Floating On The Water

“You laugh it off, you get upset for a little while, you're human and you let it go.” - Jennifer Lopez

A few years ago my wife and I took an extended early September vacation. It was a great time looking back with family, friends and just chillingout for a few days. We made a visit up to Helen, Georgia just before the start of a very long Oktoberfest celebration they have stretching from mid-September to the start of November.

As we sat in our chairs of a local drinking establishment having a beer and some wings, we noticed small clear bags of water hanging along the edge of the patio walls. This was an open air restaurant next to the Chattahoochee River, down which people float on large round tubes. One might have mistaken these clear plastic bags as water balloons meant to toss at people floating by.

A patron near us had the same thought and decided to toss one.

Why he chose a pretty girl is left to his own reckoning but she ended up being one not to take this offense calmly. She returned, yelled and screamed her displeasure at him. She did get wet, but we thought again that she was in the water and getting wet already. I'm guessing it was the surprise of a water balloon which shocked her from the calm floating waters of the river.

The exchange was heated but the patron did apologize.

I'm not completely certain he was fully remorseful, but he did apologize. The young lady stood her ground, or more actually, her water (since she was standing in the shallows of the river). Standing there, I am not certain if she was waiting for something more or maybe a burly boyfriend to come floating down to save her honor.

It was at this point we decided to leave the maddening noise.

Before leaving we could hear the restaurant staff explaining that those were not water balloons to be thrown at people tubing down the river. In fact they are there to discourage flies from hanging around.

I am certainly glad we did not make the same mistake.

So where does this leave the story and what lesson can be learned? As I said, we did not stay to see the situation play out completely. There were too many stores to visit and too many interesting places to see in town.

What I do know, things are going to happen to us in life.

There are going to be moments in which your peaceful existence is going to get interrupted. A water balloon is going to crash down upon you in a surprising way when you least expect. Getting upset is likely your first response, anger is your second and retaliation might even enter your thought process.

Will you stand on the edge of the water allowing it to consume you? And while you do, the water keeps flowing past, life keeps flowing on. Let it go, pick up the pieces and get back on the tube. Get back into the flowing water of life and move on.

Stay inspired my friends!

Sliding Through Life

"It's a beautiful thing, diving into the cool crisp water and then just sort of being able to pull your body through the water and the water opening up for you." - Dawn Fraser

How fascinating the above quote is and how you can apply it to everyday life. Our interaction with others is greatly impacted by our own opening up. So many times we develop a thick carapace or shell around our lives. We protect our feelings and self; so much that the shell becomes a heavy weight upon our lives.

When we carry this shell or build walls around our life, opportunity is lost for us to experience the cool crisp water. We slowly deteriorate and harden even further to anything beyond what we have within the walls we've erected. Our covering becomes such a hard disposition that nothing new can be breathed into it.

If we open ourselves to the world, things change.

Like diving into the water, the world will pull your body through life. It is the world opening up to you. As the words from a song (paraphrased) say, "...you'll love the color of it all."

Remove the hardened shell over your life and experience life for all it is worth. Do not wallow in the silent and lonely darkness. Open up to a life that exists, waiting to pull you to new heights. Once you remove the shell, you will never want to put it back on.

Stay inspired my friends!

Crossing Calm Waters

"The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." - Edward Gibbon

As I was thinking about what to write today, it occurred to me that change happens in my life sometimes without even realizing it. Your thought is probably "well yeah, no duh." Certainly my thought was not one of those moments of enlightenment. It is something I have always understood just beneath the surface.

What occurred to me is that we forget about this fact of change.

Even as I accept and manage changes that I am making, other unseen forces are causing change in my life. If you think about the "ripples in the water", something set in motion elsewhere can have a ripple effect on our own life.

The ripple could be disruptive to our own movement.

The ripple could be just the right push we need.

