a blog by hewbrocca
I have become a regular reader of Seth Godin’s blog, partly just because he actually posts something every day and partly because some of those things are truly awesome.
Yesterday’s entry falls in the latter category. You can read it there but the gist is:
Points for successful prioritization. Points for efficiency and productivity. Points for doing work that matters.
No points for busy.
I need to do a better job of remembering this…
I find myself writing snarky comments about my father from time to time. Dad probably would have understood, and he’s no longer around to object anyway. Even so, I feel some obligation to paint a more complete picture of the man who was for me a model both of what to do and what not to.
Facts about Dad:
There’s a ton of things I could say about why Dad was the way he was or how he was brought up, but they would probably be mostly bullshit. I’m going to stick to my own recollections, which although they may also be bullshit are at least things I own.
One of my earliest — probably in fact the earliest — memory I have of Dad is of watching him walk down the street away from the house we lived in in Mount Vernon, New York (outside New Rochelle) to get his train to work. It must have been winter, because he was wearing a big black seal-skin hat he had that made him look like Lenin or an Orthodox rabbi. (He would have been quite pleased with either comparison.) I remember seeing the hat bob up and down as he walked away, and I think I have the same walk today. Mom must have been holding me up to look out the window. I guess I would have had to have been a bit over two years old, assuming it was winter of 1970. I remember his arrival home always being a joyful thing for me — we had a kind of connection that way that seems very special to me when I look back on it.
Dad was lucky (we thought years later) that whatever variety of diabetes he had somehow did not completely incapacitate him. Although he was insulin-dependent from age 9, he was able to get through the day with regular injections and didn’t usually have too much trouble managing it. Occasionally though he would screw up and take too much insulin or not eat enough, and that (if it went too far) could result in something my brother and sister and I learned to spot well before he saw it coming: an insulin reaction. Imagine the worst case of low-blood-sugar shakes you have ever had and multiply it by a hundred — that’s what this is like. It would make him irrational, sometimes manic, sometimes just weird, and then end in a blinding horrible headache or a diabetic coma. Mom would shout at us to bring sugar or honey or chocolate from the kitchen and we would run like our lives depended on it to do that… which in a way they did.
I realized much later that other boys didn’t learn their fathers were fragile and vulnerable until well into adulthood, if even then. I learned it almost as soon as I could talk, as did my brother and sister. I think it tainted all of us in different ways, but I know I grew up feeling the weight of that vulnerability on my skinny shoulders. Miraculously, Dad never wrecked a car or passed out in a public place or did any of the other things that could so easily have happened had he had one of these fits at exactly the wrong time, but the thought that he might just lose it at any point never really left me.
Dad grew up amid great expectations. His mother was certain, I am sure, that he would be a brilliant and successful man at whatever he chose to do. He was just astonishingly articulate, in a way that made people think he was capable of anything and understood everything. (He wasn’t, and he didn’t, and that initial misunderstanding on the part of his audience was always a big problem.) Naturally he found his way into the law, which he both loved and hated, because despite his brilliance he was destined never to succeed at it. I think we would recognize now that he suffered badly from ADHD and being “on the spectrum,” and in later life from depression. In any case, he seemed incapable of organizing himself to finish anything, including important things like getting briefs filed on time. You know, stuff you expect your lawyer to do for you.
I’m going to write more about Dad later, but to close this introduction I will replay one scene that I think he might regard as his finest moment. Dad’s two great loves were choral music and his children, and he was a gifted conductor if an imperfect father. At any rate, near the end of his life — he was 63 — my sister Susie got engaged. Dad already had cancer and he must have known he was on borrowed time. Nonetheless he got himself out to California from Atlanta for the wedding, and rehearsed and conducted my brother Jeff and me and two of my sister’s bridesmaids singing the Durufle “Ubi Caritas” on the beach in Monterey. We did a fair job of it, except for the bit when I almost cried. Nine months later he was gone.
I should have cleaned my espresso machine this weekend. I normally do without fail every other weekend, but I got wrapped up in this Hackathon and failed to prioritize it. Result: my espresso this week doesn’t taste as good as usual. It’s not that big a deal, but it builds up, and as stale flavors increase in the coffee it becomes more and more noticeable — and makes me more and more annoyed with myself for not following my usual routine.
My dad used to quote famous pianist Artur Rubinstein on this — it went something like
If I miss a day of practice, I know it.
If I miss two days, the critics know it.
If I miss three days, my audience knows it
(Turns out this was probably either Franz Liszt or Anton Rubinstein, hilariously, and is nowhere attributed to Artur Rubinstein who was not related to Anton. Dad was not one to let silly facts get in the way of a good story.)
Anyway something similar applies to the coffee machine: The longer I go past the regular cleaning date, the more people can tell the coffee has nasty stale overtones.
Unsurprisingly, I am going to use this as a metaphor for life. People require regular maintenance, cleaning, and refreshing. If they don’t get it their work becomes stale and unpalatable. I’m pretty good about remembering to provide this kind of thing for the folks who work for me, but not so good about providing it for myself. Not that I don’t take plenty of vacations (I am famous for this), but between them I have a bad habit of just never stopping.
There are so many things to do, and so little time to do them in…
I spent the weekend at a Hackathon. I mean fortunately I didn’t spend the entire weekend there, unlike the participants who actually in fact did spend the weekend trying to produce some decent code, taking catnaps on the floor in between work sessions. No, I am much too old to do any productive work this way, but I did spend a lot of time there talking to some very smart young people who were trying to solve interesting problems and competing to win prizes. My employer Red Hat was one of the sponsors of the event, called Tech Together, and from our standpoint it was a great success — we have signed up I believe five interns for this summer, possibly more, and we learned a lot about how to make the event more successful for us in the future.
The interesting thing about this particular Hackathon is that it was restricted to people who prefer to be referred to as “she/her.” There are lots of good reasons to have a Hackathon so devised, an important one being that young people who prefer the same pronoun I do (“he/him”) are so goddamned obnoxious and horrible in large groups. (I say “are” without speculation as to the reason why, although being a staunch relativist I think it’s mostly just the way us he/hims are socialized.) At any rate, Hackathons restricted to she/hers provide participants a way to work in groups, learn, and compete without some he/him dominating the conversation, keyboard-barging, and otherwise impeding the group dynamic. The teams involved actually do write useful code and solve interesting problems, and my guess is they become more confident in their own abilities and meet a bunch of other interesting people taking a similar path in life.
There was one aspect of Tech Together that struck me as problematic, though, and to be honest I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The point of a Hackathon, for the participants at least, is to compete to win prizes. Some of the prizes are quite substantial — Microsoft gave away like 5 X-Boxes, for example — and worth competing for. Yet I found Tech Together’s overall vibe, from the name on down, was mostly about inclusiveness and “Isn’t this great that we’re all here together you are all so amazing.” It very much did not feel like it was about “Our team is going to kick all your asses and win this thing.” I think we can take it as a given that she/hers are every bit as competitive and even cutthroat as he/hims, so why sublimate the competition part? I suppose it is a natural consequence of trying to make the event a protected space, which is absolutely a good thing… but could we have a protected space, that nonetheless still has a little ass-kicking going on inside it?
I think what I mean to say here is that finding the right approach to rectify an imbalance — like the ridculous “she/her” deficit in tech — is subtle. You have to provide a space where people can achieve, without feeling like their achievement was only made possible by having the space. To that end, I’d like to see a little more explicit acknowledgement or even encouragement of the competitive aspect of Tech Together. Let the winners come away feeling like they have triumphed; it will make the losers leave determined to return the next year and crush everything in their path.
