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What is Success?
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What is Success?
What do we want to achieve today, tomorrow and before we die. Success is a destination, a goal which provides us with a direction and a plan to get there. But where is there?
Ah, there changes with time. Funny but when I was a consultant a client would say to me "don't move the goal posts". They were right to a point to not keep changing the original goals but my answer was as we approach our goal we can then see a path to a better goal.
And so our life is a progression of moving the goal posts. As we achieve one goal, one success, we move that goal forward. Not everyone does. Some may be happy and stay with their success.
When I was a little boy, I stood by my grandfathers belt and looked up. I said to myself then that one day I would grow to be as tall as him. He was 75 years old then and I said that one day I would be 75 years old. Well with a snap of a finger or a wiggle of the nose, here I am. Taller than my grandfather and 70 but not yet 75 although that will come in a second as well. My childhood to senior citizen happened in an instant. Here I am now. During that path while growing up time took forever but in hindsight it is an instant.
As a young boy my goal was to finish school, grade school then high school then university. Those goals seemed far away and impossible but eventually they came. That was what was most important then. After graduating my goal was to become an adult. That took many years or maybe even decades. But the goals were clear. Sports goals were the clearest and I was dedicated to being a ski racer, an instructor, a top ranked tennis player and then coach, a cyclist then a powerlifter and a powerlifting coach and gym owner and meet organizer. These were all clear goals with a path of applying myself to hard work to get there. As I reached one, I transitioned to the next one.
These were all physical goals on a progressive straight time line forward. But I also had mental or spiritual goals. In my thirties, I wrote quite a bit about what kind of person I wanted to be. Wait, I even remember at 11 years old walking to school (grade 7 at St. Vincent de Paul) and asking myself what kind of person I wanted to be. I presented myself with the choices of being a bad person because the bad boys got all the girls or being a really good person who would do everything by the book and be a model student or bookworm. I made the decision then to be in the middle, not one extreme or the other. In my thirties, I will need to find that paper if I can but I remember describing what kind of person I wanted to be. It was more important to me to be kind and compassionate, to understand people and to be sincere. I actually wrote that I wanted to learn to be intimidating when I needed to be and to be able to see into or through people. Years later, I read this list and realized that I had become this person I wanted to be. Funny, but I also wrote that I wanted to ride down the California coast on a motorcycle. I hadn't even thought of owning a motorcycle or getting a license. But, a few years later I found myself driving down route A1A on the Pacific coast of California looking down at the ocean on a motorcycle. I realized then the power of setting your goals and the feeling of achieving them, the feeling of success.
Along the way, life is full of smaller and bigger goals and successes and yes disappointments. So what is success? Well in simple terms it is achieving something, something that you were on a path to achieve whether you thought you could or couldn't. Success is a feeling. A short euphoric dopamine feeling of exhaling a breath of contentment. I did it! I can't believe I did!
Didn't See That Coming
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Didn't See That Coming
Watched a movie last night. The twin towers tall in New York City stood strong and shiny. People were walking around not paying attention to them with and had no idea what would happen to them in a few years. Nobody saw it coming.
I didn't know at 50 that I would fall and break my hip, roll over in my SUV, lose my houses and my companies, be betrayed by my best friend and live in a garage for three years pretty much homeless. I didn't see those things coming.
I did see bitcoin at $1 and etherium before it even traded as a coin for 7 cents, but I let them go.
My grandfather lived through many wars and always talked about it. I never thought a war would happen in my lifetime. Nobody in Ukraine thought they would be attacked and suffer unspeakable horrors. Everyday normal people watching tv, surfing the internet and all of a sudden thrown into a 1940's war with bombs and no heat or electricity or water. Some people like Gasparov saw it coming an wrote a book about it but nobody listened because nobody saw it coming.
Young Israelis partying, smiling and having fun together had no idea that they would be butchered in a few minutes, thousands of young people.
Time changes things. Often in ways that we could never imagine. Some for good and some for very bad.
The question is right now, what do I not see coming? What is coming next?
If time is not linear but actually happens all at once then we should be able to know what is coming. But how?
Interesting because when we recall memories we can feel that they are now. People from our past are with us now. Now is now, the past is now and so the future is now too.
There is a reason why time is linear, a straight line into the future. Strange but this straight line of time does not really have a now. Now passes instantly from the past to the future, it doesn[t stop at now. You can't stop time. You can take a snapshot of an instance but it passes.
So the real question is, is time moving forward in a straight line as we experience it or does time exist altogether in another dimension or world. If people who die go to another dimension where time all exists at the same time, then can they see what is coming in our world? Can they warn us? Or give us thoughts or feelings about our future?
On Turning 70
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On Turning 70
Before I start to write about how my life and priorities are at the age of 70, I should first backtrack to say where I was at 50. In fact, with a few exceptions I did hand write at each decade of my life how I felt and what was important. I will look those up and add them to this blog. But for now, let's start with 50 before 70 because they are just so different.
At 50, I was relatively well off financially. I was living in a million dollar Florida waterfront home that I mostly bought for cash. I had also just bought two mercedes on the same day also for cash. I just started Powerlifting after serious road cycling
About
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About
I am an engineer who gravitated to the study of time. I observed people completing work tasks and documented how long each individual task took. In a funny way of looking at it, I spent a lot of time observing time, a whole lifetime actually. I looked at eliminating wasteful work tasks and rearranging the required tasks in the smoothest flow of work possible. This lead to more efficient use of time and labour.
But, my fascination with time is much bigger that what I studied or what I worked on. No, instead I have always been unsettled about the concept of time. It was not my 46 years of working studying time that unsettled me, but rather it was life's emotional experiences that pulled me deeper into studying and exploring the concepts of time.
It was watching the moment of life stopped, watching time stop for my dog and for my relatives that set me on this path of wanting to know. At first I wanted to know how to go back in time. Sounds crazy yes, but I desperately wanted to go back and change things. I read and I studied like I never had before. Finally, after months and years in complete immersion, I picked my head up and said that I cannot understand and I cannot go back. But, it didn't end there. No, I continue to delve into what time is, does it exist anywhere outside of this earth and many other possibilities for time.
In this blog I will share some of what I have learned, what I have discarded and what else I am looking at. It may or may not be interesting for someone to explore with me but mainly it is meant to be a record for myself of my journey to explore time.
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