A recent meditation instructor told us the secret to practice is doing it. Nothing new there. Just sit your ass down at least once a day, no matter how briefly, and do it. To illustrate, he stood up for all of a second, sat down, rang his bell and, a second later, rang the bell again and stood back up. Simple.

The same goes for anything you love. Islam teaches you to pray five times a day minimum. (There’s no max last time I checked). How often do you eat in a day? How often do you curse? When you think about what you fill your precious time with, the need for management becomes obvious.

If you love something – your guitar, your novel, your side business, anything – then you have got to touch it everyday. How many days do you go without touching your spouse? Or your children?

If you love something you have to make a connection everyday. Even if its only in your prayers.

Two insights came to me from my work review today:

The hardest part of evolving as a human being is facing one’s shortcomings. I don’t like it anymore than the next man, but I have learned to see the advantage in receiving it with an open heart. If you have a sincere intention to get better, then feedback like this is the sweetest nourishment. But if you’re faking the funk and only trying to get over, criticism will always smack of intimidation.

Another hard fact is that many of the lessons I absorbed from growing up on the streets of Newport News do not translate to the corporate world. It’s a different culture, a culture of constant nitpicking and planning for the future. Of course it isn’t called nitpicking, it’s called “detail orientation” but the purpose is the same. No crumbs are to be left on the plate. The process must be constantly improving or else it’s falling apart. This is a very dogmatically European idea sprung from the industrial age.

By comparison, the lessons I learned from the street are photo negative. The streets taught you that the future was fraught with such unimaginable danger, it was pointless to try and imagine it. All you could do to prepare for the worst was to toughen your resolve to get through it. There was no sense on the streets that things would ever get “better” so it was up to the individual. This is why Black kids so often excel at demonstrations of personal excellence but are rarely lauded in the context of a team. We are driven to be entirely self-reliant and to chafe at exposure to authority. Authority, the streets teach you, is always the province of those who want to defeat you, take away your power and limit your movement. Either you are the authority or you’re a slave.

I have learned to value both of these attitudes: If you can’t play well with others, you can’t get to the top and, if you can’t get to the top, what’s the point of even playing?