Put First Things First

I saw the Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in a used bookstore, and it made me smile. I read this book in the mid-90s and it certainly influenced how I thought about life and work. As time progressed, I have forgotten the seven habits but the one that stuck with me: "Put first things first."

In the chapter on this habit, he buckets all the things we have to do into four quadrants: 1) Urgent and important, 2) Not urgent but important, 3) Urgent but not important, and 4) Not urgent and not important. In the book he shows these quadrants on a square which has importance on the Y-axis and urgency on the X-axis.

I have always loved this idea. So much of our day feels driven by the urgent, and you have to decide what is important and what can wait. So much of our off-time is made up of unurgent and unimportant things. What gets left behind is Quadrant II: not urgent but important. 

Quadrant II is the sweet spot of long-term development. This category of work is hardly urgent, but applied to your life's goals, it is often terribly important. It's usually a preparatory step. You are acquiring some building block to help you get just a little further towards that big outcome.

The habit is titled "Put first things first", and this emphasizes prioritization. What is the first thing? If you want to reach big but distant goal, you have to do "the first thing." And yet it's often the easiest thing to set aside for something urgent in your face. By prioritizing an important but unurgent task, you prioritize your goal.

This is why I'll always applaud people who run marathons, finish their thesis, produce a work of art,  give a performance, or achieve some meaningful long-term goal. These are outcomes that do not come from out of nowhere. These outcomes require sustained time and effort in Quadrant II, and everyone recognizes the satisfaction that comes from that.

By Davidjcmorris - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Same Age We Are Now

I digitized a box of old photographs a few years ago. There is one set of photos of me attending my wife Jenn's graduation from a masters program. She was my girlfriend in those 1993 pictures. I have a shock of dark hair and we look so young. We'd be engaged a year later.

I showed these digitized photos to Jenn. Her mother was in a few of the pictures, and Jenn said "She's probably the same age we are now." That statement really struck me. All of a sudden, I felt like I could see the cycle of life, the edges of the wheel of time. 

Jenn's statement changed my frame of reference. Those old pictures now present another kind of understanding for me. Our parents were "old" in these pictures, but we are now their age. It's an insight that should not have surprised me. Relative time goes in both directions, and it makes me grateful to properly see that now.

Bare Handed Fall

The cold weather and heavy snow made a slippery obstacle course in our parking lot earlier this month. On my way to the car in the morning, I saw a patch of snow that looked walkable. I stepped on it and my foot instantly slipped and I began falling backwards. 

It felt like slow motion. I wore a book bag, but it started moving off my shoulders as I fell backwards. "That was really ice," I remember thinking. My right foot was up in the air, and my left foot soon followed it. My arms and hands started reaching behind me, ready to brace for the fall when I realized: "I'm not wearing my gloves!"

My hands hit the ground first. I was on my back, my book bag next to me. I rolled to my left, slowly stood up and gingerly stepped off the snow/ice. As I brushed away the dirt and snow on my coat and pants, I felt a sharpness in my hands. I looked and my right hand had several small cuts! It hurt a bit too.

I decided to go back inside and get my hand properly treated. Jenn patched up my hand, applying some expired bacitracin and covering my two larger cuts with bandages. Three weeks later, my hand is all healed up. I'm lucky the fall didn't cause any more damage. I think my heavy winter coat helped with that.

From that day though, I made sure to wear my gloves on the way to the car. I also avoided cutting across those snow patches. Taking a fall when you're older can be a big deal so I will be watching my step a little better!

Small number (7) of cuts on my hand

My 2024 Books and Movies

In 2024, I read 24 books (LibraryThing) and watched 48 movies (Letterboxd) (11 were rewatches).

My favorite book: The Age of Innocence. I still have not rewatched the movie, which my memory holds in high esteem, but the book is so evocative of the time (the gilded age of the 1870s) and the feelings. The Countess Elena Olenska and gentleman lawyer Newland Archer are such memorable characters. The book also includes a brief stop in Jersey City, which amazed me to see. Other favorites from last year: The Tetris Effect and American Prometheus.

