Watch that first step...

Two weeks away from home may be the best time to take stock.  Having to disconnect from daily habits, work, the communities I'm involved with, and most importantly regular access to internet, eases the task of examining my routine, career, and social life.

Anything can feel natural if you do it often enough, and nearing my 30th birthday has made me extremely aware of how finite time is.  No matter how many times those who inspire me, even Steve Jobs himself, would repeat this fact, it was hard to absorb until reaching what may be the midpoint of my most productive years.

As I catalog my current accomplishments and circumstances, holding them up beside my wishes, there is basic math I must do to determine what will help me accomplish those goals, and what in my life will in fact make them impossible.  Every relationship, every job, every day, is an opportunity to learn.  It isn't by accident that I habitually try to record anything I learned that day, anything I accomplished, and lastly, what I hope to finish tomorrow.

Getting older, time seems to blur a little, and minor accomplishments don't stick out in my memory as much, so ideally moving forward, with a better way to track everything, I should be able to review those over 300 lessons and accomplishments at the end of each year, and maybe someday, even trace back a few things that came before this year.

Here's to the beginning, the first step, the opening, the introduction, to what will become the clearest memory I have of how I got from today to a tomorrow years and years in the future.

Accountability and anger

Without consequence, can a society function?  Are the specific repercussions important?  In the United States we have a strange double standard where the cruelest and most detrimental of punishments are doled out on those with simple, petty, and survival based crimes.  The other end of the spectrum has executives, leaders, and professional criminals escaping any form of retribution beyond public (and ineffective) ridicule.

Our current election is a prime example, where at worst one candidate is a professional, career politician.  Meanwhile, the other is at best, an ignorant man child who has too much money and too little accountability to fail completely.

The immutable laws of marketing and the campaign for President of the United States

As I am reading The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, paying attention to the campaigns and how people are discussing Bernie, Hillary, and Trump, it’s clear that if Hillary wins the democratic primary, that Donald Trump will win.

I’m not sure why every time Trump passes a milestone against the other republican candidates everyone insists he won’t get further. If you took the last decade of Republican talking points, he fits the imaginary resume of the perfect president according to their own slogans. He’s a businessman with no political connections, he’s not very well spoken or educated, he doesn’t care about minorities or ethical economics, he’s white, he’s male, and like so many of them, unfaithful in marriage.

He’s also, sadly, better at marketing than most Democrats. He has many people convinced he is rich (he isn’t, he just doesn’t pay his bills or taxes), that he’s good at business (he’s not), and he is already a house hold name.

So as much as I wish I was wrong, if Hillary becomes the Democratic candidate for president this November, Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. And I fervently hope I am dead wrong.