Thinking out loud.

Hello from Lincoln, Nebraska… possibly, no undoubtedly, the WORST city I have been to lately. It really boggles my mind why people live in the midwest to be honest. And yes, that’s right. I had exactly 48 hours at home after being gone for over a month straight before getting back on the plane. I have been saying (metaphorically) for a couple years now that one key to a successful life is to stay in motion. Well, I am definitely in motion lately.

Anyway, I hit golf balls for the first time in forever yesterday. It was slightly frustrating but I got a bit warmed up. I think I am going to start hauling the clubs around the country with me in fact. The good golf news was my boy, Phil Mickleson, pulled it out at the Masters this weekend for a second time. Go Phil! I am inspired to get back in shape and play some solid mid-70s golf now. No excuses right?

Well, last week was probably my most unproductive in history work-wise (spent mostly cleaning out over 400 emails and 25 voicemails that accumulated while on vacation). However, I did get the chance while in DC to go out to Kenwood and check out the blossoming cherry trees which I really rather enjoyed actually. I think we need a bunch in my neighborhood.

And speaking of my neighborhood, I am home sweet home. Last night was the first in my bed in over a month and it did feel great I must stay (although I still would’ve extended my trip if it were up to me). Anyway, good to be home and can’t wait to see everyone!! I am off to Lincoln next week again for work but I think I may get to Shannon which is cool. Talk soon, byeee.

I have arrived in the in the ninth national capital I have been in the last month. After already visiting Berlin Germany, Ljubjlana Slovenia, Zagreb Croatia, Vienna Austria, Bratislava Slovakia,`Â Budapest Hungary, Prague Czech Republic, and Warsaw Poland in the last three weeks… I now add Washington DC of the USA. Yes friends, that’s right… I am back in the US, back to work, and back to regular life it seems.Â

I do have to admit, as much as it pains me, that checking into the Marriott last night was pretty pleasant after the better part of a month in hostels. Don’t get me wrong, hostels are sooooo much more fun. You meet interesting people, their cheap, their interesting and characteristic, etc. but sharing a room with 3-15 other people does wear you down. There is always someone coming or going at all hours for instance. Having to bring (and therefore not forget) your own soap, towel, and the like is a bit rough too… and forget being able to iron clothes so you have something to wear to the opera (or the swanky nightclub ).

All that being said, for Europe, the hostels were still definitely my style. Reasonably comfortable, met tons of super cool guys and gals to hang with, and (perhaps most importantly) my average cost per night for a place to crash over the course of the past three and half weeks was, that’s right, about $21!!! Not bad for the most expensive continent on the planet I think. For purposes of camparisons, my Fairfield Inn Marriott in Wash DC is $169 per night, ridiculous! Glad I’m not paying for it.

I’m leaving in the morning for American soil. Don’t want to really but I guess you should always come home from vacation wanting to stay a little longer. I gotta replace my busted phone (hopefully Monday night after I get to DC) but then I’ll make some calls. Final thougts on my Eurotrip and pics to come still…

It is the morning of the second day of Business & You here just outside of Warsaw, Poland. This is my first Polski (Polish) Business & You though it is like now my sixth or seventh overall including last year’s trip to Beijing, China.

For those to whom I have not clearly explained about Business & You and before, it is a three (very full) day seminar/workshop aimed at business and personal development. It is very important to me and its lessons have become a big part of my life over the last several years. For instance, I was lucky enough to become one of the youngest people ever at E&Y to sell an entire engagement which amounted to just over $210,000 in total work for us. There is no way it would have ever happened without what I learned at B&Y. Additionally, call it luck or whatever you want, but I have managed to pick a small portfolio of stocks that over the period since about Jan. 1, 2005 when I started it… has earned an approximate return of 57% (an S&P index fund earned about 11% in that time). Again, I can honestly give more credit to the lessons of B&Y than my CSU degree in Finance for this result (though a return that large you almost attribute some to luck I guess )Â

Those were actually the less important things it has given me though. I have learned even more about who I am as a person (emotionally, spiritually, and the like) because of B&Y than probably almost anything else I have ever done. I think at the time it emotionally helped me actually get past the divorce of parents, a big mistake I made in college that I no longer like to talk about, and such things that have improved my personal life dramatically.

I think the next step for me is to have the courage now to share this experience with others in my life. The seminar is hugely intellectually and emotionally challenging, meaning some people hate it and to this point I think I have been too afraid of that to ask others to join me. But I want to now.

