In a couple weeks, I’ll take two Think Days to pause and reassess my life.

I’m currently a walking advertisement for the importance of making time to intentionally realign one’s life with one’s values.

• I’ve stopped exercising and have put on about 15 pounds.
• My diet resembles what a 7th grader would eat if locked inside a convenience store overnight.
• I’m spending major time on minor things, over-feeding some areas of life and starving others.
• My reading habit is dormant.

These issues are not the end of the world, but they do need to be addressed. We can’t keep life in perfect balance for six months straight—life just doesn’t work that way, and it’s not really supposed to. Everything drifts off course given enough time, and the key is to regularly take time to reassess and adjust. Think Days are the best way I’ve found do to so.

I had a colleague once—a fellow teacher—who was quite blunt. She spoke her mind regardless of the situation and who else was in the room. She also tended to be fairly impatient and was prone to black-and-white thinking. She was single-minded and did not suffer fools.

On the other hand, this person was one of the most effective classroom teachers I've ever seen. Her lectures were vivid, thoroughly planned and deeply engaging. She gave her students her personal cell phone number and encouraged them to text her—day or night—with homework questions. Professionally, her decision-making framework basically consisted of the question "Is this good for the students?" For her, there were no other stakeholders. She was completely and unambiguously committed to her students' success, and everyone who worked with her knew it.

As the plane backs away from the gate, the flight attendant holds up a yellow oxygen mask and says something like this:

“If the air pressure in the cabin drops suddenly, a yellow oxygen mask will drop from a compartment above your head. Put on your own mask first before assisting anyone else.” What they don’t tell us (and I don’t blame them) is why.

If a commercial jet loses cabin pressure at 35,000 feet, most passengers will slip into unconsciousness in less than 30 seconds without supplemental oxygen. If you put your mask on immediately, you can now help others with their masks. But if you help someone else first and they can’t help you back—if they’re a small child, for instance—you could both be in big trouble.

Seth Godin nailed it.

Seth’s daily blog is one of the very best out there, and his post last Sunday cuts right to the heart of one of the biggest problems with modern work culture. It’s a very short post, so I’ll simply reproduce it here.

There’s a common safe place: Being busy.

We’re supposed to give you a pass because you were full on, all day. Frantically moving from one thing to the other, never pausing to catch your breath, and now you’re exhausted.

What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.

— Joseph Tussman

As a trumpet major in college, I was forced to learn to transpose.

Transposition is confusing and not particularly interesting, so I’ll limit my explanation to two short paragraphs.