Well-Meaning Idiots

For too long I gave other people, collectively, way too much credit. While I had this pretentious habit of thinking in Capital Letters, I had this more troubling tendency to Believe that somewhere there were these Someones that actually Knew The Right Way things Should be Done. Maybe it was the Roman Catholic upbringing...

Maybe it was just growing up in Texas.

The trip from 20 to 30 was a slow spiral from coffee-shop idealist to bar-stool cynic. Grand Ideals dropped into lower case and Big Ideas slipped into what was available that night. Intellectually, I went relativist, subjectivist...I have even stood accused of being existentialist. But here's the weird thing...while my head let go of the big ideas of Right and Good and God and Beauty, I never gave up the notion that there were people out there that had, in fact, figured it all out. Sitting in sumptuous deep leather chairs somewhere, where dim lights still reached high ceilings, Capitalized Words Were Still Bantered Over Priceless Cognacs.

And stuff.

I guess I had abandoned the idea that it would be me that would ever decipher those big things, but I never let go of the idea that some folks actually could, perhaps even had. I hadn't given up on the idea that some thought in capital letters, I had just given up on the idea that I was one of them. I remained an idealist. Just a really, really shitty idealist.

Maybe it was just leaving Texas for California.

This is not a new tale, merely my own pulling back of Oz's Curtain, of busting through a candy factory roof after witnessing marvelous rivers of chocolate .

But from 30 until now, well, I have seen some things. I have met a couple Oz's, chatted up a Wonka or two, even hyped a couple dirty rivers until we all believed them chocolate. Some days I am even expected to slip behind the curtain myself and flick the levers that sustain the illusion. Truth be told, I think conspiracy theorists give humanity too much credit. That level of complex, sustained evil may simply be well-beyond any concatenation of us goofballs. Look, even the Wall Street weenies couldn't make it 30 years, and the best and brightest of Hollywood couldn't even bring a solid TV conspiracy show to a coherent close. Even when given a second chance.

The fact is, The Illuminati, well, they're just a bunch of well-meaning idiots.

They is us.

I've riffed on the humans-ain't-smart-enough-to-pull-off-a-Dan-Brown-novel theme for a few years now, completing my own personal lower-casing of pretty much the entire evolution of humanity. It's kept my humility on a working par with my views of those above me. But I have been taken down several pegs lately by my kids that are spinning up their views of what they wanna to be when they grow up, and their stories are all written in Title Case. (Even when the Big Idea is driving a street sweeper because if the roads aren't clean the cars will crash...)

And cynics make for shitty dads.

So, a million blog posts lie in how I have come to feel a little more worthy of these Big Red Letter conversations with my half-size muses, but let me cut to the chase. I'll loop back over time, but it goes a little something like this...

A king needs his jester . I'm beginning to believe the best kings could play both roles.

(The best queens probably already knew this. I expect them to tell me so.)

And really, in the end, is it all really anything more than something like...

Find excellence. Then dance.


(And PS, my sister is much better at this mix than I. Always has been. Hats off and a deep bow to K8.)

Creases

I just stumbled badly through a rare perfect moment.

My kids somehow conspired to grant me a peek at my life through their eyes (it involved dancing and chocolate and balloons and rain) Then they each faded lightly, allowing me a glimpse of their hearts each rising and falling softly, breath by breath...asleep in a warm house solid against wind and, I think, a little thunder.

And as the world might have it, I had this amazing opportunity to think these moments through, feel them all, with a drink on a porch fingering a nice cigar, feet bare in a welcome, drenching spring rain.

And even then, my mind wandered to other moments. Tensions building to all the things that might and should and could come next. A couple thoughts of what I might want this all to lead to when it all came down, when I figured it out, when I finally and responsibly grew the hell up...

And something caught me raw, the snag of a third-day razor, realizing I had just lost some of this moment in pursuit of...something not...here. Something else. This moment had faded into wonders of what other moments at other times in other places might somehow be like.

Unique shimmers of this moment melted into the gray of some lengthening shadows.

