no gap between cause and effect. However, humans have the gap between stimulus and response, and we can use this time to decide if this is what we want to do. After all, if we let someone or something, get under our skin, we are giving them the power.

With that in mind, let’s focus on January as the time to focus on ways we can take the initiative and own up to our decisions, rather than let decisions be taken out of our hands.

If you want to accept the challenge, share this message, join the group, and feel free to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing from those who want to make this their year.

Recently, I have finished one of the best books I have read on the subject of personal development in a long time: The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life by Jeff Olson. You may have recognized some of the examples that I gave in an earlier post about doing small things to make big changes, using an example of a $10,000 bank account that compounds at a daily rate of 0.3%. What amazes me is how there are so many other areas in life where this takes place, and Jeff Olson hits on so many in his book.

Health and Fitness

You may remember my efforts to get in shape for my ultimate goal in running: a mile in five minutes or less before my 40th birthday. This is a perfect example of The Slight Edge at work. I decided that I would make the effort to stay consistent in my running. While I have only had one major mile test since I started running again, I have noticed something about my daily runs. When I started running this summer, I noticed that my daily runs (where I try to run without having to breathe hard at all, and keeping my pulse at least above 140, more depending on the type of run) were 10-11 minutes per mile (or slower on some days) and my weekly long run was at 11-12 minutes per mile. However, by continuing to run and get miles in on a weekly basis, I’ve noticed that my daily runs are at about a 9 1/2 minute per mile pace, to the point where my last two runs have actually been at a per mile pace of nearly ten seconds faster than the 5K race I entered in the fall, and I was running much harder that day. As Jeff Olson reminds us, drawing from Jim Rohn

The things you need to do to succeed are easy to do. Unfortunately, they are also easy not to do.

He points out that making a daily run will not make someone healthier the first day, or even the first week, but that once the discipline kicks in, we can surprise ourselves by what we can do. However, what disappoints so many people these days is our instant gratification society where we expect things right now, but we ignore the things that we should do in the long term.

What Not to Do

In a similar idea, Stephen Covey talks about the difference between farming and school. One of the requirements for my degree is that I have to have three foreign languages: German, Greek, and French. I took German as an undergraduate, but it has been six years since my last German course. The test for proficiency is a relatively simple concept: you have a 300-word article in your field, and 90 minutes to translate it, with the use of a German-English Dictionary for words that you can’t remember immediately. The test is offered twice a semester, but life kept getting in the way (or perhaps I let it get in the way), and once I found out that I couldn’t start the Greek proficiency until next year instead of this year, thus postponing my degree another year, I lost motivation, and the next thing I knew, I realized that I hadn’t done enough studying to refresh my brain for German, so I knew that I would have to wait another semester. This is how The Slight Edge can work against you.

So, in the things that you have done in life, I am sure that you can find how this principle has both worked for you and worked against you. What are you willing to do to change your circumstances and make The Slight Edge work for you?

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I love movies. One of the things that is so great about movies, and a lot of great art, is the way that it so eloquently describes our conditions and our dreams. I have seen a lot of movies in many genres. One of those genres that I have thought about recently is the romantic comedy. Some versions of romantic comedies are geared towards a heavily female audience, and they get the sometimes undeserved label of “chick flick.”

The Need for Competition

My favorite romantic comedy of all time has to be The Baxter. It was released in 2005 starring Michael Showalter in a movie that examines what happens to the other guy in romantic comedies. In this movie, the other guy is referred to as a “baxter,” the man who is destined to be dumped. This got me thinking: how many romantic comedies that I have seen have the other person who is destined to be dumped because the leading lady is already in a relationship at the beginning of the movie? In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it is a battle between Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy; in You’ve Got Mail, it’s Joe Fox vs. the Greg Kinnear character. In The Baxter, there are actually multiple competing love interests going on involving people who must get hurt. However, this movie is a satire of the genre. I realize that there are times that there are multiple people who love the same person, which means that someone’s feelings will get hurt. However, there are also plenty of relationships that start between people who happen to be single when they meet.

The End… Or The Beginning?

