Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Since I am skinny, and no one yells at me about what I write here, I will write some more about weight loss.

Now to a more specific diet. This is taken in part from the movie Fat Head. Henceforth, when you see Burger King you may substitute McDonald’s or Wendy’s or something else. When you see Whopper you may substitute Quarter Pounder or Single or something else.

Here is a diet that almost guarantees weight loss.

• Breakfast: a Whopper and a no-calorie drink
• Lunch: a Whopper and a no-calorie drink
• Dinner: a Whopper and a no-calorie drink

A no-calorie drink, in order of preference, is:

• water
• unsweetened tea
• coffee
• diet soda

As best as I can determine, the Whopper has 630 calories, so the above diet provides 1,890 calories a day. The average American, by the way where is that person, consumes much more than that daily. I think most of us would lose weight eating 1,890 calories a day.

Balanced diet?

I know the reply to this diet as I have heard it many times:

but this isn’t a balanced diet

Okay, you live in an air-conditioned home, drive an air-conditioned vehicle, probably work in an air-conditioned workplace, drink clean water, use indoor toilets, bath every day, wear clean clothes, sleep in a bed every night, and so on and so on with the health benefits of modern life.

The preponderance of these modern life benefits far outweigh the concerns of a balanced diet. At least for the six months that you will use this diet to lose weight.

Okay, now everyone can be angry with me, but only for an hour. After all, I am “skinny” and the average American is not.

by Dwayne Phillips

Since I am “skinny,” I feel obligated to tell the world how to lose weight.

About 15 years ago I discovered that I was skinny. I never knew that. As a child I was always “small for my age” and you many not know how much a boy hates to be called “small for his age” and that ranks just above “he looks like his mother.”

Anyways, I graduated high school at 5′ 8″ but grew two inches in college. I always thought I was an average weight for my height. Surprise – I was and still am skinny.

Since I am skinny in a nation of obese people, I want to share my secrets of weight loss and weight control. Here there are:

1. eat less
2. walk more

Some caveats:

1. when eating less, continue physical activity as before
2. when walking more, don’t eat any more

Now lets delve into more science or nutrition or experience – also guaranteed to make people angry with me.

Don’t eat

• bread
• potatoes
• fruit

Also, don’t drink calories such as

• coke, pepsi, and the like
• sweetened tea
• fruit juice

Those foods have a lot of sugar (not technically correct, but that is the general idea). I told you people would be angry with me.

But then again, I am skinny and you are probably not because, as I keep reading, most Americans are overweight to really, really, really overweight. Ignore the above at your peril. Be angry with me all you want, but for no more than an hour. I really am a nice person.

by Dwayne Phillips

Experienced people have a significant problem in today’s unemployment environment: we are very good at knowing what should not be done.

I have been working since 1980. That is a lot of years in some fields. I know a lot more than I did in 1980. One of the areas where my knowledge has increased significantly is:

Recognizing work that should not be done.

That should be a highly prized area of knowledge.  Employees who can discern useless work are able to use their time to perform only useful work.

What is wrong with that?

Well, I find myself in a small minority. People who pay the bills, a.k.a., customers, want me to do useless work. They don’t think it is useless. They think it is quite useful. Hence, they pay people to do it.

What do I do? Explain why the work is useless and not do it? That causes me to wait until the customers find useful work. Sometimes that is a long, long, long wait. Go ahead and do the useless work because that brings a paycheck?

I don’t know a good answer for these questions.

by Dwayne Phillips

I have read it dozens of times – quit your job, do what you love, you will succeed. Oh really?

I read something today that agrees with my experience:

It takes money to start a freelance life.

There – I wrote it.

This disagrees with most of what I have read about starting your own freelance life – especially quitting your job and becoming a full-time writer. The oft-repeated advice is:

Do what you love; you will succeed.

My experience: I have several close relatives who quit their jobs, embarked on what they loved and went bankrupt. Not a figurative bankruptcy, but a literal bankruptcy with legal proceedings and all that. Property seized, courtroom appearances, the whole thing.

Love of an occupation does not guarantee financial success or even financial survival.

Can I write it another way?

Let’s consider writing. You can go to a public library and use one of their computers an hour a day. You use gmail (free email) to access Google Docs (free word processor and free document storage). Great writers have rented typewriters at public libraries an hour a day and succeeded. An hour of solid writing once a day is enough to produce three or four good novels every year.

So, with nothing more than your brain, you can write.

Maybe, just maybe, someone will buy what you write. Joanne Rowling went from welfare to wealth by writing a book. Let’s name a dozen others. I am waiting, but nothing comes to mind.

And what do you do while writing? What do you eat? Where do you live? Rats, that old food, shelter, and clothing stuff. It takes money.

If I haven’t convinced you to give it up, here is a plan.

1. Save one year’s salary.
2. Quit your job.
3. Move from where you live to a place where the cost of living is much lower.
4. Now you have about 18 months living expenses in the bank.
5. Write 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
6. If you are not making a living wage after 12 months, spend an extra four hours a day searching for a full-time job (while still writing 12 hours a day)

This will be difficult, but you may be doing what you love and you may succeed. If you follow steps 1, 3, and 6, you won’t go bankrupt.

by Dwayne Phillips

As simple as it seems, I had to learn the zero-th law of fiction.

