Name Something You Need to Win

Host Richard Dawson and contestants from the o...

I have one vice on Facebook. I am relatively addicted to Family Feud on there.

Two reasons:

1. it is short and sweet. I answer my questions, answer friends and then move on. I am not asking multiple friends to plant seeds or kill someone in an effort to win.

2. I've become competitive from week to week with several friends.

I bring this up because I actually committed this past week to beating someone I know on there. Surprisingly, we help each other.

If you've never seen the Feud. in the end, two contestants answer the same questions and the top answers win but BOTH can count towards the total with different answers.

In this way, the Feud on FB is still quite communal and yet, it is also very competitive.

Thankfully, I don't commit too much time to this vice, but this past week I decided I wasn't fooling around and really wanted to beat this friend of mine in the points standing. He whooped me good the past month or so.

This weird schizophrenic game reminded me how a little competition can help us do our best.

Who are your competitors in whatever you do? Do you know what they are doing? Would you know how they are winning or you are winning? Are there easy metrics to understand? If not, how do you develop them so you know how you can do better?

Sweet little post about using competition here.

The weirder thing might be that most competitors in anything, even Family Feud, while they can still BE competitors can also be friends, mentors, and more. But being competitors might just make us better, all of us, in the long run.

Check out my appearance on the The Toddcast Podcast

Click and watch the podcast recording of my appearance on the Toddcast Podcast Such a fun time!

New Life

It's weird, sad and slightly freeing. I've been headed towards a completely different life for a lot longer than I even knew. It took me a while to catch up to realize it was happening. Thankfully, I was cognizant enough to see it finally and mostly ready for it. It's amazing when you have the rug completely pulled out from underneath you. The adjustments are jarring. I made mistakes, but like most I learned from them, adapted, and tried my best to do better. The reason you see that truck next to a storage place? That's the sum of my life right now. Never take for granted that you will work hard for something or someone, and it will end up meaning very little. You are guaranteed nothing, owed nothing, promised nothing. Anything and everything can be taken away in a heartbeat. I wrote this to my kids a while back: I tried to be the best father I could be based on what I knew when I knew it and how I could. One of the lessons for your life needs to be: you need to b

Guiding Light

Most folk who know me, know I lost my father when I was 14 years old. However, before he passed, he shared a timeless secret with me—a practice that would shape my life in ways I could never have imagined. He didn't teach me meditation in the traditional sense, with incense and crossed legs. Instead, he showed me how to meditate by gazing at a lone light on the ceiling. When I was very young, I had night terrors that would wake me in the middle of the night. I'm sure it was terribly frustrating to calm a child from that. But my father had the way. I never understood how he came to the practice. But over the years, I've come to understand that my father's unique approach to meditation was, in fact, a profound lesson in mindfulness and presence. In a nearly pitch black room, he would tell me to find a speck of light, not unlike a star. Then focus. He would say, "Just watch the light, like you're watching a story unfold. Be the observer, not the thinker." I

Todd Lyden

Search This Blog