I am starting to think that my core issue is less that I am not doing enough and more that I am really just not good at recognizing those cameo moments when all I have done might be paid back in wonder and joy. I really need to fix that.

I need to unfold myself.

Thin Peanut Butter

I've been whining a lot lately, both loudly and, for the most part, indiscriminately.

Frankly, I think I have even started to annoy my dog who now spends most of his time visiting various neighbors around the cul-de-sac, leveraging his fuzzy puppy-eyed evil for table scraps and a relentless game of fetch. He comes home from time to time, but his expanding social options seem to have made him even more cocky when he now begrudgingly drops by to sleep.

The whining snuck up on me. Things, all in, aren't bad. But they surely aren't simple. I work for a company in a pretzel of a financial mess, while many of the people and things I value right now fold up on each other in some absurd origami. Not...bad. But not...simple.

So I whine. But I'll get over it.

I am, however, getting a whiff of something different in the nose of this whine. In the past, when the tannins grew tart, I would revel in the inevitable transcendent moment when enough things reached near-crisis level that I could blow off any one of them because some other one had reached an even sharper peak of crapitude.

Realizing this moment had always been amazingly liberating. I would find this clarity to look at one pseudo-crisis and, instead of overreacting, conjure some what-if, some scenario in which some other frenetic demand was even more urgent. What-if...(aha!)...that?!?! And what-if I didn't, couldn't deal with this fire drill right now?

Just that pause would bring perspective, and I could often just walk away from it all, letting things I had spun up to into the silly to resolve themselves on their own.

[Insert your own details here.]

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But this whine around, I am finding the usual transcendence a bit troubling. My normal course is to trade one worry off against another, put one panic off for another that is just an inch more red...lather, rinse and repeat...until ya have done a cycle or two through all that ails ya. the Irish Spring moment is a slap upside the head with the reality that if each could be trumped by another, perhaps none was as serious and urgent as I had originally overthought. Peace and calm slipped in where self-righteous needs to solve and fix had once flipped all my light switches on.

But this time, I'm not feeling so sanguine. My day job has long, long been more than somehow...external to me, the people and commitments and rippling implications on others are now settled in as core. At 4, 4, and 6, my kids are now...like...people. Real, live personalities, at least two stronger than mine. And I seem to have gotten over enough of my own personal shit to find some ports open for family and friends that have been over-secured for far, far too long.

So here's the deal. This time around I am not liking the idea of letting the emotion and importance and urgency of things fade, one trumped by another. I want to linger and learn, pause and ponder, stay and immerse myself, finally, in some select few. I guess the lesson is that up until now I have been spreading myself way too thin peanut butter. I guess before I thought that I had my ways of dealing with all that, sticking and moving, never being too deep in any one thing that I couldn't get deeper in another until in some MC Escher fashion in looped back on it all to restart at zero.

But you know, I think I am done with that.

If I have so many godammed important things going on that any one could trump another at almost any time, I think I can do the math to prove that, in fact, not a single one of those things is, actually, godammed important. At least important...enough.

But, and here is the kicker. I can point to three beautiful things currently splashing in baths upstairs right now that...each in themselves...prove that selfish argument wrong. Dead wrong.

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Back in the dot-com days -- and it may still be there -- there was this groovy-ass deli at a poorly engineered Market Street intersection in SF where all the tattooed with pipe-sections-as-earrings bike messengers would hang, as hip in their heads as Kerouac used to be up-the-street and back-in-the-day. More importantly, this deli made this sandwich...This Sandwich...this amazing sandwich that took two sweet slabs of some sort of wheat and put them top-and-bottom around a full inch of peanut butter, buttressed by uncut slabs of banana. Dessert, lunch, decadence...health food? Whatever. Just perfect. That...that...my friends...

...that is peanut butter.

[Insert metaphor here.]

Rainy Day

The cool thing about writer's block is the completely lightning-strike way that you inevitably get shaken out of it.

