Happy New Year Everyone.

Some thoughts leading into Christmas and the 2026 New Year.

The more I observe and talk about these things, the more I think I sound like my father.

Sharing why I decided to start fasting once a week for 36 hours and where it took me.

I was checking in with myself around being so irritable, grumpy, negative, and complainy the past few days and made a commitment to auto-correct. Sharing my thought process and steps to unwind it all.

It was working great until I went to Whole Foods...

I get asked quite a bit about how to create culture.

The simple answer is you don't create it, you're living it.

You don't start out with a blueprint of how to create a culture. You begin by living the values you've spent time thinking about and invested in upholding ruthlessly and consistently.

If you give a little of something you have to someone who needs a little of that something - the net value is greater.

It might not work with the numbers & maths, but it's absolutely true for the things that matter most.

Call it whatever you want, it still is so much more than can be described.

You can't use loyalty to capture it and likely a distorted concept of loyalty would ruin what would be the greater part of the sentiment.

Using our recent Annual Elk Camp Trip to try to build the picture of what I'm trying to talk about. Maybe it wasn't as well spoken as it feels or sits in my head & heart.

I generally have to manage my first reaction & pop up thoughts anytime someone talks to me with their arms folded across their chest or hands on their hips. More so with strangers than with knowns, but even still.

There's  lot of suggested non verbal communication and room for misinterpretation for sure. However, the majority of the time there's a trend or pattern of something - righteousness, dominance, arrogance, ego, know it all, excessive confidence...

I constantly have to fight this feeling of "do you know who you're talking to?" or "look at you, you smug..." and miss out on half of what's discussed.

Then that makes me question that if I'm having these thoughts in response, what does it suggest I think about myself in the same regard?

A little clean up from last week's ending.

People are messy. Life is complex. I believe that most people are good and well intended. Driven be self-interest to varying degrees, but that doesn't necessarily mean we are wrong or bad.

Giving some tolerance & allowance for each other and ourselves to be messy w/o a major character flaw indictment, to be personally ok when others show up and elicit some sort of injury within ourselves, and not having to invent some narrative about another to dismiss them or loft ourselves.

Humanness

Kind of a babble this evening talking about spam email & phone calls through feeling guilty or held hostage by those free return labels that come in the mail.

Not sure what prompted me to start a little rant about shit talkers and gossip champs leading into 'consider the source'. But maybe there's a full circle in there somewhere.

Mostly not a heavy or deep session other than just listening to myself talk to let things out.