The mystery in my front yard.

Somewhere around leaf bag number 30, I hit the wall. The novelty of tending to my very own yard had worn off. My wife and I had just closed on our first home a few hours prior, and I found myself waist-deep in an ever-expanding sea of black contractor bags, brimming with leaves. 

I enjoy a good story, especially a mystery. If our new home has a story -- especially the yard -- it is a story of neglect. The tale remains largely a mystery to me. As I've worked to bring the yard in line, I've found a few clues: the mangled shower curtain rod hidden beneath a mountain of soggy leaves in the hedges, the half-used container of lawn mower oil discarded next to the front walk, empty cans of cat food sunken into the grass like landmines, and about two autumns' worth of leaves blanketing every surface and snared in the tangled lower branches of hedges.

Each discovery came with a twinge of sorrow and a feeling that our house deserves better. I leaned the rake against my shoulder and opened and closed my hands, feeling the raw flesh of my palms scrape against the inside of my gloves. I asked myself then, if I had choice, would I have it any other way?

There were more bags to fill, and it was getting dark. 

I run, but I am no longer a runner.

I have a complicated relationship with running. It's complicated because I was a runner, as in, running was a cornerstone of my identity. And to further complicate things, I was of the self-loathing variety: distance runner. I turned to it out of athletic desperation. It's the sport of last resort when you lack the coordination to get a ball safely back to a pitcher, or the size to open a gap on an offensive line. I ran, and I ran away from my problems.

I gave it up when I got to college and started hitting the weights. Hard. I went from being 6', 125 pounds to 175 pounds by the end of my freshman year. I didn't have a drink on campus that entire year and I ate as cleanly as possible. It was all bulky, useless muscle. I stayed that way for nine years. No functional strength. I was not fit. I was not healthy.

That all changed when I met my wife, then my girlfriend. She got into running, so I ran again. She got into metabolic conditioning, and so did I. I ditched my gym membership for a set of kettlebells and didn't look back. Eventually I found my way to jiu jitsu, and that physically humbled me in a new way. But I had forgotten entirely about running.

I was listening to Steve Maxwell on the Joe Rogan Experience last week, and he was talking about the need to run. Running is our first line of self-defense. It's also an essential survival skill. It is something every human should be able to do and do well. It's one of the first athletic abilities we acquire. And when was the last time I ran?

At the track this morning, my head lit up with endorphins as I kicked my legs into a gear they hadn't used in a couple of years, the wind whistling in my ears, the orange surface of the track a blur under my feet. The workout, a basic sprint progression, kicked my ass. It had been too long since I had run. And it made me realize something: Humans are not runners, or lifters, or throwers. We are not specialists. We are generalists. And we would do well to train, think and live accordingly.

What Instagram's new logo tells us about change.

Today will go down in the annals of social media history as the day the internet freaked out over Instagram's new logo. A reporter at the New York Times went as far as to say, "All is lost. Instagram will never be the same again." Maybe that's tongue in cheek? But based on the overwhelming reaction, I'm guessing no.

Though I'm not a designer by training, I sometimes play one on newsprint. I've lived through four redesigns of the newspaper I work for over the course of six years. And while comparing newspapers to Instagram is more than a little apples to oranges, just hear me out on this.

Users overwhelmingly hate change. Not one of the redesigns I was a part of went over without a reader backlash. And similarly, not one of the redesigns were perfect. There were course corrections along the way, with our most recent redesign being a back-to-basics approach that went over shockingly well.

I'm pleased to say though that every time the look of the paper was refreshed, there was a need for it. The changes were aligned with our mission. They had a purpose. Each was done with the intent of creating a paper that made more sense in an increasingly digital world.

I don't work for Instagram. I can only speculate as to their intent. But I was an early adopter, and I can say without any hyperbole that the app itself is bigger than just photos and videos -- it's about sharing content. By minimizing the camera in their logo, they're communicating this. It's also probably about money, but that's a subject for another post. 

The change makes sense to me. But what really matters is, does it make sense to them?

The time I almost met John Prine -- or -- 'Hello In There'.

He was standing on the opposite side of the glass, his hair hanging lank across his head in the Dominican humidity. Could it be him?

I thought I'd seen John Prine walk by as I lounged by the resort pool, sipping the umpteenth beer of the afternoon. My senses dulled by alcohol and idyllic setting, I couldn't be sure. Plus, the sight of the man, whom I heard as a voice of the snowbound Midwest, seemed incongruous with the tropical setting. But later in the week, there he was again, closer this time, one of my favorite songwriters in the flesh -- just on the other side of the glass door.

I smiled a thin smile that he must have interpreted as a sign of recognition, because he thought twice about coming into the resort office and instead walked on. I couldn't blame him. I gathered our luggage and went to meet our ride to the airport. As I took in the last vestiges of paradise before getting back on a plane for frigid New Jersey, I saw him milling about the resort entrance. I thought about approaching him. 

But what is there to say to someone like him, someone who has lived more in a three-minute song than most people have in a lifetime. In hind sight, it's easy. You say thank you. And I regret not saying it.

The danger of scaling up.

The concept of scale seems to work only in one direction: up. Scaling up is synonymous with growth, and growth is synonymous with improvement. Bigger equals better. But what about growth for the sake of growth?

We've all seen the local restaurant that adds another location only to see the quality of its food suffer; the team that pushes its salary cap ever skyward only to realize you can't buy victory; the startup that gets acquired for big bucks only to see its stock lifeless and under autopsy by journalists and industry insiders.

We are growth-obsessed. This blog is no exception. However, growth for the sake of growth often results in no net gain, other than scale. If we are looking to expand -- whether its our businesses, our brains or our consciousness -- it must be done with a purpose.