Personal Development

The time, money, and energy gauges to help a man avoid blowing up

 

When I was in college, I borrowed more money than I should have to buy my dream car, a 1981 Toyota Supra. I loved that car, but after a while, I got tired of spending half of what I made working part-time at Sears to make the payment.

 

One day a couple pulled out in front of me and totaled my car. I wasn’t happy at the time, but I got happy when the insurance company gave me enough money to pay off my loan and pay cash for a VW Scirocco. There was even enough left over to put a $99 paint job on it and a killer stereo in it. The truth is the stereo was worth more than the car. 

 

The car turned out to be a complete POS. The design of the engine and cooling system was terrible. The car drank oil like I used to drink Gatorade during two-a-day football practices, which meant I had to keep an eye on the oil pressure gauge to let me know when the oil was running low. The cooling system design was so bad and the fan so weak I had to keep an eye on the engine temp gauge to let me know when I needed to add water to the radiator to avoid overheating.

 

In other words, I had to keep an eye on the gauges to keep my crappy car from blowing up. 

 

How does this apply to my life?

 

I’ve figured out my life is the same way; I have to keep my eye on a few gauges to avoid blowing it up.

 

Here are the three gauges I watch.

 

Time

Time is your most valuable asset, even more than money, because you don’t know how much time you have left. That’s why you need to have a plan for how you’re going to spend every day and be sure you’re working towards a long-term goal. Or, to put it simply, daily execution of an annual plan. 

 

Here’s how to break your daily schedule into three categories 

  • Must-Do, or if I don’t do this, I’m screwed stuff.
  • Should-Do, or if I get the Must do stuff done, I can move on to this.
  • Could-Do or on those rare days, I get the first two categories completed I can choose from this list. 

 

Pro Tip- have no more than 3-5 items in each category.

 

Pro Tip #2- Learn to say “No,” don’t let people guilt their way onto any of your lists. 

 

Money

The problem most people have is not that they don’t make enough money; it’s that they don’t know how to manage what they do have. 

 

This gauge is all about knowing three things about money:

  • How much you make
  • How much you owe
  • How much you have

 

Most banks have apps for your phone, so there is no excuse not to know all three numbers. 

 

Pro Tip-Beware of money leaks like subscriptions you forgot you had or $12 energized teas. 

 

Energy

 

Your energy level is the gauge that will help you avoid burnout. The more you pay attention to your energy level, the more likely you are to maintain the proper balance between rest and work.

 

Pro Tip- One of the best ways to manage your energy is a 30-minute walk. Grab your earbuds, turn on some classical music, and take off. Every problem and opportunity looks different after a walk. Commit to doing this at least three days per week.

 

The SECRET

 

The secret to avoiding blowing up your life is You Must have margin in all three areas of time, money, and energy.

 

Leave time in your schedule for the unexpected opportunities to connect or serve

Don’t spend every penny you make so you’ll be able to pick up the utility bill for a single mom. Learn how to spot energy vampires. People who will suck you dry. That way, you’ll have the energy to spend time with your kids and be fully present.

 

Time, Money, and Energy will either enhance your life or implode it based on your choices. So watch your gauges and make wise choices.

 

PS

Solomon summarized the difference between the man who watches his gauges and the one who doesn’t.

 

The wise are cautious and avoid danger; fools plunge ahead with reckless confidence. Proverbs 14:16

How Good is Your BS Detector?

Does the name Peter Attia mean anything to you?

Peter Attia is an over-achiever. He’s a surgeon, a cancer doc, and he left medicine for a few years to join a Silicon Valley consulting firm. Now he’s focused on helping people live longer.

If that wasn’t enough, he also found enough spare time to run ultra-marathons and swim round trips from Lanai to Maui.

He’s done some stuff, but the thing that impresses me is his BS detector. It’s off the charts good. He belongs in the BS detector hall of fame because he walked away from what looked like the chance of a lifetime. A job with stock options that would have made him tens of millions of dollars.

