Doug Kreitzberg

Alarm Clocks

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I did a bit of traveling last week, different hotels in different cities. Invariably, I would get up early to get some work in before my meetings. And as I worked, I would begin hearing the incessant beeping of alarm clocks going off in unoccupied rooms. There would be the 5am alarm clocks, the 5:30am alarm clocks, the 6am alarm clocks. It nearly drove me crazy until I figured that I could tune them out by plugging my ear phones in to my ipad and listen to the Vijay Iyer Trio (great stuff for any jazz fans out there).

But it also got me to thinking about the alarm clocks which might be beeping in my background. And there’s always a few. There are the ones that are louder and more discernible, like those that tells me I’m late for a meeting, or that I need to get a project done. And there are ones that I probably should ignore, like some issues which are due far out in the future, or ones that talk to me about things I have no control over, or about people or actions that get my blood boiling over trivial issues. But there are other ones in the background that I really should listen to; the ones that ask whether I’m focusing on what’s really important, that tell me I’m spending too much time on the road and not enough with my family, or the ones that tell me I better watch what I’m eating or that I’m not getting enough sleep.

The key is to tune into those alarms which are important and tune out everything else. In my mind, there are six “alarms” to pay attention to. (And, full disclosure, I’m not good at paying attention to them all the time myself)

Alarm 1: Relationships — Are you spending enough time developing and nurturing your relationships with your family, your beloved, your friends, your co-workers? This is perhaps the most important one to pay attention to. Self-imposed lonliness is a hell that is very difficult to crawl out of.

Alarm 2: Your Passions — Are you spending time on activities which you thoroughly enjoy? Did you take the time to read that book you want to, or go see that band you wanted to see or work on that project that you loved to do?

Alarm 3: Your Health — Take it from someone who knows — When you’re young, you think you can do anything to your body and it will bounce back. Then one day, it knocks at your door and asks for payment due. Pay attention to what you’re body is telling you, and treat it as you would like to be treated (after all, it is you!).

Alarm 4: Your Sprituality — I’m not talking (and wouldn’t talk) religion here. I’m talking connection. To each other, to the world, to the universe, to yourself, to a higher power, to all of the above. Call it what you will, but if you’re not focusing on your version of “it”, you feel like you’re going through the motions.

Alarm 5: Your Finances — Is your spending out pacing your income? Have you set enough side for that upcoming wedding or junior’s college? When you’re stretched financially, it becomes difficult to focus on anything else and you feel like you can’t get out of it. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Alarm 6: The One Thing — During a strategy session last week, we talked about the line from Curley in the movie “City Slickers”, when he tells the main character Mitch, the secret of life. Curley: Do you know what the secret of life is? This. [He holds up one finger.] Mitch: Your finger? Curley: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean sxxt. Mitch: But what is the one thing? Curley: That’s what you have to find out. We spend a lot of time responding to alarm clocks, often someone else’s alarm clocks that at the end of the day do more to distract us than any thing else. As Verne Harnish writes in Rockerfeller Habits, a business consultant once got a job by telling the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that he could help him generate millions in revenue by simply writing down the top five business strategies that would move his company forward and looking at the number one item on his list every fifteen minutes until it was implemented. We think we are great multi-taskers. Perhaps we are just multi-muckers, simply moving the crap from one part of the stall to the next, without getting any of it out of the barn. If you focus on your One Thing you’ll do more than most, and enjoy life more than most, as well.

Take a sheet of paper out, write down the six alarms: Relationships, Passions, Health, Spirituality, Finances, The One Thing. Next to each alarm, write down what your long term goals is and then write down what you want to achieve today in each of those categories. If you really truly focus on these alarms, you are paying attention to what’s really important.

Then pop in your ear buds and tune out the rest.

Give the Ability to Receive this Year

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This is the gift-giving season.  And, as we know, it is better to give than to receive.  If you’re like me, you’ve bought and exchanged gifts (and perhaps had some of those gifts exchanged at the store afterwards) and, maybe, even now Aunt Minnie is wearing one of the sweaters you bought her and nephew Andy is playing the new Wii game you gave.

It feels good to give.  And yet, for me, there’s that nagging sensation of “how long will it last”?  When does the sweater get placed neatly in Aunt Minnie’s dresser rarely to be seen again and when does the “new” Wii game get shuffled to the back of the deck of Wii games?

