I was listening to a podcast recently where they discussed how we all have various “chapters” in our lives, often only seen when looking back on them. I thought it’d be interesting to see how mine shake out so far.

I thought they might be tied to each time I’ve moved, and that’s certainly a factor, but I’ve moved 11 times in my life and really only have five chapters. The number of moves is a bit misleading because 8 of them happened in my 20’s (moving out of home, with friends, to an apartment, then a house, etc).

Here are my five chapters so far:

1976 – 1988

Birth through sixth grade. In sixth grade we moved across the state, met new friends, etc. Also, middle school is a pivotal time in many lives, and that seems like good place to call it a chapter break.

1988 – 1998

This was the rest of the time I lived at home. We moved across the state again in the middle of that, but it was less of a major shift. I was already in high school and was active in track and cross country, so that move wasn’t really a new chapter.

1998 – 2002

In 1998 I moved out of the house and down to Georgia, met my wife a few years later, and got married. Certainly a noteworthy chapter there.

2003 -2004

By far the shortest chapter, but we moved to Alabama for two years, had our first daughter, and then moved back to Georgia. A short chapter, but certainly a noteworthy one!

2005 – present

This is my longest chapter so far, but it’s seemingly coming to a close soon. With one daughter off to college this fall, and the other a sophomore in high school, things are changing fast. That said, I’m not sure that this chapter will have a clear end. Is it now, with one off to college? Or in three years, when both are out? Or what if one of them moves back home for a while?

I think in the future I’ll be able to look back and see it more clearly, as I have for the other chapters, but right now it’s very fuzzy (and that’s ok).

GreenMellen

This could also be a fun way to look at our company. How does that break down into chapters? While each hire essentially makes for a “new” company, I think I can simplify into a few bigger chunks:

• 2005-2009: The pre-years. I met Ali, we worked together at a different job, and we slowly came closer to starting a company.
• 2009-2013: The early years. We started the company and it was just Ali and I for the most part, figuring things out as we go.
• 2013-present: The real company. In 2013 we got our office and made our first few hires, and it’s been onward and upward ever since then. This could be broken down a lot further, but it seems like a solid chunk to keep in one chapter for now.

What do your chapters look like? If you break them down, how many do you have so far?

28,687 days. That’s how long the average US citizen will live, around 78.5 years. Given the chaos of our world today, that number can be quite important. There’s a lot of inspirational things you can do with that, but we’ll be more practical today.

Given an even distribution, that means that 1 out of every 28,687 people will die today, or roughly 11,000 in the United States, from various causes.

That means if I called 1,000,000 random people today, 35 of them would likely be dead tomorrow. Is that because of my call? Not likely.

That also means that if 1,000,000 people were vaccinated today, 35 of them would likely be dead tomorrow. Is that because of the vaccine? It sure doesn’t seem that way.

Scaling that up, if I called 342M people today, 11,921 of them would die tomorrow.

Or how about the 342M doses of the vaccine that have been administered in the United States? We’d expect that 11,921 people would have died the day after taking it. You can finesse the math with typical age ranges and health of those getting the vaccine, but at a large enough scale those types of things tend to average out. If 11,921 people died the day after taking the COVID vaccine, that’s exactly what it should be if the vaccine was 100% safe.

VAERS

Tracking adverse vaccine events in a system like VAERS is hugely important to make sure things are safe, and it’s helped when awful situations arise like the Johnson & Johnson vaccine causing some blood clots earlier this year. In VAERS they generally count any event within seven days of a vaccination, so I’d expect we’d have seen somewhere around 83,447 reported deaths “from” the COVID vaccine in there so far.

When you see someone get worked up and claim that “VAERS shows that 6,207 people have died after taking the vaccine“, you can rest well knowing that, if anything, that number is lower than even the best case could predict.

This past Saturday, a video started going viral that seemed to very clearly show a police officer planting drugs in a car. While the video stops abruptly, it seems to be clear what’s going on, and it looked really bad.

While the video was getting passed around quite a bit and outrage was beginning to stir, the Caledonia police responded quickly and promised to do a full investigation and release all of the available footage. This gave people a chance to catch their breath and wait for all of the facts to come out, and Caledonia indeed released more footage very soon after. You can view the body cam footage from the officer here:

While it indeed shows some procedural issues by the officers in question, the full video explains exactly what happened and why the baggie was tossed back into the car, dispelling all thoughts of “planting evidence”. This further justifies why all officers should have body cams turned on at all times, as it can help to give a full picture of a story, which is good for everyone.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a good overview of what happened, and while I expect we’ll see a bit more come out of this as more footage is released, it was good to see clear heads prevail and not snap to judgement. Taking a minute to collect more information is always a good thing.

When you’re working on something, you have two choices: do it right, or take time later to explain why it was done incorrectly. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said:

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

This came to mind when reading a recent post from Kevin Paul Scott, where he explained why that might be easier said than done:

We’d all like things to move faster. You want the builder to complete the house, the person fixing the appliance to finish it quickly, and the individual taking your order to get it out faster.

Of course, he followed that up with:

At the same time, you don’t want the builder to cut corners, you want the appliance repaired correctly, and you want to get the food you ordered.

It can be a tough balance between “fast” and “good”, and it’s worth evaluating your process to find the right mix. I’ve mentioned before that we pride ourselves on being slow and nimble, but that’s not the right answer for everyone. If you want to cut some corners to gain speed, though, be prepared to explain why you did it that way.

This morning I’m heading out to run the Peachtree Road Race 10K for the sixth time, though my first since 2015. If memory serves, I’ve run it in 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 and now this year.

