The person with the best description of the problem doesn’t win anything. The one who most completely understands who’s at fault hasn’t undone any damage. She with the highest standards of verifiable deniability is not really making a contribution.

What if we put as much energy into constructing solutions as we did into describing problems? What if the courage we’re deploying to oppose The System were dispatched to build a new system, based on connection and partnership and all the other things we value?

Giving a damn is a much better strategy than being right.

(hat tip to David Menefee-Libey)

Delaying gratification is an important skill that correlates to lots of other positive outcomes. So don’t eat the marshmallow. Wait the 15 minutes, and you’ll get two. Plus, you’ll probably score higher on your SAT’s.

Does the imperative for delayed gratification apply to creative work? If we’ve made something and we’re ready to ship it, to share it with our friends, can we publish it early? Would a band ever release their new album a month early because their fans really want it and it’s finished anyway?

Why wait? If it’s done, ship it. Who cares if it’s early?

All this to say that my podcast for this week is a day early. I had a great conversation with Aric Clark, and I’m eager to share it. So I am. Because I can.

Check out all the podcasts here.

I spotted a cot outside my office’s sliding glass door yesterday, the one that opens onto a small fenced-in garden no bigger than 10 X 5 feet and with the statue of St. Francis in the middle. Someone’s been sleeping in there.

I saw it in the morning but didn’t say anything to anyone as I did my work. Whatever needed done about it could wait, I figured, until I’d knocked out the tasks most urgently needing done. There was nobody there now, anyway, so why make a fuss? But then I left in the middle of the day and forgot to say anything to anyone about it.

I was ambivalent. On the one hand, if somebody with no place to sleep at night has found sanctuary on the church grounds, I don’t want to wreck it. That seems inhospitable and the opposite of what Jesus might do.

On the other hand, there are other church staff to consider, and, more importantly, a preschool. You can’t really have people sleeping on the campus when teachers and parents are arriving at 6:00 in the morning all by themselves.

I grappled with it for awhile. I even texted some friends to ask what they would do. At the very least, I decided, I needed to tell my colleague about it, and so I texted her (on her day off): “There’s a sleeping cot outside our office doors.” She replied within minutes:

“I know. I saw Laura and Faith put it there yesterday.”

Laura is my daughter. Faith is her best friend.

Sigh.

We have a responsibility to listen to you all the way to the end of what you’re saying. And so you should make that as easy as possible for us.

Not I-agree-with-everything-you’re-saying easy or there’s-nothing-challenging-about-your-ideas easy, still less making-easy-appeals-to-my-emotions easy, but interesting easy, engaging easy, you-have-put-your-life-into-this easy.

Put the good stuff at the beginning. Don’t make us sit through minutes of prolegomenon setting up some big reveal; that narrative arc doesn’t work anymore. Get good fast and stay good.

Avoid detours. They’re distracting for us and dangerous for you. There are slightly off-color remarks that way, and many the undisciplined speaker have tripped on them. Stay on target.

Make us care right away.

This thing you’re listening to sounds a lot like something you’ve heard before, and the visuals resemble the presentation you heard six months ago, and it’s the same person talking. This again.

But why not listen to the end and see if there isn’t some novel gem hiding in the familiarity? There may be a new learning there, even a revelation, and if you tune out early because, well, you’ve heard this before, you could miss it.

The superlative honor I was given by my high school newspaper mates was “Most Likely To Replace Bob Costas.”

A part of that prediction is being fulfilled today, but it has nothing to do with sports. Rather it has to do with red swollen eyes during a public event where you have to address people.

A big part of me wants to hide in the hotel all day. Can’t do that, though. Sunglasses would be too conspicuous. No, the only thing is to charge into the thing and pray for some relief along the way.

Some of the youth I know are preparing for Battle of The Bands, and for one of them this is the first time she’s performing in front of people. She loves to play music. She loves the people she plays with. But right now, three weeks out from a three-song set in front of all her peers, she just wishes it was over.

She can’t see any outcome other than the one in which the other bands are all better and the crowd boos them offstage. She’s confident these 10 minutes will prove to everyone that her musical dreams are misplaced and that she’s nothing but a poseur. The misery she’s putting herself through now is as if those things have already happened.

I told her that winning in this case is just getting on stage and shredding. Winning isn’t the cheering crowd. Winning isn’t even the Battle of The Bands crown. In this case, winning is showing up and doing the thing you love while your knees are wobbling and you feel like puking.

#winning.

We don’t get to pick what grows from our acts of personal courage, and I have no doubt that more grows than our dread can imagine. We conjure images of important people disapproving, but I suspect there’s fertile soil in the audience we’re not accounting for, people who live with their own fear and who will take courage from yours, people who need some imperfection and the raw delivery that only the terrified can summon.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Then shred.

The six old pleaded for $1.15 to buy a pink eraser at school because “everybody else” has one and because they’re all making fun of her for not having one.

&%$#.

The details were short. It’s clearly exaggeration, if not emotional manipulation.

But still, &%$#.

Halfway through my life lesson about you-don’t-want-those-kinds-of-people-for-friends it occurred to me that she doesn’t really have a choice. When you’re in first grade, you have no control over your environment, and all those things that grown ups chalk up to kids being kids dominates your every interaction, and you can’t get away from them.

They can’t get away from you either.

So you want that eraser to win their favor or at least to fend off their jeering, until, of course, the next trinket comes along that you don’t have, when it starts all over again.

Then you give her the money for the eraser.

Just sayin’, parenthood is a mess.