I like to write fiction short stories. It’s fun for me. I have written 70 or so stories and have them on Smashwords which makes them available on many other outlets such as Barnes and Noble.

I often struggled when I first started writing short stories. I wrote from my life. I wrote about things that I had done and that had happened to me. The stories were boring, so I tried to improve on them.

But, improving on reality is lying. And I am not a liar.

Duh! Here comes the zero-th law of fiction:

Fiction is not true.

And everyone knows that. I, however, had trouble with the zero-th law. It took quite a bit of emotional energy for me to accept it. I could stretch the truth. I could make stories from my life end in ways I wish they had. I could make stories from my life end in terrible ways, far worse than they had. This is fiction.

Duh!

Sometimes it is amazing what blocks writers from writing better.

by Dwayne Phillips

As a writer and a person, I find it important to differentiate between me and something I wrote.

I write a lot of things. Some of the things I write, especially those I write a my day job, are reviewed by others. I find one statement helps me and the reviewers:

This is something I wrote. It is not me.

This helps me: when people tear apart the thing I wrote, I am not hurt. I am standing far enough back to listen to what they are saying about what I wrote to make it better.

This helps the reviewer: the vast majority of people I have ever met dislike tearing a person to shreds. Hence, they don’t provide the type of feedback that will improve the piece of writing. Once I remove myself from the piece of writing, they are free to shred it.

by Dwayne Phillips

One of my sons is an engineer. Another son is a scientist.

Engineer: We’ll do this.

Scientist: That’s not how it really works.

Engineer: We’ll make it work.

by Dwayne Phillips

It is often the case that you accomplish more work by attempting less work. At the same time, you can be a pretty decent person.

Several years ago, I worked as the technical lead overseeing government contracts. I worked with a Contracting Officer (CO), who monitored the legal aspects of the contracts.

On one occasion, the CO with whom I worked transferred to a different job. It was about a month before her replacement arrived. Her arrival date was announced and I, along with the dozen other engineers who were to work on contracts with her, was quite anxious to begin work.

On the morning of her arrival, the dozen other engineers pushed their way into her office, dropped large piles of heavy folders on her desk, and told her to get right to work or the world, and her job, would come to a horrific end.

About the middle of the morning, after the rush ended, I knocked on her door, entered with a smile, and said something like, “I’m Dwayne Phillips. We’ll be working together on the big ABC contract. Welcome. As a token of welcome here are some flowers and a box of chocolates. I’ll be back in a few days after you’ve had time to settle in and we can talk about the work.”

Needless to write, she worked on my contract before she worked on anyone else’s.

Flowers and chocolate may not be appropriate in your situation. Find something else that expresses a better perspective on what is happening. Working slower and less usually accomplishes more work. Being a decent person always helps.

by Dwayne Phillips

Don’t believe things at first. Be skeptical, but maintain your health.

I haven’t blogged on this topic before, and that is sort of surprise.  I used to have a job where I told people that being a healthy skeptic was one of the better things you could be. In that job, people told me what was happening. I needed to be skeptical in that I needed for people to demonstrate to me that what they said was true.

For example,

• demonstrate that everyone was at work
• demonstrate that the goods had arrived
• demonstrate that the software worked
• demonstrate that the hardware worked

I trusted the people personally. It was, however, my job to represent the taxpayers on projects. Verifying was important.

Another part of this was to be healthy. It is easy to  become distrustful of people. That isn’t good for me and wouldn’t be good for the people around me. How would you feel if the people around you didn’t trust you? If they constantly questioned your word?

Be healthy. Tell people, “I trust you, but as part of my job I have to see proof of what you say. Please show me.”

I expect to blog about other aspects of this topic in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

by Dwayne Phillips

This may be a waste of time, but I review how to calculate the percent change.

I feel silly about this post. I am going to show how to calculate the percent change in numbers. I learned this when I was 12 or 10 or something in school math. A look at the recent media discussions of the fiscal cliff and such reveal that many people don’t know how to perform this calculation. So here goes:

Percent Change = (New Value – Old Value)/(Old Value)

Not very complicated, right? Let’s take a real-world example.

The Payroll Tax, formerly known as the Social Security tax, will increase from 4.2% of salary to 6.2%. Most media outlets proclaim this to be a 2% increase. Gosh, how wrong! Let’s go back to the formula and walk through this.

If you made $100, you paid 420 cents in taxes. Under the change, you will pay 620 cents in taxes:

Percent Change = (620 – 420)/420

Percent Change = 200/420

Percent Change = 0.48

Percent Change = 48%

WHAT? Payroll taxes are rising 48% !?!?!?!??!? They told me they were rising 2%! What gives?

Perhaps the media:

1. is buddies with those who are raising the tax and doesn’t want them to look bad
2. doesn’t know anything about math and the definition of percent change

There is probably something of both 1 and 2 in the story, but more likely 2 is the dominant factor. Have you ever discussed “higher math” with a person having a journalism degree?