Love Case for Intended Change

This morning, class, let's think about the phrase, "People don't change." Though that may have been the case with the older generations who were married for 50 years and employed by the same company for 30 years or more... it is not the case today.

Non-profits have realized that their strategy must change. No longer can they depend on the fierce loyalty of our oldest generation to simply send their donations in on a regular schedule; NPOs have learned that they must be accountable and they must focus on retention. Giving has a low switching cost and the web provides us with more information that we can handle.

Emergent strategies are becoming more the norm in business practice. In other words, strategy has been intended (proactive) for ages, we're beginning to see how an emergent (reactive) strategy can make an organization more nimble and able to capitalize on innovation and opportunity. People today are changing constantly: changing the TV station, changing the song, changing jobs, changing careers, changing partners... the list goes on.

But, enough of the business world examples. What I really want to talk about--what I always want to talk about--is love.

I think one of the greatest misnomers in love is the concept of change found in the statement, "I don't want to change for someone." Fact is, the world is dynamic and it changes around us and we constantly have to figure out how to continue making our way in it as individuals, as a couple and as a family. Things change. People change.

I believe that you should figure out how to change with and for each other in the beginning, not after things have already changed.

There is a saying that goes, "A man spends his life hoping she doesn't change; a woman spends her life trying to make him change." Haven't we all encountered that?

I recently had a conversation with someone that (I thought) was a potential true love. I wanted to believe that it was a real opportunity, but this concept of change continually popped up in our talks. In the great grand finale of the relationship, she said some of the following things:

• I want someone that ADDs to my life, not SUBTRACTs from it.
• I don't want to be with someone that wants to change me.
• I don't want to fit a square peg into a round hole.
  

She didn't need to say anything else to me, at all. Right then and there, in those three bullets, I would have been foolish not to see the immaturity and lack of depth. First of all, there is nothing negative about subtraction, sometimes we have to give a little to get a lot. One of the great strategies in soccer is to play the ball backwards and stretch the opposing players out so that you can open up space between them and opportunity to move forward.

Second, every thing that she said was about finding someone that fits her; nothing about finding someone where they fit together. "I don't want you to try and change me" sounds an awful lot like "I don't want to change for you" or "I'm not interested in sacrificing for you." Either way you approach it, being changed or changing, there was no concept of togetherness in her words--no concept of sacrificing for each other and for the greater good.

Third, I believe that the perfect fit is the one that isn't quite perfect; we both have to tuck in a corner here and squeeze into an angle there... we're snug... we need a little tap from a rubber mallet to snap into place... we didn't just fall into place... we had to work on it together. Our imperfections are what make us unique.

Because we're so snug, it's hard to pop us apart... that's my love.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that the world is constant around us and we're the ones that attach our emotion to it... well, the objective world might stay constant, but our subjective world is constantly changing, will your strategy in life and love be intended or emergent?

Me?
I intend to be proactive about a togetherness strategy for change and reactive to the opportunities that love will present... now, to find the right woman.

[8/6 UPDATE: Apparently, this post has caused quite the stir and if there was one sentence that I'd go back and clarify, then it would be the one about immaturity and lack of depth. Yes, I believe in those words and stand by them, but that doesn't mean that I don't think we evolve. I believe there is a point in life where we realize what really matters. I'm just saying that there are people in my life that haven't gotten there yet... and they won't fit with me until they do, in any capacity, because I won't waste my time pretending to care or trying to convince them that what they think matters--really matters--is trivial in the grand scheme.]

"... But I'm Going to Change!"

As I was running in the KC rain this morning, I thought about how funny we humans can be in our self-mental-medicating. In the middle of conversations, we find ways to insert a seal of approval on our behavior:

"Oh ya, I'm a little narcissistic."
"I can be a total bitch."
"I'm kinda lazy."

We say these things as if they are no big deal; as if our announcing them to our friends and ourselves makes it fair to act these ways... setting us up perfectly for the, "Well, I told you I act this way!"

Maybe we think that if we announce it, then we can accept it enough to attempt to deal with it. Maybe we're a little embarrassed by acting that way, but telling the world about it is a reach for someone else to identify with us and claim that they are the same way.

But, acceptance doesn't change behavior. Validation from peers doesn't help you to eat less, get off the couch, think about your selfish ways or think more about others and less about yourself. In fact, acceptance reinforces that it's okay to continue in the same behavior.

Next time you get the urge to say something negative about your self, add this to the end of it, "...but I'm going to change."

"Oh ya, I'm a little narcissistic, but I'm going to change."
"I can be a total bitch... but I'm going to try and be more thoughtful."
"I'm kinda lazy, but I'm trying to change by going for walks."