So what happens when these ripples or waves cross paths with our own? They can upset and knock you off the course you had set. It is one of those things which could destroy a person, but only if they let it. You could be crossing calm waters only to be swept away. Knowing and understanding that the wind will shift, or that waves could come crashing over the side will help you better navigate your life.

Life and circumstance can bring change in the blink of an eye.

The outcome of your experience in life is the result of how you respond to events that occur in your life. Once you realize a calm sea will not always exist, you can prepare for and adjust when the calm is disrupted.

Be at peace in the crashing waves and you will come through into the calm stronger, happier and even more focused on your life goals.

Stay inspired my friends.

EMC World 2014 - Now Back To

"You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem." - Tim Cook

It is the end of the week, EMC World 2014 is over and we can all return to our normal lives. Or can we?

During this IT conference, customers, analysts and others heard information on how the storage industry is being redefined. The traditional second IT platform is going the way of the buggy whip and horse-drawn carts. There will still be quaint horse-drawn carriages around the park on a Saturday evening.

But the Lotus F1 of third IT platform is here.

To borrow a quote from a Stephen King novel, "Get busy redefining or get busy dying." EMC is changing and redefining how storage is done and how companies are going to meet the challenges of the third platform. This week in Las Vegas at EMC World, we clearly marked that beginning.

But will you go back to your regularly scheduled programming? Or will you be changed? Will you redefine the way you think about storage and your way of doing business in this new third platform?

Better yet, will you redefine your life?

Changing the way you do business means dropping what has gone wrong, what has been slow and what has been holding you back. Changing the way you do life means doing the same things. Drop what has gone wrong, slow or held you back. In other words, REDEFINE how you approach life going forward. Do not let the past define you.

Do not return to the regular scheduled programming. Redefine yourself, do something for others, help others redefine themselves and see how life gets redefined, gets lifted, to a new and higher platform.

Redefine your business for life in the third platform and redefine your life for something better. Stay inspired my friends.

How can you redefine things in your life?

Check out Charity: water

EMC World 2014 - Safe Water

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today marks the final day of EMC World 2014 here in Las Vegas, an annual get together of the most brilliant minds in the IT industry. And I am talking about you, the attendees that truly make the industry run and perform as well as it does.

In all of the hubbub of everyday work life, conferences such as ours, we spend an awful lot of time trying to solve business problems. That is a good thing because business drives the economic life of the world, your city and your household. Without it, we would be scrambling to find those basic needs in life such as food, clothing and shelter.

Without it, we would be searching for clean water.

Water, that is what I am here to talk about today. How much do we take it for granted that we can turn on a faucet and drink clean water. To step into the shower and have water to bathe in or to fill a pot for cooking.

An organization named Charity:Water thinks about that everyday. Everyday they know that 90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old. That diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. They also know that over 3.6% of the global disease burden could be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene.

So how can you REDEFINE your life?

You can take part of your time, your money and your talents to help organizations like Charity:Water help those in need. You can change your way of thinking by changing the way you think about others.

We get a limited lifetime and the greatest reward you will ever achieve is in helping others. Now that is life REDEFINED.

Stay inspired my friends!

Floating on Time

"Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal." -Irish

On Sunday, my wife and I were able to witness a moment of transition for a husband, a family and friends that lost a wonderful woman by the name of Belinda. She loved the ocean and the peace it brought her. She would lay for hours upon her raft, floating in the emerald gulf waters. All of us would laugh, wondering when the day would come that she floated all of the way to Cuba on that raft.

This day would be that day in which she floated forever upon the currents of time. Her husband Mark would take her ashes out into the deep and allow the waters to carry her for eternity. Some may call it letting go, but I say it is a "locking in" of the memories. Those that we love, while no longer with us physically, they live on in our hearts, in our minds, in our memories.

These things we do in honor of our loved ones both honors them but more importantly establishes more lasting memories. Those are the memories that will keep us connected long after the pain of losing them leaves us. Those are the memories that will forever live on through us, through our children and generations of family.