I have told David Neenan, who leads the workshop, that I am setting a goal to personally recruit ten people to join us in Fort Collins this fall. I hope some of you reading this will consider. I can guarantee two things about it. One, you will never forget the experience and two, it is potentially life altering. Either way I feel it is the cheapest investment of $300 and three days you will ever make. I have earned my $300 back probably 50 fold at minimum all ready I feel and think I could do potentially 1,000,000 fold by the time I die.

Anyway, if interested, the website is www.businessandu.com to learn more, though it is much different now (website is a bit out of date). Talk with me if interested, I’ll provide more info or get you a spot reserved.

On a final note, as I watch the intent and desire the Polish participate with, it rivals only that which I saw in Beijing (light years beyond what we see now in the States). The days of the States as the greatest and most powerful economic nation on Earth may be numbered I feel… not because others are smarter, cheaper, or anything else. Only because they desire it more. The Chinese, when you see them in this setting, are scary they are sooo smart, determined, and interested.

Anyway, can’t believe I’m coming home soon already. I’ll blog probably once or twice more only from Europe before I am headed to my own nation’s capital next week. Ciao!

Â

I don’t know if anyone besides me ever watches Mythbusters on the discovery channel but it is great show. Here is my mythbusting facts (or at least observations) about Eastern Europe:

MYTH: Polish are kind of stupid (hence we make Polish jokes). BUSTED: The Polish I met seem quit intelligent (although they did build the tallest building in the city of Krakow in 1975 and it has stood there totally empty the last thirty years).

MYTH: The drink Absinthe contains a crazy hallucinogen that makes you see a green ferry. BUSTED: Original Absinthe may have but the kind you can buy now (which is still illegal in the US) just makes you drunk and tastes really bad. There are no hallucination effects.

MYTH: You can get a five star hotel room in Bratislava for $1.83 per night (Eurotrip movie). BUSTED: The exchange rate is helpful in Slovakia but nowhere near that helpful.

MYTH: Germans are highly stiff and pretentious. CONFIRMED: Travelled with one for quite awhile, had to everything planned down to the minute. Subway station in Berlin tell the exact time in minutes and seconds to the next train.

MYTH: All the graffiti in Eastern Europe is expressive of the artistic culture. BUSTED: Some is good but the vast majority just looks like vandalism to me.

MYTH: Berlin is the third biggest Turkish city on earth. CONFIRMED: Only Ankara and Istanbul have larger population of Turkish people than Berlin.

MYTH: Germans drink huge quantities of beer. CONFIRMED: I see people all the time just walking down the street and drinkin a beer while reading their paper…. at like 11 AM.

MYTH: Opera consists of a fat lady singing FIGARO. BUSTED: No singing in the opera I went too.

MYTH: Eastern Europe has some of the most beautiful women on Earth. BUSTED: I would have to say no more so than back home and definitely not like some parts of Asia. Perhaps it is necessary to venture even a bit further to the east to confirm this myth.

That is it for this edition of Mythbusters… check you next time.

What to say about the capital of Germany… I just got done saying how Prague is my fave city visited but I may be changing my mind. Prague has more to offer the tourist and is really awesome but Berlin is a city that gets under your skin. It is sort of like Beijing and Bangkok I think. Beijing is very cool, great sites, somewhat compact, geared to a tourist, etc. but Bangkok is the city that gets under your skin. I could see myself on a long stay in Berlin.

Here, you have to really work hard scratching the city’s surface to find what the city can really offer. Prague just packages it up and hands it to you. Berlin is so much more modernized, fast paced, and the like but yet when you really look, talk about history. Capital of the nation divided by cold war, the nation that started two world wars, the nation that has been both the occupied and the occupier several times in modern history. Really, really distinct culture and historical attitude. It is working hard to remember and at the same time put the past behind it to lead Germany back into the big time on the world stage.

Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt are three amazingly different cities… think NYC, San Francisco, and Vegas or something. It would be imperative to go to at least these three (and more I’m sure) to consider yourself as having seen Germany. Anyway, Berlin is really worth the trip (one few tourists make relative to other European destinations like Paris and London). I can’t believe I consider not making the stop, almost messed up on that one for sure. I am leaving tomorrow afternoon I think for Warsaw to meet David and the others for Business & You. Makes me a bit sad to think I’m on to my final destination before the flight back over the pond.

