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I've been watching several feeds I set up on the web about relationships.  I started with ICERocket and Newsvine feeds and the topics that have come across the wire are hilarious.  Everything from "How to make a Sex Tape" to "Consolidate Loans" has come through.  I'm convinced I'm missing something here. I think the missing piece is that the word "Relationship" is too broad.  With Google returning 732 million results, the enormity of this topic is definitely confirmed.  In fact, it's very interesting that the top 15 results for relationship are about romantic relationships.  It's not until the 16th result that business relationships come into the picture with a link to Salesforce.com.  In starting to blog about relationships, I now realize that I was assuming that relationships were 99% non-romantic.  If the Google results are any indication, this shows a HUGE deficit in knowledge about non-romantic relationships. So, I am going to officially define what I think of as a romantic and non-romantic relationship.  I am guessing that there are further types of non-romantic relationships, but we'll start here first. Romantic relationships are obviously with someone you are romantically involved with.  I best understand this as a relationship that includes a sexual component.  I know that sounds rather clinical, but there you go.  Normally, I'd assume only one person can fill this role at a single time.  What makes a romantic relationship interesting is that it gets the lions share of attention in our lives.  I probably spend at least 40 to 50% of my relationship effort on my wife.  I consider that time very well spent, but the fact that the minority receives a large portion of my attention is definitely interesting. Non-Romantic relationships are relationships that lack a sexual component.  Friends, co-workers, family all fall into this category.  I would say that I spend the other 50 to 60% of my relationship effort with this group.  I'm not sure I know the exact size of this group either.  My outlook contact list is about 130 individuals.  However, this includes a variety of distant family members that I may talk to only once or twice a year.  A better estimate might be around 80 to 90 individuals I connect with on a normal basis. What surprises me here is the imbalence of relationship effort to the type of relationship.  Now, if I broke down my non-romantic relationships even further, different types emerge here as well.  I would classify some friends as "Close Friends".  Of course "Family" would be a group here as well.  However, a certain effort level is applied to each of these groups as well.  As I move down the line, I spend much less effort on keeping up with distant family members rather than close family members.  Thus, I think it's safe to say that not all non-romantic relationships are equal either.  In fact, there is even an order to the amount of relationship effort spent on non-romantic relationships. Wow, my brain is spinning with this.  I'm a visual thinker, so here's a chart of how I'm visualizing this: If you apply all the long tail hype of late to this graph, some interesting things stand out.  First off, this completely validates the MonkeySphere(link 1, link 2) principle.   read more »

This post is part of a series of posts covering the topic of personal Calling & Vocation.  You can find more about the entire series in the archive on the Vocation & Calling page. More on this here.  Summary: We live in a time called the "Information Age".  The amount of information around us is increasing exponentially.  With more information available to us in any given day, we become overloaded.   read more »

This post is part of a series of posts covering the topic of personal Calling & Vocation.  You can find more about the entire series in the archive on the Vocation & Calling page. More on this here.  Summary: As a result of the Crisis of Employment, workers today are left with little confidence in their ability to do their jobs.  This is extended by the realities of life.  When you've worked for 40 years only to find retirement difficult to deal with, or you haven't reached your career goals, the confidence you need to do your job well evaporates. In recent history, the pinnacle of a person's employment was reaching the level of Master.  A Master of any craft was the best at what they did.  Because they had been working in the same craft their entire lives, this level was much more achievable than today. Today, we still strive for the level of Master.  Yet, as we near it in any particular career our lives are jolted by external change that kicks us back to the bottom of the ladder, where we must start again.  This creates a Crisis of Confidence. Response: How many people have you known that are having trouble planning for retirement?  How many people do you know that have had to start fresh in a new profession after the age of 40?  I know several, and I think most people know several as well.    read more »

This post is part of a series of posts covering the topic of personal Calling & Vocation.  You can find more about the entire series in the archive on the Vocation & Calling page. A person's Vocation or Calling is a deep part of our human spirit.  It is the thing we constantly search for in our lives.  Few find the balance of life and vocation that brings satisfaction.  In the first post about Vocation & Calling, I am going to be digging into the meaning of Vocation and Calling and how it relates to my life.  read more »