Thursday, June 13, 2024. 3:42 pm.
It's a heavy summer rain so that means I open the garage door, pull up a chair, bring out my laptop and start typing. It's an automatic response to rumble in the sky and raindrops dancing on the driveway. It's the same sound that some of you pay to listen to every night when you go to sleep... white noise, waves on a beach, train, raindrops - subscribe now..
I've been off from the show for almost three weeks now. It is of course driving me crazy not to be on the radio and TV in the morning. But don't worry. I'm scheduled to come back on July 1st. I'm not sure why, but I think the right thing to do is stay away from the microphone for a whole month. I want very badly to email all of the people doing my show for me through June and tell them that I'm coming back early. But I won't.
It's a heavy summer rain so that means I open the garage door, pull up a chair, bring out my laptop and start typing. It's an automatic response to rumble in the sky and raindrops dancing on the driveway. It's the same sound that some of you pay to listen to every night when you go to sleep... white noise, waves on a beach, train, raindrops - subscribe now..
I've been off from the show for almost three weeks now. It is of course driving me crazy not to be on the radio and TV in the morning. But don't worry. I'm scheduled to come back on July 1st. I'm not sure why, but I think the right thing to do is stay away from the microphone for a whole month. I want very badly to email all of the people doing my show for me through June and tell them that I'm coming back early. But I won't.
It has something to do with pace. I talk about it a lot on the air, that the world is moving too fast for human consumption and that it's gonna be the ruin of us all... or at least of me. This isn't an old guy in the garage speaking. I'm pretty sure that if I was a young guy on my phone at the grocery store I'd be saying the same thing - slow down, everybody.
I've been listening to Cal Newport. He's the guy who wrote "Slow Productivity," the bestseller about knowledge workers, which I guess I am. Cal says we should::
Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality
It's eerie how this is the same amount of words - 11 - of something I wrote on a trading card and carried in my pocket for a couple decades. Several times throughout the day I would be standing there in the pit with everyone yelling and pushing and spitting and farting and I would pull out the card from my trading jacket and look at it:
Cut Losers Now
Let winners ride
Guts to follow your gut
It's not that my 11 words mean anything near to what Cal's 11 words mean. It's simply that they have the same rhythm. They're words that can force you to take a breath, recalibrate, set a course and, even though you're tired, soldier on. The thing that catches me these days about Cal is the admonition that many of us should pay attention to the pace of our lives. More specifically, to the pace of our work lives.
I am way guilty of revving the engine hard all of the time. As an athlete in high school, I figured that even though I might be small that some of the other basketball players, I could outwork them. This was a good trait to have as a union laborer, although you wound up pissing off some Laborers if you busted up concrete too fast or set up a laser in a flash. There's a pace that the old timers set that worked for them for decades. It took me until I was 62 to figure this out. I first got my Laborers permit at 16, and I've been revving the engine ever since.
The rain is still coming down hard. There's a lot of birds chirping. That may have to do with the fact that it's raining like hell and the sun's out. It's been this way for a while. You know how once in a while the sun will peak through the clouds during a heavy rain and then go back behind a cloud again. Most of the time I've been writing you the sun's been brightening up my driveway. There must be a rainbow somewhere, but I really don't feel like walking into the driveway in the rain just to see it.
I'm called to walk away from my morning show for a while - to reset my pace. I can already tell that I'm thinking more clearly... although if you read that last blog post about coach Friend liking Mexican women, you may beg to differ. I feel as if I'm seeing the business path a little more clearly, mainly that it's gonna take a while for our sports streaming video to take off in the Region. Our head of programming, Sonny Santana, went with me last week to the Innovation Showcase in Indy last week. Indy is trying hard as a city to be the sports tech capital of America. They're well on their way.
We presented to a couple hundred Indy innovators our streaming sports platform. All sorts of people came us to us afterwards who were somehow involved in sports tech. Parents also came up to us proclaiming that we should stream their kid's games in Fishers of Carmel. There is interest all around for sports streaming video in Indy. Not so much here. We're getting a ton of people watching the games and some real loyal fans. I just went and got a haircut at Great Clips in Hammond - with Dana - and one of the guys waiting for a cut said to me on the way out -
"I recognize the voice. You're JED, aren't you?"
"Could be." This is what I say in case I owe the person money.
"I just wanna say I love what you guys are doing with the Sports. My kid plays for Hanover Central and I have to work shift work at the mill and I can sit in the John and watch him on my phone. It's great. Thank you."
