The stuff that matters

I am a sucker for sentimentality. Like Clint Eastwood, the stuff that gets to me is the stuff that matters, the non-trivial, the stuff that comes from the heart, the stuff I am passionate about.

Simon, my brother-in-law was reading a post I wrote on fabricatedbacon.com about fatherhood and he looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, “You made me cry you bastard. This is much better than all that negative stuff.” He was referring to fucktard, a blog I started out of anger at Stephen Conroy’s Internet filter policies.

Simon’s comments rang true. I started jonstribling.info as a professional type blog where I posted stuff about ecommerce, the Internet, stuff related to my profession. It was intended to let me own my personal brand online just as I told people they needed to do in my work. I think it has been successful in one sense but the problem is that it is completely inauthentic. The singular focus on one topic reduces me to being a mindless commentator, like mashable, rather than a fleshy human with random fits of humour, genius and bile.

The stuff that matters to me is what difference I make in the lives of others, the lessons I learn, the lessons I help others learn, the fights I avoid rather than the fights I start, the joy of seeing something grow that I have started or helped to start, the sound of the Kookaburras on a cold frosty morning, the view from my deck over the city as the sun sets, the faces of my family as they sleep soundly, the love in my wife’s eyes.  It is about creating something rather than complaining about something or destroying something. It is about rising above the stormy seas of life, work and commuting to create something great.

If I look at my life so far, i have built a career, started a beautiful family and had a lot of good ideas. The good ideas are written on the white-board in my study and few of them have seen the light of day because I haven’t been authentic. I haven’t focusing on the creation, on the passion, on the dream. Rather, I have been bearing witness to how life can be pretty busy sometimes, particularly with a long commute, a demanding job and a young child (now I have two young children). Reflecting on this whilst watching Master Chef is not getting things done or ticking off the great ideas on my white-board. It is sitting on the couch being a lazy arse. The combination of the TV and the couch has robbed many a good idea from being breathed into life with a bit of hard work, passion and focus.

So, very soon the design of this blog will change to reflect the change in focus, the change to something authentic that is about my real brand and what matters to me.

Photo credit: Sean Lamb