Share the love/hate

One of my ongoing challenges is directing my attention toward positive things. Sometimes the temptation away from the positive is toward the negative, but more often, it's toward the neutral. And too much time (how is that defined, I wonder?) in neutral is just as negative.

I've been a gamer since my family first got a computer in 1985 and my dad bought me Boulderdash. Since then, a lot of games have come and gone, most notably everything Blizzard made in the '90s. All great fun, and initially fully neutral on the positive/negative scale for use of my time. But as you might have guessed, too much time has tipped that often into negative territory.

So in the last several years, I've been trying to reduce my gaming habit, mostly by not paying money for games (usually). This kind of works, since free games are rarely on par with commercial titles. However, there are some. Here are a couple of the games I love to hate and hate to love. Check them out...if you dare.


The Battle for Wesnoth
Turn-based strategy game with a fantasy (knights and wizards and trolls) theme. Simple, engaging interface, well written scenarios, balanced, huge. The best freeware game I've found.

The DROD Family
Although not technically completely free, there are enough demo levels and classic versions to make it seem that way. DROD stands for Deadly Rooms of Death, which summarizes things pretty well. In a turn-based tile puzzle mode, your job is to clear each room (there are lots) of nasties using a Really Big Sword. Humor, variety, and challenge make for a game that's hard to walk away from. I've even bought an installment, and that says a lot from me.

If there's anything else that should be on this very short list, please don't tell me. :)

The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge)

Nearly everything we do or experience is part of a system. It is the very rare circumstance where we can attribute cause and effect to independent entities. Yet we do it all the time.

"The Fed/housing bubble/Lehman Brothers caused the financial break-down."
"A public option will fix healthcare."
"I'm eating because I'm hungry."

All these statements have truth in them, but they are incomplete. They are incomplete because they leave out the system. They leave out the history, the other players, the unintended consequences, the emotions, and all the other subtle, critical influences.

The 5th discipline of Senge's title attempts to capture all that other stuff through "systems thinking." Everything is connected, and only by broadening our view to encompass the whole system will we ever understand what's really going on. If not, unintended consequences will reign supreme.

The other four disciplines, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning, all feed into systems thinking, particularly as part of an organization. At one time, Shell excelled at this, but I'm no longer convinced it's part of the culture.

Although somewhat academic in style, the world today is too complex not to be moving toward thinking in terms of systems. If you're not doing it now, this classic is well worth reading.

Five people I admire in the gym

1. The 80-something guy with a walker on the stationary bike.
2. The guy with the workout notebook dating back to 1984.
3. The Indian couple working out in matching street clothes.
4. The guy doing pull-ups...upside down.
5. The 50-something female professional trainer.
   

Five things I learned in school

1. How to coast
   
2. How to take multiple choice tests
   
3. How to sleep upright
   
4. How to manipulate a system
   
5. How to submit to authority
   

*Format credit to Merlin Mann*