Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

How To Catch A Monkey

by Walt | Aug 27, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

This is not a riddle.

Question: How do you catch a monkey?

Answer: The same way we get caught ourselves.

Catching a monkey is fairly easy. Find a coconut and go to the jungle where monkeys live. Cut a small hole in one end of the coconut so that a monkey can just slide its hand in. Fill the coconut with fruit. Tether the other end of the coconut to a stake driven in the ground.

Now here’s the cool part: a monkey will come along and, smelling the fruit, stick its hand into the hole in the coconut. When the monkey closes its fist around the fruit, it won’t be able to pull its arm free from the coconut. Voila, it’s caught! Go get your monkey and take it home.

Of course if the monkey gave any thought to this, it would realize that it isn’t really caught at all. All it has to do is release its grasp and slide its hand out of the coconut. And run free.

But, you see, monkeys like their fruit. Once they get their hands around some, they’re not about to let go. Even if holding on costs them their freedom.

We do the same thing.

We hold on to work that no longer serves us. Relationships we’ve outgrown. Old grievances. Old identities. Possessions. Expectations. Ways of living that once made sense but don’t anymore.

And because our hand is clenched so tightly around them, we begin to believe we’re trapped.

Often, we’re not.

Sometimes the thing keeping us stuck isn’t the coconut.

It’s our grip.

Freedom may not require fighting harder, working harder or finding some clever way out.

It may simply require opening our hand.

What are you holding onto that it’s time to release?

Running Down The Battery

by Walt | Aug 20, 2026 | Success | 2 Comments

There’s a little light in your car that can cause a surprising amount of trouble.

The dome light.

Leave it on for a few minutes and nothing happens. Leave it on all night and you may come back to a dead battery.

The light itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that it stayed on too long.

I think about that when I think about the news.

There’s so much coming at us all the time. War and unrest around the world. Political infighting and name calling. Wildfires. Climate worries. Financial markets swinging wildly. Gas prices. Violence. Tragedy. Crisis.

There’s no stopping point. The news is always there.

The red banners flash BREAKING NEWS. The talking heads dissect what happened, what might happen next, and what it all means. Then there’s another story. Another alert. Another reason to keep watching. Or scrolling.

Staying informed matters. We should know what’s happening in the world. We should understand the issues that affect our communities, our country and the people around us.

But there’s a difference between being informed and being immersed. Immersion wears us down.

We can spend an hour reading about things over which we have little or no control and then wonder why we feel agitated, distracted or exhausted.

We carry it into dinner. Into our work. Into conversations with people we love.

Sometimes we carry it right into bed with us, the phone glowing inches from our face as we take in one more awful thing before trying to sleep.

That’s the battery running down.

And the trouble is that our attention and energy are finite. If we give too much of them to the endless stream of bad news, we have less available for the life that’s actually in front of us.

Less capacity to notice a beautiful morning, enjoy a meal, take a walk, do good work or really listen when someone we care about is talking.

So the answer isn’t to tune out. It’s to create better boundaries.

Decide when you’ll check the news rather than allowing the news to decide when it gets access to you. Turn off the constant alerts. Choose a few reliable sources. Check in once or twice a day, then move on.

Be mindful about what you let in. Be intentional about how long you stay there.

The world will keep turning while you take a walk, have dinner, read a book or sit quietly for a while.

And the news will still be there when you come back.

Take care of your battery so that you can actually live this one wild and precious life.

A Night In The Museum

by Walt | Aug 13, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

The Uffizi Gallery is Florence’s great Renaissance art museum near Piazza della Signoria. Its halls are filled with works by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian.

You can certainly walk through it by yourself. You can admire the paintings, read the little placards on the walls, take some pictures and come away believing you’ve seen the Uffizi.

But to really see it, you need a guide.

A good guide points out the things you would never notice on your own. The symbolism hidden in a painting. The political intrigue behind a commission. The small detail in the corner of a canvas that changes the meaning of the entire work.

The painting was there all along. You simply couldn’t see everything that was there to be seen.

We understand the value of guides in so many areas of life.

The best golfers in the world have coaches. Often several of them. A swing coach. A putting coach. A strength coach. A sports psychologist.

Professional tennis players have coaches working on their serve, their backhand, their conditioning and their mental game. Actors have acting coaches. Singers have vocal coaches.

In the mountains, having a guide can be even more important. The terrain can look perfectly safe to an inexperienced eye while hiding crevasses, avalanche danger or a route that leads nowhere good.

The guide doesn’t climb the mountain for you. But the guide sees things you don’t.

And yet, when it comes to our businesses and our lives, many of us suddenly decide we should be able to figure everything out by ourselves.

We go it alone.

Part of it is pride. Part of it is independence. And part of it is simply that we don’t know what we don’t know.

We all have blind spots. We get too close to our businesses, our relationships, our habits and our ways of thinking. What looks obvious to someone standing ten feet away can be almost impossible to see when we’re standing in the middle of it.

I’ve had coaches for decades. Not because I want someone telling me what to do. And certainly not because I believe a coach has all the answers.

I have coaches because I know I don’t have all the answers.

A good coach helps me step back. Challenges my assumptions. Asks questions I haven’t thought to ask. Calls me on my stories. Sometimes sees possibilities I’ve stopped being able to see for myself.

I believe good coaches have coaches for exactly that reason.

