Witness To Your Life
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
Most of us have heard the phrase "they really knew me" — but rarely stop to consider what that truly costs us when it's gone. ----- What Does It Mean to Have a Witness to Your Life? Strange question, I know. But it surfaced at my mother-in-law's funeral this past Monday in Raleigh, and I haven't been able to shake it. A childhood friend of my wife's pulled her aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "Your mother was a witness to your life. Losing her is hard." I had never heard that expression before. And the weight of it hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for. If we're lucky, we have...
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Busy Hands
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
There’s sad news at Cam’s house. Friends are reaching out to help his family through their grief. Losing a loved one is never easy and friends just want to help by doing something. ----- Busy hands surround my wife and me these days. Recent bad news has brought the need for friends to reach out and want to help us get through it. “I’m so sorry,” they say. “What can I do?” Our reply, just like most people’s is “Nothing. Thank you. We’re all set.” And they reply with, “Well, let me at least bring dinner.” The need to do something to feel helpful. The need for busy...
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Purpose
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
Cam’s been studying retirement trends for his work lately. One thing’s for sure, he’s not ready! ----- More often than not, when I ask someone who has retired in the past two years, their answer is nearly exactly the same. They say, “Well, retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” Why? They worked so hard for it, now they have it. So, what’s missing? My work has steered me into retirement studies. Most people think about money when they think about retirement planning, but I’m learning money is not the only thing you need to plan for. There’s more. And it’s something...
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Carnival Cruise Ship Crashed Into the Dominican Republic
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin’ It Real, Cam has been away lately but just got back from Spring Break with his kids. Imagine a cruise ship wrecked on a beach and they turned it into a hotel…. ----- Imagine a Carnival Cruise ship out at sea and loaded with passengers headed full speed, for the coast of the Dominican Republic and crashing ashore not far from Punta Cana. Then, rather than clean up the mess, they turn wreckage into a hotel, add a bunch more swimming pools and put loud Bose speakers everywhere, and call it the Hard Rock All-Inclusive Sodom and Gomorrah Resort and Hotel Punta Cana....
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Ant Farm
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, Cam has learned that there are moments in time where a simple guttural sound really really matters. And they can’t accumulate because they expire quickly. All this relates back to an incomplete Christmas present. ----- I got an ant farm for Christmas. My kids laughed and they told their friends and they laughed but my family came through and on Christmas morning I opened an ant farm. It has a main chamber and two auxiliary chambers. I set it up just like the pictures showed. A few weeks ago, in March, I got the ants for my birthday. Apparently, the farm...
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AI Me?
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam has been pitched by a software company to duplicate himself. Who would want another of him? Even he questions his own worth from time to time. ----- I’ve just come from my accountant’s office where I handed all my tax information to the lady at the front desk. The manilla envelope was much lighter this year than in years past. Last week I had a long talk with an AI guy out of Houston. He said he loved to find people like me – content experts with books and videos and training programs and blogs and podcasts and such. He wants to take all content...
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Lenten Commitment
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam realizes that he really had no choice over what he gave up for Lent - it was given to him and he's not happy about it. ----- Our new puppy continues to rule the house and my life. She was trained by the breeder to urinate on a pee pad which is exactly what it sounds like – an absorbent mat for dogs to urinate on indoors. At our house, that means the carpet. She’ll trot off the hardwood floors, pass the open back door to find the Persian rug and squat and look at me with an expression of “look how good I am!” Meanwhile the whole yard in available...
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Another Tree
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, Cam wonders what the life span of a titanium knee is and whether his father might need one or two more with the way he’s going. ----- My eighty-nine-year-old father is scheduled to get a knee replacement next week. Let me say that again - he’s eighty-nine and getting a new knee and is eager to return to his very active life when the pain subsides. He’s done this once before and wants the same results. People stop me nearly every day to ask about my father. They comment on how healthy he is and how he never slows down. This is true, though I can...
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In On the Joke
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
In a few coastal cities in the deep south, in the weeks before Lent begins, a strange behavior begins to appear. Honorable and respectable people step into a different personalities for a short time. They do it together, and it's a heck of a good time. ----- Grown people acting like fools for a few days might very well be good for the soul. I’m not sure how large groups, primarily of men, agreeing to behave silly is therapeutic, but it is. I’ll leave it to some psychologist try to explain it. As a participant, though, I assure you, it’s good stuff. Over the top costumes, over the...
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He Claims to Know
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, Cam Marston admits that from time to time when he’s on his knees at church on Sunday he asks himself what in the world he’s doing. Has he, maybe, lost his mind. ----- The Mayan god of rain was called Cha ac. When drought hit the jungles of Central America fifteen hundred years ago, Cha ac was called upon to send rain. So, the Mayans, led by their shaman, offered a child – children, actually. The archeologists who studied Bartlett Cave in Belize say they found the bones of eighteen children in one area alone, and there were many areas. None of the children...
info_outlineThre are three types of people, he said, and my mind has been racing ever since.
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In a Zoom call this week I chatted with another speaker for an upcoming conference. He and I want our messages complement each other and he offered some of his presentation highlights and one thing he said has rattled around in my head since our call.
He said there are three types of people - and when he said this he was quoting someone else but I don’t remember who – he said there are fragile people who when pushed or dropped or damaged, they break. Once broken, they don’t heal. We all kinda know people like this.
The second type of person is resilient. When dropped, they get back up. They don’t break. And though it sounds laudable, they don’t change. Each time they’re pushed or dropped or damaged, they simply get back up and resume.
And there’s the third type which he very inelegantly referred to as anti-fragile. When pushed or dropped or damaged, they get back up, learn from what’s happened, and change so that it won’t happen again. These people prove remarkably successful over time, he said, in both business and in life.
And he went further and applied this concept to organizations. In this post-pandemic business climate, he said, we’re seeing organizations who were fragile and broke due to the pandemic, the organizations who were resilient but simply resumed what they’ve always been doing, and the ones that are anti-fragile and are using pandemic-learned lessons to become stronger.
Well, I can’t hear stuff like this and not start thinking about the people around me. My wife is anti-fragile. She learns from her mistakes, and they’re seldom made twice. My business manager is definitely anti-fragile. She negotiates for me and though we may have been taken advantage of in the past, it’s never happened the same way twice. She learns. She changes. Which is good.
And, of course, I think about my kids. They’re a mix and it’s situational. I have children who have their athletic weaknesses revealed and they change to fix the weakness. However, they may make mistakes with friendships and get right back up to only to have those same mistakes happen again and again – a resilient behavior. They’ll learn what’s necessary to perform well in class but repeat the same mistakes regarding rules my wife and I have about our home – again, a resilient behavior. None of them are fragile, they’re either resilient or anti-fragile depending on the situation.
And the questions continue: how do we raise our kids or groom our colleagues or employees to become anti-fragile. Are we born one way or another or is this a learned behavior? And is today’s coddling society today raising our kids to be fragile and can we fix it? Or them?
And what am I? I don’t think I’m fragile but am I resilient or anti-fragile? I don’t know.
I do know this though - this other speaker needs to bring the goods next month. He’s started my head spinning and I didn’t allot enough time in our Zoom call to ask these questions and we had to cut it short – a simple mistake I’ve made too many times.
And, well, I guess that answers it.
I’m Cam Marston and I’m just trying to Keep It Real.