The Power of Negative Blogging

We all get stressed. If you’re not stressed a little, you’re not trying. Stress, like negativity, is part of our daily lives and it’s how we cope with it that really defines what our life ultimately will look life. Are you constantly frazzled or are you understanding the causes and adjusting accordingly?

Here are a few ways negative thinking will help you (yes, positive thinking helps as well, but if you can’t get in that frame of mind, work with what you’ve got!):

• I’ve said this time and time again: Learn how to say “no” – Know what you can do and know what you can’t do. Don’t let others add to your stress by piling on tasks. Especially if they’re taking time and resources away from more important ones.

• Don’t over-commit yourself    - Try not to cram too many things in a short time span. Things almost always take longer than we would like them to. So overestimate the amount of time things should take for two reasons:    

1. You want plenty of time in case something goes wrong.

2. You’ll get a great feeling of accomplishment when you finish things earlier than expected.

• Cut down the amount of tasks – Take an honest look at what you’ve got to do. Basically, what “must” get done versus what “should” be done. I’ve already discussed the myth of should. You can only do what you can do and you “should” only do what you “must” do. Prioritize and eliminate. If you’ve managed to overestimate the time on a few tasks, you’ll actually get a chance to accomplish some “should” tasks. That reduces even more stress.

• Take time to think things through – The whole concept of The Power of Negative Thinking deals with planning and prevention. If you can think ahead, see problems before they happen or prepare for the ones you can’t avoid, you aren’t grasping for answers when things get tough. You’ll already be prepared.

• Delegate – Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You can’t be all things to all people. You don’t need to do everything if you have others who can give you an assist. If you can responsibly dole out some (not all your tasks!) of your tasks to others, they not only take some of the load of you, but some of the stress as well.

And finally…

• Lower your expectations - Trying to hit a homerun every time out will cause more strikeouts that hits. Take a good honest swing at it, though. You can’t be perfect every time. And many, I repeat MANY tasks do not even require perfection. They require completion. So try not to stress out over the lack of a masterpiece.

Stress sucks. There. I said it. But now you have some tools to manage it. I hope. Possibly. Now I’m stressed I haven’t done enough for your stress.

I need a nap.

With the Super Bowl fast approaching and the possibility of my favorite negative thinking team, my New England Patriots, attempting to go for a perfect season, I thought I’d throw the negative spotlight on Football. Not that sport the world calls football and Americans call “guys running around yet not scoring”. But real American football.

Football is full of negativity. Any sport that knocks you flat on your butt has to be a bit negative, right? So let’s break down “Madden Style”.

Offense. You’re looking for matchups. You need to see the weaknesses in the other team. You need to know where your weaknesses are as well. You try and match your strength with their weakness. Blocking is a purely negative action with positive results. You are trying to stop someone from tackling your running back or quarterback. You are preventing a possible problem. At the snap you’re doing hard counts, putting people in motion to deceive the opposition so they won’t know what you’re doing.

Defense. You goal is to stop them from reaching the end zone. You’re using schemes to hide what coverage you are going to do. You’re trying to avoid penalties. In some situations, you’re trying to minimize damage. For example, in the Red Zone (inside the 20 yard line) you’re trying to prevent a touchdown. At that point you’re hoping to stop them from getting any points but in the red zone you’re going to look at a field goal as a minor victory. Yes you gave up points. But not many.

In the NFL, on any given Sunday any team can win. Hopefully this Sunday, New England will do all the negative things they always do to succeed.

Good to see “The Power of Negative Thinking” is seeping into the world. I saw two examples of it today.

The first example is from CNN.com title “Worst things to say at work“. It’s basically a “What not to say” guidebook for dummies. Some of them are fairly obvious like “That’s not my job” and “It’s not my fault”. Others are less obvious and result in a comfort level with the office and your co-workers like “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but …” and “I got so trashed last night …” You like your co-workers, you feel safe saying almost anything to them, and so you do. You forget that tales of debauchery can sometimes make you look bad and unreliable.

The second example is from ESPN.com where they list several things the New York Giants should NOT do as they prepare to take on my New England Patriots. Everything starts with DON’T.

Don’t say anything stupid.

Don’t assume that the Patriots will under prepare.

Don’t expect the Patriots to break.

I’d go on but I’m sure Tom Coughlin is reading this right now (Hi Tommy!) and I don’t want to be the person who helped out the enemy. Sorry Tom, maybe next year.