At the end of Bridget Jones’s Diary, the words “The End” are crossed out and replaced by “The Beginning.” However, how many romantic comedies end things right there when the couple have found each other? With the prevalence of divorce, I wonder how many people decided that the reason why they couldn’t be in the relationship any more is because the “new relationship excitement” is gone, and they become junkies for that feeling. However, here is the problem with that line of thought: real life is often what happens after we lose that initial excitement and decide to commit to a lifetime.

Why This Happens

I don’t think that romantic comedies are doing this with a goal of sabotaging the institution of marriage. I think that they are trying to present a storybook fantasy, and they skip over just what “and they all lived happily ever after” really means. So, why do they end there? Because, from a cinematic point of view, the interesting part is the chase. There are some movies and TV shows that illustrate the difficulty of this thinking, although it seems more prevalent in TV where the artists get years to develop a character, as opposed to a few hours.

So, if you are looking for that fairy tale moment, never forget that these movies are meant to convey a fantasy. There is nothing wrong with fantasy at all, but we have to be able to tell the difference between the two, and decide every day to make the commitment to make our marriages work.

Last month, I celebrated my first wedding anniversary. While I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of marriage, I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the past year, and what things I have learned that I hope will help others as they go along the marital journey.

“I Love My Wife”

In his excellent book Everything and a Kite, Ray Romano says that this is a phrase that is so difficult for him to utter that this phrase could be a very effective field sobriety test for most men, even “quoting” his wife at the end of the book after he explains that, looking back on his (then) eleven-year marriage, that he loves his wife, asking if he has been drinking. Well, I am a teetotaler, so I can say with no suspicion of intoxication that I love my wife. Our relationship was a long-distance relationship until one week before the wedding, when I flew down to see her as she prepared for her trip east for the wedding. It was a big transition for me going from spending hours on the phone every day and seeing her for a week or two every few months, but I can say honestly that there is not one moment over that time when I regret marrying her. It has been even better than I could imagine, I am glad to have her in my life, and I look forward to more anniversaries as the years roll by.

Changes

As I said earlier, my relationship with my wife was over the course of 1400 miles until shortly before our wedding. I am not saying that the changes were bad, but that there were things that would be different for the rest of my life. I am someone who has the tendency to put things in what an old sergeant once called “organized piles.” Namely, I know where everything is, but my system is one that others might not recognize. Ironically, whenever I put things in an “organized” place, that is when I tend to lose them. Needless to say, this is not something that always goes over well. However, this is just an example of give-and-take. There are going to be times when spouses are used to doing things in a different way. It’s not that one way is right and the other one is wrong; they are just different. In cases like these, it always helps to keep things in perspective and realize that it is not the end of the world if something is a little different than “normal.”

A Commitment Means Just That

A few years ago, I went to a friend’s wedding. There were many things that struck me as odd as I watched my friends getting married by someone who received his ordination through the Internet (As a seminary graduate, this could be the topic of an entire blog post on its own.), but the one that struck me as the most odd was the fact that “lifelong” or “as long as you both shall live” or any variant thereof was never uttered by anyone at any time during the ceremony. (The closest was “[y]our life together.”) Within three years, the marriage crumbled. I have heard from many clerics of several different denominations, and they have told me that there are a lot of wedding ceremonies that are performed today without any mention of a lifelong commitment. (One even went so far as to promise “I will marry you as long as my love remains for you.”)

With the divorce rate in the United States stabilizing at somewhere around 50% after a long and steady increase since roughly the Civil War, and a rate that is even higher among those who have already been divorced, one of the most striking things about this trend is the lack of commitment. I considered it an honor and a solemn pledge when I promised to be there for my wife as long as we both shall live. However, I wonder how many couples really do look at marriage as something that is a lifelong commitment, and how many seek that new couple jubilation, and lose sight of their partner when it wears off, as it always will. A lifelong commitment means constantly making an effort to build and maintain what you have. After all, there are a lot of people who wake up estranged from their partner and stunned at this realization. There will be things that are for worse, but one should never lose sight of the things that are for better. This is what I know as I look at my wife, and I thank God every day for her.