JeffMilesSays.com | Let’s make the world a better place! | Faith, Family, Fitness, Fun, & Functions

So, today’s a big day, the season finale for Season 2 of The Mandalorian drops today. I’m super excited and decided to channel that excitement by letting my inner nerd out a little bit. Today’s Follow Friday post is about one of my favorite people in Hollywood, Jon Favreau [imdb].

When I think about all the things I geek out about, Jon Favreau [Wikipedia] is associated in some way. For those of you who are Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, you’ll recognize him as Happy Hogan, Tony Stark’s comedic right-hand man (he has also had his hand in several of the MCU movies as either director, executive producer, or both). If you know anything about Shannara, you’ll be happy to know he was one of the executive producers on the show The Shannara Chronicles [affiliate link]. Finally, If you’re a Star Wars fan, you love him because he is the creator of The Mandalorian. It was even rumored at one point that Jon would replace Kathleen Kennedy as the person in charge of everything Star Wars at Disney, something I would absolutely love to see.

I don’t typically get star struck, but if you were to ask me if there’s anyone in Hollywood I would geek out about spending time with, at the top of the list you’d find Jon. I can imagine there’s a lot of my inner geek that would be showing if I ended up in a conversation with him.

If you have even a hint of an inner nerd, you should follow Jon Favreau and keep track of what he’s doing!

Follow Jon: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.

On a normal FollowFriday post, I would be pointing you to someone else that I follow as a way to encourage others and bring value to your life, referring you to someone who has impacted me in some way or another for the good. However, now that I have had some time to start rebuilding my blog, cleaning it up, posting a few new posts, and getting some of the features implemented that I feel are necessary I wanted to take a moment and explain where I’m coming from, effectively officially re-launching my blog and asking you to join me on this journey.

As I mentioned in my post last Friday, I have been queuing up post ideas for quite some time and have finally gotten to a point where during the course of 2021 I will be providing more than just FollowFriday posts, providing my followers with even more value. But first, I want to explain my philosophy behind why I blog, and second, explain the types of things you should expect to see on JeffMilesSays.com.

First off, what’s my philosophy? I’ve alluded to it in a previous post, but my intention is to add value. Not by regurgitating articles you can find in other places on the internet, but by bringing my thoughts to relevant topics (more on that below) and offering my perspective on what’s going on in this world and how we can be better members of this big blue ball circling the sun, enriching each other’s lives.

From a content perspective, there are 5 pillars of what I will talk about on my blog. You see them in the title of the site, but I will explain each below.

Faith – My faith is the foundation for everything in my life. It influences how I conduct myself and relate to others, raise my children, and conduct my daily affairs. For too long, Christians have been known for what they’re against, I will show you what I’m for (your good) in how and what I write. I plan to offer a fresh, faith-based perspective on the world around me. From time-to-time, I will quote Scripture. It will be quoted to help you understand my perspective, but never to beat you over the head. It will be quoted to you from a basis of love and understanding, to encourage you to be better, never to tear you down.

Family – Second only to my faith is my family. As a family man, I want to offer a perspective that hopefully builds up marriages and families based on what I find in Scripture and what I’ve experienced in the nearly 15 years of marriage and parenting I’ve lived. From a qualification standpoint, I am not a counselor and I would encourage you to take what I say as a perspective to add to your bag, not Gospel truth (unless I’m quoting Scripture obviously 😀).

Fitness – I am not a fitness professional. Let me say that again, I am not a fitness professional. I am a banged up, former football player turned desk jockey trying to make sure I don’t keel over at my desk and am around to walk my daughters down the aisle and love on my grandbabies (and great-grandbabies). Any fitness opinions I give will be just that, opinions based on my own experience and from my research because fitness is something I enjoy and is absolutely necessary to lead a healthy and productive life.

Fun – Life has enough to bring you down, from time-to-time, my posts will just be for fun. In my weekly team meetings, I currently have a section called Monday Funday where I try to bring something I found in the previous week to include that made me laugh for one reason or another and I intend to, from time to time, include things on my blog just to make you laugh, but my intent is never to be offensive or crude.