As these articles show, it is important to know what not to do. Sometimes more so than what we should do. Many times, what we should do is obvious. Society and education has a tendency to do that to a person. A+B=C. It’s the variables that throw us the curves and thinking of some of those curves in advance keeps us in the driver’s seat. Anticipation and preparedness is a huge key to success. Not the only key, but certainly a good chunk. So don’t be afraid to think of what you should and shouldn’t do.

If you only think positively, you’re only getting half the story.

No, this is not the Titanic but the movie Titanic. Both were doomed from the start, but only one sank.

If you remember, the industry was touting James Cameron’s a monumental flop, the next Waterworld. A bloated budget and out of control shooting schedule was sure to doom the famous ship twice. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Filming Titanic was an arduous experience for all involved. The schedule was intended to last 138 days but grew to 160 — twenty days shy of six months. Many cast members came down with colds, flu or kidney infections after spending hours in cold water, including Kate Winslet. Several left and three stuntmen broke their bones, but the Screen Actors Guild decided, following an investigation, that nothing was inherently unsafe about the set. Cameron never apologized for running his sets like a military campaign, although he admitted, “I’m demanding, and I’m demanding on my crew. In terms of being kind of militaresque, I think there’s an element of that in dealing with thousands of extras and big logistics and keeping people safe. I think you have to have a fairly strict methodology in dealing with a large number of people.” After almost drowning, chipping an elbow bone and getting the flu, Winslet decided she would not work with Cameron again unless she earned “a lot of money.” She admitted Cameron was a nice man, but had too much of a temper.

The modern day scenes were shot on the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh in July 1996. It was during this shoot that someone sprinkled phencyclidine (PCP) into the crew’s dinner, affecting many including Cameron, and sending several dozen of them to the hospital. The person behind the prank was never caught.

Also from Wikipedia: Cameron’s budget for the film reached about $200 million, and it became the most expensive movie ever made. Before its release, the film was widely ridiculed for its expense and protracted production schedule.

So a recipe for disaster, right? Nope. It not only was a good movie (admit it, you liked it) but it was a critical and box office success:

Titanic opened with $28 million on its first weekend. The film’s grosses escalated in the next several weeks. Titanic was one of very few modern movies to gross more in their second weekend than their first. Its gross increased from $28.6 million to $35.4 million from week 1 to week 2, an increase of 23.8%, unheard of for a wide release, and a testament to the appeal of the movie. This was especially noteworthy, considering that the film’s running time of more than three hours limited the number of showings each theater could schedule. It held the #1 spot on the box-office charts for months, eventually grossing a total of over $600 million domestically and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Titanic became the highest grossing film of all time. (Adjusting for inflation, the film brought in the sixth-highest domestic (U.S. only) gross of all time.) The CG visuals surrounding the sinking and destruction of the ship were considered spectacular. During the 1998 Academy Awards, the film won a record-tying 11 Oscars. Among them were Best Picture and Best Director.

Sometimes, as we’re neck deep in something, we start realizing we’re in too deep. We didn’t do something as well as we’d like or we spent too much than we should have. We failed in our process. But failing the process sometimes doesn’t mean you failed in your goal. We try so hard to go from point A to point B to point C, thinking “this is how it is supposed to be”. We get caught up in the “supposed to” and forget about the “what is”.

Failure happens along the way. Over-budget, mis-managed and late. Yet a complete success in the end. Plus, valuable experience learned for the next big project.

It’s no secret I’m not 100% thrilled with how kids act today. The entitlement, their over-inflated sense of self-worth, the fact they want respect for existing, not for anything they may have done or earned and the complete lack of understanding that actions have consequences. So it was with a hearty chuckle that I saw this story on the news. From the Washington Post:

Snow days, kids and school officials have always been a delicate mix.

But a phone call to a Fairfax County public school administrator’s home last week about a snow day — or lack of one — has taken on a life of its own. Through the ubiquity of Facebook and YouTube, the call has become a rallying cry for students’ First Amendment rights, and it shows that the generation gap has become a technological chasm.

It started with Thursday’s snowfall, estimated at about three inches near Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke. On his lunch break, Lake Braddock senior Devraj “Dave” S. Kori, 17, used a listed home phone number to call Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer for the county system, to ask why he had not closed the schools. Kori left his name and phone number and got a message later in the day from Tistadt’s wife.

