Sometime during the way too many moves of the past dozen years my folks got custody of a couple of my hats.
There is the gray Fedora I picked up when I was 20 because it reminded me of Bogart in Casablanca and a black one I grabbed somewhere around there too for a Blues Brothers bit.
I grabbed them when I was in LA last month and brought them back with me. Made a couple of silly videos with both and laughed at myself.
Sometimes I play around with picking up a Borsalino for myself but I am not sure if I can bring myself to spend that much on a hat.
I go back and forth on it as you don’t see me dress up very often.
But I have come to appreciate the benefit of wearing a nicer suit that is properly fitted.
Words Left Unspoken
A dear friend told me recently he has been torn about sharing his thoughts with someone important to him. I told him I understood and that I have had several conversations with the younger Mr. Wilner that tie into this.
They all connect to timing and to not being a hundred percent certain about what path to take in the future. I said that if you wait to make decisions based upon the perfect situation you may never find it.
Doesn’t matter if it is personal or professional, life keeps moving and if you wait because you are not sure if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars you may regret it.
Turns out the younger Mr. Wilner didn’t catch the reference, well he knew I was doing it but wasn’t sure what it was connected to.
Anyway I told the one it is ok not to know exactly what you want to do as long as you are active in doing something and working on figuring things out.
He is doing that and is a big part of setting yourself up to figure things out. It is not perfect, but it provides experience and income and those provide options.
And the other, well I said if you wait too long someone else may find the person you were thinking about and those words left unspoken because of timing may leave a bitter taste.
Later on I put the Casablanca hat on my head and pretended to be Bogart for a moment. Obviously never met the guy so I have a very limited idea of what he was really like in person.
But as I told the younger Mr. Wilner if you operate off of a script much in life can be easy. You know what lines to say and what lines will be said in response.
It is easier to look calm, cool and collected when you never have to improvise. Good news for him and for me is neither one of us feel the need to be cool all the time, if ever.
There is freedom in kind of goofy.
A colleague asked for my help composing a letter. I told him to make sure it had a beginning, middle and end.
He asked me how fast I could write one and I told him I could write three in the time it took him to get through half of one.
I didn’t mean to sound arrogant and obnoxious, but I suppose I did. I was distracted when I answered and so I was more blunt than I mean to be.
He challenged me to prove it and I did. I pumped out 500 words in a matter of moments and then it became the email I didn’t send.
Didn’t send because I didn’t want it to be read by people who might misunderstand the tone and see it as being far too plain and far too critical.
That restraint made me smile because I remember when 27 year-old Josh sent a scathing email to the middle and senior leadership of the company he worked at.
It was pretty well crafted and quite accurate but it was a mistake as it made his boss look stupid and incompetent.
Both of those things might have been true but it wasn’t the kind of move you want to make if you want to maintain good relations with your boss.
Nor was it the kind of thing that would be well received by all because true or not some people wouldn’t like it for a host of reasons.
And I learned first hand about some of those reasons and very quickly confirmed the boss didn’t like having his boss learn he hadn’t shared crucial information with us.
Nor did he appreciate his colleagues being informed that he was semi-literate.
It didn’t cost me my role, but I paid for it in other ways.
Twenty-seven years later I laugh at it and appreciate the life lesson it provided, but it was pretty darn awkward.
Maybe I should have worn my Bogey hat and delivered a follow up monologue. I could have pretended he was Major Strasser and then winked at the crazy receptionist and walked out with a “here’s looking at you kid.”