I started this blog oh-so six-or-seven posts ago to lean on outside pressure to keep me writing, and more importantly, to keep me writing in ways that, well, didn't suck -- or were at least on a trend away from that-which-sucks. But it hasn't really worked. The first posts were, alas, really riffs on the few ideas that have stuck in my head in the decade or so since I last took writing seriously. I cranked them out, flashed a wry smile, and then found that everything I was writing -- and I have actually been writing quite a bit -- since my last post was falling flat. Attempts to opine led to no point. Introspection slid into self-importance. Even the humor seemed mean-spirited.

Sometimes writing flails because the mouse-trap mechanisms that connect mind to keyboard are all fubar. Sometimes writing flails because the keyboard is just faithfully tapping out the notions of a head that is all fubar. I think writer's block is the cheap way of blaming the writing skills for not having anything to say.

I have had nothing to say.

With all the historic events swirling around me, I have only reactions, not opinions. I feel like a brontosaurus looking up from a pleasant over-sized frond after hearing a massive boom, wincing at a brilliant flash, and then thinking wtf? as the last thought of my species. (And even there I pop an over-stated metaphor...)

When I take the step and admit the fact that I don't know what is next, that the world right now is too close, complex and concentrated to have any rational insights of any use...well, then I turn to my reactions and they are...limbic.

So tonight, I'm getting that there are times when getting through shit might mean that you don't try to put too many words around said shit.

So tonight, I am getting that my trash-bin writing sounds self-absorbed...because it is. And that is not a problem with my writing, it is a problem with the writer.

So tonight, I am learning that sometimes getting through things requires a little distance from those things until it is done. Real-time is not always necessary. Or good.

So tonight, I am thinking that I never really knew why my dad taught me to save for the rainy days, to put things aside for when life stumbles. I've never really stumbled. I've never felt a rainy day that was anything more metaphorical than wet.

So today, it rained.

And tonight, I finally admitted that it is the proverbial rainy day. And I am glad I listened to dad. Even if I never admitted it.

So tonight, I wrote.

The Father of the Man

I have no idea where the thought came from, but I have the clearest memory of the moment it did. I was 28, in Providence, and was sitting on the edge of my bed, rushing to lace up my basketball shoes, late as usual to meet friends for some pick up hoops. Suddenly, my head was filled with an image that I did not recall ever considering before, but something that has not faded since.

A simple, quick scene of me in my parents’ room, back in the day in Rochester, watching my dad lace up his basketball shoes on his way out for a men’s league. The room placed the date, and the date placed my age. For some reason quick math fired off in my head to tell me that in that image, my dad was the same age as I was…right then.

That was the first moment in my life that I could actually remember my father being my age. It messed me up for days. Where I was at 28 was surely, certainly, and without a doubt unworthy of the respect and awe that the 5-year old me could recall holding for my dad when he was my age. Pulling on those black and white Adidas high tops was the precise moment when I stopped wishing I was a kid again and resigned myself to being a grown up.

I’m a little messed up again these last few days. I have no idea where the thought came from, but I realized that Emma is the same age I was when my dad was getting ready for that basketball game; the boys are not far off either, really.

I'm feeling...like I need to get my hair cut.

For the want of pink socks...

Two recent events…

A bad morning. I woke up late to cranky kids who couldn't even decide on a flavor of pop-tarts when I had given in to my convenience over their health. The whole get-to-school system got completely fubar when I had to shave and dress with the cell in my ear to deal with some work crisis that I never really understood. Finally, after clothes and shoes fly back and forth from the top of the stairs to the foyer and back, I focused an inappropriate level of my anxiety on Emma finally getting her coat on so we can get in the car. I helped the boys, grabbed some coffee. No coat on the girl. I ask again. Get the boys in the car, buckled, back inside… No. Coat. On. The. Girl. I lose it more than I should, “Why didn’t you put your coat on yet!?!?”

And she stands toe-to-toe, gathering all of the righteous anger a 5 going on 6 going on 15 year old girl can muster and screams, “BECAUSE. YOU. DIDN’T. GET. ME. MY. PINK. SOCKS!”

