My 2015 Annual Letter

One of the (only) blogs I read diligently is Farnam Street, founded by Shane Parrish. For the first time this year, Shane followed the lead of many public companies which issue an annual letter to their shareholders. I'm doing the same via this blog.

After all, those of you who read my blog are representative of all the people investing in me and my success - family, friends, colleagues, random strangers on the internet who sometimes follow me on twitter, etc. 2015 was a transformative year for me, and probably the best I've had. Aside from a little luck, it's been a stupendous year mostly because of you all. I honestly don't think I had much to do with it, other than showing up.

So first and foremost, thank you for investing your time in me throughout the year. I am grateful for your influence and caring on a daily basis. I've been doing my best to generate a return on your investment. Here's a recap.

A SUMMARY OF GOOD THINGS

The greatest result of the year, was the moment Robyn said yes to my proposal for engagement. It was truly a moment I have been anticipating my whole life, even before I knew her. It was the end of a long, slog, of a journey as a bachelor which so many folks helped me survive. Over the course of decades, people have been helping me to be more confident, mature, and persistent to find Robyn. Well friends, all your work (and patience in dealing with my shenanigans through single life) has finally paid off.

A few months later, I graduated from the Ross School of Business with a graduate degree. But the greatest result of my time at Ross was not my degree, but the great friends I made there. What's super cool is that these friends are not just interesting people to pal around with. They're thoughtful, courageous, people who have deep convictions about the world...beyond profits and being recognized for their accomplishments*.

People criticize MBA Programs for just being a two-year party where affluent people make the connections to stay affluent. Luckily, I received more than that, I'm now part of a tight-knit crew that really pushes me beyond the edge of my talents.

Some of you who know how frustrating I found business school to be, will probably be surprised by how much I appreciate what I learned there. In undergrad I learned how to think, and in my first job I learned how to work hard. In business school, I learned how to teach myself. After business school, I now feel like a learning machine because I learned how to transform myself, use deep reflection to learn from my experiences (and from other people), and developed the courage to proactively do things that are very difficult (which are the experiences you learn the most from)**.

Finally, I started a job working for the City of Detroit that has been dynamic, inspiring, and challenging in the best way. I don't like to draw attention directly to my work on this blog (it's not about me, and I don't want my opinions to be construed as the administration's), but I will say this - my colleagues and I have been pushing very hard on projects related to public safety. I'm optimistic that our labor will start bearing fruit in 2016 and the results will speak for themselves.

A SUMMARY OF FAILURES

For better or worse, my failures*** this year were small in scope and large in quantity. It all boils down to one root-cause, committing to too much. Here are the most notable examples:

• I have been an advisor to my college fraternity for several years. I recently stepped down because I didn't put in the effort to help them at all. I'm in the process of resigning my position.
• I was working on planning some events with 3 high school friends. My commitment has been hot and cold for months.
• A close friend of mine had a emotionally taxing autumn. My friend is fine now and came out of it okay, but I was not sufficiently supportive during that time. Luckily, others were there for my friend to lean on.
• I can't even count how many times I had to reply to e-mails and texts, with something to the effect of, "Sorry, I've been behind on my e-mail for months, but I'd love to get together..."

Committing to too much has always been a struggle for me. I've already started taking steps to narrow my scope and stay focused.

A SUMMARY OF WHAT I'VE LEARNED

Over the course of the year, I've tried to keep my eyes and ears open. Here are some of the more impactful observations I've had.

Real Talk
Over the past few months, I've been asking a daily question which is usually of the "it made me stop and think" variety. Friends have shared some remarkably sincere responses. I've certainly learned a lot about what really matters to others. But most importantly, I've noticed that the conventional wisdom of "people are usually averse to putting themselves out there" isn't true. People crave honest, heartfelt interactions with other people. I've been shocked at how just providing a safe-enough forum and a sincere desire to listen makes a difference.

Being Present
For some time now, Robyn and I have enforced a rule that we don't check our phones at dinner time. It's taught me how hard it is to stay focused on the moment I'm in (my mind races to work, the future, anxieties, etc.). The broader lesson here is that you have to fundamentally approach "projects" with long time horizons (like marriage) differently than shorter ones.

For long projects, you have to be present and immerse your self in every second of it.

Longer projects tend to be harder, more complex, and more important. Because of that, you can't depend on quick fixes and short sprints of intensity to get them done. You have to show up every day, ready to work without cutting corners. To make it to the end of long projects, you have to find reward in the journey and not the outcome.