YES, while you're at it--if you're bold enough--tell the world HOW you're changing your behavior and my bet is that you'll find that your friends also identify with your attempt at change and validate the positive instead of the negative.

BET!

First Thing to Change: My Hope Hangover

What an incredible night!

At the last minute, I was invited to the main Democratic Watch party at the beautifully renovated Midland Theater (thanks, TessK!). I’d never been to a watch party, especially one that was likely to produce a win for my candidate. Little did I realize that the evening would be much more than just a party for me… and for the world.

When I arrived slightly after 7pm, the crowd was still sparse. Most of the local volunteers were still out on the streets doing their thing to get Democrats into office at the local, state and national levels.

I wandered around the Midland admiring the immense chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the ornate woodcarvings on the walls. “Historic,” I thought, “this place hasn’t changed at all.” I’d been to the Midland once before when, as a child, my father brought me out to see “The Empire Strikes Back.”

As the night continued, both attendance and electoral votes were building for Obama. As CNN, the channel of choice at the party, put a state into Obama’s column, the crowd would stop their merriment and roar with delight. Pennsylvania. Indiana. OMG OHIO!

CNN reports that GOP insiders admit that the race is over, yet the crowd remains pensive. We are all waiting for the same thing, 270 electoral votes. A wave of energy—of Hope—that had been building for generations was coming to a crest.

While CNN breaks for commercials, the sound system at the Midland plays inspiring tunes such as “Change Is Gonna Come.”

“Oh, there been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long,
But now I think I’m able to carry on.
It’s been a long, a long time comin.'
But I know a change gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.”

The music takes my eyes from the projected television and prompts me to look around. White. Black. Asian. Latino. Tall. Short. Known. Unknown. Young. Old. T-shirts. Suits. Smiles. All smiles. Everyone sitting up straight or standing tall. Everyone smiling.

I was micro-blogging the event, so I tried to stay on the outside of the experience and looking in. I took a break for an Obama-dog and an ObaMerlot. In a corner of the lobby, I saw the head honcho for the Obama movement in KC pacing back and forth on her phone. Missouri wasn’t going to easily go blue, it was going to kick and scream. I could see the tension on her face; she wanted to win the battle and the war.

The wave crested around 10pm. It still gives me goosebumps to recollect the experience. The crowd counted down, 5-4-3-2-1 and CNN posted that Obama had won the election. This wave, made up of millions of hopeful Americans, flooded the Midland Theater and we all splashed about in it for countless minutes. I was no longer on the outside looking in. I was smiling, too. I was clapping, too. I was high-fiving, too. I was singing, too. The elation changed into dancing and singing. An old theater was colored with Hope. An old theater was remade into a kaleidoscope of Hope.

“YES WE CAN!”
“YES WE CAN!”

And then, I promptly got off of the wave. The very first speaker to stand at the podium kept repeating, “WE WERE RIGHT! THEY WERE WRONG!” in reference to health care, to taxation and to all the issues that were a major part of this election. “WE WERE RIGHT! THEY WERE WRONG!”

That’s not Change. That’s not Hope. That’s the same shit, different day.

Those that spoke to us were unknowingly confused. They spoke of unity, yet boasted of victory over their enemies. They spoke of Democratic success in the state that would give them license to lord over their enemies.

That’s not Change. That’s not Hope. That’s the same shit, different day.

I began to wonder if the evil Empire was the Democratic Party. Much like the Red Sox have become the hated Yankees, would the Democratic Party take the crown of hatred from the Republicans?

Congressman Cleaver took the stage. He spoke of how “YES WE CAN!” had changed to “YES WE DID!” His words brought me back to Hope. He said it was okay to strut a little bit tonight, a little bit more tomorrow and to put a skip in your step on January 20th, but that we must remember that “YES WE CAN!” is only the beginning. We have to come up with a new slogan and continue riding the wave of Hope and Unity.

McCain concedes. The watch party boos his recognition of Palin’s hard work. And just like that, division returned.

But then our Leader-elect entered the room with a calm, omniscient, kingly presence. His face filled up the screen and his spirit the entire theater. As he walked to the stage in Chicago, one of his volunteers was singing the National Anthem to us in Kansas City. Hope.

All I can recount from the emotion of Obama’s speech was what I Twittered to the world:

“Obama captured this crowd, this country, this world. We barely blink. Eyes and ears open. We're ready. Lead.”