The greatest value of a guide isn’t that they know the path better than you. It’s that they can see the terrain from somewhere you can’t.

You can certainly walk through the museum alone.

You can try to build the business alone. Navigate the transition alone. Overcome the stumbling block alone.

But there may be masterpieces hanging right in front of you that you’ll never really see.

A Vacation From The Vacation

by Walt | Aug 6, 2026 | Success | 2 Comments

I saw a colleague recently who had been away on vacation for a few weeks.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Good,” he said. Then he paused. “But I’m exhausted.”

They’d been to a lot of places. Seen a lot of sights. Covered a lot of ground.

By the end, he was out of sorts. The kids were out of sorts. Everyone needed some time to recover from the time they’d taken to recover.

They needed a vacation from the vacation.

Taking time away is important. Really important.

We need a break from the routines and demands of our daily lives. We need distance from the inbox, the meetings, the errands and obligations that fill our days.

A change of scenery can be restorative. New places can wake us up and remind us that the world is larger than the small circle of concerns we’ve been carrying around.

But a vacation can easily become another project.

There are reservations to make, routes to plan and sights to see. We race from one experience to the next because we may never be here again, and we don’t want to miss anything.

So we create lists. We organize the days. We measure the success of the trip by how much we managed to fit in.

It starts to look a lot like work.

The location changes. The underlying rhythm doesn’t.

We’re still rushing. Still producing. Still trying to get the most out of every hour.

And we still come home to ourselves.

That may be the part we overlook.

We carry our inner lives with us wherever we go. The restless mind comes along. So does the part of us that needs to be accomplishing something, even when there is nothing that needs to be accomplished.

We may tell ourselves that we need to get away. But sometimes the mad dash to get away is really a mad dash away from ourselves.

Then we come home and begin the cycle again.

Maybe the deeper work isn’t finding a better destination. Maybe it’s learning how to settle our hearts, minds, spirits and souls.

It’s learning how to sit by the water without checking the time. How to take a slow walk without needing it to count as exercise. How to have an afternoon with no agenda and not feel as though the day has been wasted.

That kind of rest can feel uncomfortable at first.

When we’ve spent years equating movement with value, stillness can make us anxious. When we’re accustomed to filling every space, an empty hour can feel like a problem to solve.

But rest isn’t another achievement.

It’s a way of returning to ourselves.

A good vacation doesn’t need to be extravagant. It doesn’t need to cover much ground. It may not even require going very far.

It needs space. It needs ease. It needs enough quiet for us to hear what has been drowned out by the noise of our ordinary lives.

The purpose of a vacation isn’t to come home with more photographs, more stories or a longer list of places we’ve been.

It’s to come home more fully alive.

About Your Rings Per Minute

by Walt | Jul 30, 2026 | Success | 0 Comments

We go to the grocery store every Saturday morning at 7:00.

Over the years, we’ve gotten to know the people who work there. Rob, the produce manager. Henry at the service desk. Debbie in dairy. Last week, we met Danny, the Coca-Cola vendor who comes in to restock the shelves.

We check out in the same lane every Saturday too. Kendra’s the cashier, and Tammy is the bagger. We’ve always enjoyed the conversation and banter.

How’s your week been? Is your mom feeling better? What are you going to do on your day off?

Small-town stuff, even though our town isn’t all that small.

Lately, though, there’s been a lot less banter and a lot more hurry.

The grocery store chain has decided to evaluate its cashiers based, at least in part, on how many items they scan per minute. They get an RPM score. Rings Per Minute.

The more things you ring up, the better your score. The better your score, the better your chances of keeping your job, getting more hours, maybe earning a raise.

So you can’t waste too much time with idle chit-chat.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve felt something precious beginning to slip away. The time to connect.

There’s nothing wrong with efficiency. Nobody wants to stand in a checkout line for half an hour while their ice cream melts.

But there’s a danger when efficiency becomes the measure of everything.

Because once speed becomes the metric, the conversation with Kendra becomes a problem. Asking about her mom slows things down. A laugh becomes inefficiency. A moment of connection becomes wasted time.

We’re hearing a lot these days about artificial intelligence. People are worried about machines becoming more human, about AI replacing jobs and changing the way we work.

Those are legitimate concerns.

But I wonder whether there’s another danger we should be paying attention to. Long before machines become more human, are we asking humans to become more like machines?

Faster. More productive. More measurable.

We do it in lots of places. We measure billable hours. Calls per day. Patients per hour. Packages delivered. Emails answered. Sales closed. Tasks completed.

Metrics can be useful. But they can also quietly teach us what matters.

And what gets left off the dashboard can begin to disappear.

What if, instead of RPM, we measured SPM?

Smiles Per Minute.

How many customers did you greet by name? How many people left feeling a little lighter than when they arrived? How often did somebody feel seen instead of processed?

Those numbers would be harder to measure.

But they might tell us something more important.

We’re wired for connection. We need the small encounters that remind us we belong to one another. The conversation at the checkout counter. The smile from the barista. The person who remembers your name.

None of it is especially efficient.

But maybe efficiency isn’t always the point.

Saturday morning, we’ll be back in Kendra’s line.

I hope her RPM is good enough to keep the bosses happy.

But I hope there’s still enough room for a smile, a laugh, and a little conversation.

Because some things are worth slowing down for.