Category Archives: Life

As part of my ongoing commitment to "bulk positive randomness" and my focus on meeting more people under 30 who are at a similar professional point as me, I participated in a retreat in Tennessee last weekend with about 15 other entrepreneurs, consultants, writers, and grad students.

Everyone was under age 30 (most under 25) and we spent three nights living in a huge house (11+ bedrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms) nestled next to the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee.

Besides a couple organized conversations and two yoga sessions (including a 30 min Laughter Yoga session which was fascinating and fun and I recommend everyone do it at least once), the weekend was totally unstructured. The itinerary was: wake up, sit around and talk to others, continue talking, eat, talk some more, eat again, talk some more, go to bed, repeat.

I was reminded that where you are can affect the quality of what you talk about. Since many of us traveled from California to a very redneck part of the South, it made us more committed to getting the most out of the experience. It also was just culturally interesting and memorable. We smoked a pig for 11 hours and ate with with real BBQ sauce. We went out for lunch one day at a place that served almost entirely meat and fried things. The accent was strong. The religious imagery ubiquitous. These new and different sights and smells colored the conversation in an interesting way, I think.

Right after arriving at the house, I was talking to a young guy about water issues and he did three things that immediately soared through my "litmus tests" for determining whether I’ll like someone. First, he took notes as we talked, jotting down book references and ideas. Second, he revealed he had a blog (usually suggests intellectual curiosity). Third, he referenced the TED Talks which is not an indicator in and of itself but suggests he probably consumes the same kind of online intellectual content as me (like Bloggingheads or BookForum or blogs in general).

I am cautious about attending events or conferences. Most conferences are a waste of time or money. There’s too much variance in the quality of the attendees, the speakers are hit-or-miss, the networking opportunities are rushed, and the actual learning (for me) could be better obtained on my own. But, like the St. Gallen Symposium or two other off-the-record events I participate in, when there’s a strong filter on attendees and when there’s an emphasis on conversation instead of dreadful "expert" panels or keynote speakers, the group dynamic among like minds can be uniquely stimulating.

My brothers and I have long had reputations as masters at coining new “lines” which catch on within our respective social circles. A couple months ago, I set up a wiki for us to track memorable lines and their origin.

I’ve always been fascinated by why certain lines catch on and others do not. The winners seem to be brief (no more than a sentence), versatile (can be used in a range of situations), and involve a good dose of sarcasm / pseudo-arrogance. Most of all, though, it’s when and how you deploy the line. Like anything, good humorists / line creators are the product of their input, and for us, the TV show Seinfeld and the situational brilliance of its lines have been a huge inspiration.

Today, I had a proud moment. Some friends and I were celebrating a 21st birthday at the very tasty, very hip, and overall very excellent Brazilian restaurant Fogo de Chao in Beverly Hills. It has the best salad bar ever and 16 different types of meats served to you by roaming waiters who carve meat onto your plate as you desire. Meanwhile, roasted bananas and cheesebread and other assorted goodies are bottomless side-dishes. The whole restaurant is all-you-can-eat.

As my friend Dave and I were raiding the salad bar, Dave — in response to me loading my plate with full size mozzarella balls and artichoke — says to me, “Ben, be careful and save room for the meat later on.” To which I respond, without missing a beat, “Hey Dave – you do your job, I’ll do mine. Deal?” It was pitch perfect sarcasm. The source for this line came from a college basketball coach who said these words in response to the statistician who tried to offer coaching advice.

After a laugh, Dave utters another serious comment, asking me, “Do you know if the bread here goes with this tomato?” I respond, drawing deep into the Casnocha Line repertoire, “Dave, you know, I don’t have all the answers. I have a lot of them, but I don’t have all of them.”

As in most things in life and business, timing is everything.

It was the start of a great dinner which capped off a memorable day. Earlier, we were in the UCLA student section at Pauley Pavilion to see #2 UCLA come back against Cal and win by one-point with a crazy Kevin Love double-pump three-pointer and behind-the-backboard Josh Shipp throw-away lay-up. A few hours later, I found myself lying on the top of a roof in Westwood tanning in 73 degree L.A. weather.

Happy birthday Dave.

***

Here’s a blog I read on humor. Here are notes from a Silicon Valley Junto discussion on how to be funny in the professional world. Humor in serious, business situations is much harder than in Saturday night dinners — but even more powerful.

Do I want to have children when I’m older? I waver from “No” to “Maybe.” I have yet to meet anyone on my college campus — or anyone close to my age — who shares my ambivalence toward having children when older. You’re not going to have kids? comes the gasp of a response, like I’m somehow letting down my race by pondering the possibility of opting out of the procreation process.

My theory is that many young folks can’t imagine married life with no children. By imagine I mean a vivid image in one’s head about how a no-child situation would actually look. Most of the adults you get to know as a kid are the adult friends of your parents. Because parents tend to hang out with other parents, your first-hand knowledge of adults consists almost entirely of other parents. In other words, kids and teens usually have minimal exposure to families without children.

In my own experiences in the business world, I have befriended several adult couples without children and seen close-up how happy they are. I have a clear image in my head of how this could work out; it feels like a real option.

