I got to attend an exclusive event a while back, with a promise that I’d get an inside look at an organization that is big heat in our area. How could I resist?

So I took a shower and put on clean underwear and combed my hair and shared the secret word with the security guard to gain entry to the super-special event. OMG, it was absolutely…

… a gigantic waste of time. Everything was a platitude, a generic comment, a flowery statement that was supposed to sound like it had great meaning even if there was no there there.

Over the course of an hour, I learned that:

1. Sometimes, the person in charge needs to make the tough decisions.
2. It’s important to get the entire team involved.
3. We cannot predict the future.
4. Some choices are less obvious than others.
5. There are many opportunities to improve.
   

I wanted to leap to my feet and do my best Clara Peller impression as I shouted, “Where’s the beef?” I held back, though, and just listened, waiting in vain for a fact or an insight or a bit of wisdom that would justify the environmental impact of my commute. It never arrived.

I started squirming in my seat as I looked at the door and wondered how much longer this parade of pablum would continue, but then I noticed something. All around me, people were nodding and smiling. Not nodding off, though; nodding in agreement. When the speaker said it’s important to meet challenges, everyone but me was thinking, “Oh, yeah, you got that right.”

I was a bit confused, at first. Why was the audience enthused about a pile of word salad that could be applied by anyone to any situation in life? Why wasn’t everyone else staring at the door and wondering how quickly they could get to their cars?

At first, I thought I must be missing something, but then I realized I was viewing it all through a different filter than the smiling throng at the other tables. While I was curious about the organization on display, I had no particular emotional attachment to them, their success, their past or their future. I was merely interested in gaining some understanding about a local institution. At the worst, I’d have some newsy tidbits to impress my friends at a party, if I ever made any friends or got invited to a party.

Pretty much everyone else in the audience felt more of a connection to the organization, or at least that’s how it appeared. They had an emotional or financial investment in the history and opportunity, the success and failure, of the people on stage. They came to see someone smart and decisive and strategic and that is apparently what they saw.

I’d like to feel superior about the whole thing and think of them as saps who’ll fall for anything, but that would be unfair. In fact, they’re probably smarter than I am, because they found a way to gain more enjoyment and a greater sense of intimacy from their engagement.

Maybe I can still salvage something from the experience. Next time someone mentions the organization, I can relate that I actually spent some time with their leaders. I can relate that they need to get the entire team involved to make the tough decisions that can be hard to make because you can’t predict the future on your way to improvement. I'm sure those insights will make me sound like a real insider.



If I ever attend a program where I actually learn something, I’ll be sure to share it with all the people who click here to subscribe.
 
 

 
Time has a way of smoothing out the edges, shifting the focus of our memories. 

At a funeral, everything is fresh. Everything is raw. Individual details about life and death are more striking and more urgent. Even if you’re trying to put an entire life in perspective, your thoughts and comments are weighted more to the aging shell, the recent conversations, the final day.

When I delivered mom’s eulogy a year ago, I spoke openly about the two different people we had come to mourn. The challenging person who made life more interesting shared equal billing with the woman who made a home and welcomed her family. Everyone at the service had gotten to know her well during her 94 years, and I wanted to recognize the full arc of that life.

By the time we gathered a couple of weeks ago to unveil her marker, though, the focus had shifted. We acknowledged the difficult parts, but stressed more of the positives. We spent more time with the woman who hosted the holidays and kept up the traditions, who showed up at all her grandchildren’s events and became a pen pal to two of her great grandchildren. Her grandchildren spoke about the blooper reels, of course, but they also described the lessons learned and traditions continued, the legacy she passed on to a new generation.

During the year since she left, my sister put together a gathering of cousins from mom’s side of the family and it was truly eye opening. We knew about some of the dysfunction and some of the tough characters who came before us, but the reality was worse, and it re-framed my view of mom’s life. She was a tough contract, absolutely, but things could have been a lot worse. I had not thought previously about her struggle to get past the family culture she inherited, but my new awareness put a softer filter on my memories.

Life is graded on a curve, with a million relevant factors for the ultimate judge. Where did we start? What tools were we given? What was the degree of difficulty? How hard did we try? In the day-to-day, we measure people on an absolute scale and find them wanting. With the benefit of hindsight, or distance, we can and should be more forgiving.

After the dedication, we all went back to my sister’s house and spent the rest of the afternoon together, talking and reminiscing and being a family. Looking around at the people, enjoying the ease of our conversations and the closeness of our bonds, I was reminded of the woman who did so much to set the table for us.

I went home that night and pulled up the eulogy I delivered a year ago. If I was doing it again, I’d add more stories to emphasize the effort she made, the challenges she had faced in her own family, and the traditions she passed on to the generations that followed.

Time has a way of smoothing out the edges.