How To Change A Habit
I've been obsessed with changing habits as of late...because I'm getting married, because I'm getting older (and less healthy), and because my work requires it. I don't think there's one system to change habits that works for everyone. That said, there are three absolutely bedrock principles I've discovered when trying to change a habit.

First, you have to feel the consequences of your actions swiftly, ideally immediate after the action / decision occurs. Second, you have to find a way to make the new habit a ritual and build it into an existing habit. Third, changing habits doesn't just mean forming new habits, it also means killing old ones.

A SUMMARY OF WHAT'S NEXT
Because I'll be having so much life change in the next year (i.e., marriage and a dog, eventually) I don't intend on rocking the boat too much in other areas of my life. What I do plan to do, is continue to declutter my mind, my time, and the physical space around me. I've been cutting down on facebook and TV, and reading more. I've been trying to focus on changing no more than 3 habits at a time. I've been creating systems to reflect, refocus, and recharge. I've even been trying to downsize my t-shirt drawer. I'm not done with this yet and I intend to continue it into 2016.

What I do want to do is write more. I've been struggling to blog regularly and I intend to do so at least once a week in 2016. I also have been flirting with writing a book and it's time to get started. It'll be a memoir in two parts. Part I will be a series of observations about what is unprecedented about the times that we live in now. Part II will be a reflection on the sort of world I hope our grandchildren live in. I'm excited to share more as the year progresses.

Cheers to you and yours. Let's have a great year.

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*Not many other business schools seem to have such a humble, thoughtful culture. Ross does more than others, and so does Haas.

**Being a learning machine starts with reading. The smartest people I know are all voracious readers. Shoutout to Dominik R., the most prolific reader I've ever met in person.

***I have lots of mistakes and failures. These were the ones that bothered me the most in 2015, namely because letting other people down is something that I really, really don't like to do.

Hustling Hard, Hustling Smart

In our town, you're either known as a talker or a hustler.

Talkers are the ones who have grand plans and spend hours in meetings figuring out what to do and getting "buy in". They're the ones getting everyone "on the same page" without actually creating something tangible.

Hustlers are the ones who think talk is cheap. They are the ones on the ground, getting it done. They are people of action and initiative. They're the dreamers who aren't satisfied just dreaming, they do, too.

In our town, you want to be known as a hustler not a talker, in my humble opinion. In Detroit, talk is cheap. Real Detroiters actually make things and make things happen. It's in our DNA.

I'd propose however, that there's one more category - thinkers. Thinkers are the ones who figure out the best way to go about doing something, so that the work actually results in something. It feels like a waste of time, but it's really an investment of time. 

Thinking is a slow process, but when done well it allows teams to move much faster in the long run.

What's difficult for us thinker types is convincing people that thinking isn't a waste of time. Because for straight hustlers, thinking feels a lot like talking. It's on us to make thinking action-oriented instead of passive.

A National Policy For Working Fewer Hours

I'd like to propose a hypothetical Federal law.

"For any hours worked beyond 40 hours per week (in total, across every employer and job held by the individual) the employee must be paid triple his or her normal hourly wage or effective hourly wage, if salaried."

Of course, in practice this would be difficult to pull off. But let's say it did (I know it's a stretch, but humor me). If so, it would likely discourage any employer from making their employees work more than 40 hours per week. And that - limiting our work hours in America - is an idea that's worth exploring.

To me, as much as we work in America has tremendous non-monetary opportunity costs. Here's a sample of what we could be doing if we worked fewer hours:

• Spending time with our children and families
• Exercising, sleeping, and other things to improve our health and motivation
• Participating in leisure activities which reduce stress and increase happiness
• Volunteering, and participating in civic life
• Learning or working on entrepreneurial projects
• Going to church or participating in some other spiritual development
• Shopping and participating in commercial activities

What I'm getting at is that there are lots of things we could be doing with our time that addresssocial ills we care about solving. Would kids do more homework if their parents were around more? Probably. Would we be less angry and violent if we had more time to rest and recharge? I'd think so. Would we have stronger communities if we felt like we actually had the time to talk with our neighbors? My guess is yes.

For those that care about economic arguments, I think penalizing companies for overworking employees would actually increase productivity and output. Working longer hours, particularly in white collar jobs, is a buffer that covers up bad management. If supervisors knew that they could no longer just force employees to work longer they probably would quickly learn to better manage their employees' time and only assign work that led to results. Applying a modest constraint on workers' time would cause the managers of companies to innovate their own management practices.

This is a side-note, but I also find the American tendency to wrap up our identities in our vocation to be damaging and unsustainable. If we literally weren't allowed to work so much, we would be more likely to define our lives in broader, healthier ways.