Moreover, I have befriended couples who have kids and I’ve seen their careers or lives suffer. As youth we tend to hold romantic notions of parenting — taking junior to his first baseball game! buying her her first dress! — but children require enormous sacrifice, sacrifice not often paraded by parents and therefore invisible to many. When was the last time your dad told you about his hobbies left unpursued, travel guidebooks unopened, and everything else that went on pause after your birth? Never. Every parent says “It’s worth it.” Thanks to the ginormous investment of time and energy it takes to rear kids, our brains wouldn’t let us think any other way. And what kind of parent would want to guilt trip his son or daughter?

Even if, as a kid, you’re aware of the sacrifice in the abstract, it’s much different to ponder it from afar at age 19 than to actually face the brutal reality at age 29 when you’re thinking of having kids and yet just a couple years away from the promotion you’ve spent the last eight years striving for.

Finally, I have the good fortune of being free from any kind of religious or parental or societal influence pushing me toward procreation. I’m growing up in the 2000’s, not 1950’s where staying childless was considered “deviant or abnormal” according to the Chron article linked to below.

I don’t mean to imply that I’m more “enlightened” than my age-similar peers. Most people have children. I’m in the minority now, and if nothing changes (though I may very well change), I will be in the minority later. I’m just speculating as to why I have yet to find another person in college who shares my view.

Related Link: Here’s a Salon article on studies that show couples who choose not to have children are happier than those who do. Here’s a SF Chronicle article on groups such as “No Kidding!” which help childless-by-choice couples connect.

Sometimes it’s surreal that I’m experiencing first-hand that which is the subject of so many movies, articles, songs, and jokes: college life.

Last night, my close friend Andrew and I went to visit some of our friends at UCLA. We had a great time.

It started with The Terminator. After an excellent sushi dinner in Westwood (a dinner in which the real men were identified by who cleaned out the most sushi — hint: I finished off the other three plates), our friend David saw Arnold Schwarzenegger drive by in a black SUV. David waved, and Arnold waved back. I had to console Dave. He wanted a "west side" sign, but I told him to accept Arnold’s gesture as awesome in its own right.

We then headed over to a sorority house of one of our high school friends. It was my first time in a frat or sorority house; Claremont has no such things. A pretty sweet set-up: 54 girls all living in one massive house, with private cooks, an admin, and plenty of hang-out space. We were only there for 15 minutes, but even in that short period of time the door-bell rang and a member of the same sorority from Michigan State asked if she could look around. It crystallized the networking benefit of being part of a national fraternity or sorority: it’s a whole new group of people with whom you have a special connection, independent of the network from your university. (The negatives also exist, of course. I heard stories last night of some sororities forcing its pledges to strip naked and then circling the parts of each girl’s body which are sub-par (e.g. a fleshy leg or something). Truly despicable.)

Next we hit up the UCLA basketball home-opener versus Portland State. UCLA is ranked #2 in the country. We had the pleasure of seeing Kevin Love, the #1 ranked high school player last year who committed to UCLA, play his first official collegiate game. Most experts say Love has long and fruitful NBA career ahead of him. My take? I want to see his outside game. At 6′ 10" he seems small to be a center or power forward in the pros, but apparently he can drain 3’s from the outside and has unbelievable touch down low.

Sitting around a friend’s apartment later in the night, as jokes were told, arguments hashed out, YouTube videos cited, and "new lines" coined, I thought of this paragraph from my old post on Tyler Cowen’s talk in Zurich:

He said America empowers youth as influencers — college students sit around and listen to music, start fads, build web sites, etc. They may not be "working" per se, but they are contributing enormously to American popular culture. Indeed, most of our popular culture is created by young people, and this is the culture that is exported abroad. If a country cares about the influence of its culture abroad, they should ask how much power is given to youth. He noted that Latin America and Asia have huge youth populations, making it prime for a lot of cultural influence in this next generation.

So true. You put a bunch of smart 18, 19, 20, and 21 year-olds in confined space and add alcohol, and you actually get a lot of crude creative output.

Thanks Dave, Teddy, Kevin, and Andrew for a fun night in LA.

I can be highly social. I’d like to think I can work a cocktail party crowd pretty well. I love meeting people.

But I also have an introverted side which has been starved for oxygen in a college environment which places social interactions at the forefront. Alone time can be hard to come by…and I have a single!

During my gap year I had much time to myself. I lived in a condo in Boulder, CO for three months and ate many meals and enjoyed many weekends by myself. I traveled overseas for three months and sometimes went weeks without a full-length conversation with another native English speaker. I drove 5,000 miles in the month of April during my road trip / speaking tour, mainly by myself.

I like alone time because I like to think, and I can’t think hard with others around. I don’t think in real-time very well. I like alone time because I like to read and write. I write to be alone.

If I could, I’d put my life on pause and just hang out and read and write and drink bottled water. Unfortunately the chances of this happening are slim. Emails continue to fly in, professors expect me to show up at designated times, and the social scene at college is all-or-nothing.

Related Article: The Call of Solitude in Psychology Today, how solitude can increase intimacy.