The Official Thanksgiving “Not-To-Do List”

I’m sure most of you have embedded in your thanksgiving rituals a healthy dose of food, family and football. Well, maybe it’s stress, maybe it’s that I might be actually maturing. Maybe it’s because every year I do the same thing and nothing gets resolved, nothing gets better. And worse — nothing changes.

So while I do look forward to this Thanksgiving’s ritual of eating too much, saying too much and watching too much football, there’s another, new tradition I am starting this year and it’s my New, Official, Thanksgiving “Not-To-Do List.

U.S. Football and Thanksgiving

Frank Deford had a wonderful commentary the other day on U.S. football’s brutal beginnings.  He spoke about how some games even ended in death for several players, the college rivalries that existed, the blood soaked linemen.
If you look at the game now, it’s still violent, physical.  But the broadcast of it is very much polished, slick, marketed like hell, and still such a boring damn game in concept.

Lunch at your desk

It’s pretty much like this: the more elegant your lunch is, the better job you have.

If you have the three-martini lunch you are pretty much at the top of your game, and the top of your company.  In fact, you are probably not even sure what your company does anymore.  It may be your company, and the concept behind it is/was yours to start with, but if you’ve got time to take three martinis, and hell, if you’ve even got time to HAVE lunch, you are probably so far detached from the day-to-day operations that you could not even explain what are the day-to-day operations.