Of course, my crude, hypothetical policy of a psuedo-tax on hours worked beyond the first forty isn't the point. The point is that how much we work in America is probably damaging to our individual and collective welfare. Moreover, if we worked less, I would expect it to enhance welfare. 

I don't believe silver bullets which solve all our social problems exist. But finding a way to limit how much time we spending working is as close to a panacea as I've ever imagined.

Ideas and Unlimited Shelf Space

On the internet, it's basically free to create an idea and share it. In fact, that's what I'm doing now. In the old days, this wasn't the case. Ideas had to compete for shelf space to get in front of audiences. Now, ideas just have to compete for eyeballs.

There's a key difference here. When competing for shelf space, proprietors of ideas had to convince broadcast companies and publishers that they had ideas people wanted to hear. Moreover, if those broadcasters had a modicum of journalistic integrity, they could insist upon quality standards for themselves and for others.

Today, when idea-peddlers compete directly for eyeballs instead of shelf space, they can make money even if their ideas lack quality. After all, these peddlers can buy audiences with advertisements or with low-brow messages that appeal to humans' neanderthalic compulsions.

There are also many more ideas bombarding us on a daily basis than in previous decades. After all, If it's no longer costly to create ideas, two-bit hacks (like yours truly) say whatever they want whenever they want.

When ideas can become higher in quantity and lower in quality, it's harder to build momentum around a single (good) idea because there are so many lesser ideas to distract from it. What perplexes me is how to keep those more meritorious ideas around long enough so that they lead to action.

But maybe a way out of this cycle of distraction is getting back to to basics and propagating ideas the old-fashioned way, with authentic, in-person, interaction. And, by articulating ideas with such compelling quality, sincerity, and persistence that those who hear them can't help but talk about it with everyone they meet.

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My Lingering Toothache

For my soon-to-be family-in-law, enjoying the lake life in Northern Michigan is a yearly ritual every fourth of July. During one of the evenings of this year's trip, we ate dinner at a local biker bar. Shortly before our dinner arrived, one of my siblings-in-law and I ventured to the far side of the bar to order a drink. At the time, we were both bearded.

While we were waiting, we overheard an over-served young man trying to charm a young woman. He, of course, was not particularly charming but was trying his best. As he was conversing with the woman, he said something which compared me to a member of ISIS and how he wouldn't be surprised if I did something to harm the patrons of the bar. He was obviously trying to use hyperbole to be funny.

I gave him a befuddled, "Are you serious?" jaw-hanging glance from across the bar. He was extremely embarrassed. When I ordered my drink, I bought him a round to demonstrate I didn't have lingering ill will toward him. This of course, made him feel more foolish.

I'm not interested in making preachy platitudes about racism, prejudice, or patriotism. Rather, I share this story to illustrate why I have a barely-noticeable, but persistent, anxiety in public places. I honestly don't know if someone's going to bother me because of my race (which in my case makes me arbitrarily different from others). What's worse, is that I don't know whether someone will hassle my family or friends because I happen to look like someone they think they should be afraid of.

The slightest uncertainty of safety is what I find difficult about my racial identity - like a toothache that I have to just grow accustomed to.

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Money Shouldn't Be A Mental Model

A clever way to understand a culture, I think, is to examine its commonly used phrases. In America, we have a remarkable amount of phrases about money. Here are a few examples:

"Money can't buy happiness."
"Penny wise and pound foolish."
"Making bank."
"Money doesn't grow on trees."
"You can't put a price on ______."

I don't think the most interesting observation here is that Americans care about money. It's that we think in terms of money. Put another way, when evaluating a complex situation, the first (and sometimes the only) thing we consider is it's price in dollars. In America, money isn't just a tool we use to buy things, it's a mental model that's hard coded into our brain from birth.

I think this is problematic because as individual humans we care about stuff, for reasons beyond their economic value. We care about how things make us feel and whether they adhere to our moral code, for example. Corporations have the luxury of thinking about the world exclusively through an economic lens because they don't have flesh, bones, and feelings.

People are more complex, which is why we ought to think of things in broader terms than just their price.

What's challenging is that there are many more frameworks which help us simply understand and evaluate economic value. I'm working on mental models to evaluate things not in terms of money, and if you have any thoughts on the topic I'd love to hear them.

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Three Pre-Requisites for Intimacy

My last roommate, Divya, and I were talking about relationships a few weeks ago. During that conversation, I was vibing with her about three pre-requisites I discovered, to even be capable of an intimate, committed relationship.