Functions – In your life, you wear many hats. I’m no different. I’m a husband, father, computer programmer, book lover, people leader, moviegoer, and workout junky. Posts in the Functions space (it’s a little light right now but it will grow) will be used to help you be more productive with the different hats you wear. Sometimes they will contain code snippets, other times they may be leadership principles for your work, your home, or even both. You never know what you’re going to get in this section.

I will try to keep my posts in logical sections, but sometimes, life just isn’t logical so I may come at you with something completely out of leftfield (I’m writing this at the end of 2020, the least logical year I think all of us have ever experienced). Just bear with me and we’ll get through this.

As I hope I have made clear to this point, my intention is always to build you up, leaving you better, never to tear you down. However, if tearing you down is necessary, it will never be to harm you (I will never leave you there) but to remove harmful beliefs and perspectives holding you back only to replace them with ones that will hopefully help you become a better person.

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Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.

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Those that have worked with me, especially those that know me from Phillips 66, know that I’m a big productivity nut. (I founded a group called Productivity@Work as a way to help the folks at Phillips 66 be more productive in their daily lives). One of these days if it makes sense I will share productivity tips on this blog, but as I said in my previous Tuesday TechTip post, I’m not going to rehash things that you can easily find in other places on the internet. One thing that shocks people sometimes is the fact that the person I email most frequently is myself. Different things work for different people but, especially since the advent of the smartphone, for me, if I want a quick reminder, my best bet is to fire off a quick email to myself. I have several different email accounts for different purposes, one of which is used for this blog. The other night I was cleaning out my blog inbox, transferring all the blog post ideas I had sent myself to my note-taking software, and it became very clear who my next Follow Friday post should be about.

I don’t know exactly when I started following Seth, but it has been at least 5 years, but I would guess it is actually closer to a decade if not more. The earliest case of me emailing to myself a Seth Godin blog post as something that encouraged me to think more deeply or differently was back in 2015 but I’m almost certain it was in the early-2000’s timeframe that I found Seth and started my subscription to his blog (to give you an anchor point, on November 6, 2017, he wrote a post titled This is post 7,000, which if you do the math means he started blogging in the late 1990s since he blogs daily).

A lot of people will look at my background and look at what Seth does and wonder how I even started following him in the first place. With my background being in software development and technology and Seth’s being in marketing, it doesn’t look like a very natural match, but what I’ve found is that on a daily basis, Seth’s blog makes me think about things in a different way than what I would normally think about them even though I couldn’t actually tell you how I found his blog in the first place. All I know is his thought-provoking posts have been a daily read of mine for as long as I can remember.

As I continue to clean up and prepare my blog for more in-depth content posts I will continue to post Follow Friday posts but I really look forward to sharing some of the things that have come from thinking deeply about Seth’s posts so please stay tuned.

In the meantime, use the links below and scattered throughout this post to get connected to Seth and his content.

Follow Seth Godin: Website| Blog | Medium | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Wikipedia

Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.

2020 has been a year for the history books for sure. There’s a joke I saw on the internet that said when kids go to college to study history in the future. If they choose to have an emphasis on 2020, they will need to specify which quarter they are going to focus their studies on.

As we roll into the end of November and those of us in the United States get ready to celebrate a non-traditional Thanksgiving I keep hearing, “I can’t wait for 2020 to be over.” The realist in me wants to ask these folks what do they expect will magically happen on January 1, 2021, but out of love, I keep my mouth shut. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to put 2020 behind me, but I sincerely feel like we’re in for a long haul, we have a long road ahead of us and there will be a lot of work for those of us who lead to help others as we come out of this pandemic.

With how heavy this year has been, humor has been absolutely necessary. That’s where Julie Nolke comes in. Julie is a Canadian actress and comedian that used her quarantine to bring her craft to others via YouTube. I haven’t watched many of her videos outside of her Explaining the Pandemic to my Past Self series but the few I have are just as funny.

On this final Friday before Thanksgiving, I want to spread a little joy through humor to those of you reading my blog, and I’ll start by sharing Julie’s pandemic videos. Enjoy and have a great Thanksgiving!

I’m going to apologize in advance for the swear words, sorry…

Follow Julie Nolke: YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.

The email said, “What in the world are you doing?”

