Splatch of Assorted Musings

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Scattered, mostly trivial musings. Just need to get these thoughts out of my head and out of my "drafts" folder….

  • An audience member gets nervous if he senses the speaker is nervous. Hence, as a speaker, the best way to put the audience at ease is to yourself be and appear at ease.

  • Annoying: people who talk slowly most of the time. Talking slowly at times can be a great way to emphasize something, or to occasionally come across as profound, but a default pace of slowness I find insufferable.

  • Without wanting to further the "brilliant guy who hasn't showed in three days" stereotype…men I know who are metrosexual or spend lots of time thinking about their fashion / grooming are usually not very smart. Similarly, people who make spiritually a big part of their identity tend to be fuzzy thinkers. (I know, I know, generalizations are dangerous, plenty of exceptions, etc etc.)

  • Like every other sentient being, I find excessive name-dropping annoying and a sign of insecurity. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't effective at conveying success or importance — someone's proximity to power does usually mean something.

  • Why do pilots always announce the direction of the wind? Any regular flyer knows what I'm talking about: the pilot comes on with about 20 minutes left in the flight and says, "We're about 20 minutes away from San Francisco's International Airport. It's a beautiful day there, about 68 degrees and winds out of the west at 6 miles an hour." It's always those two facts: the temperature and the wind. Why do they say the wind? This is irrelevant to the passengers. I understand why the pilot wants to know this info. But passengers, inasmuch as add'l info is going to be given, would be more interested in tomorrow's forecast, temperatures of other neighboring cities, what the weather has been earlier in the day, or chance of precipitation. Anything. Wind speed and direction, not so much.

  • Side projects needn't make money. The experimental value alone is worth it.

  • People with learning disabilities should get extra time on tests but their special status ought to be known by the evaluators of the results. Currently, a college does not know which SAT scores came from an extra-time exam.

  • Gossip is a form of social bonding. To tell someone a secret, or something juicy, is a way to build closeness with the person. Of course, it's an awfully lazy way to bond!

  • Why don't people wear shorts in India or Ecuador? In both places, even on hot days, no locals were wearing shorts when I was there.

  • How the hell do people deal with time zones on their calendar? I schedule all events in local time and keep my computer time zone on Pacific Time. If I schedule a meeting in Denver next week, I enter it under the setting Pacific Time but at the local time the actual meeting is happening. E.g.: 2 PM MT meeting on Tuesday goes in my calendar as 2 PM and I don't change my time zone as I travel (otherwise all entries would be knocked up an hour).

  • Ever had this happen: you describe your position to somebody you respect, and they reply, "I agree!" and go on to "reinforce" your argument…except that you discover during their reinforcement that they don't actually agree. They misunderstood you. Do you correct them and say, "No, actually, wait, you don't agree" or simply move on? Oh, the high stakes of social interactions!

  • Many big companies interview potential candidates by having 5-6 employees interview the candidate for a half hour or hour each. If a candidate has a set of talking points, he can dish them out each time. I prefer one trusted person going deep with the candidate for a couple hours.

  • Even in this advanced state of civilization, when I'm on the road, I find my days animated by the primal hunt for food, water, and a bathroom. I feel I'm always hungry, thirsty, or needing to pee. And yes, I understand these things are connected!
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Thanksgiving Time: Thanks Dad and Mom

Posted inLife6 Comments on Thanksgiving Time: Thanks Dad and Mom

In this post I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: express gratitude to my parents and articulate some of the things I've learned from them during my brief existence. Why now? First, Thanksgiving will be soon upon us and expressing thanks is the name of the game. Second, when Tim Russert tragically died a few months ago, there were plenty of touching articles about his relationship with his father (documented in his book Big Russ and Me) and on that day I vowed to write this post. Third, over the years my mentor Brad Feld has written movingly about his father and mother and inspired me to do the same. What follows are informal comments which seems appropriate given that the learning is not over!

Dad

Dad has taught me the value of hard work. So many people talk about hard work. Yet actions speak louder than words. There's no better way to internalize the hard work habit than to witness it first-hand as a kid every day growing up. In building a successful career and life for himself, Dad embodies the value of focused perseverance.

In addition to work ethic, Dad's writing and speaking skills have taken him far, and he's shared those gifts with me. Dad taught me how to write. In the early days of my fledgling business career, I showed him literally dozens of drafts of business plans, memos, brochures. On each page, he deployed his red pen to suggest ways to make the writing more economical and precise. Dad prized clarity above all, and so from age 12 on I have been pushed to articulate my thinking in as straightforward a manner as possible.