One thing I’m also trying to give during this season as well as strive to do more of next year is to give the ability to receive; give those I care about — whether my family, friends or business relationships — the time to connect with them, to really hear what they have to say, to engage with them at their level, to set aside the multi-tasking jumble that my brain usually becomes and receive their ideas, passions or idle thoughts.  Even if it’s nothing more than a few minutes a day, it’s at least something.

Because, just perhaps, in these days where we are frantically trying to “stay connected” via e-mail, twitter, facebook, and voice mail, the greatest gift we can give is to push all that aside, empty our minds, reach out to someone and let them become connected to us.

A Stick of Gum

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I was on a flight yesterday from San Antonio to Charlotte.  A woman sat next to me and ahead of us were, it seemed, her parents. As we were taking off, the woman pulled out a pack of gum, offered a stick to each of her parents and turned and offered me one.

It was, as the cliche goes, a random act of kindness, without strings. And it made me think, that’s what a stick of gum is for.  To share.  When people pull out a pack of gum, it triggers some primitive urge to reach out to someone.  The gum doesn’t cost much and the act of sharing doesn’t come saddled with commitments. Yet the small gesture makes both parties grateful, a small ritual of acceptance and recognition that we are human and somehow connected. And it’s all wrapped in minty freshness.

What if we consciously turned every interaction we made into that ritual?  If every time we met someone, or spoke to them on the phone, or sent something in the mail or posted something on the web for them to see, we made them feel like we had offered them a stick of gum, that we said, “I know you”, “I’m just like you” and “You are special.”

I barely spoke to the woman on the plane.  I will never see her again.  Yet, for that one small moment, we shared something and it made me feel good and I won’t long forget it.

I think I’ll carry a pack of gum with me, from now on.

Life on the Fly

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Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about how people visit museums.  The author juxtaposed the pre-technological age habit of “deep-diving” into literature and art versus today’s “smash-n-grab” approach (walk in to a museum, grab a headset, walk through, drop headset, have a latte).

I think that we all feel like we are skimming the surface of our lives, that we’d love to dip below the surface, but that there’s so much to see and so much to do.  Instead, we’re content to find the “top 10” this and the “favorite” that and make choices as if all of life were in a zagat guide.

If we ever gave ourselves pause to think, we might realize that life’s richness requires us to get engaged, and that engagement requires time, focus and attention.  Ironically, time, focus and attention are becoming scare in the internet-dominated world where we can communicate with anyone and be anywhere we want.

On your way to work, think about what you are really passionate about.  Determine to be an expert in that subject. Find people who are equally engaged in what you love.  Try to do it all off the grid.

Grab a pencil, grab a sketchbook.  The rest is up to you.

Fahrenheit 451

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I am not a pack rat.  In fact, at home, I have a six-month rule — if we haven’t looked at or used something for over six months, out it goes.  (To be truthful, my wife has a separate rule which requires us to fill the basement to overflowing before we consider throwing anything out, so of course we follow hers.)

Despite this, it was eye-opening when I moved my office recently and reviewed the files I had compiled over the years; 90% of what I had kept was no longer needed.  To be honest, it was both uplifting and discouraging.  It was uplifting, because I was able to “lighten my load” and maintain only those files that now had a relevant purpose.  But it was discouraging because a lot of the files that went out were signs of deadends, bright ideas which had lost their luster, forms and numbers that were no longer meaningful or useful, “urgent” items that seem trite with time.  (For full disclosure, I have not thrown out the 90% I no longer need because my assistant has a separate rule which is to box everything up and send it to storage, so of course we follow hers.)

On a related note, a couple of years ago our family cabin in Montana was literally hours away from being burned to the ground by a forest fire. My mother had only a few minutes to evacuate and the only thing she took was her dog and pictures of our family.
Finally, I was in Browning, Montana recently on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and bought some paintings by a Native American artist who drew sketches on old ledger paper from the late 1800’s taken from general stores, real estate offices and assayers; from the dry script of Mrs. Anderson’s can of peas or sack of flour emerged the colorful and enduring spirit of a proud people.

These three incidents have made me think of what really is important.  What is enduring?  And, how do you know at any given time that what we’re doing is, after all is said and done, worthwhile?