Peter Attia got a phone call in 2006 about the job of Chief Medical Officer for a small startup company called Theranos. The company was starting to get famous in Silicon Valley because they claimed to have developed a black box that could take a drop of blood and quickly provide a report full of health data. Information like if the person had AIDS or if they were likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Theranos was the first of what was being called “lab-on-a-chip” devices that would make blood testing more accessible and cheaper.

Attia had lunch with Theranos founder and inventor Elizabeth Holmes to talk about the job. He was curious about the technology because there was nothing like it on the market, so he asked all kinds of questions about how the black box worked. The answers didn’t make sense to him, so Attia asked if he could see inside the box, and Holmes told him absolutely not. This was weird because he had to sign an NDA to even get in the building, but the answer was no.

Attia passed on the job because his BS meter was pegging out.

It turns out Attia was right. In 2015 a series of articles accusing Theranos of fraud were published in medical journals and the Wall Street Journal. All the bad publicity turned out to be the beginning of the end. After a few years of investigations and lawsuits, Theranos was closed in 2018.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on multiple counts of wire fraud.

Peter Attia avoided getting caught up in one of the biggest corporate frauds of all time because he asked smart questions, listened to the answers, and paid attention to his gut when the answers didn’t make sense.

In other words, he used his BS detector.

What is a BS detector? It’s simple, you don’t believe everything you read or hear.

Instead, you do some research. You talk to men who are experts in the field. Maybe even read a book or two or three. And for sure, you don’t invest time, money, or energy in something just because it was on Facebook.

Men with great BS detectors expect to be lied to. This is one of those depressing facts of life you wish weren’t true, but the faster you accept that it is, the better off you’ll be.

When you expect to be lied to, you learn to ask “how do you know that?”. It’s the most powerful question in your arsenal. You want the answer to involve verifiable information, and you need to check out every fact or stat you hear or read.

There is so much information available now that the only reason a man should ever get conned is because he was too lazy to use his phone for research instead of watching tik tok videos.

Want to be a better man? Develop one good habit per month

Way back in 1892, a psychologist named Willam James said, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” 

Most men think what they do every day is a series of decisions. But that’s not right. Most of what we do is a habit. A researcher at Duke University wrote that 40% of what we do in a typical day is actually a habit instead of a decision. 

Think about the stuff you do every day from your morning routine to the route you take coming home from work. All of those are habits more than decisions. 

Men are habit machines

So it makes sense that if you want to be a better man, you need to develop better habits. 

Let’s start with the fundamental question of “Why do we form habits?”  

I wondered why humans have the pre-wired ability to form a habit instead of being born with the habits built-in. I did some research and learned our brains are designed to constantly look for ways to reduce the effort required to stay alive. To automate routine tasks so men could use their brains to hunt, figure out how to defend themselves against an enemy, or find a better place to live. 

By the way, men have not lost the innate drive to improve their environment so that it’s a little easier to survive. It’s just changed as the world has become more complex. Now men develop new technologies or improve existing ones to make it a little easier to survive. 

I don’t know what habits Willis Carrier developed so he had the energy to invent air conditioning but I’m glad he did. 

This is why forming good habits is so important and bad habits are so destructive to a man. Bad habits will sabotage your ability to do something amazing like Willis Carrier. 

Here’s a secret that should inspire any guy who has tried to break bad habits but constantly relapses and loses his motivation to keep trying; 

You don’t break old habits as much as you overwrite them with new ones.

But what habits does a man need to develop? Here’s a three step process to identify the new habits you need and how to develop them. 

Step 1 

Think about the men you admire, it doesn’t matter if you know them personally. Men who are successful businessmen, great dads, or world class husbands.

Step 2 

Spend some time observing them and take notes about what they do. Pay special attention to what these men do that’s different from what you do.