I fall back on my butt on the steps behind me, open my arms, and give her a huge hug as she starts to cry. Dammit, she is right. Dammit, I am an ass.

A good afternoon. We are pushing hard at work. We are a Dairy Queen swirl of internal and external needs for change and everyone on my team wears the goofy paper hats I remember the soft serve folks wearing at the DQ next to Pennington Field back in the day. Not everyone around us, however, is down with the change. After a few months of a Godzilla vs. Rodan struggle of old versus new, a much needed infusion of cooler heads stepped up with a surprisingly effective and energizing half day session on managing change.

I am generally a pretty cold skeptic toward what often seem like scripted and overt business-psychology ruses, but in this case, breakthroughs were made. The key moment for me came later in the day when we were discussing how hard it was to get folks to buy into key messages when the resident guru stopped the conversation with an old saw. What you say and how you say it are way, way low on the priority list when crafting strong, effective communications. Start first with what you want the audience to know, feel, and do.

Know. Feel. Do.

Until you have that clear in your own head, you will stumble over what you say and how you say it. As soon as you get that set…gold. KNOW. FEEL. DO.

****

The one thing I am most trained and purportedly experienced in is communication, on many levels. The one thing, however, that I most consistently screw up and suffer grievous metaphorical head wounds from getting wrong is also…(wait for it)…communication. Home work family friends north south living zombies rocks trees and emerging life forms…I am either on or off when it comes to the words. I don’t do gray here. And I am a poor predictor of when I will actually get it right.

****

So back to Emma. In the negotiating of that day’s wardrobe, I had bartered approval of her wearing the outfit I had chosen if I would let her swap for the pink socks she had grown to love in the 8 seconds she had been considering her affections for such things. Now, the whole morning ritual includes kids getting dressed and then ceremonially gathering at the bottom of the stairs to put their socks on…together. Then their shoes…together. THEN…their coats. In the tumult of the morning, I had made it known to Emma what I expected. I had even gotten her all worked up about the importance of this grand and mighty task. But, in failing to deliver the pink socks…I had left her unable to do what she knew she needed to do, something she felt she wanted to do. I left her…frustrated. (heh.) Good on her for telling me about it.

Now back to work. Most of us are very good at relaying information. Fact known Here is transferred to the appropriate There…via email or voicemail, or (archaically) memo, or (even more rarely, in person). We deliver facts and dry knowledge with the pompous certainty that the implications are self-evident, that the desires and drives that this little factotum inherently…means…are somehow energizing from the moment they are uttered. That somehow knowing something implies caring about it, that facts imply feelings.

Even in those instances where we get all jazzed about what we are saying, and we get those around us fired up to do something about today’s bit of insight, the whole scene falls flat if there is no sense of what anyone can do about it, whether it is because the path to success is not clear or the value in making the effort just does not seem…worth it. Either way, we flatline.

So, you told someone, but do they give a shit? If they give a shit, do they know what to do about it? If they know what to do about it, do they give enough of a shit to do what needs to be done? And even if they have all that…NOW…do they have what it needs to be done?

Know. Feel. Do. If you are going to say something, anything…what do you want your listeners to know, feel, and do? And have you done what you need to ensure that the next time you say something people will care enough to do it? So you said it, do they give a shit? If they do, have you done your share to get it done?

Even if it is just getting the pink socks you promised out of the dryer…

The Hype Cycle (or, Please, Disappoint Me...)

I work with a guy who spent several years at Gartner, a research firm that tracks the business of technology. Gartner takes special interest in how and when emerging technologies will be ready for companies to lay down bets on them actually, you know…working.

The mojo behind firms like Gartner (and Forrester and Jupiter et al.) lies in their ability to quickly summarize complex technologies and the landscape of options in simple ways that even us ADD marketing folks can grasp. Forrester is famous for their wave and Garter counters with their magic quadrant. What is nice about working closely with someone from this world is that he can take our wacky ideas and thinly stretched plans and give that gloss of professionalism, make them look like we actually know what we are talking about. (I mean, of course we do…and, like, stuff.)