Let your love of family and friends live forever.

Stay inspired my friends.

A Big World

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.” -George Carlin

You might expect the usual discussion about a glass half full or half empty at this point. I have written that article before describing and discussing the nature of our positive or negative attitudes. But this article is not going down that path.

In fact, for those that firmly believe in predictions of the wrold ending tomorrow, December 21, 2012, time spent reading this article won't matter I suppose. It is very likely that those people will not have the time as they prepare for what may or may not happen tomorrow. They will be rushing about ensuring their "bug out" packs are ready. I truly do admire their preparedness.

For me it is interesting to think people would be worried about that specific day though. Why not worry and prepare for December 1st, April 22nd, February 3rd or any "tomorrow" day? If not an interpreted doomsday word from thousands of years ago, maybe a large meteor hitting the earth, huge earthquake or world war. Are not the odds generally the same or more likely?

Then again, I am not against being prepared in life. It is smart to plan forlife's circumstances in order to have a chance at reacting to the curves it throws at us. But I am also on the side of having expectation of good things happening. I prepare but I also allow myself to have expectation of great things to happen as opposed to the worst.

If I read the quote from George Carlin again, I begin to realize that the glass is life itself. Life is so much bigger, so much greater than I can ever imagine. It means to me that we get to choose how full we want the glass to be. For some of us that will mean only a few drops of water. Others will fill the glass with as much as they can.

The glass will always be bigger than what we need.

Glass Of Water

"I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it." ~Groucho Marx

There she was, the Delta Airlines flight attendant, standing at the front of the plane and pleasure was not written upon her face. It was getting late in the evening of a holiday with one more to go and 142 passengers.

Sometimes you can just see it all over a person. The pain or frustration of a day, a job or a lifetime. Many people would see it on another person and shy away. Not me though, I only wanted a glass of water.

The way she addressed or responded to people was not all that pleasant. I would describe it as a tourist asking a New Yorker for directions on a hot and humid day in Times Square. It was not going to be fun but I was determined to make an effort. Besides, all I wanted was a glass of water.

Rumbling down the aisle, "watch your elbows please" was the constant and stern warning of my flight attendant. I say 'my flight attendant' because I was going to make her smile and let her day finish brighter then it appears to have started.

So many times we see people that we would rather avoid. We get a perception of them that probably isn't very flattering. But we can never know what exactly is happening in their world. So much is hidden inside but it surfaces on the faces of those having a bad day. You can make a difference in that day, sometimes by simply asking for a glass of water.

When our row was approached, before asking for something I instead to ask how she was. I offered up a pleasant great day and thanking her for working on a holiday. All of a sudden it appeared, a smile. The hard shell of the day seemed to melt away. Maybe things would be just a little better. Maybe what troubled her was going to be okay.

And then, she offered me a glass of water.

Opportunity Flows

Opportunity abounds most every where in life. You may pass it daily and not recognize that it is there. It flows through businesses, personal lives and out on the street where you may least expect it. There are those opportunities that you find or those that are presented to you directly.

But things can or cannot happen relative to opportunity if you are not prepared. First, if you ready yourself by increasing your knowledge, knowledge of anything and everything, then you are prepared for opportunity that is presented to you. Additionally, you will be able to identify opportunity flowing eveywhere that otherwise you may not have seen.

You also have to be prepared for change. The type of change that is required to take hold of things that come your way. Many of us have a tendency to build walls of resistance to change. This prevents us from seeing or being able to grab hold of new possibilities. If you break down that wall of resistance, you will see a difference.

It is said that opportunity is like water. When it comes to containing water, it will always find a way, a path through which it can flow. If you dam it up, the water will rise and flow over the top. If a leak in the dam occurs, the water will find it and open it further. Opportunity is like this as well. It will flow to the path of least resistance and if you have a wall built up around you, the flow will occur to those that are open.

"It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared." - Whitney M. Young