  • They do what they say they’re going to do. Every time!
  • They correct actions/behaviors in others without denigrating the person
  • When talking with someone, you can see the person has their full attention.  They don’t look at their watch. They don’t respond to a text message. It’s clear that this conversation is the only thing that’s on their mind at that moment.
  • They provide explanations but they don’t make excuses for themselves.
  • They have control over their life and time instead of time having control of them. Their schedule is full of things and people that matter to them. 
  • He listens more than he talks.

Step 3

Identify the one habit of that guy that you’re going to develop this month. Just a heads up, don’t try to develop more than one new habit per month. It exponentially increases your chances for failure. 

Write it down.  

Tell your spouse and coworkers what it is and ask them to help you notice when you fail.

The biggest thing you need to know before you begin developing a new habit is it’s a process. First you’ll notice after the fact when you didn’t do it and think “Dang! I did it again”. Later you’ll notice when you’re doing it. Finally, you’ll progress to the point that you realize after you’ve done it and you’ll celebrate internally by saying “I did it!”

Bingo! You developed a new habit in just one month. 

Now that you’re armed with the confidence you can develop a good habit, choose another new habit and start the process over 

Change 12 habits over the next year you’ll be a better man.

PS

Special thanks to a successful man whose habits I try to emulate, Ron Klein, for the idea for this article, 

 

Dee’s 3’s – how to deal with hard times like a marine

A man’s life is full of tough times; divorces, health problems, or losing a job. The question is not If it will happen to you but When. 

So step one is to accept that fact instead of burying your head in the sand or living like you’re exempt from hard times. 

Too many men, especially young men, have been raised in an environment that has them thinking their lives will be free from any difficulty. And if some difficulty does sneak through, the solution is to find someone to sue or have them fired. 

That’s how boys think, not men.

Men understand there will be hard times, so they need to learn how to deal with them.

Did you know some hard times you face will result from bad choices you made, some hard times will result from the bad choices made by others, and some hard times will happen because good decisions can have bad outcomes? 

Because hard times come from so many different directions, it means you won’t always see them coming. So you must develop the skills and mindset to deal with hard times if you want to be a man who survives and thrives.

One way is to incorporate the Marine Corp way of dealing with hard times into your life. It’s just three words,

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

What does that even mean? How does it work in practice? Here’s a story directly from the United States Marine Corps Field Manual, FMFM 1-0 called “Leading Marines.”

“During Operation Desert Shield, as Marine forces began to expand their lodgment, one of the “greatest concerns was overland transportation. Doctrinally, the Marine Corps planned for moving support no more than about 50-80 kilometers from a beachhead port. Faced with double and triple these distances,… [Marine logistic leaders] resorted to a series of practical if somewhat unconventional actions to solve the problem.” By leasing as many civilian trucks as possible, virtually every truck in Saudi Arabia was thrown into some kind of use regardless of its age or mechanical condition. Dubbed “Saudi Motors,” the new transport fleet grew to more than 1,400 vehicles and eventually included 50 colorfully decorated 10-ton lorries, over 200 civilian buses, and about100 rental cars – everything from Toyota Landcruisers, to Mitsubishis, to Jeep Cherokees donated from allied governments.

It was this fleet, together with some quick thinking by Marine leaders that led to the establishment of a remote logistics base well beyond the distances “allowed” by Marine logistic doctrine. “

Think about what you would have done if you had been a Marine in that situation? 

Would you have said, “sorry, the Book says we do no more than 80 Kilometers”

Or

“We’ve never done it that way before.”

Or

“We don’t have the equipment or resources to do this.”

A man can’t think like that because it means he will fail to answer the bell when his family or others need him to step up and handle a challenging situation. So that’s why I want you to be the man who knows how to improvise, adapt, overcome when times get tough. 

Here’s what the process looks like

Step 1 – Improvise

The first thing you have to do when faced with a tough situation is figure out what tools you have and how they can be used in a new way. There’s a great line in the movie Apollo 13 that illustrates this.

