During November I wrote a (little) novel as part of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.) The goal is to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. It is like climbing a psychological mountain with only your imagination and your laptop. Those that succeed either do a large amount of planning in advance or write with abandon trading in quality for the needed daily quantity (averaging 1700 words a day will do it.) I ended up with a choppy story entitled One Friend Two Many. It relied heavily on Facebook as a setting and my own fictionalized experiences for content. My point being that it is fiction, but if you knew the author you would see quite a bit of non-fiction therein.

The last two weeks, I have been compulsively drawn to the disappointing and ocassionally depressing story of the (no longer) Secret Life of Tiger Woods. This brings up lots of questions about fact and fiction. How many of the facts that we now have are actually facts? How much of the man’s former life (husband, father, smart cookie, master of PR) are now called into question? And wherever we as persisting golf fans are led in the months ahead, how much of that story (from the PGA, from caddy Steve Williams, from mistresses number 11, 12 and 13) will be factual?

Meanwhile at work we are scrambling to digest what it means when a NYC consulting firm proposes 80 recommendations to our Governing Board, and those recommendations are judged be able to save 25-40 million dollars. Is that estimate a fact? Are the recommendations based in fact or from a desire to win more consulting business or a blend of both? Does our Board have estimates in hand concerning how much money needs to be spent up front to harvest the estimated savings?

All of this makes me ponder that it is useful to take one’s time, to be deliberate, to carefully consider the messenger, the message and the motivation(s).