I have an affection for what’s come to be known as the short short story. In May 2006 I was inspired by a relationship I observed and wrote this story. I hope you enjoy it.

Maggie couldn’t remember when she finally really saw Alfred. They had been acquainted for so many years that when they finally did connect on a more intimate level the experience seemed natural, a logical progression. And while it’s true that Maggie never imagined for a minute that she might end up marrying a man like Alfred, she never questioned her decision. Alfred was a good man. Alfred was good to Maggie. Alfred was fat.

Yes, fat. A kinder description might be hefty, stocky, or some other euphemism for fat, but Alfred was quite clearly fat. He wasn’t always that way, but as long as Maggie had known him he’d never been what you would call thin.

When they initially met, during their last year of high school, their social lives kept them in separate camps. Maggie was the beautiful, popular girl with just enough brains to appease the more academically inclined around her. She managed to deftly walk that thin line between cool and nerdy. Alfred was never cool. Sure, classmates had stopped openly kidding him by that time in his life, but he was still the last to get picked for dodge ball during gym and his close friends proved to be small in number. His weight was the reason.

Friends kept telling Maggie how crazy she was when they first learned that she had dated Alfred. How could she date a man that looked like that? She was beautiful. What could she see in him? At first, she listened to them and canceled her second date with Alfred. Then he called and left that sweet message. Short, honest, gentle words that touched Maggie’s heart. So she went out with him again.

More pressure from her friends brought about the cancellation of her fourth date. Then came the candy, and flowers, and the nicest card she’d ever received from a guy. By the fifth date Maggie just couldn’t resist the charms of Alfred’s rather plain, unaffected manner. All the guys she’d dated before couldn’t hold a candle to Alfred when it came to sensitivity and caring. And he truly loved her in a way no guy had before.

Then there was that voice.

Alfred could sing, really sing. So soulful and beautiful was his voice that when he sang men and women alike were swept away in sonic bliss from the first note to the last.

Maggie didn’t know Alfred could sing right away. They dated for a long time before Alfred had the courage to ask Maggie to one of his concerts. On that night Alfred fretted backstage, wondering what Maggie might think of him once she’d seen him sing. Maggie sat in the audience quietly wondering if what she was about to see would change her perceptions of this new man in her life. As the crowd hushed and the lights dimmed, Maggie took a deep breath, bracing herself for any reaction she might have to Alfred’s singing. The curtain finally rose and Alfred stepped out on to the small concert hall stage.

There was Alfred, standing alone on the stage in a follow spot halo. Music began to rise from the orchestra pit and Alfred sang. Maggie didn’t really remember anything after that. The beauty of Alfred’s voice held her captive and suspended time. Such perfection wafted from Alfred’s mouth that the audience collectively held their breath during the more moving passages. Finally, the concert ended and a burst of applause erupted as the audience rose to its feet.

That was the turning point for Maggie. It was during that concert that her affections were cemented. Prior to that moment Maggie would never have believed that she might end up with a man like Alfred. But the fates are strange creatures that prod and cajole us with their constant twisting of future outcomes. This relationship was clearly an example of how destiny can turn on a dime.

Maggie looked towards the door as she heard Alfred’s key jangle on its key ring. Alfred was home. His concert must have finished up early, she thought. She looked at the clock and realized that a lot of time had passed while she was reflecting on the start of her relationship with Alfred. It was late.

The door closed and Maggie could hear Alfred’s familiar footsteps walk to the entryway side table. The keys once again rang out with a familiar tune as they were dropped casually on the table. More footsteps. Maggie looked at the mirror in front of her. Behind her was Alfred, standing quite still, with a bunch of carnations in his hand. He was looking at Maggie’s reflection and smiling broadly. Maggie smiled back. And in that moment, her destiny shifted slightly yet again, because at that moment Maggie Strombach fell a bit more in love with a fat man who could sing.

I read Sir Ken Robinson’s book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, and loved it. I posted a link to a great TED Q&A session with Robinson on my The Art of Self Education blog. Check it out. It’s great.

I just posted on my LifeMaximo blog site my thoughts about living a life governed more by qualitative assessments than quantitative ones. Check it out here and let me know what you think.

This week I had an experience that restored my faith in humanity and the basic goodness of people. Two specific events led to me to feeling this way.

San Francisco undertook a massive community H1N1 vaccination effort for thousands of city residents. All vaccinations were free and they did thousands of the vaccinations over the course of just a few hours. 400+ volunteers (non-paid) gave up their entire day to help with this effort. Both non-medical and medical volunteers wrangled thousands of people through a brilliantly organized public health effort. Everyone was astoundingly helpful and caring. The thousands of people lined up for their vaccinations were orderly, friendly and the community feel was evident. The volunteer doctor who gave me my shot chatted with me briefly. He had just come back from volunteering his medical services in Haiti. I could sense he was a truly generous, good man.