The engineers are meeting to figure out how to get the astronauts home when somebody says the spacecraft was not designed for what needed to happen. Mission Control Chief Gene Kranz says ,“I don’t care what it was designed to do, I care about what it can do.”

That’s the mental attitude to improvise. 

Step 2 – Adapt

Once you figure out your situation and what tools you have to work with, you are in a new normal. Now you have to adapt or figure out how to move forward in the new normal. You have to think differently to survive. The biggest mistake you can make now is to fall back to old ways of thinking. 

Step 3 – Overcome

Now that you’ve done the hard work, it’s time to kick ass and execute. This is where you overcome your situation. You conquer it.

Just like a Marine.

 

Are you older than 25? Then Your Behavior is on You

I bet you’re like me and don’t enjoy being around the guy who says, “I can’t help it, that’s just how I was raised” whenever someone calls him out for being a bigot, losing his temper, or just generally being a pain in the ass. You’re not alone; nobody wants to hire, marry, or work for that guy. 

Blaming your parents or the neighborhood you grew up in only works for boys, not men. The truth is you have until age 25 to blame your behavior on your upbringing. After that, it’s on you.

That’s the opposite of today’s culture. Today everybody is looking for someone to blame for whatever is not perfect in their life. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their junk. 

That’s not how men do it. A real man knows that a key ingredient to authentic masculinity is to take responsibility for his life. The Good and the bad.

You can only move on from a bad past after you embrace it and begin to take responsibility for your life. Here are three ways you can 

  • Make peace with your past- as long as you hold onto your past, you’re a prisoner to it. Extract the lessons then delete the details. 
  • Make peace with your parents- most parents did the best they knew how. Parents parent the way they were parented. That’s why it’s so important to have men who are committed to breaking the cycle of poor parenting in their family history 
  • Ask people who care about you to call you out when you act like a jerk- don’t think of these people as an accountability partner just waiting for you to mess up so they can pounce on you. Instead think of them as your allies who are fighting side-by-side with you and are trying to keep you alive by telling you when you’re about to do something stupid. 

You shouldn’t want to keep blaming your upbringing because what that really says is you’re good with being a prisoner to your past. No man should ever allow himself to become a prisoner to anything, especially things that happened in his past that he will never ever be able to undo.

Commit to owning your junk. Give up excuses and crutches. People are more inclined to help you improve when you’re honest. People are attracted to authenticity instead of being repelled by men who are less than perfect but refuse to admit it.

Reverse Engineering Your Life

Before everyone had a GPS in their pocket, the old joke was a man would never ask for directions or admit he was lost. It was funny because there was a certain amount of the truth in it. 

The bad news is there isn’t a GPS for life which means a lot of guys just float through day after day with no real plan to follow. They make decisions in the heat of the moment without thinking about the future consequences. It’s like they’re taking a road trip without a map. Instead of having a planned route, they just hop on the road and make turns whenever the mood strikes them.

What’s weird is they’re surprised when they don’t end up where they meant to go and some are even pissed off and look for somebody to blame. 

That’s life for way too many guys and it’s not good, but there is a better way. So I want to show you a process for how to develop a plan to get you where you want to be in 2, 5, or 10 years. The time frame isn’t important, the important part is for you to have a plan you’re following.

But before we talk about planning, we need to establish some axioms about your life:

Playbook for Men Axioms for Life

#1: Your life is a checkbook and you write a check for it every day

#2: You must have a WRITTEN plan

#3: Everything in life costs something (time, money, etc.) and you can’t ignore that fact.

Those three axioms are going to frame the process of coming up with a plan. 

I think the biggest takeaway is nothing in life is free. Everything you want costs something of value, money or your really valuable asset, time. So choose wisely. 

Now I want to show you how to set goals based on where you want to go, not where you are. In other words, how to reverse engineer the life you’ve always wanted.