My favorite movie: Mars Express. Sci-fi animation from France. Robots. Mars. And a hard-nosed detective. It's emotional, complex, and dense. Everything I like in a movie. Highly recommend this beauty. Other notable watches from last year: Flow and All That Jazz.

Some movies I watched from 2024

Garbage Truck Worker

The apartment complex we live in has large dumpster bins that are emptied out by garbage trucks every three or four days. The garbage trucks are the front-loading kind, with large hydraulic hooks in the front that extend and attach to the dumpster. The hydraulics then lift the dumpster over the front cab and deposits the garbage into the large refuse container. The workers rarely get out of their trucks!

The operation does make a lot of noise however. I don't know if this is on purpose, but sometimes the dumpster is repeatedly slammed into the ground, like a toddler banging a toy. The sound reverberates throughout the buildings, and I'm sure it's audible to the other buildings near us. I think they bang the dumpsters to dislodge garbage so that it falls into the truck better. Or maybe they just like making noise.

One morning, probably while taking a walk, I saw the garbage truck entering our street. I watched as it slowed down, then it came to a stop. I stopped also. The garbage truck worker opened his door, and then hopped out. He had a large iced coffee cup in his hand. He walked towards the back and then casually flipped this container over the high wall of the truck into the open garbage bin! I was dazzled.

I still think about that moment. Did that worker see someone do this before? I appreciated his cleanliness. I can imagine his thought process: "Well... I have this empty container which I should throw away. But wait! I'm driving a garbage truck!" The whole moment put a smile on my face. I may have even waved as he drove past, on the way to our dumpster.

From Mack Terrapro (Flickr)

Caffeine Headache

One evening after work this month I came home and immediately took two Tylenol. I had a sharp headache, the kind that made me wince every time I moved my head. Jenn asked if I had my coffee in the afternoon, and incredibly, I had not! I got distracted from having my usual coffee after lunch. 

As an antidote, on top of the Tylenol, she suggested I have a soda. To my surprise, I learned that Diet Pepsi has caffeine in it. It says so right on the can: 35mg! In contrast, a cup of coffee contains 100mg of caffeine. Somehow, my afternoon coffees were enough to keep the headaches away.

Later on, I learned (or relearned) that caffeine is an addictive substance. When you stop taking caffeine, your body produces withdrawal symptoms: headache, irritability, fatigue, low energy, depressed mood, and others along these lines. I had never correlated headaches with lack of coffee.

I don't intend to give up coffee any time soon. It's too delicious! But my body has developed a sensitivity and expectation for my two cups a day: once in the morning and once after lunch. It's rare for me to forget my post-lunch coffee, but the next time I have an evening headache, I'll at least know one thing to check!

Generated from NightCafe AI

Dwayne Wade's Statue

Like so much of the Internet, I reacted with some glee at the pictures from Dwayne Wade's statue ceremony in front of the Kaseya Center in Miami, FL this past week. Dwayne Wade is a well-decorated former basketball superstar, a three-time NBA champion. He played thirteen seasons for the Miami Heat, and the organization decided to make a bronze statue in his likeness to honor him.

Unfortunately, the face on the statue did not resemble Dwayne Wade. The Internet was abuzz in mockery, and I was laughing at all of it. How could the artists of this statue, Omri Amrany and Oscar León, get his facial features so wrong? The face is mildly contorted and you have to work really hard to see the resemblance. 

The next day I read a piece on The Athletic following up with Wade on the reaction. He was not defensive about the statue's initial impression. "I don't know know a lot of people with a statue. Do you?" I admired the defiance in this statement. In an interview on the Miami Heat's YouTube channel, he seemed completely humbled. He recognized he was being immortalized.

I am on an email list from artist Danny Gregory. In one of his essays ("The art spirit"), he reminds us that artistry exists in everyone, and that every artist sees the world differently. It took Omri and Oscar ten months to create this statue, and even though everyone can like or tweet a criticism, none of it can diminish the meaning of this statue to its creators and its subject.

It's pretty fun to joke, to mock, to pile on. But after reading and listening to how much the statue means for Dwayne, after learning about its many personal details, I think I'll stop laughing as hard. Years from now, people will look at this in wonder. They will look up his records, watch his plays, and learn what he meant to his team. They'll look at this statue in awe.