We have to accept the fact, that not everything we do will be enduring, that there will be deadends and ideas that will flame out with time.  The important thing, for me at least, is to treat each action as if it will have enduring consequences, to put the time and energy in to those ideas and, when they don’t pan out, spend a brief moment to learn and consider what was done and why it didn’t work, then move on to the next one.  Nothing great is ever achieved without failure and we aren’t always prescient enough to know what will work until we start working at it.

Ultimately, if we let it, time does grace even the smallest note with an enduring spirit of struggle, redemption and (occasionally) success.  The files in my boxes aren’t just static pieces of paper; they’re representative of ideas and actions done by people for people  and — laid out end to end — tell a story that might be as vibrant as the Blackfeet.  And, while I have no use for them now, they are a part of what I am and what I’ve done and I respect that.

My mother’s actions, however, speak the loudest; perhaps the only thing that is enduring are the relationships we have, certainly with our family and loved ones, but also with our friends, those who work with us, our clients, our customers our business partners.  Our success as individuals or as organizations is ultimately tied to the strength of these relationships and the attention we pay to them.

The author, Ray Bradbury, wrote a book called Fahrenheit 451 which is required reading for most high school students.  It talks of a society that burned books (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns) and how individuals internalized those books to keep them alive. In the end, each word that we write, each action and interaction we have endures (positively or negatively) to some degree within ourselves or within each other.  Perhaps success lies only in recognizing this.

Phillipsburg

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The Autumn before my Father died, we visited Phillipsburg, Montana. That previous Summer, before the surgery that left him unable to speak, my Dad had mentioned that his father had taken him to Phillipsburg and he wanted to see if he could recognize the place.  So, on a bright Fall morning, my Mom, my Dad and I left our lakefront home north of Missoula and made the two hour trip to Phillipsburg.

My Dad never spoke about his father. He died when my father was 11 and was a salesman for Pacific Fruit, so I imagine that he was on the road more than at home and most of my father’s memories of him were therefore vague, blurred and distant.  In fact, it was somewhat surprising that Dad mentioned him.  He said that when he was young, he remembered his Dad taking him on a sales call to Phillipsburg.  They stopped at the grocery store there and his Dad bought him some penny candy and an ice cream.

Phillipsburg, like many Montana towns, is an old mining town that has long seen its day. The mines are closed, and many of the stores that once provided its residents with clothing and furniture have now become museums, curio shops and expresso bars to cater to the occasional tourist.  We drove slowly down Main Street and my Dad peered out of the window, trying to recreate the Phillipsburg of the early 40s. He pointed to one of the stores, a burger joint, and we pulled over and went in.

The restaurant had a counter with three stools and four or five booths.  We choose a booth and sat down. As we ordered, I told the waitress that my Dad had come here as a child and we were wondering if this wasn’t at one point a grocery store.  The waitress was in high school and certainly not in a position to know.  She asked the owner, who was in her mid-thirties and she wasn’t sure either.  My Dad didn’t seem to mind.  He sat there with a smile in his eyes.  We ordered hamburgers and finished them off with a bowl of ice cream, toasting Dad and Grandpa.

I thought about this trip a while back, as I was driving from Bozeman to Missoula and passed the Phillipsburg exit off Interstate 90. I thought about my Dad and his father, about the short time they had together.  I also thought about my Dad’s memory of his visit to Phillipsburg, of how such a small, seemingly inconsequential act could last so long.  Perhaps it was the only time that my Dad could remember being with his Father one-on-one, without his mother or brothers.  Phillipsburg is not Disneyland; there’s no rides or attractions, but it did have a Father who took time to be with his son.

When I first became president of my company, one of the first things I did was to travel around meeting our key clients.  I had seen many of  them in the past and they knew who I was, but I wanted to be face to face on an individual basis, to understand what they were focused on and to give them some perspective on what we did.  Those meetings have paid large dividends over the years and certainly were worth the time and travel.

Every day, we all are interacting with indviduals, whether on the phone or face to face. Each moment, each act, each comment may create a lasting impression, either in a positive way or a negative way. Be conscious of the power of those moments. You may not have penny candy to offer, but you do have your time and your attention.  Some times, that’s all that matters.