Somewhere during the last week of writing I published 2 million words and asked if you could identify my writing.
Only one of those two things are true because I am certain I didn’t come close to a million words, let alone two. I am not certain if I could say I have written a million words in any of the many blogs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did or exceeded that.
Word count isn’t how I measure my performance or indicative of quality but it does prove that I can pump out content at a high rate and that I have a certain level of tenacity.
There is some kind of merit there but this won’t be the post in which we discuss that.
One day I’ll ask the harder questions in person and that penetrating stare that you know so well will fix upon you and I’ll evaluate your response.
I’ll pay attention to whether you pause, if your eyebrows raise or narrow and listen to your tone. I’ll use that and instinct to determine what I think of the response.
Might take less than a heartbeat for me to conclude if I find it sincere or to determine I am uncertain what it really means.
But my best guess is that if I let myself be open to anything and everything I’ll know.
And undoubtedly I’ll ask if you can identify if maybe it is the best letter I have ever written to you.
What Once Was Cool
Sometimes when I take another pass at something like The Expressions We Know I shake my head at what I see because I see a foolish mistake and wonder how I miss it.
And sometimes I look at posts and think what once was cool doesn’t sound like it anymore. There are posts and articles where the answer to why I don’t appreciate it is simple.
It is forty-years-old and sounds like a child wrote it or it is stilted, stunted and weak because I couldn’t make the words rise from the depths and work for me.
Sometimes I recognize the material I have spit out has as much value and choose to publish anyway and sometimes I nuke it.
Depends on whether there is a goal tied to it.
Maybe there is a some event that I feel the need to memorialize and I am willing to post something that I am less happy with to make sure I have recorded my thoughts, feelings and ideas about it live.
There is value in recording such things as they happen and not based upon a memory which could lack accuracy because the words weren’t spilled out upon the page soon enough.
Sometimes I know it is not up to snuff but I see it as a benchmark I can set and work against. It is a way to measure myself and my improvement.
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Been thinking about how to measure some things and determine where I think they ought to lie. Been thinking about who is in my life and who isn’t.
At a professional convention I attended one of the speakers said all of our relationships should be measured by who brings us joy and who brings us pain.
I can’t tell you his name because this particular nugget came during his speech on how to become better sales people and I didn’t buy what he was selling.
No surprise in that because in some areas I am a very tough audience. I can be ornery and disagreeable and though I may not voice my distaste, there is a pretty good chance you’ll know.
I appreciate the simplicity of the idea but his presentation reminded me of a guy from college who was very successful at getting a first date.
The women thought he was charming and clever but he rarely had a second date. It is hard to take advice from someone who claims to be an expert but whose track record is questionable.
I Didn’t Forget The Rest But Sometimes The View Is Hazy
I know a guy in his fifties who has been divorced long enough to have had a girlfriend that he broke up with and got back together with again.
When he told me the story I said it made sense.
“You can keep a scorecard if you want, but if you pay too much attention it will kill it. The deal breakers are the things that you have to pay close attention to. If those don’t exist you need to let the rest of the view become hazy.
And if you took a chunk of years off in between you need a little time to see if you are the same or different. Can’t do it without taking a chance and if you can’t take a chance why bother.”
