My new friend Anwyn passed along this tag that asks us to list eight of our habits (and then ‘tag’ eight other bloggers, which I’m not going to be able to do because I’ve only got three other friends in the blogosphere). I will honor the request to post eight of my habits.
1) People come first. I know I have to put God first, but I personally tend to drop everything else when someone needs to talk. I’m not quite as good at dropping everything else to do much other than listen. I consider this habit a mixed blessing because I’m not really prone to action like many other more effective people are, but lucky for me a lot of times people aren’t looking for action, they’re looking for a shoulder. I like to think this is the way God wants me to be. I figure Jesus spent a lot of time listening, how else would he have known people as well as he did? Oh! Maybe it was inherent omniscience, being God and all. Hopefully my dear Lord understands I don’t have that advantage.
2) The J-O-B runs a close second. Everyone by now has heard the axiom that "No one says on their deathbed they wished they’d spent more time at work." That’s definitely not true in my business. What I don’t know absolutely can kill me, and I’d hate to be going down in flames wishing I’d spent a couple extra minutes looking up exactly how to avoid whatever missile had just hit me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m spending enough time at work.
3) I follow the news pretty closely. This kind of goes with the J-O-B. I can watch world events unfold and have a pretty good idea why I’m getting a phone call in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, this isn’t true of everyone in the military. That said, I stop listening after the first sentence (or reading after the first paragraph). I’ve found that journalists may get the basic fact correct (someone is shooting at me!) but then get the analysis completely wrong (the cease fire is broken! when there was no cease fire).
4) I think I know what I’m doing when it comes to investing. I’ve only recently (within the last four years) begun to invest in things that actually go up. Watching Taser Int’l go up over a dollar per share a day back in early 2004 was a lot of fun! Selling it while it was crashing but still making a small profit was almost as fun. I’ve been so busy for the past three years I basically pulled out of the market and had been mostly in cash, but when people were standing in line waiting to buy an iPhone, that was just too obvious a signal to buy my most recent addition. It’s done pretty well.
5) I still love to play video games on my computer. I refuse to elaborate further. It’s too embarrassing.
6) Speaking of games, I would rather participate in them than watch them. This should hardly be surprising. As Toby Keith would say "I ain’t as good as I once was." This doesn’t change the fact I’d rather get out on the field. Perhaps in another 10 years I’ll be happy to watch. My son will not quite be in high school yet, so it’s probably an appropriate timeline.
7) If an opportunity comes along, I’ll bite. Once the opportunity is locked in, then I’ll probably procrastinate in getting to it. Sometimes I even do this at work (Hey, I just had to go fly instead of programming that Excel spreadsheet, don’t you know!). In principle it drives me up the wall when I do this, but on the other hand I don’t lose opportunities due to indecision. And if one waits until the last minute, it’ll only take a minute to finish, right?! (Other dearly held corollaries are: "There’s never time to do it right, there’s always time to do it over;" and "If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done!")
8) When I’m not on the computer, I’m probably reading. Unfortunately, my net information input is a lot higher than my net output. I was hoping the Blog would rectify this, but alas, I’m still a sponge rarely squeezed.
There you have it! Eight habits, no waiting!