While trying to figure out what to write for my first post, I wrote nearly 20,000 words before I decided the first post didn’t need to be revolutionary. Rather, I found after much soul searching the first post should probably be simple and help lay a bedrock for what is to come. I title this “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” and it is a story of my childhood where I started to question what was told around me - ultimately leading to me being more observant and “reading between the lines”.

The story starts with me in high school my freshman year. I decided that I wanted to start playing football. I knew our team was historically bad. My freshman year I think I might have played 2 total plays the whole season. I saw plenty of practice action as I forced myself into every play I could, and I got made fun of - a lot. I wasn’t strong, fast, skilled, or anything of any importance. What I did have is a good drive. An this propels into the off-season when we started our training program. I remember the first time I did a bench-press I only did 95 pounds. For those of you that don’t know, it’s not very good. I think I was the weakest person on the team. All of this is said not to tell my life story, but to lead up to this: my sophomore year I was much improved. And I remember we got “Booster T-Shirts” which said the phrase “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” on the back and had a “hulking” football player on the front. It was one of my favorite workout shirts because I felt like I related to it. I was easily gaining the most ground of any one year by year, even if it is mostly because of how lowly I started. Just recently, sometime later I finally had to “retire” the shirt as it was old and for whatever reason, is imprinted in my head the saying. And now that I’m older, I started getting more philosophical about the saying.

This shirt indicates that “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” means you’re better than you were, and by extension better than your competition. It was shortly after this I started reading Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life, where one of the rules is “be precise with your language”. In my daily life, I try to be precise anyways, I learned at a young age being loose with your vocabulary can lead people to think the wrong things. So this wasn’t exactly revolutionary for me in the same way as some others might have seen it. But, I started being precise with other people’s language around me. I started paying more attention. And this phrase, “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” stood out to me from earlier in my life. I started thinking about what it was trying to say, what kind of deeper meaning did it have. And that is where I found this idea that the shirt’s meaning is “I’m better than I was”.

After deep thought about this particular phrase over a longer period of time, I realized that I didn’t believe that being bigger, faster, or stronger made you better. Yes, those attributes can certainly help. But as an avid football fan, I watch a lot of preseason talk about how “Player Bob has gotten stronger this offseason” and then about halfway through the season you’re asking how they are even still on the roster. This sent me on a spiral on what is “better”? How can I ensure that I get better? What metrics can I check and work on to ensure I always improve, trying to apply it to my own life in some way? Eventually, after thinking on this several times over several days, I realized there is no one or group of metrics that can ensure you have got better at any one thing.

The easy thing to do is define if someone is better or not, we do that by looking at the results. And sometimes, just to be fair, people will define better differently. For example, in football I consider better or worse is simply defined by wins and losses. But, others will look at things like personal stats, like total yardage or tackles. Even more so, you can have some people say even in defiance of wins or losses, personal stats be damned, “You can just see that they are better than before.” So with our next evolution of thought, how do you define better? What is better? After I’ve said all of this, I’m going to break it down very simply:

End of story. Saying someone is stronger doesn’t make them better. Saying something is cheaper, doesn’t make it better. Saying something is expensive, fluffy, fast, sturdy, or whatever adjective you can come up with doesn’t mean that something is inherently better. The only thing that makes something better, is simply being better.

This stems from many different arguments, none of which is less important than what someone defines as better. We can always talk about what is and isn’t better. Someone strapped for cash might say something is better because it is cheaper. How many times have you heard someone say “It does what it needs to” or “Just give me whatever is cheapest”. These people value the money in their pocket more than the item they’re purchasing. Other people will look at objects and say “Oh, I only want the best” and “You get what you pay for” as very common sayings. People have different definitions of being better. And because of this, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. And the definition of better is always shifting.

This brings me to our first point of truth. We as a society need to define our adjectives better. (get the pun) It is one of the things when I watch politicians talk, they use so many adjectives in their speaking. For example, Donald Trump said “Then my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest ever, by far, the launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus.” at the Rose Garden on May 15, 2020. But when I heard this I was thinking “what is fast?” “In the next year” would be not only fast it would be “light-speed”. I don’t genuinely think that at the time anyone thought that within the next 6 months we would have a vaccine to market, even Donald himself. But the word “fast” means different variations to different people. Some people might have been expecting in the next month or so. Others (like myself) felt like in 3 years would be fast. The use of words like this doesn’t always convey what we mean.

Additionally, something else to consider is that while you increase one attribute, usually there is at least one that goes down. As a football player gets stronger, they usually get slower because of the extra weight they have to carry around. And depending on how much stronger versus how much slower can determine a lot. Same thing with other objects like food. As food gets cheaper, it usually tastes worse. And as food becomes more processed to last longer before spoiling it becomes less nutritious.

These are all key concepts that I think most of us would intelligently understand. Now that brings us to the “end-game”. What is the “final” takeaway from this question that we’re venturing through? The real question is now that we’re armed with this new knowledge how do we proceed to listen to others during our conversations? Here are my general guidelines that I try to follow:

1. What adjective did they use? How does that adjective relate to the current situation?

2. Do I agree with the individual? Does this “actually” need to get “better/quicker/cheaper”? Is that my chief issue on the topic?

3. Does the person provide a definition for their adjective?

4. Does the person avoid explaining how to achieve their adjective?

Usually, after answering these four questions you can get a good idea if someone agrees with you and better yet if they’re being honest about their opinion. A classic example is Joe Biden’s campaign slogan “Build Back Better”. And my first response is “What does he mean by ‘better’?” Now you’re starting to see what “better” means. Better to them means pulling out of Afghanistan in a show of weakness. Or having 6 months straight of unemployment numbers not meeting the goals. My favorite example, (which is a comparison between Biden’s administration vs Trump’s) is that the Trump administration’s “vaccine rollout plan” called for “Vaccinating 1 million people per day” during the first 100 days. Joe Biden’s agenda called for “Vaccinating 100 million people” for the same 100 day time frame. Any of you that are poor with math should be able to tell fairly immediately that the result is EXACTLY the same. This makes you wonder what is actually better? Let’s not forget how the Biden Admin achieved this goal by requiring military members to be vaccinated with an experimental drug (an unprecedented move) and supporting travel bans inter-state. While pushing a first-of-its-kind executive order forcing a vaccination just to publicly work. So do you consider the same result (number of people vaccinated) to be better considering the actions required?

In short, “better” isn’t always “better”. It all depends on perspective. What do you think is better and what do “they” think is better? What objectives are we trying to achieve?

Hopefully, as you continue to read these coming posts you’ll review them knowing that sometimes change is good, and if we look at the problem and solution combination that we might be able to find a solution that meets our needs, maybe even better than what we had before! (Pun intended)