This is the kind of thing that I hear from Region fans and from people in Sports Tech in Indy. But it is not the kind of thing that we - salesman Peter Krukoski and I - hear as much from marketing departments at Region hospitals, banks, power companies, casinos, etc. We're streaming hundreds of local high school and college games, many with two, three or four cameras. The quality of the broadcast is good. And the quality of competition is always good because it's Indiana high school sports. The numbers add up. But still we get ghosted by local marketing departments.
"Maybe we should be in Indy," Sonny Santana said on the way out of the conference. "They seem to get it down here."
It finally stopped raining. Tons of birds are chirping and there's the dripping, flowing sound of water down a drain pipe. The sun's glaring. It's like being in a jungle, except it's a garage.
The key to all of this is pace. I'm seeingmore clearly what we should do with our streaming video of local sports, and it's this - Nothing. Comparing it to trading in a pit... there were times when you had on a position that was a small winner. Let's say you were long 50 Five-year-notes from 100- even. The market was trading a little higher. Let's say it was at 100-04 or so. It's a winner, so to keep with my 11-word trading philosophy, you really shouldn't get out of the trade until it was a small loser or big winner... or you just got tired of holding it and wanted to go get a drink or do other bad things.
Never leave the trading floor with a position on... unless you're going up to your office. If you're going to a bar, get out of all trades and start drinking.
Anyways, sometimes you had the small winning trade on and your inner clock said to you that the market might go up. You had been trading long enough to know that you really don't have a way of telling which way the market's gonna go. You just buy and sell and sell and buy and every once in a while you wind up with a position that's a winner.
That's when you wait.
You put the card with your winning trade written on it in your pocket and you do nothing for a while. Every once in a while the market would go up. It goes to 100-10. A little while later it's at 100-20. It's very difficult, but the thing you should do at that point - you guessed it - is nothing. There's all sorts of guidelines about when you exit a winning trade, but we won't go into that right now.
What we're talking about right now is streaming video of live sports at the local level in the Region. We stream hundreds of games for a couple dozen schools. They love it. But it seems as if we're always begging marketing departments. We're beseeching for ad dollars and entreating conferences to stream with us. In the end, our streaming video of live sports isn't really accepted in the Region, at least not by athletic directors or marketing departments. There are exceptions. The ones that break through the noise believe in us wholeheartedly. The thing to do right now is, you guessed it - Wait. .
This is where pace comes in to play. You can't make clear-minded decisions when you're jammed up with a million things to do and only thousands of hours to do them in. You're frazzled most of the time. It reminds me of one of the best meditations ever -
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, frittered away by detail."
If you know who wrote that, you're probably not reading my blog because I'm a little too low-brow. If you don't know who that is - picture Jethro Tull hopping around the forest barefoot next to a lake playing his flute and in between songs jotting down a few things he just thought about.
Pace. Work at a natural pace. That's what I'm trying to do. I am starting to clear my head of political divide and bad traffic. And the first thing that comes up isn't work on this or that. It's work on nothing at all. Imagine that.
It's stopped raining and completely sunny. I think I'll go for a bike ride.
I've been listening to Cal Newport. He's the guy who wrote "Slow Productivity," the bestseller about knowledge workers, which I guess I am. Cal says we should::
Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality
It's eerie how this is the same amount of words - 11 - of something I wrote on a trading card and carried in my pocket for a couple decades. Several times throughout the day I would be standing there in the pit with everyone yelling and pushing and spitting and farting and I would pull out the card from my trading jacket and look at it:
Cut Losers Now
Let winners ride
Guts to follow your gut
It's not that my 11 words mean anything near to what Cal's 11 words mean. It's simply that they have the same rhythm. They're words that can force you to take a breath, recalibrate, set a course and, even though you're tired, soldier on. The thing that catches me these days about Cal is the admonition that many of us should pay attention to the pace of our lives. More specifically, to the pace of our work lives.
I am way guilty of revving the engine hard all of the time. As an athlete in high school, I figured that even though I might be small that some of the other basketball players, I could outwork them. This was a good trait to have as a union laborer, although you wound up pissing off some Laborers if you busted up concrete too fast or set up a laser in a flash. There's a pace that the old timers set that worked for them for decades. It took me until I was 62 to figure this out. I first got my Laborers permit at 16, and I've been revving the engine ever since.
The rain is still coming down hard. There's a lot of birds chirping. That may have to do with the fact that it's raining like hell and the sun's out. It's been this way for a while. You know how once in a while the sun will peak through the clouds during a heavy rain and then go back behind a cloud again. Most of the time I've been writing you the sun's been brightening up my driveway. There must be a rainbow somewhere, but I really don't feel like walking into the driveway in the rain just to see it.