REVERSE ENGINEERING YOUR LIFE

Step #1:

Write out your priorities (no more than 7) and put them in order of importance. For instance:

  1. God
  2. Wife
  3. Kids
  4. Extended family
  5. Career
  6. Church
  7. Serving others

Step #2: 

Pick a day for yourself and your family sometime in the future and picture that day. How far in the future? I would say a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 10 years. But it’s your choice, just be reasonable. Nobody can set goals for 30 years from now. What does your life look like? Ask the following questions:

Housing

  • Where do you live?
  • What does your house look like? 
  • What vehicle(s) do you drive?

Health

  • How much will you weigh?
  • How much will you exercise weekly?
  • What day will be your Sabbath?
  • What do your vacations and holidays look like?

Financial

  • Where do you work?
  • How much money do you make?
  • How is your money spent?
  • How is your money saved?
  • How is your money invested?
  • How is your money tithed?
  • What is your insurance package?

Marriage

  • How often do you pray together?
  • When is your date night?

Family

  • How many children will you have?
  • How old will your children be?
  • How will they be educated at that time? Public, private, or home school

Extended Family

  • What is your relationship like with each family member?
  • Do you take vacations together?
  • What about holidays/special days?

Friends

  • Who are your closest friends?
  • Which people have you dropped as friends?
  • What things do you do with your friends?

Learning

  • How many books have you read by that date? 
  • What other experiences have influenced your life (conferences, mentors)?

Ministry

  • What church do you attend?
  • How involved are you?
  • How are you studying the Bible?

I’m not promising you’ll never have any problems if you follow this process but I am telling you the chances of you ending up someplace you never wanted to go are almost zero. 

The best way to do this is when you have the time to really think through each question. 

Now grab a notebook and reverse engineer the life you’ve always wanted. 

PS

The late great Alabama football coach Bear Bryant kept a copy of this poem in his wallet to remind him about the value of a day.

“This is the beginning of a new day. God has given me this day to use as I will. I can waste it or use it for good. 

What I do today is very important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever…

leaving something in its place I have traded for it. I want it to be gain, not loss — good, not evil. Success, not failure in order that I shall not forget the price I paid for it.” -Hartsill Wilson

PPS

Thanks to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church for the big idea behind this column.

 

Letters to Bennett #2- God is on your Side

Bennett,

Life can be confusing because it’s always changing. It’s made up of seasons like it says in Ecclesiastes 3. BTW, these letters are a lot like Ecclesiastes, a grandfather is telling his grandson what he’s learned and offering some tips on how to apply the wisdom. 

But back to what I was saying, here are some of those seasons: 

“For everything there is a season… A time to be born and a time to die….A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance….A time to keep and a time to throw away….A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.” Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3:1-8‬ ‭NLT‬‬

That’s life, Bennett. Those are the kinds of things you’re going to see happen all around you and you’re even going to experience some of them yourself. 

Why am I telling you this? Two reasons, the first is I don’t want you to be surprised when the world gets weird and the second is I want you to be equipped for the questions you’re going to have about the weirdness.

Bennett, most people are addicted to comfort. We don’t want any pain or unpleasant issues to deal with. Discomfort is to be avoided at all costs. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a relationship, money, or at work. If something is causing you pain, make it go away or escape as soon as possible.

You’re even going to find some people who believe that when any bad stuff happens to a Christian, it’s punishment for some sin. Thankfully that’s not true.

But avoiding pain is not a realistic way to live because Ecclesiastes says there will be pain or discomfort at different times in your life. 

So you need to figure out how you’re going to respond. Especially how you’re going to think about God when you’re in one of those uncomfortable seasons of life.

You’re going to be tempted to think God is with you when things are going good and he’s far away when things aren’t going so well.  

But Bennett, I want you to remember this, God is On Your Side. 

No matter what seasons you’re in, He’s got your back, even when it doesn’t look like it or you don’t even believe it.

I got this from the book of Psalms 56:9, “This I know: God is on my side!”

