Walk a Day in My Shoes – Berger

Inspired by Daryl’s post, which was inspired by Franklin:

If interested in more details:

I almost never wake up before my alarm. I sleep well and can sleep a lot. I learned awhile ago I’m neither a morning person or a night owl. I’m a get 7-8 hours-of-sleep-whenever-it-comes person. The alarm goes at 5:30am and depending on how many times I hit snooze I have 5-30 minutes to read a combo of Scripture and social media. Now that I think about it, I have a “barbell” strategy regarding the seriousness and usefulness of my morning reading.

I organize my inbox and todo list before I shower. I want to have the day ahead in my head before getting in the shower and getting ready. The rote nature of a shower provides just the right level of distraction for me to come up with some of my most creative, but not necessarily, good ideas. But if those shower ideas can sustain until I get into the office they are usually at least worth a discussion with the guys.

Jessica either wakes up with me or sometime while I’m getting ready. We sync up for the day and then the kids emerge from their rooms. We talk about the day, eat a quick breakfast, and all head our various ways.

In graduate school I had a 30 minute commute and learned to make that time more useful. Today I only commute about 12 minutes depending on where I’m commuting to but still follow the same practices. The first 10 minutes is a Listen through the Bible in a year podcast, followed by Albert Mohler’s Briefing. Usually those two get me to the office but if not or starting on the way home is an audio book (too cheap for Audible, our library has a pretty good app with a bunch of books for free) or podcasts [side note: look for an upcoming post on my must useful podcasts].

I generally try to structure my day around the mantra: “think in the morning, talk in the afternoon”. I want to give my best hours to thinking deeply about the most important (not necessarily urgent) problems we are facing. Thinking in the morning can sometimes be me in solitude. Or, it can be a team jam session. These aren’t your typical boring meetings that flow linearly. We are going back and forth in rapid succession (practicing our conversational parkour). We argue. My role is to be the contrarian. I like to play out the edge cases even for something I agree with.

Talk in the afternoon means networking, catching up with one of the current businesses I’m involved with, meeting with a potential business seller or new partner. It doesn’t mean I don’t think during these times. It just means they tend to not take as much dedicated attention for a long period of time.

I do a lot of lunch or coffee meetings. The nature of Little Engine Ventures is that we are discussing with people some very life changing possiblities. While we do this every day for them it is often a once in a lifetime opportunity. So we don’t take it lightly that people are allowing us into something very personal for them. So to that end it often is better to break bread together rather than sit across each other in a boardroom.

At the end of the workday, I enjoy heading home to dinner and an evening with Jessica and the kids. The evenings I don’t do that are spent usually with a meeting at church or at MatchBOX. My church and my community focused non-profit are small “businesses” themselves and besides hopefully benefiting both of those organizations I’m amazed how much I learn in each of them that I pull back into Little Engine Ventures related activities.

This is a pretty typical day for me. But I also have tried to live less day to day and more from season to season. The season of LEV that started last year sure has been an exciting one. Here’s to it being a long one!