Psychologists have demonstrated over the past 80 years a social reality that telling other people your personal goals makes them less likely to happen.  When you tell someone your goal, most people react with great support.  I’m going to quit smoking!  I’m going to start running!  I’m going to lose weight!  That is wonderful, John!  I know you can do it.  You are going to be a great success.  Congratulations!

You immediately feel wonderful just by being congratulated.  Your mind is tricked when you get that feeling of accomplishment – yet you haven’t done any of the work associated with accomplishing the goal.  This feeling significantly increases the likelihood that you will not achieve your goal.  You’ve already had the great feeling of accomplish – why on earth would you want to do the hard work now?

I am living this advice today.  I have a few ‘bad goals’ that I’ve talked about for months that I’ve taken no action on.  I have a couple of ‘great goals’ that I’ve kept to myself that I’m wildly successful at (one goal in particular).

I think I’m going to try this more often…

Interesting 4 minute video from Derek Sivers.

I recently spent another night in Chicago visiting a couple of associations.  Rather than spending the evening at the hotel bar, I decided to walk around in the Theater District in Chicago and work on my street photography.  I went with my Canon T1i and my Canon 100mm 2.8 macro.  I know that a lot of street photography is done with 20-25mm, but I wanted to try something a little different.  It is simply amazing to me how much is going on within a 10 block area.  I was walking very quickly (using it as an excuse to exercise as well), and I snapped about 200 photos.  I would look at each photo, and if I had something that I liked, I took the time to recompose, think about what I was shooting, and reshoot.  I’m pretty happy with a few of the photos.  I’m very happy with the experience.

Sometimes street photography is extremely awkward.  Most people don’t like to have their photos taken, yet some really enjoy being photographed.  My favorite interaction was with Russell.  Russell saw me taking boring photos of a building.  He stood in front of the building and started posing, informing me that it wasn’t a great photo until I had some color in it!  The funniest part of that was that I was shooting everything for monochrome.  Thanks, Russell!

Of course, the other extreme was one of the ladies I took a photo of.  “What the F do you want?”  She screamed at me.  I apologized to her and told her I was just snapping photos of everyone.  She kept screaming at me and told me to get the hell away from her.  I did.

Early Tuesday morning I was walking around in a back alley where a city worker was driving a trash pickup truck.  He stopped and got out to talk to me about my photography.   He said that he sees people taking photos of these buildings all the time and wanted to know why I was doing that.  He said that he understood that it was a famous area, and the buildings are pretty neat, but he just didn’t get it.  I told him that in reality most people just pay too much for a camera and feel obligated to use it so they try to take the same photo that they’ve seen in a magazine.  We talked for a few minutes when I showed him a couple of the photos that I had been taking.  When he saw one of the photos with fire escapes, he actually paused for a minute.  “I see all of these fire escapes everyday and never once thought they were interesting.  That looks really neat.”  I think he got it.

Check out the best of the photos from this session on my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stovereffect/4791641675/in/set-72157624365278889/

It’s worse than everyone says.  Watching your child get hurt hurts you.  My wife, Kathleen, was brushing our 7 year old daughter’s hair this morning when Emma just fainted.  She fell slowly to the floor as my wife held her head and sort of helped her fall.  At first Kathleen thought she was messing around – which she is known to do – but then her eyes were sort of fluttering in the back of her head and her arms stiffened and straightened out in front of her.  She woke up nearly instantly (maybe 3 seconds), wondered why she was lying on the ground, and then grabbed her head like she had a headache.

I had been in the office on the desktop computer when I heard Kathleen say, “Emma!  Emma!”  I ran into the bedroom just in time to see Kathleen laying Emma on the floor.  I helped her lay Emma down, saw Emma’s eyes flitter once or twice, and then she seemed conscious, looking up trying to determine where she was.

It was quite scary.  Emma was okay, but very shaken afterwards.  I’m not sure if she was upset by what had happened or by seeing her mother acting frantic trying to hold her and make sure she was okay.  Regardless, we threw everyone into the minivan, and headed in to see the pediatrician.  I thought about the emergency room, but our pediatrician has Sunday emergency hours, and I was sure Emma would get more attention and better care from a doctor that knew her.

Emma is fine.  It took a couple of hours before her headache completely went away.  She was back to torturing her younger siblings about 3 hours later.  She seems perfectly fine tonight.  The doctor said that she should be fine.  “Completely normal”, he said.

It’s really strange though.  Something so simple that immediately strikes a chord of fear in your soul.  Everyone uses the word ‘faint’ lightly.  “I almost fainted”, “I could have fainted”, or “She looked like she could faint”.  Seeing my child faint snapped me back into the reality of just how fragile life is.  We should be spending more time on the important things – living, loving, and sharing.  It’s so easy to know this, but even easier to get caught up and forget it.

I’m trying to keep this in the forefront of my mind and live in the now for everyone that I interact with: my children, my wife, my colleagues, my friends, and, yes, myself.   I will be present.