I'm called to walk away from my morning show for a while - to reset my pace. I can already tell that I'm thinking more clearly... although if you read that last blog post about coach Friend liking Mexican women, you may beg to differ. I feel as if I'm seeing the business path a little more clearly, mainly that it's gonna take a while for our sports streaming video to take off in the Region. Our head of programming, Sonny Santana, went with me last week to the Innovation Showcase in Indy last week. Indy is trying hard as a city to be the sports tech capital of America. They're well on their way.
We presented to a couple hundred Indy innovators our streaming sports platform. All sorts of people came us to us afterwards who were somehow involved in sports tech. Parents also came up to us proclaiming that we should stream their kid's games in Fishers of Carmel. There is interest all around for sports streaming video in Indy. Not so much here. We're getting a ton of people watching the games and some real loyal fans. I just went and got a haircut at Great Clips in Hammond - with Dana - and one of the guys waiting for a cut said to me on the way out -
"I recognize the voice. You're JED, aren't you?"
"Could be." This is what I say in case I owe the person money.
"I just wanna say I love what you guys are doing with the Sports. My kid plays for Hanover Central and I have to work shift work at the mill and I can sit in the John and watch him on my phone. It's great. Thank you."
This is the kind of thing that I hear from Region fans and from people in Sports Tech in Indy. But it is not the kind of thing that we - salesman Peter Krukoski and I - hear as much from marketing departments at Region hospitals, banks, power companies, casinos, etc. We're streaming hundreds of local high school and college games, many with two, three or four cameras. The quality of the broadcast is good. And the quality of competition is always good because it's Indiana high school sports. The numbers add up. But still we get ghosted by local marketing departments.
"Maybe we should be in Indy," Sonny Santana said on the way out of the conference. "They seem to get it down here."
It finally stopped raining. Tons of birds are chirping and there's the dripping, flowing sound of water down a drain pipe. The sun's glaring. It's like being in a jungle, except it's a garage.
The key to all of this is pace. I'm seeingmore clearly what we should do with our streaming video of local sports, and it's this - Nothing. Comparing it to trading in a pit... there were times when you had on a position that was a small winner. Let's say you were long 50 Five-year-notes from 100- even. The market was trading a little higher. Let's say it was at 100-04 or so. It's a winner, so to keep with my 11-word trading philosophy, you really shouldn't get out of the trade until it was a small loser or big winner... or you just got tired of holding it and wanted to go get a drink or do other bad things.
Never leave the trading floor with a position on... unless you're going up to your office. If you're going to a bar, get out of all trades and start drinking.
Anyways, sometimes you had the small winning trade on and your inner clock said to you that the market might go up. You had been trading long enough to know that you really don't have a way of telling which way the market's gonna go. You just buy and sell and sell and buy and every once in a while you wind up with a position that's a winner.
That's when you wait.
You put the card with your winning trade written on it in your pocket and you do nothing for a while. Every once in a while the market would go up. It goes to 100-10. A little while later it's at 100-20. It's very difficult, but the thing you should do at that point - you guessed it - is nothing. There's all sorts of guidelines about when you exit a winning trade, but we won't go into that right now.
What we're talking about right now is streaming video of live sports at the local level in the Region. We stream hundreds of games for a couple dozen schools. They love it. But it seems as if we're always begging marketing departments. We're beseeching for ad dollars and entreating conferences to stream with us. In the end, our streaming video of live sports isn't really accepted in the Region, at least not by athletic directors or marketing departments. There are exceptions. The ones that break through the noise believe in us wholeheartedly. The thing to do right now is, you guessed it - Wait. .
This is where pace comes in to play. You can't make clear-minded decisions when you're jammed up with a million things to do and only thousands of hours to do them in. You're frazzled most of the time. It reminds me of one of the best meditations ever -
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, frittered away by detail."
If you know who wrote that, you're probably not reading my blog because I'm a little too low-brow. If you don't know who that is - picture Jethro Tull hopping around the forest barefoot next to a lake playing his flute and in between songs jotting down a few things he just thought about.
Pace. Work at a natural pace. That's what I'm trying to do. I am starting to clear my head of political divide and bad traffic. And the first thing that comes up isn't work on this or that. It's work on nothing at all. Imagine that.
It's stopped raining and completely sunny. I think I'll go for a bike ride.
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