Gartner also lays claim to a model they have dubbed the “hype cycle,” that lays out a typical evolution of the roller coaster of perceptions a promising new technology will face in the market place. The fact that key stages of the cycle bear snark-laden labels like, “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” “Trough of Disillusionment,” and “Slope of Enlightenment” makes it clear that Gartner is not looking to be especially complimentary of the zeitgeist that tends to follow the “next-new-thang” in technology circles. Expectations rise unreasonably fast but give over to a harsh fall the morning after. Disappointment is presumed in this model.

Cynical as it may seem, the hype cycle has proven to be exceptionally prescient since it debuted around 1995. Gartner likes to tout how it was used to predict the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and annual updates of where the latest shiny toys fall within the cycle are anxiously awaited and oft-cited events. Having noodled around South of Market, dabbled in start-up ventures, and stumbled trying to get new technologies into battleship companies, I declare that the hype cycle is real.

I concede, of course, that while real, the basic mass hysteria notion underlying the concept of the hype cycle is not a Gartner original. In fact, what got me thinking a little more about this was the fact that nearly every mention of this idea leads to my Gartner alum colleague quipping that, “EVERYthing follows the hype cycle,” with a smirk revealing that this he is not trying to be especially complimentary of the fundamental order of things.

It is a cynical notion, a lemming rush to unrealistic expectations followed by an almost inevitable plunge into disappointment. The ray of hope in the model comes when cooler heads prevail and find a more reasonable, practical, sustainable role for some of these once-hyped technologies that bring real benefits to consumers and long term value to the shareholders.

The thought that takes me down the rabbit hole here swirls around whether my Gartner pal might be right in the ubiquity of the hype cycle and, if so, whether its underlying jab at inflated expectations applies more broadly as well. To put a finer point on it, we all get excited…we all get disappointed…with everything from relationships to jobs to lottery tickets to unopened FedEx. But…so what? For instance, if you take the sober rational “big company shareholder value” approach to emerging technologies, you never toe the leading edge (let alone rail grind the bleeding edge), you stake claim in being a fast follower, a conservative adopter of technologies that have already proven their value and scale. I get it. Trust me. Even the hippest of technology companies can deliver duds.

But let’s get away from the technology of business for a moment and consider that initial rush of the new. If you run a business funded by other people’s money, then being easily excitable, being one who rushes to the mere possible…these are not traits that likely make you a good steward of outside investment. Fair enough. But say we are talking about our own expectations and dreams and fears AND we grant that we are weak sauce irrational at our core, running up the escalators that would have gotten us there anyway, hoping hype this time will deliver it all, knowing that likely it won’t.  Knowing that statistics tell us beyond a reasonable doubt that we are reading too much in to what could be with that new ________________.  Knowing that we will likely be disappointed.

The Big Honking Question: knowing all that, do I go all eTrade monkey and go for it, or do I go Fortune 100 CEO and…wait it out, catch the things important to me only once they have demonstrably leveled off at the “Plateau of Productivity?” My prose betrays my preference.

My biggest regrets come from making my biggest decisions buying in markets on the Productivity Plateau, picking up the Consumer Reports best buys from among the proven and safe picks…making my decisions based on the roller coaster rides others took. Such acts are safe…transactions. Fair…exchanges, like for like. Such acts are not the stuff of dreams.

But here is the subtlety…and in this is all. The trick, I think, is not in chasing all that is shiny, no more than it is in accepting only the safe. I think it lies in something like knowing that passion and loyalty and commitment and wonder can only come from riding out the whole cycle, placing bets, being there when it is risky so you have a well of value to draw on later. That means getting on eyes open, knowing that the first hill on the roller coaster is always the highest, but also that it is the only one that has a shot at giving you the momentum to get through it all. And that sometimes it won’t. Fair enough. I need to make myself strong enough to handle that.

But, given a choice, get me high. I know it won’t last just like that, but I have to be ok with that.

So, in short…please, disappoint me. Soon. It’s the only hope in the long run.