Category: Writing

I helped a couple of my colleagues use the the first O in John Boyd’s OODA (Orient, Observe, Decide, Act) today, and it was a joy.

I’m often asked several times how I am able to connect with people fast (I don’t think I do, but that’s a different story). It was a great opportunity today to observe myself apply it in practice. After the meeting ended, my colleagues shared their observations of my behaviour. I shared how I was responding to our interviewee.

I’ve seen how powerful a combination of tech and people skills can be to drive change. The eclectic bunch of people I work have very strong tech skills. A smaller subset of them are exceptional at both. In the next few weeks, I’m hoping to show those who want to learn how to hone their people skills. In exchange, they’re teaching me the harder tech skills.

It’s indeed a joy to be able to learn communally. Ben Franklin did this centuries ago with his Junto. Mastermind groups and MOOC’s replicate some of that magic. Creating my own Junto, and learning from them has been the highlight of my work the last four years. Collaborating with a small group to scale it is a mission worth pursuing. I’ve taken the first step in that direction today.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”

The ambition or desire to want more is probably a uniquely human trait.  That trait has driven so much of my own behaviour over my lifetime, and caused both great fortunes and misfortunes. If I’d have kept an honest account, it’s likely to have caused more of the latter.

In my observations of the people around me, most of them ordinary folks, and from the  writings of some philosophers/writers, contentment is a trait more closely aligned with happiness than ambition or achievement. The more pickled I am by the years, happiness is by far the most preferred feeling. Know when or what is enough, and being okay with saying it to myself, is a skill I’m only just beginning to learn. It’s a liberating feeling.

It’s been a quick month into 2022, and the bodies of resolutions are piling up by the road to good intentions.

Work:

There’s no way to sugarcoat the reality of how quickly things can and do change.  Within days of getting back to work after three weeks or so of holidays, several people I respect have decided to pull stumps at work and take a break. The great resignation, in their cases, are from well paid jobs, not menial ones. They wanted out from the meaninglessness of it all, and to use their (at least temporary) financial cushions to put perspective back into their lives.  Kate O’Neill, in a blog post titled The Great Resignation and the human future of work, makes the point amply clear:

“the Great Resignation could be a sign that not enough people are finding enough of a sense of meaning in work.”

Bowing out of a rat-race, merely to join another one, is not an attractive proposition. The need, not merely a desire, to go beyond accomplishment, and towards contribution, is getting stronger for a lot of people I know, and it is wonderful to be a small part of their discovery.  I know that I, like everyone else, will get to the point of frustration in my organisation’s way of doing things. Until that comes about, I choose to focus on the things I can change.

Health

I finally got around to seeing a specialist about a cough that has intermittently been my companion for nearly two decades. Daily walks continue as a habit. I’ve added the 100 Day Pushup challenge to my routine. And of course it’s a challenge at the end of week 1, even though I’d gone up to week 3 in a previous attempt before giving up.  Eating better and less, moving a bit more, drinking more water are habits I want to build. Knowing how to add them to my routine (keep a bottle of water next to me, get up to go fill it, pick a fruit when I feel hungry are working slowly in my favour although not always. Yet).

Finances

Stock markets around the world are shedding the gains they made over the last two years. There’s a sense of despondency, and it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of looking at the portfolio every day (I do) and feeling despondent (I surprisingly am not!).  The housing market is hot and unaffordable for most people here in Australia.

Prof. Scott Galloway’s blog post “The Algebra of Wealth” was a timely read too, a wonderful reminder that wealth is more than mere income.

I’ve always struggled with focus. There are a ridiculous number of things I want to do well (that I can do badly now), and I’m not always sure why I want to 🙂 Prof Galloway slaps me down with three words:

Follow your talent.

Practically, in the last month, I’ve managed to get my taxes sorted, got talking to a finance professional about consolidating investments, and tidied up all record keeping to date.