Travelling and being here has reminded me how much I love doing this. I could easily spend a year or two or three doing nothing but backpacking the planet and love every minute. It helps me keep life in perspective a bit I think… career is critical in life I think we can agree, but at times we must ask if it is enabling you to do what you love or impeding it. A good thing to always keep in mind I think when looking for that elusive thing humans call happiness.

Back to Poland or bust!!

Prague was totally fabulous, but I hit the road for one more destination again before my final stopping point in Poland. I am back in Germany in Berlin for a couple days. I was pretty tired this morning checking out at ten after staying out late (like late, late)Â on the town in Prague. It was fabulous tho… I met a whole bunch of really cool people again in Prague. A Scottsman, couple of English girls, couple of girls from Delaware, and several of new Aussie and Kiwi mates. All are super cool and we went out dancing last night and gave Prauge our all.

I have even acquired a travelling mate who cruised up here to Berlin with me… Marty from Melbourne, and we are meeting a German girl up here that we met in Prague so we even a local tour guide. I love the road!! Anyway, more to come with have something to report on Berlin. Ciao again!

OK, I hate to say it. Vienna was beautiful, Munich was a blast, Budapest if fabulous, but I finally figured exactly why I came to Europe…. PRAGUE! This is the spot. Real old-world architecture (not rebuilt after WWII destruction), tons to do, cool mix of people… yea, I think I may not be coming home. Just jokin, kind of. Really, right up there with Bangkok, Singapore, and New York City among my favorite cities.

No time to talk tonight for long tho I am afraid. It is Friday night and a young guy wandering the Earth looking for a good time is in Prague. I am off to explore… Hope everyone is well. If the nightlife here lives up to expectations and is as cool as the day life, I really may stay. Later ya’ll!!

My right brain obviously needs a lot of help. So… I am doing my best to learn how to appreciate all of the world’s variety of art. In fact, I feel it is art, sport, and economics that unite people around the world when so much of everything else is devisive. I love sport and business is my life, but art has generally escaped me.

Therefore, I travel. Traveling always triggers my interest in art as it has this trip. I am proud to say (when at one point in my life I would have been embarassed to admit) that I have taken in six art museums, the opera, and tons of architecture in Europe. Yesterday, in fact, I saw an original Leonardo Da Vinci oil painting called “Lady with an Ermine”. According to the brochure, there are only like five Da Vinci paintings anywhere in the world (one of which being the Mona Lisa of course) and I just happened onto one in Krakow Poland. It was a pretty cool picture even actually, outside the fact someone famous did it. The light effects are really pretty cool when you check it out up close, I kinda see why the dude got so famous, haha. Actually, a Rembrandt I saw in Budapest is my favorite of the trip so far.

So… speaking of Budapest, guess what I did under my own freewill. Yes, I actually paid the full price of a ticket to watch the opera. And… it was marvelous. It is called an opera but there is no fat lady singing figaro (obviously a stereotype I acquired from a cartoon or something). No singing at all actually, more like a symphony and it is way better when you’re there in person because the different sounds from different instruments all come from different directions which you can’t do with speakers.

This crazy Hungarian guy was real famous I guess who both wrote and conducted the opera. So he wrote this thing (design and build phase) and then conducted it (execution and management phase) and made this hugely diverse set of instruments symphonize (if that is a word) into this wonderful sound that all these very diverse people in the audience went crazy over at the end.

It occured to me that if more CEOs operated like this guy they would be much more successful. In business, we generally take bigger problems or tasks and then break them down into small pieces we can solve. In art, there is some great vision and the objective is take small parts to create the vision. It is the difference between construcing and deconstrucing. Businesses fail (look at Ford or GM) because they creat no symphony, the departments or people or whatever the pieces are, are constantly working to solve their bit of the deconstructed problem and are pulling against each other. Great comapnies (look at Wal-Mart or GE) are constantly operating as an organization, not a department, in symphony toward some great vision (a vision which is generally not profit, that just follows). The composer knew when he needed to give the violins a bit of extra encouragement and when he could just leave the cellos be as they were cruising just fine because he had a clear vision of what the constructed result should have been. I think a bunch of us who call ourselves business people really don’t have this vision of what we are actually trying to create. Anyway, I think the arts are good, great in fact, so I take back all the mean things I once said about them :-\