However, this one will be a quite a bit different due to COVID restrictions. Among other tweaks, the big change is that rather than just being run on July 4, they’re splitting it across July 3 and 4 to help with crowd size. Even though that doesn’t much matter thanks to vaccinations, it’ll certainly make travel to and from the race quite a bit easier!

To that end, I’m going to try using Uber for both ends of the trip rather than driving and parking and taking shuttles and such. That could get interesting, but should make life a bit easier for me. We’ll see what happens.

If you’re running it today or tomorrow, good luck to you!

I recently finished the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind“, and I’ll likely share a few things from it in the coming weeks. It was an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.

Near the end, the author talked a lot about happiness, and how most things generally only make us more (or less) happier for a short period of time. That new phone might excite you today, but it’s just “your phone” after a few weeks. Likewise, if something bad happens in your life it will hurt your mood for a while but then often become part of your new normal.

He summed it up like this:

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

Reading that in the full context of the book, looking back at thousands of years of human history, really made for some interesting thoughts. Check it out for yourself when you have time.

It’s easy to think that we control all of our own decisions, and to a large extent we do, but it can also be crazy to see how things like sea levels 100 million years ago have a direct impact on elections today.

Take the 2020 election results in Alabama, that looked something like this:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the black population of Alabama closely resembles those voting results.

Going back further, the black population is largely in that belt because of slavery 150 years earlier.

So why was slavery so common in that belt? It held the largest farms in the state.

So why did the largest farms happen to be in that area? Well, that was some of the best soil.

Why was the soil so good there? Because of sea levels 100 million years ago, which left cretaceous sediments along that band.

Following it from start to finish is simply an amazing journey from sea levels 100 million years ago to an almost identical voting streak in 2020. Here is the full layout of images:

Voting patterns can look weird in many states, and there are often interesting reasons for them. In this case, it really caught my attention and made me realize that some patterns of today’s behavior can literally go back millions of years.

Kudos to Ryan Starkey of Starkey Comics for putting together such an amazing set of images. The insight to even realize what happened here is outstanding, and putting together those graphics took it to another level.

You can read more about this work, including more details and statistics behind each image, over on his Facebook Page.

Yes, you should.

I see this come up from time to time. Someone is speaking to a group of perhaps 20 or 30 people, and wonder if they can avoid the internal awkwardness of using the mic, so they hold the mic to the side and ask “can you still hear me”?

Not wanting to be rude, people let them put the mic down and it’s worse for everyone. Unless it’s a crackly system or something, everyone can hear you more clearly if you use the microphone. I have a saying I often say in this situations if someone asks: “Always use the mic“.

There are a few other situations in life where you should just default to yes if you’re not sure:

• Should I use the restroom before we leave?
• Should I put on eye protection for this super quick cut?
• Should I wait for that truck to go by before I try to pull out?

In any of those cases you might be ok, but all of them are very easy to say “yes” to, with escalating downsides if you say “no” and things go wrong.

The microphone is a different beast, though. When you’re on it, and it’s something fairly rare for you, you hear your voice and you think you sound weird. It’d be so much more comfortable if you could just put the mic down and speak loudly instead.

Don’t.

Always use the mic.

There are a lot of awards given out to companies and websites that are various levels of scam. It can be a pretty lucrative business to “sell” awards to other companies, and it’s frustrating.

However, there are many awards out there that are legitimate and merit-based, and I’m thrilled that GreenMellen was chosen as one of the Top 30 Small Businesses in Cobb County this year! It’s an award we’ve applied for before, but have failed to win until now. In past years, the committee has provided us excellent feedback on how to improve (at least in their eyes) for future years, and it’s paid off.

The list of all 30 winners this year is full of incredible companies, and we’re honored to be mentioned among them.

I’m proud of how far we’ve come in 12 years, and 100% of the credit for this award goes to our amazing team. We’ll always keep our eye out for other awards that are worth attempting to win, but this one is pretty great.

I think we all know the story of the Titanic, which set sail with around 2,200 people on board, of which roughly 1,500 perished when it sank.

However, the sinking of the Titanic likely saved many more lives than the 1,500 that were lost that cold night in 1912. How so? Better safety practices that were implemented as a result of the tragedy.

More lifeboats

One of the first things most people learn about the Titanic was its vast shortage of lifeboats on board, which contributed to many of the deaths. They had enough to pass regulations (they were actually beyond what was required), but the regulations were woeful at the time.

As a result of the sinking of the Titanic, new regulations were instated that made ships carry enough for every person on board, as well as having better training for staff in case of emergencies.

24/7 watch

After the sinking of the Titanic, the “Radio Act of 1912” mandated that ships remain in contact 24 hours a day with other vessels in the area.

Ice Patrols

The other big change after Titanic was the introduction of the “International Ice Patrol”, which still exists to this day to locate and track icebergs in the North Atlantic Ocean.

In the 109 years since the sinking of the Titanic, these new initiatives have undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. It’s impossible to know how many (how do you count ships that didn’t hit an iceberg?), but it’s certainly a great thing. Had the Titanic have somehow completed its maiden journey safely, it’s likely another ship would have gone down in the years later instead.

You see similar outcomes with other situations, such as the flurry of new laws after the 9/11 attacks. Tragedies like this are always horrible to see, and “could have been prevented”, but they force us to look closely at what really went wrong and work hard to prevent it from happening again.

Those lives can’t come back, but hopefully we can take lessons from events like those and save even more from similar events in the future.