It will be a few days before I fully realize the unprecedented nature of the experience that I had at the Midland Theater. The world is a different place this morning. I've realized that the Empire is truly the American people, the Empire is good and last night we executed the first step of a long-term plan to renew our country.

My ears are still ringing from the roar of the party last night. I’m Hoping that, at least, will Change.

The Choice for Change

If you want to read a moving Editorial, then this is the one that you should put on your radar today. The Editors of "The New Yorker" have written an amazing piece on how our country must believe in the word "change" and make as large a change as we possibly can to make progress at home and abroad.

The article is called "The Choice" and I urge you to read it by clicking here NOW.

I'll warn you in advance that this is simultaneously a pro-Obama and anti-McCain article. In any Presidential election, we rarely get the ideal candidate, but in this one we've got one candidate that gives us a chance to avoid the pending collision of the economy, war, health care, entitlements, education and environment. A "maverick" is the last thing that I want in this age... please give me someone with the intelligence and charisma to make a difference... to be the change agent that we need.

The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Read the full article... for your country if not for yourself.

Thanks to @fredwilson for pointing out this amazing article in a Tweet this morning.

To Clear Up the Confusion about Obama vs. McPalin

* If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you're exotic, different.
BUT IF...
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
BUT IF...
* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
BUT IF...
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
BUT IF...
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive and next in line behind a man in his eighth decade.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
BUT IF...
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and then left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a true Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
BUT IF...
* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.
BUT IF...
* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

This really clears things up for me, you?

How My Landline Became Twitter

I remember cruising the roads (The Ridge) in high school with a keen eye for anyone that we knew in a parking lot or having a party at their house... or just looking for a street race.

Yes, this was way before the time when we had cell phones, email, IM or anything else of the sort... when we got bored, we played video games on the Commodore 64 or Atari.

If we didn't make plans in advance of the evening, then we had to wing it. There wasn't a way to reach anyone that was already out and about.

So back in the day, the landline phone was the primary means of communication. The phone had replaced good old face-to-face and postal forms of communication.

When I entered the business world, the land line phone was replaced by email and instant messaging. Shoot, I'd be one cube wall away from someone and still use IM to talk to them. The ease of communication increased, but did the efficiency?

Shortly after I began my working career, I was acquired by broadcast.com and ultimately by Yahoo! the summer thereafter. Email and IM dominated the communication channels each day, but because we were a satellite office (broadcast was in Dallas and Y! in Santa Clara, while we were in San Diego), we quickly learned that we could accomplish more face-to-face in a few hours than we could accomplish over a week over email and IM. So we'd fly up to San Jose and jot over to Santa Clara for a day or two to make progress and we'd do this once every couple of weeks.

I was never much on the text messaging thing. In fact, it would bug the crap out of me when my girlfriend would continually get messages while we were out on a date (I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall sooner with that one). But then, I went to work for a text messaging company, 4INFO, and learned of the benefits that one could receive by getting information pushed to one's phone.

By spending so much time in the text world, I began to communicate via text, as well. So, instead of picking up the mobile phone to chat with friends, we'd text.

ASIDE: I still haven't figured out what I'm worse at, driving while talking or texting, but I think it's talking for me.

While talking on the mobile phone had a temporary glimmer as the primary method of communication, it was replaced by something more impersonal in text messaging, but more efficient?

Facebook has brought many of us back to the computer as the means of communication. Facebook is rather like text messaging online for you get these fast food nuggets of information about your friends wherabouts, plans or moods. Facebook is a bit more efficient, for it can help us plan for future events quite simply and easily, but it mainly helps us to stay in touch without actually being in touch. Efficient and impersonal.

Enter Twitter, which does the one to many updating that Facebook did, but now does it over a medium that is with us at all times. Broadcasting a message is efficient for finding out who is listening and then reverting back to person to person text messaging is the norm to make plans.

But, I still believe that we'd be more efficient if we'd simply make the call. I'm as bad as it as anyone. Instead of sending 25 text messages, we could spend 30 seconds on a call and take care of business.

I simply think Americans love the ring of the phone, the vibrate of the text message, the ding of a new email... and even though we claim that we want personal touch, we really prefer impersonal methods of communication because we really don't have to change what we're doing.

Again, this word "change" which is so prominent in the country right now. I firmly believe that we agree with it objectively, but not subjectively. No one wants to change; they understand where they are and fear something different. Different is an unknown quantity.

When we've been on one side of a spectrum for a long time, we have a tendency to over-compensate to the other side... I think that will be interesting in this day of a tough economy, a topsy-turvy market and a pending election with so many issues facing us: education, crime, immigration, war, entitlements, environment, etc.