The Important Stuff

My talent is in connecting. To be really good at it, I need to communicate effectively, both in writing and verbally. The only way I know to do this is with practice. That’s why I write every day. I’ve discovered the value and power of a handwritten note, preferably a legible one. Learning calligraphy has been helpful. Most benefically, it is also a meditative exercise, calms me down, makes me cogitate on the quotes or passages I’m writing and commits at least the idea to memory for recall later. In the last month, doing all this publicly has been liberating, habit-building, and sometimes the best thing to do. This will be 64th post here in 2022. I’ve journalled almost every night about things I can’t or won’t do publicly.

None of this means that I’ve gotten better at communicating, including with my kids, a constantly evolving challenge every parent faces? They do push me to think about better ways of connecting, through the things that resonate with them. (Flying a drone at the beach, combining several interests and doing it together as a family has been great fun)

Our garden is flourishing, entirely through my wife’s effort. She’s discovered her talent, and the energy she exudes while doing it gives me the energy I need to work on things I can to keep our household going.

I’ve read a few books this month:  Richard Feynman (What do you care what other people think?), Donella Meadows (Thinking in Systems), Gary Provost (100 Ways to Improve Your Writing), Seth Stevens-Davidowitz (partly read Everybody Lies), John McPhee (in the middle of Draft No. 4).  Keeping reading on  Feedbro has let me stay focused on reading/saving/sharing which I’ve done copious amounts of!

I’ve learnt how to use new digital tools or get a bit better at using the ones I know: Notion, Github, RStudio, Markdown & Xaringan to build HTML slides, CSS.  I’ve learned how to, and repaired and rebuilt two MacBooks.

For the community radio station, I wrote up a strategy plan, reviewed and tidied up finance plans, integrated a payment gateway on the radio station’s website, created a brand new sponsorship/ad pitch document, arranged the Board Meeting, gave ideas on how the presenters could be publicised, and a bunch of other things.

Blows my mind that I also spent, on average, 4 hours on my phone throughout this month.

***

The one article I think is worth reading over and over again was shared by my friend and manager early this month. Titled Time Billionaires, it offers a frame to look at the one resource that every one of us has in a very different light.

If you had the opportunity to switch places with Warren Buffett, would you do it? You could be one of the richest people in the world. But you would also have to be 90 years old.

Dan Olson’s counterpoint/takedown/rant
about NFT’s goes on for 2 hours. In an exhaustively researched video, he paints his narrative about why he feels so viscerally about Web3.0/Crypto/NFT and everything it represents. I procrastinated on my taxes project this afternoon, and watched it this evening.

What that did, besides give a very strong counterpoint to the optimism about decentralisation that I am exposed to every day, was also make me think about what really drives me and makes me feel at my strongest. While technology can make connections easier, it still requires human intuition about what can connect, and then – more importantly – making those connections happen. Connecting ideas/people/things is what I love doing without too much effort (or it seems like that), and I’m never tired of doing that either.

Configurations and combinations – that’s what I love thinking, doing and spending time on. With a couple (or more) other talents that I am average at, I combine and configure that strength to help people succeed. And that is satisfaction enough.

Riff on Enough tomorrow. I feel it’s important enough to reflect only for a while.

After two years of growing his hair well past his shoulders, the little lad went in for a ‘trim’ to a salon with his mum. He’s been talking about it for a few days, since he’s starting in a new school in a couple of days. He had asked my opinion a few times, and getting a ‘haircut’ was simply unacceptable to him (and my joke about getting one like mine was heresy!)

And so it began late this afternoon, the hairy saga.

Bad haircuts are rarely disastrous. Even when they seem so, it’s only temporary until the hair grows back (or you get a wig). That wisdom comes after years of haircuts (or balding, as I am).

For an adolescent though, they are worse than disastrous. They turn into a a time sink. The haircut, done by a young lady who may have thought him a girl, does accentuate his dimples and give him a sharply feminine look. He’s been staring at himself in the mirror, rearranging his crowning glory, constantly asking both his sister & I to opine on his appearance. The sunk cost – twice what it would cost at his (not recently) usual barber – has driven a different conversation between his mum & I.  Lots of perspectives have ensued, including a friend who’s staying over and has no background to this saga adding fuel to the hairy fire.

