Refocusing Life & Getting it Right

 I'm less than 3 hours back from vacation and, as usually happens when I visit northwestern Wisconsin, I relax and refocus my brain. I make more resolutions in 4 days than I've done all year. I think about what I truly value in life, what I want to be doing (personally and professionally), and what I can do in the short-term to get me to the long-term goals I want to achieve. I've always loved to write, so one resolution was to restart my blog.

That said, I vow to get my facts right. I'm reminded of the importance of getting facts right when a teenager overheard a news story and said, "Wow! The Brewers are in trouble! Rickie Weeks is going to prison for 3 years!" I was initially perplexed, then I realized the source of the confusion. He'd overheard a story of Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence officer who leaked hundreds of thousands of pages of military secrets to Wikileaks. The teenager HEARD "leaks" (rhymes with "Weeks") and "prison", then mentally combined the two. I corrected the issue to the teenager (who'd already repeated it to other teenagers, all of whom denied that there's such thing as "Wikileaks"), but this reminded me of the importance of getting the facts right the first time, not just repeating the first rumor I hear without getting confirmation. We're all guilty of not getting confirmation of time to time, to the detriment of us all. We're all in such a rush to be right that few take the time to confirm the accuracy of the "facts" we repeat.

There are other resolutions I'll mention in future blog posts, and I want to continue to create achievable resolutions for myself. Some are to make the world a little bit better, but most are simply because I see a problem and I'm sick of doing nothing about it. If I do nothing, who will?

"If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change". (Michael Jackson)