Maybe I’ll mellow out a bit more as the coming year progresses, but you’ll only learn about it if you click here to subscribe.
 

Once again, the super-science whiz kids at Dad Writes have discovered the hottest new innovation in tech, an advancement that will make AI look even more artificial and much less intelligent. We’ve only encountered this financial tool infrequently, so far, but we know it’s use is going to explode, so you’ll want to get in on the ground floor.

Simplifying the concept for everyone who can’t understand how crypto and NFTs work (Hint: They don’t.), lets’ just describe this new invention as a government-backed gift card that never expires, has no processing fees, and can be used in any store. Well, almost any store, but we’ll get to that part later.

Anyway, it’s called Consumer Accessible Secure Holdings, or CASH, and I cannot believe nobody thought of this sooner. Basically, it’s a nano-thin gift card that takes up much less space than a stiff plastic card, and you can fold it if you’re into origami. You can fit it into a wallet, under your mattress, or even into your penny loafers if you want to flaunt your wealth.

Better yet, you can access these CASH cards without having to download an app, and you always know the balance, because it’s visible on the card at all times. If you only want to redeem part of the value of the card, no worries. You can get other cards and tokens that have their value visible on them, as well.

No more embarrassment when you go to a store with the wrong gift card, or your plastic mystery card isn’t worth enough to buy what you want. With the CASH-based card, you don’t need Samuel L. Jackson to tell you what’s in your wallet.   

And it gets even better for both buyers and sellers. With CASH, there’s no interest on your credit card bills at the end of the month because, voila, no credit card bill. And the store owner benefits, too, because there are no processing fees when people pay with CASH.

Still, as with every new technology, there are a few bugs to be worked out. Some retailers haven’t updated their systems to accept CASH, relying on the old-fashioned system of tapping credit cards and demanding 30% tips for handing us a Twinkie. Converting to CASH will make their lives so much easier, but they need to get with the times first and many are still resistant.

CASH is also in short supply, apparently, because banks will require that consumers fill out all kinds of forms if they want to obtain more than $10,000 in CASH in any single transaction. It’s a bit of a headache, but obtaining multiple supplies at $9,999 should absolutely solve that problem.

Finally, it can be a challenge to record all the transactions when businesses use CASH. With credit cards, computers keep the tally, but businesses that deal in CASH might forget to include some of their sales when they report results to the Internal Revenue Service. From what I’ve heard, though, business owners who deal only in CASH say that has not been a problem and they have reported all their transactions without fail.

Once you start using CASH, you'll be a fan for life. I can't imagine any technology supplanting this incredible system any time soon, or ever.
 
What hot new tech will we discover next? Click here to subscribe and you'll be the king of the nerds.

While I was posting this, I noticed that half of it focuses on stuff we don't know and never care about, except that we should...

1. If I did a man-on-the-street interview with 100 people and asked when inflation will drop below 15%, I would get 95 forecasts and maybe five people would notice that inflation never actually reached 15%. And If I asked 100 people when the current recession is likely to end, pretty much nobody would point out that we aren’t in a recession. We don’t really pay attention as much as we’d like to think. On the other hand, if I asked people to sing the theme song to Friends…
   
   
2. In the Bible, the original sin was Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience to God’s instructions, but many people seem to think it was eating from the Tree of Knowledge itself. That must be the reason so many people think they’ll be better off if they never learn anything.
   
   
3. I met a high school teacher who teaches entrepreneurship and he wanted to know if I could introduce his students to some business founders. I pointed out that less than 1% of all entrepreneurs end up making a living off their businesses, but roughly 95% of plumbers do just fine. On the other hand, there does seem to be a good job market for people who want to teach about entrepreneurship.
   
   
4. Rule Number 2. Never click on an unsolicited link. I’m sure you all remember Rule Number 1 from 2019.
   
   
5. More than a dozen decades ago, Joseph Malins wrote about the choice between putting fences at the top of the cliff or paying for ambulances to collect the poor souls who topple over the edge. I suspect millions of people have read his poem by now, but they all must have an ownership interest in ambulance companies.
   
   
6. I butt-dialed my cousin the other day and she called back when she saw the missed call. We had a nice chat as a result and I was reminded that I should butt dial her more often. 
   
   
7. We need an app that prevents us from re-posting or forwarding any video for three days. That’s enough time to find out if it was a fake, a deep fake or really, really deep fake. If we were all using that app, our average blood pressure would drop 20 points, internet traffic would fall 15% and all our carpal tunnel syndrome would be healed.
   
   
8. I read recently that eighth-grade test scores in civics and U.S. history fell to their lowest levels ever in 2022. Educators are upset by the news, but I suspect most politicians are absolutely ecstatic.
   
   

Maybe we'll discover some areas where we are much smarter than we realized. Not likely, of course, but you'll want to click here to subscribe so you won't miss the update.