Now, before I get into the response of the wife, let’s talk about the kid. For the purposes of full disclosure, I grew up in New Hampshire and 3 inches of snow didn’t even warrant the thought of closing schools unless there was ice involved. So, for me, this is a non-issue. You go to school.

But for “Dave” Kori, he figured it was important for him to call an administrator, at home, to get to the bottom of this. He did this at school during the lunch break. Why didn’t he ask the administrators of his own school first. Go up the chain of command, so to speak. But he felt he was too important to deal with the school’s minions and a call to the top of the food chain was appropriate. This is where we are failing our children. We need to teach them about privacy, about boundaries and about making appropriate choices. If he (and his family) we’re so concerned about safety, why go to school? An excused absence from his parents would have be fine. So was it really a concern or was it just some smart-ass kid? We’ll see.

Then he got a voice mail from Dean Tistadt’s wife, which is transcribed as follows:

This is Candy Tistadt, Dean Tistadt’s wife. This message is for Dave Kori. How dare you call us at home?! If you’ve got a problem with going to school, you do not call somebody’s house and complain about it. My husband was up at 4 o’clock this morning, trying to decide the best thing to do, to send you to school, on a day when the weather man is calling for one thing and another thing happens. You don’t begin to know what you are talking about, and don’t you ever call here again! My husband has been at the office since 6:30 this morning, so don’t you even suggest that he purposely didn’t answer his phone. He is out almost every single night of the week at meetings for snotty-nosed little brats, and he may not have called you but it is not because he’s home because it snowed. Get over it kid, and go to school. Get an education, that’s what you’re there for.

There’s a reason I posted the transcript. I wanted to take the “Crazy Rant” sound out of the message. I would have dropped a few more F-bombs on him, but that, again, is because I was raised in New Hampshire. But she does make a few valid points. You don’t call someone’s house. Sounds like “Dave” made some false accusations as well as she is pretty upset that he thinks her husband is at home safe while he’s sent innocent children to school to die in the snow like the Donner Party.

But after this voicemail came the part I take greater exception to:

Not so long ago, that might have been the end of it — a few choice words by an agitated administrator (or spouse). But with the frenetic pace of students’ online networking, it’s harder for grown-ups to have the last word. Kori’s call and Tistadt’s response sparked online debate among area students about whether the student’s actions constituted harassment and whether the response was warranted.

Kori took Tistadt’s message, left on his cellphone, and posted an audio link on a Facebook page he had created after he got home from school called “Let them know what you think about schools not being cancelled.” The Web page listed Dean Tistadt’s work and home numbers.

The Tistadts received dozens more calls that day and night, Dean Tistadt said. Most were hang-ups, but at one point, they were coming every five minutes — one at 4 a.m., he said. At the same time, his wife’s response was spreading through cyberspace.

Within a day, hundreds of people had listened to her message, which was also posted on YouTube. A friend of Kori’s sent it to a local television news station, and it was aired on the nightly news program.

Kori, a member of the Lake Braddock debate team who said his grade-point average is 3.977, said his message was not intended to harass. He said that he tried unsuccessfully to contact Dean Tistadt at work and that he thought he had a basic right to petition a public official for more information about a decision that affected him and his classmates. He said he was exercising freedom of speech in posting a Facebook page. The differing interpretations of his actions probably stem from “a generation gap,” he said.

“People in my generation view privacy differently. We are the cellphone generation. We are used to being reached at all times,” he said.

Kori explained his perspective in an e-mail yesterday to Fairfax County schools spokesman Paul Regnier. Regnier said, also in an e-mail, that Kori’s decision to place the phone call to the Tistadts’ home was more likely the result of a “civility gap.”

“It’s really an issue of kids learning what is acceptable and not acceptable. Any call to a public servant’s house is harassment,” Regnier said in an interview.

If every voicemail, every email, every phone conversation can be posted online for the world to see (I posted this as well since it was already out there. I’m guilty of hypocrisy, but at least I know it and admit it) you are fostering an environment (not yet, since the kids are too stupid to realize it yet, but it’s coming) where secrets and facades will be the norm, yes-men will be rampant because no one will be willing to express their opinion in fear that it will be used against them in a very public forum.

Now the kid is surprised (and annoyed) with all the phone calls he’s getting. I hope he’s slowly realizing there are consequences for every action. Most kids don’t learn this until after the voicemail hits the yahoo, but if we can teach them some negative thinking, maybe, just maybe, we can help these kids before they make a really big mistake. Before we stop taking an entire generation seriously.

After reading my own post…I’m officially old.