29May, 2010

Follow our Climb up Mt. Hood Live on the Internet!

Posted by Don
0

At midnight on Sunday the 30th, some friends from Texas and I will summit Mt. Hood and you can follow our adventures live on the internet. We have a GPS spotting unit that will mark our coordinates every ten minutes or so. You can follow our trek here. (Make sure to click on the Satellite view so you can actually see the mountain) It should take us about six or seven hours to summit, and about that long to get back down. On Saturday, before climbing Hood, we will summit Mt. St. Helens and you can follow that climb (3AM Pacific through the rest of the day) when you click on that same link.  All in all we will climb about ten thousand vertical feet between the two mountains. It’s going to be quite an adventure. When you climb Mt. Hood, you summit in the middle of the night when the conditions are colder so the ice is packed hard and is less dangerous. We should reach the summit at about 6AM or so, or around 9AM on the east coast. Toast us with your coffee cup if you happen to catch it live (I think that means you’ll see a [...]

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28May, 2010

Want to Learn More About Living a Better Story?

Posted by Don
25

If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and wanted to know more about starting a new story, or just making your existing story more meaningful, we’ve put together a Living a Better Story Seminar here in Portland at the end of September. It will be a relatively small, intimate and personal seminar in which we will go through the elements of a meaningful life. My hope is that attendees will leave having a clearly mapped out story, and a plan to achieve their life ambition. You can learn more and register here…

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26May, 2010

Climbing Mt. Hood

Posted by Don
50

I’ll be out of pocket for the next seven days or so. I still intend to update the blog, though not as frequently. Several guys are showing up from Texas and we are hoping to climb Mt. Hood. I’ve been worried about the weather, because we have had nothing but rain here for weeks, but it looks like the weather is going to break Friday and stay semi-clear through Monday and that means we will attempt to Summit. It’s a routine climb that a lot of people around here do, but your prayers would be appreciated. If the weather changes, or if too many climbers get bottle-necked at the top, we won’t be able to summit. I’ll post pictures once the week’s adventures are done. Today will be my final training day. Me and the guys leading the climb will hike up to the top of the ski area. It would be boring but we have some bad weather to play with so that will make it seem exciting. It will be harder for me to moderate comments while we are running around and in the mountains, but I will get to them whenever I am able. Thanks and I’ll [...]

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25May, 2010

A Leader Loves Their Enemies

Posted by Don
189

About every twentieth comment on this blog, somebody says something sharp or harsh. Often it’s insulting to me, personally. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. I do go through all the comments and manually approve them. I do this about three or four times each day. I’d say I let 95% of the comments go through. The only comments I report to spam are comments that are mean spirited. When comments get mean spirited, people just stop visiting the blog, so I pull those out. That said, I encounter a lot of comments that are directed at me, personally, and can get quite insulting. A year or more ago, these bothered me a lot more than they do now. Sometimes I’d spend ten minutes or more feeling frustrated or even angry. But about two months ago, I realized something that changed my attitude all together. I realized many of the leaders who changed the world learned to love their enemies. Our greatest example, of course, is Christ. And Tolstoy learned from Christ and then Ghandi and Martin Luther King and so on. If a leader doesn’t learn to love his critics, his critics will destroy [...]

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23May, 2010

Sunday Morning Music, Ben Heppner

Posted by Don
39

Several years ago I went to Toronto to see my friend Jason Hildebrand do a one-man play (that was terrific). Jason couldn’t pick me up from the airport, so he sent a friend. I came out by baggage claim and saw a man holding one of my books up like a sign, so I went over and introduced myself. He said his name was Ben, and he’d be driving me around for the next couple days. Ben and I had to run some errands and so made small talk. I asked how Jason’s play was coming along, but Ben didn’t know as he’d just returned from Paris where he’d been working for a few months. I asked what he’d been working on in Paris, and he said he’d been in an opera (I assumed it was some small production. How many times do you meet an actual professional opera singer?) I asked what Opera, and he said McTeague (I then knew he was a pro, but I assumed he sang in the chorus, as how many times do you actually meet somebody who sings lead in an opera?) I asked what part he sang, and he answered McTeague. He played [...]

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