At that point in May 2018, I had been traveling a lot, somewhere in the ballpark of 4 or 5 trips within the span of a few weeks, which meant I was reading A LOT and had been churning through books and making a lot of updates to Goodreads which triggered almost daily updates to Jane Gasdaska. She had taken one of the status update emails from Goodreads and forwarded it to me asking how in the world I had been reading so much lately.

I first met Jane when she was the keynote speaker at an internal tech conference at Phillips 66 in 2014. At the time Jane was a leader within our commercial organization and was a great fit for what we wanted as a keynote speaker. As a member of the core leadership team, I was given the opportunity to go to dinner with our IT leadership team sponsors including our CIO as well as Jane and her assistant. We had a great dinner out with a lot of great conversation, and Jane revealed her I ♥ IT shirt (pictured above). The tech conference was a hit and Jane did a phenomenal job as our keynote speaker. At some point during the conference, it came up that Jane and I were both avid readers, and a couple of years later we connected on Goodreads.

Fast forward to 2018, I read the email mentioned above as I was waiting for one of my co-workers to check out of the hotel in Vegas where I had been a speaker at the ServiceNow Knowledge18 User Group Conference, a final commitment from my previous role in the Customer Support Technology group at Phillips 66. I shot Jane a quick response apologizing for blowing up her inbox and explained that due to my new role as well as commitments from my previous role I had been traveling quite a bit, and I asked how she had been and how she was liking her new (and current) role in Organizational Change Management. That led to a quick touchpoint phone call and an ongoing mentor/mentee relationship where she and I touch base every couple of months to trade stories on how things are going, anywhere I might be stuck, what we’re reading, the pulse in the organization, and the occasional technical troubleshooting that I provide for her. It has been a great two-way street that I look forward to as I see the appointment coming on my calendar.

As a Phillips 66 employee, I am able to receive her Monday Moment blog posts via internal email, but she also posts them on her blog every week. You should check them out on her blog.

Follow Jane Gasdaska: Twitter | LinkedIn | Goodreads | Blog

Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.

Back in 2012, I had a pretty major back episode that required disc decompression therapy to allow me to get back to some semblance of normal. There was a combination of events that led to the episode, but one of them was a very high-intensity plyometric workout. After that episode, I realized a lot of things I had been taught about lifting, working out, and fundamental strength, as well as many of the underlying assumptions in my lifting, were incorrect which had led to a relatively speaking weak core. As I was laying on the decompression table day after day, I resolved to challenge all of my assumptions which resulted in me searching out websites like T-Nation where they post a lot of content for seasoned lifters who are looking to up their workout game. I already mentioned Lee Boyce last week, this week I want to introduce you to Paul Carter. When you first see his pictures, you realize this dude is JACKED and after watching a few of his lifts on Instagram, you realize it’s not all show, the man is a BEAST. But what I feel really sets Paul apart is he is not afraid to shy away from taboo subjects like emotional & mental health. Subjects that you typically don’t find talked about much and he’s not afraid to call anyone out. For example, a little over a month ago, he posted this little gem.

But he’ll also post these as well!

These have been some of my favorite posts of his lately. If I have learned anything the last few years (since Michael died) it is that strength looks a lot different than what I thought it looked like. Loving so deeply you get emotional is strength, real men do cry, and I’m worth loving.

Finally, I also appreciate posts like these two, they’ve really gotten me thinking recently.

On the last one, he said something in the caption that really struck home for me (relevant parts pasted below).

…
Words are incredibly important and play a huge role in allowing us to connect and communicate and get to know each other.

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But if you want to cut through the bullshit about what’s really important to someone then simply look at their behavior. And see if the words and actions consistently line up.

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If someone gets up at 4 a.m. to train, and runs off to work two jobs then as you can imagine, training is important to them.

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If someone tells you that it’s important to them to lose fat, and get in shape, but won’t stay on plan with their diet, training, sleep, etc, then what are they really saying?
…

I don’t know how many times I’ve said, “I’m trying to lose weight.” when let’s be honest, if I was really trying to lose weight, my behavior would be different. So there it is, one of the things I respect about Paul is he challenges me to be a better me and I need to be hungry for awhile…

P.S. – the dude has EPIC cheat meals, but he’s earned them 😁.

Follow Paul Carter: Yoke Squad | Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Follow Friday posts are posts where I highlight someone I follow as a way to promote and encourage other people.