I then left the auditorium where the vaccinations were being given and read a book on my Kindle (blatant product plug – I love my Kindle) in the park across the way as I waited for my partner to finish getting his shot. As I sat there and read, I watched a young family of husband, wife and two small children walk through the park. They walked around with big smiles on their faces and when they encountered someone who looked homeless, or otherwise looked like they needed some cheering up, the father and mother handed the children sandwiches and told them to go ask the person if they wanted a sandwich. Some of the faces on the people getting the sandwiches lit up. They were touched by the generosity. The children giving the sandwiches smiled back. The parents beamed as they watched their children carry out the social giving they were trying to engender in their children. It was a lovely thing to watch.

So, anytime I feel we’re doomed as a culture, or I feel otherwise negative about the future of humanity, I’m going to remember these moments. I get all warm and fuzzy when I do, and that’s a good thing.

I hope you have moments like this in your life. It’s my holiday and New Year’s wish for you that you do.

We are all creative people. How we create and what form that creation takes varies dramatically, but we are all creative. However, creative people often struggle with the process. Anguish and self-doubt often pervade the creative process for many. For anyone who has ever felt this way, please watch this video. It helped me and I hope it helps you.

Here’s a poem I wrote in May of 1980. At the time I was working as an Administrative Assistant and bemoaning the drudgery of corporate life I was dealing with at the time, which is quite clear from the poem that came out of me that day. Maybe you’ve had these same feelings at your job.

Often I sit and contemplate my inevitable demise
And wonder if my stable life is truly smart and wise
Sitting at a desk from early, till often very late
Undoubtedly a common, but nonetheless ill fate.

The papers arrive upon my desk as the day begins
Secretaries gossip of the previous weekend’s sins
I shuffle and I shuffle, but the paperwork seems to grow
Then the clock shows noon, and I decide to go.

I push into the elevator, packed like canned sardines
And eavesdrop on a couple discussing what EST really means
Arriving at the restaurant, I find that there’s a wait
Once again I question my nine to five work fate.

After gobbling down my lunch, I hurry back to my job
Once again pushing through the now fed office mob
The papers are still there, in even greater number
I sit down and resume my nine to five work slumber.

Cranking out all the work one man can possibly do
I finally look up from my desk and notice it’s only two
Only three more hours of this with which I must contend
Eventually the clock shows five, another day’s work end.

An hour later I arrive at home, and start to watch TV
Wishing that the character there would switch his place with me
I begin to fall asleep, but awake suddenly startled when
I realize that tomorrow, I’ve got to do it all again.

This is a post that appears on my The Art of Self Education blog dedicated to providing information, inspiration and resources for adult self learners.

One of the skills that benefits everyone in terms of networking and productivity is learning people’s names. Once you are introduced to someone, it’s amazing how impressive it is to others when you remember their name the next time you see them. Of course, this is not new information.

Many years ago my father gave me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and I still consider it a classic. One of the guiding bits of advice Carnegie offers is to “remember that a man’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” That’s wise advice.

By nature, I’m not inclined to remember people’s names. I have to work at it. But I consider it something for which exerting the effort is worthwhile. So many times I’ve remembered someone’s name upon meeting them again and seen the clear sign of pleasure the other person experienced when they realized I’d remembered their name. It’s validating. We all like it.

Enter Facebook. While I use Facebook for my closer circle of friends (I use LinkedIn professionally), I also have an extended range of casual friends I’m connected to on Facebook that I meet only rarely and often don’t remember their names. Now on Facebook I regularly see their picture alongside their full name. This reinforces their name in my mind, and this includes their last name too which most don’t remember nearly as often as a first name. All of sudden I’m remembering people’s names better. Yay!

Human interaction skills like remembering names is something we should all learn. It will serve us well in both our personal and professional lives. Not all learning has to be comprised of absorbing facts or complex technical skills. Much of the learning we should all pursue centers around how we can best interact and communicate with others. I’m glad Facebook has helped me with one human interaction skill in which I was truly lacking any expertise. Maybe it can help you too.

This is a post that appears on my The Art of Self Education blog dedicated to providing information, inspiration and resources for adult self learners.