I've also learned from Dad what it means to be serious about something. You can't be "serious" about everything, so choose wisely which things deserve your focus and then hold yourself to high standards when pursuing them.

Dad's taught me intelligence matters but effectively communicating the fruits of your intelligence matters more, that dreams and imagination are nice but one must be grounded in the messy realities of life, that most any scenario can be analyzed by evaluating options, costs, and benefits, and that, through it all, you must never surrender your sense of humor. Seinfeld, after all, was the one TV show that we were encouraged to watch growing up.

Dadbensandiego_small (Dad and me in San Diego, December 2005.)

Mom

Mom was the central figure in my childhood. As a kid I went to museums and parks and the library with her. Throughout the adventures she imparted valuable life skills. She taught me how to shake someone's hand and look a person in the eye. She taught me how to sit at a dinner table and be courteous. The little things.

When I began expressing business interests, Mom didn't push me back to "normal" activities, but neither did she irrationally cheerlead like many moms I see. She was happy if I was happy, a sentiment that's easy to talk about but extremely hard to believe, let alone convey, as a parent.

Mom has taught me about frugality, about doing more with less, about how to use coupons at the supermarket and find wearable clothes at Goodwill.

An intellectual through and through, Mom has showed me the pleasures of unleashed natural curiosity. She reads more than anyone I know and brings to bear an outstanding command of history, art, and literature. As a student, she lived overseas and through her example I took an interest in traveling, now one of my greatest passions. Together we delight in the mysteries of other cultures.

The life of the mind aside, above all, Mom has taught me that heart is more important than brain and that who you are matters more than what you know or do. She's taught me that a rich interior life can sustain a person through stretches of solitude. And that a strong family is the best way to feel a little less alone in the world.

Dad, Mom: I love you. Thanks for being there for me every step of the way for my first 20 years on this planet.

Momandmejapan_blog  (Mom and me in the Japanese alps, June 2006.)

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In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused

Posted inPhilosophy4 Comments on In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused

I’m in the (freezing) midwest this week to keynote a couple of events and see friends. During Q&A someone asked whether I feel confused about what’s happening on the macro-economic and political front and how that affects how I plan for the future. Here’s the essence of what I tried to say:

I distrust anyone who says he can predict the future or anyone who is overly certain about anything. I am uncertain about most things that are going on around me — especially at a macro level, but also on a personal level, where almost daily some of my intuitions about what will happen get mugged by reality. I plan and think about the future a great deal, but no matter how much I plan, shit happens. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I think we lie to ourselves about how in control we are. Chaos rules. Randomness rules. Emotions grip us. I’d like to think I posses a kind of inner calm that helps me make rational decisions day-to-day. I know I’m stable and confident (sometimes too confident) and, most of the time, relentlessly optimistic and happy. But I’d be lying if I said this amounted to a high degree of certainty about where the world is headed or even what in God’s name I’ll be doing in five years. I suppose I see the more enlightened among us as having achieved a certain comfortableness with uncertainty / confusion.

I would add that if you don’t regularly feel utterly confused, if you don’t occasionally feel like you’re treading just above water, if you don’t ever feel misunderstood, then you probably aren’t living in life — you’re just observing it.

The “living in life” concept comes from Joan Didion, whose quote to this effect I reproduce in the Introduction of my book. It’s from her UC Riverside commencement address:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is ncessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

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Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”

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Just finished Gladwell’s latest book Outliers. It was a fun read but not sure I would have bought it on my own (I read the pre-pub galley).

I would say more but I cannot match Tyler Cowen’s very interesting review, do go read it.

Here’s my delicious tag for Malcolm Gladwell.

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Main Side Effect of Some Drugs: Identity Confusion

Posted inHealth / Fitness10 Comments on Main Side Effect of Some Drugs: Identity Confusion

It’s astonishing how effective pharmaceuticals are today with only very minor side effects.

But there’s one side effect yet solved and I suspect it’s the most potent for some drugs: the identity confusion of whether the you on drugs is really “you.”

For drugs that deal with personality issues or depression, I imagine even a successful patient must grapple with whether their newly improved state is artificial. (Artificial in a more serious way than the effect of myriad everyday things like coffee.) Am I really happy or is it just the drug that’s tricking me into thinking so?

If the goal is to have people take medication that can help them while also minimizing in their own minds the fact that they’re on medication, maybe these drugs could induce temporary amnesia immediately after swallowing the pill? The problem is that you need to know you’ve actually taken it!

Bottom Line: We’ve made remarkable progress in eliminating the biological side effects of anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs, but still have to figure out how to deal with the assorted identity and self-understanding issues that can bedevil medicated patients.

(Note: I have never been on any these drugs so I’m speaking from observation not experience.)

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