About Me — Rusty Alderson. Beyond My Profile Bio
By: Rusty Alderson
Tags: Life Lessons, Introduction, Quotes To Live By, Wisdom, About Me

Things I Have Learned (You’re Welcome)

1. We are all exactly where we are meant to be

I fully believe in the wisdom of an intelligent and nurturing universe. I also believe that quantum mechanics holds the key to every physical phenomenon.

Every event and every occurrence, and every incident in our lives is the direct result of all that has come before it. There are no accidents.

2. Everyone has a story — most have many

My professional career spans many decades and many jobs. Early in this variegated history, I began to notice that the people I worked with weren’t just people — they were stories.

For example, a secretary (a.k.a. administrative assistant 😏) I worked with at Compaq Computers (1989–1993) was a Texas state ballroom dancing champion. She and her partner competed annually, all across the State of Texas in ballroom dancing tournaments, and one year they won it all! A woman who worked as a technical writer for the IT department at Compaq was the coach of a men’s semi-professional basketball team (note: she was The Coach, not the assistant coach, and not the trainer!) Over the years, she developed three players who went on to play in the NBA! My memory being what it is, I only remember the name of one of those players — Cadillac Anderson. Here is a line from his entry in Wikipedia "He attended and played collegiate basketball at the University of Houston , where he was one of the last original members of the famed Phi Slama Jama fraternity. He competed in the 1984 Final Four in Seattle while at Houston." A woman I worked with at Intel (1995–1996) went from being a secretary… errr… administrative assistant at Intel in Belgium, to being the project manager of a critical internal system project at Intel in Folsom, California (where I worked). She not only managed the project, but she did so: - without corporate approval. She created the project out of a twinkle in her eye and a dream in her heart, and evangelized a proposal to upper management. Management loved her idea, but had no budgetary leeway to shoe-horn it into the official strategic plan for that year. - without a budget (she begged and scrounged from various executives to loan her employees so she could staff the project, and called in various favors for other expenses) - while leading a rag-tag team of misfits and burned-out staff (when you beg for staff, you end up with the dregs, although the dregs at Intel were extraordinarily talented) to a widely recognized success. In fact, she was so utterly successful that, three months after the project had come online, Intel named her the Employee of the Year! (out of some 95,000 employees world-wide).

My point is manifold:

people are multi-faceted, and unless you take the time and make the effort to get to know them, you will have a very distorted understanding of them. You will miss all of the hills and valleys of their personal contour. You will miss all “the good parts” of their story and only know the public persona of that individual. Never underestimate anyone. In fact, never judge anyone! Chances are you really know nothing about any person, and any judgement you make would most likely be superficial and inaccurate.

3. Growing old gracefully and comfortably is simply a matter of fighting off laziness

This is a hard one for me personally, since I am starting to get “old.” But I have sworn to live to be at least 100 and maintain good health and stamina up until the day I die. This was my “new millennium resolution.”

Those of you who have children have undoubtedly heard them say, “Do I have to?!” That sentiment is one that we never seem to outgrow, because I often hear myself thinking that very thing.

“Do I really need to exercise today?”

“Do I really have to go to work today? I really don’t feel like it!”

That’s laziness talking, and it must be squelched.

The more you give in to this lazy attitude, the quicker you will succumb to “old age.” You see, old age is not a condition, it is an attitude. If the old age attitude is allowed to prevail, it will hasten your physical and mental decline.

Nip this in the bud, or soon you will hear yourself saying things like:

“Do I really need to get out of bed this morning?!”

4. The Secret to life is… that there is no secret!

Early in life we believe that there must be a secret to life. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe that other people have it so easy, and yet they don’t seem any different than us. They must know a secret!

From My Lost Reunion Essay:

"There were many whom I admired, many to whom I looked up, thinking that somehow they were privy to some secret recipe which made them immune to the fears and confusion swimming in my head at the time. So many seemed that they knew who they were, and knew where they were going. "Having now experienced many years of social observation, I believe that their reality was probably closer to my own experience of clueless bewilderment. But they were better actors, had better command of their karma, or understood that they were still quite early in the process of creating themselves."

There actually is a secret, and the sooner you learn it, the faster you can set about creating a wonderful life for yourself. The secret is…

…that there is no secret!

5. You truly can accomplish anything you want to!

I have accomplished several things in my life for which I am inordinately proud. I won’t recount them here, but you may get a taste of what I’m talking about in my essay How to Work. Pay attention to the story I tell about going back to school and changing my career path under the section heading, Tackle the Impossible.