The need to grow, home

Three ski jump ramps in Lahti, Finland.
Never dreamed of being a Senior Olympian. Yet in 2009, here i was. Lahti, Finland. Representing Team USA at the 2009 Masters Track and Field World Championships.
two black frames with personal items
From the office wall where i blog most days, these two photos are a few feet away. Photo: My ‘racing bib’ from 2009 and a newspaper article photo from 1977.

My greatest “personal-life” growth opportunity surfaced while teaching Disney Institute (DI) business principles for 15 years.

Disney has, since 1955’s Disneyland opening, operated with four foundational Quality Standards.

They are, in alphabetical order:

  1. Courtesy
  2. Efficiency
  3. Safety
  4. Show

The key however is putting these in an operational priority order.

While teaching this nebulous business wisdom to outsiders, the time-tested DI curriculum never (literally never) rallied outsiders to work through the pain, and risk, that comes from committing to a ‘carved-in-stone’ holy-grail operational imperative.

To help solve this i created a heretofore undiscovered prioritization filter:

  1. Non-negotiable
  2. Famous-for
  3. #1 Business-need

Watch how this becomes easy to put the four alphabetized quality standards into an operational-priority order.

Non-negotiable = Safety

Famous-for = Courtesy and Show (in that order)

#1 Business-need = Efficiency

This business wisdom is context neutral and can be applied in any domain. So, long ago i applied this (and still apply it) to create our family quality standards.

Note: Quality standards are simply a prioritized decision-making matrix. It’s applied by everyone, everywhere at Disney. Your work scope and department NEVER alters the order. Consistency is the hallmark of world-class organizations. This is how we do it at Disney. It’s also how i run my personal life. Safety, Service, Simplicity.

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This website is about our HOME. This is the fifth of five daily, differently-themed blog posts about: (1) mind, (2) body, (3) spirit, (4) work, (5) home. To return to Mid Life Celebration, the site about MIND, click here.

Favorite priority? Home

Bent car tire rim
Crazy how much it costs to repair this damaged tire rim. We objectively pay whatever it costs to eliminate the safety concern. Cheryl is at Toyota taking care of it as i type this post.

Favorite priority?

Prioritizing my priorities.

Safety, service, simplicity.

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This website is about our HOME. This is the fifth of five daily, differently-themed blog posts about: (1) mind, (2) body, (3) spirit, (4) work, (5) home. To return to Mid Life Celebration, the site about MIND, click here.

Haves and wants, home

Mountain chalet
This was a temporary HQ in mid-September 2024. We had both rooms.

The saying goes like this…

We always want what we can’t have.

What if the saying was re-engineered…

We always have what we can’t want.

That reengineered sentence doesn’t resonate with me in any obvious way. Kinda like the way today’s blog titles didn’t fully go where i thought they might.

The “Summer 2024” blog experiment seems to have slowly morphed into a new style of writing, driven simply from trying to efficiently scale the admin side of the blogging effort.

Noteworthy: When blog titles are generic, like “Sperry Day One, mind”, the topic can be anything — ton of flexibility. When blog titles are not generic, like today’s titles focusing on a contrast between haves and wants, the title suggests you stay in that lane. This is a new discovery and new creative opportunity.

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This website is about our HOME. This is the fifth of five daily, differently-themed blog posts about: (1) mind, (2) body, (3) spirit, (4) work, (5) home. To return to Mid Life Celebration, the site about MIND, click here.

Glacier 2024 thoughts, home

Screenshot of pdf filler websites
Turns out, Apple has an easy way to sign pdfs.

When you expect power to go out you become weirdly vulnerable.

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This website is about our HOME. This is the fifth of five daily, differently-themed blog posts about: (1) mind, (2) body, (3) spirit, (4) work, (5) home. To return to Mid Life Celebration, the site about MIND, click here.

Blogging experiment update, home

two hawks sitting on a fence
Those two.

Seriously, you’re writing today’s five blog posts from your pool?

Yep.

Yee-haw!!!

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This website is about our HOME. This is the fifth of five daily, differently-themed blog posts about: (1) mind, (2) body, (3) spirit, (4) work, (5) home. To return to Mid Life Celebration, the site about MIND, click here.