Tomorrow will see him get another haircut – and many internet searches are now being conducted to see what might be suitable.   Peace may finally reign in the household on this subject.

After years of ignoring the cough that rears its head ever so often, I finally saw a respiratory specialist today. My GP was stern about getting it checked out.

I was a few minutes early to the clinic. I was almost immediately impressed by the teamwork of the two ladies at reception, both in how they’d organised themselves and their workload, and how they coordinated phones and patients with finesse.  I had forgotten to take my referral document, and within minutes she had ensured a copy was on her records with a quick, warm, and persuasive phone call. Every patient was seen to with surgical precision, all while the phones kept constantly ringing. They both had a sense of humor, and the banter was hilariously entertaining even though I pretended to be buried in my phone.

My specialist was late – the explanation was printed at eye level “all doctors work at the hospital and are on call so they may be delayed or may take a call when they’re with you” – so for a while I became the only person in the waiting room with them.  The door burst open, and a lady with a voice like a foghorn, muted a little by the mask she was wearing, filled the room. She dropped the bags she was carrying on the floor, ripped off her mask, adn demanded to know where the pyschologist’s practice next door had gone.

The older lady at reception, K, calmly responded that they’d moved years ago. No she didn’t know where to. No there was no forwarding address. No  she had not told any of her patients either, based on the number of people who had come in the last year asking for her. Yes it was too bad that she’d moved. Yes, she must have been a really a good pysch.  Foghorn kept going for a while, calling someone to ask if they remembered the pysch’s last name. The lady she’d called clearly had a lot, and enough of Foghorn too, and you could hear it in her voice coming through the speakerphone.

This went on for a while, until K, dropped her voice and called attention to the fact that there were patients in the room behind Foghorn, and could she keep her voice down please? Plenty of apologetic noises later, Foghorn finally figured that she was going to have to do her own investigation to get the help she needed, and left as noisily as she had entered.

The three of us burst into laughter when the door closed. And in laughter, a small moment of connection at a human level. They told me how the incessant phone calls and the sometimes challenging patients made the day go by faster, kept them out of sin (the chocolate bars in the hard-to-get-to-drawer) and gave them stories to tell each other.

A small moment of human connection that they included me in.

Ah, and the specialist was one of the best explainers I’ve come across in a long time. I understand some of the possible causes for my cough, and more importantly, an aspect of my own physiology that I am starting to see in new light (or should I say hear with a new sound?)

“You don’t get better, you grow.” Bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius

This quote caught my attention this afternoon as I caught up on my newsfeeds. (note to self: OpenCulture about French music teacher Nadia Boulanger.)  Six simple words that encompass a great many philosophies or mental models of the world and approaches to work or hobby or art and so on.

Weeks of writing later, scattered here and in my journal and in Notion and elsewhere, words are flowing easier. Not better :), pun intended. The growth has been in quantity, not necessarily quality. The growth has been in finding topics easily. The growth has been in finding, no, making time to write. The growth has been in confidence that I do have a voice that I can raise and make a little sense. The growth has been testudineous – at the pace of a tortoise. Barely discernible day by day, it has been making its presence felt in my fingertips.

It appears in my calligraphy too –  in the strength in my fingers, in how I’m holding the pen, the hairlines I’m able to write, the pressure on paper, the consistent slant angle, and so on. Learning is as much about study of form as it is of practice, and it’s something I suppose I’ve not focused on as much this sprint as I wanted.

Growth. Not just a mindset, although it might start there. Showing up. Doing what needs to be done consistenly even when I don’t feel like it. It no longer is a feeling, but a habit, like brushing teeth. Going back to the basics is what I can do, and I am the kind of person who does go back to the basics. That’s how you become a professional.

and here’s Jaco, accompanying the mid-week reflection 🙂

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.