The guy who wrote it talks about all of the seasons of life he’s endured. He’s been lied about and attacked by enemies, but he keeps saying he knows God is there. He hasn’t left. He’s on his side.

The writer has decided to believe this in such a deep way, that it’s the first thing he thinks of when life gets hard. 

That’s the reaction I’m praying you’ll develop because I know it will save you a lot of sleepless nights. 

I wish I had learned this one earlier in life. Not the fact that God is on my side, but that this is the first thing I should think of when life goes sideways. That I know I can keep going because I don’t have to be afraid of how the season is going to turn out ok. After all, God is on my side.

Love,

Saba

Letters to Bennett #1- People aren’t against you, they are for themselves.

This post is part of a series called “Letters to Bennett”, which is all about recording advice for my new grandson to read as he grows up. I’m excited to write this series because I’ve kept a list of stuff I want my kids and grandkids to know for years. This list is made up of hard-earned life lessons and I don’t want the wisdom to go to waste.

Bennett,

Throughout your life you’re going to encounter people whose behavior is going to convince you they are out to get you. They may tell lies to you or about you. They may accuse you of doing something you didn’t do. After a while it will be easy to think there are people who want you to fail and they sit around thinking of ways to make your life miserable. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret you need to remember,

People aren’t against you, they are for themselves

Bennett, people are self-centered. You are. I am, We all are. Every person walking the planet has the same favorite topic they like to talk about, themselves. BTW, remember this when you’re trying to make small talk with a stranger. Just ask them questions about themselves then sit back and listen.

Anyway, all of those people you think are out to get you, don’t have the time to ruin your life. They’ve got their hands full paying the bills, getting the kids to soccer practice and doing enough at work to not get fired. In other words, life has given them all they can handle. They don’t have enough excess bandwidth to spend time plotting against you.

So don’t worry about what people think about you. Refuse to waste even one second agonizing over someone else’s opinion of you.  Instead focus on becoming the best version of you. That means living out what Dr. Phil McGraw said about this:

“You wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought about you if you knew how seldom they did.” 

Love, 

Saba

Read Good Books, Ask Great Questions, Listen with Intensity

I’ve interviewed over 100 guys for various podcasts I’ve done over the last few years. They’ve come from all walks of life; College football coaches, best-selling authors, multi-millionaire businessmen and more. All of these guys are successful and I want to know how they became successful.

One day it dawned on me that I had learned the secret of their success, never stop learning.

Men have to keep learning if they want to keep from falling behind other men. Because if they do, they won’t be able to take advantage of opportunities to provide a better life for their families.

So I want to let you know the three learning 3 strategies I’ve learned from the guys on the podcast.

#1 Read Good Books

One of the saddest stats I’ve ever run across is that 64% of women will read one book in a year but only 45% of men will.

One book? 65% of all men can’t find the time to read one, stinking book in a year? Think about that. The average book is between 320 and 350 pages long. That means, a guy only has to read one page per day to get through a book in a year. One page. Or less than 5 minutes.

Too many men ignore the massive amount of information they can access by reading books and instead waste time doing constant cycles of trial and error, when one good book could save them years of frustration.

There’s a book out there to teach you everything from how to take care of your car to how to invest your money. All for about $20. What a bargain.

Bonus tip: Read biographies if you want to accelerate your development as a man. Here are a few of my favorite;

-Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson

-Ben Franklin: An American Life by Walter Issacson

-Sam Walton Made in America- by Sam Walton with John Hue

-Zig by Zig Ziglar

-Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

#2 Ask Great Questions

Wise men love to answer questions. The best use of $50 for you may be buying a wise man a meal and asking him a few questions. But here’s a pro-tip, have 5 questions ready before the meeting. Every better is to send him the questions beforehand, so he has time to think about great answers.

When a successful man realizes you took the time to come up with great questions, he’ll know you’re a serious guy. That’s important because successful men have a common trait, they hate wasting time, especially on a guy who is looking for a handout or a shortcut so they can avoid doing any hard work.