One of the important components of good self education habits is the ability to focus. I don’t buy in too much to innate intelligence as the determining factor in whether someone can learn well. I’ve just seen too many instances of someone with what appeared to be average intelligence and skills excel far beyond others who supposedly had much more of both. I believe focus makes the difference. Someone who can truly focus on a learning project is going to learn better than someone who is constantly distracted or multitasking.

Alan H. Cohen’s advice in his book Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It is one of the smartest bits of advice I’ve ever read in a self-improvement book. (It’s a great book by the way and I recommend it.) Here’s what he wrote.

The secret of genius is focus. If you can laser your attention on any subject or project, it will reveal its blueprint to you. George Washington Carver discovered 325 uses for the peanut and 100 for the sweet potato! Great geniuses are powerful focusers. Many have been called eccentric or insane because they put aside worldly concerns for the sake of their music, art, architecture, drama, inventing, or writing. But they are the individuals who change the world, while those with scattered attention wade through mediocre lives. Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses.

Cohen’s insight is so true and the focus he mentions, combined with tenacity and conviction, is an astoundingly powerful combination.

Recent research on the effects of multitasking back up the claim that focus is important and gives pause to those of us who are constantly emailing, tweeting, surfing, texting, watching television, playing video games and otherwise flitting constantly from thing to thing while we attempt to learn something.

According to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, heavy multitaskers are easily distracted by irrelevant information. A potential reason for this may be that people who multitask tend to retain all of that distracting, and often mundane, information in short-term memory. If your short-term memory is full of a lot of stuff that’s not relevant to the real tasks at hand (such as learning something), it affects your ability to focus.

So what can we learn from all this. When you want to learn something, focus on it. Set aside time to focus solely on your learning. If your environment is distracting, change it. Go to a library or anywhere you can best focus. Or find yourself some good noise-canceling headphones to create some privacy if you’re in a loud environment. No two of us are alike and what might be distracting surroundings to one person might be an atmosphere of solitude to another.

In addition to controlling the distractions within our environment, we need to minimize the distractions within ourselves. Whatever it takes to bring your focus to the objective of the moment, make that a part of your self education practice. Meditation might help. Taking care of those lagging chores or tasks on your to do list might free up your mind to focus on more important matters.  Perhaps you can “trick” yourself into focusing by thinking of your learning projects in 15-minute chunks of time. Whatever works for you, do it. The ability to focus is imperative if you’re going to maintain a life of effective self education.

Remember what Peter McWilliams said, “Our thoughts create our reality – where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go.” So put your focus on your learning and you’ll learn.

I’m an extremely happy corporate employee these days. I have one of the best jobs around with interesting work, a great boss, a great team I manage, and a great environment filled with people who respect what I do. It’s fulfilling in so many ways. I’m lucky and I know it.

However, there’s still a part of me that needs some other avenues of expression. So I’m undertaking a new venture. Over the next few months I plan to launch a number of blogs, each pertaining to a specific area of personal interest.

Since I’m content with my current employment, I don’t intend to push too hard to monetize the blogs. If I do make some extra money from them, that would be great. But it’s my need to both help people and to feel fully creative that’s driving this new venture that I’m naming Race Bannon Media.

For now, this site will become the online home for Race Bannon Media. Stay tuned to this site for more information.

To visit my first foray into the blogosphere go to my The Art of Self Education blog and let me know what you think.

Have a great day.

The Four Agreements
By Don Miguel Ruiz
Published by Amber-Allen Publishing

This book was recommended to me by some good friends (thank you David, Shawn and Gene). I’m glad they did. It’s a quick read I completed in an afternoon and its brevity and conciseness is part of its charm.

In essence, Ruiz’ message, based on ancient Toltec wisdom, is that we’ve all made agreements to believe certain things, most of those beliefs based on falsehoods. The process of indoctrination into these belief systems Ruiz refers to as our domestication, and that terminology is apt. Through our domestication, foisted upon us by society, family, friends, religion and other sources, we end up living lives contrary to who we really are. Ruiz emphasizes the need for every human being to live their lives in congruence to who they truly are, not who they pretend to be in order to please internal and external judgments.

The four agreements Ruiz offers, if adhered to and assimilated into our daily lives, allow us to push past unhealthy and dysfunctional agreements we’ve made and form new agreements that foster us living lives as we truly are. Only by being who we really are, living the lives we want to live, can we do honor to ourselves, God, or whatever energies in this life we personally feel deserve honor.

The four agreement are:

• Be impeccable with your word.
• Don’t take anything personally.
• Don’t make assumptions.
• Always do your best.

I won’t go into deep explanations of what each of these agreements means. Rather, I strongly advise you to pick up this delightful volume and read Ruiz’ explanations for yourself. You won’t be sorry.