What makes a question great?

  • It takes more than a “yes” or “no” to answer

  • It gives the other guy the opportunity to answer a question you didn’t know to ask

  • It focuses on revealing principles that can be applied to multiple situations

I’ll give you the three questions I ask every guy who comes on my podcast as examples

  1. What has surprised you the most in life?

  2. Who taught you the most about being a man and what did they teach you?

  3. What advice would you give to 18-year old you?

#3 Listen with Intensity

I had never done an interview when I started my first podcast so I had to learn fast. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the key to being a great interviewer was listening with intensity. You have to stay focused because those golden nuggets can come when you least expect them. Same thing with teaching moments in your life. You never know when you’re going to hear something that will make you money or help you avoid a catastrophe. That’s why you should learn how to listen and not just hear.

Here are some stats on that show how important listening is:

* A person hears between 20 and 30,000 words every 24 hours

* 55% of communication is devoted to listening

* The average man retains approximately 17% of what he hears

After over 100 interviews, here’s what I’ve learned about listening with intensity:

  1. Pay attention to what is being said instead of coming up with what you’re going to say.

  2. Don’t interrupt

  3. Ask follow up questions

But I think the best tip to listening with intensity is you have to believe the more you listen, the smarter you become.

There you go, start incorporating these 3 strategies into your life and you’ll never have to worry about being ready when opportunity strikes.

PS

My current podcast is called Playbook for Men and you can check it out by clicking here. It’s also available wherever you listen to podcasts.

A front porch is the perfect place to think, make a decision, or pray

It’s mid-September in North Alabama so that means it’s the perfect weather to sit on my front porch. 

I love front porches. 

The house I grew up in was a two-story antebellum with massive front and back porches. An angry tornado destroyed it in 1974 along with much of the area I called home but I still remember the front porch. The time I spent sitting in a rocking chair playing the game you used to amuse yourself with when you lived on a forty-acre farm far from your friends but in front of Hwy 72, you counted cars. The rules are simple, you pick a color and the other person picks a color then you start counting how many cars pass by that are your color. 

Sidebar; this game is much better if it’s male vs male or female vs female. The reason is most guys can only name about 8 colors so it’s pretty simple to determine if a car is your color. While ladies know about colors like seafoam or periwinkle. Which causes more time spent debating what color a car was than actually counting cars.

But that’s another story for another day. 

That house might be where my fascination with front porches began but I developed the love of them when we lived in Tuscaloosa. Our house had a huge wrap-around front porch with a swing. I got to spend some good time in that swing with my daughters and my wife talking about life, laughing and just hanging out. I have lots of good memories from that front porch.

I also learned that a front porch is a great place to think when we lived in that house. Especially when you’ve got trouble. Dark nights and a front porch are a great combination to help a guy figure out what went wrong and if it can be fixed. 

It’s also a great place to make decisions. I’ve spent dozens of hours sitting and thinking on a front porch. Sometimes doing what John Wayne said he was doing in one of my favorite movies “McLintock”, some “thinking drinking”. Pondering what to do next or figuring out what not to do. Which is really the most important decision. Most mistakes I’ve made are because I ignored the little voice inside me that said, “let it go”.

But a front porch might find its highest value to me as a confessional. A place where I’ve talked to God, yelled at God, begged for God’s forgiveness and cried as I tried to comprehend the depth of His love for me. 

I’ve started most mornings on my front porch reading scripture and pondering what it means to be a fully devoted follower of Jesus. Some days I get closer to that goal than others but every day that starts like that is infinitely better than the days that don’t.

Front porches can be found all over the world. From big houses on the banks of a river to stoops on a brownstone in New York City, but I like to think we southerners have elevated the activity of sitting on front porches to an art form. I know my best days are when I can begin and end them on a front porch.

Turns out, it’s also a great place to write stories like this.