First, I accepted my best self and quit trying to be my "ideal" self. No happy person can fulfill a false persona for an indefinite period of time. Eventually, with your partner, your true self will shine through. Consequently, it's practical to just be yourself from the beginning so there are no surprises.

Doing so is not easy, even though "being yourself" is proverbial wisdom. In society and culture we're surrounded by messages that talk about how to be an "ideal" lover, worker, and partner instead of ourselves. Fashion magazines, books (like Neil Strauss's "The Game"), blog posts on LinkedIn, etc. have checklists on how to be an ideal person to others. We're constantly nudged into being someone else, often subliminally. That makes it hard to "just be yourself."

Accepting my best self required me to stop trying to be the center of every social network, and constantly trying to be everyone's friend. It also required me to place less emphasis on being the best consultant at my company and considering myself a success only if I gained admission to the most prestigious graduate schools in the country.

Second, I allowed myself to feel deserving of love. After all, if you can't accept love it's basically impossible to give it. About 2 and a half years ago, everything in life was going well - I had a good salary, a good enough GMAT score, and lots of fun times with friends - but I felt guilty about it, especially about relationships. I didn't feel like I was worthy of being loved. In retrospect, pursuing extrinsic things (i.e., career, money, social status) was probably something I was doing so that I would feel accomplished enough to deserve love. I was in a terrible mental state and was driving myself to be crazier by the day.

I was lucky though, a few close friends and my family pulled me back and just gave me love without me even asking for it. They told me I was worthy of love (from other people and from God). They gave me books to read so that I could re-wire my brain. Everyone has a different process for realizing that they were worthy of being loved, and I was lucky to have a lot of support through it.

These two realizations have to come early on (or before) a relationship. My third realization came after starting a relationship with Robyn.

Third, I started to find joy in making sacrifices for my partner. Not just compromise or acceptance in sacrifice, but joy. Relationships (of any flavor) don't work without sacrifice. If they're not joyful, they aren't additive to the energy of the relationship, they're subtractive. Given the choice, why not be joyful about sacrifice? For Robyn and I, finding in joy in sacrifice was a virtuous sacrifice for our relationship.

Here's an example. I'm very messy about having clothes strewn about in my apartment. Robyn isn't ever upset with me about it, but she's definitely not amused by messy clothes. Knowing that she would rather have laundry taken care of neatly, I started to make an effort to put my clothes where they belong. This is something Robyn presumably appreciated so it made me happy. Because it made me happy, it became a habit, which made Robyn even more happy. Now, we're in an upward spiral of sacrifice and appreciation in more than just the realm of laundry. None of it would've happened, however, if either of us didn't find joy in the smallest of sacrifices.

To have intimacy, I discovered at least three pre-requisites: accepting yourself, accepting love, and finding joy in sacrifice for others.

The funny thing is, they have very little to do with "knowing what you want", "trying out lots of people", finding "the one" or other externally-focused cliches. Rather, these three truths I've discovered have to do entirely with changing yourself.

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Business Modeling for Civic Enterprises

In my last semester of business school, I completed an independent study research project under the direction of Professor Allan Afuah. Professor Afuah's research focuses on business modeling and business model innovation.

What I found is that business model frameworks are useful for private-sector executives, but have never been translated in a way that is useful for public-sector executives. The paper I wrote, translates Professor Afuah's framework for dissecting business models so that it's useful to leaders of "civic enterprises" in the public sector.

I hope you'll read the whole paper, but here's a very brief summary. Please let me know what you think, privately or in the comments.

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The Business of Urban Growth - Executive Summary

Just like private enterprises, governments must create value for their customers (i.e., residents and taxpayers) to survive. Businesses have great tools, like business model frameworks, to help them think through their strategies for creating and capturing value. Civic enterprises, however, do not have a business model framework that is tailored to their executives' needs - until today.

Professor Allan Afuah has a great framework for articulating the business models for private enterprises, which I've translated to the civic context. Afuah's components of a business model are capabilities, value proposition, customer segments, revenue model, and growth model.

Here are the key takeaways from translating the business model framework for use by civic enterprises:

• Revenue Model - Revenues models are fixed by law, and therefore relatively simple. Crowdfunding could be a supplemental revenue model worth exploring.
• Growth Model - A good proxy for "growth" could be revenues and costs of a civic enterprise's budget. There are generally only four ways for civic enterprises to increase revenues: add population, add businesses, increase individuals' wages, and increase businesses' revenues. Therefore, all growth initiatives should directly impact at least one of those four growth levers.
• Market Segments - A civic enterprise's main segments are individuals and businesses, but additional segmentation would be useful so that cities could target their growth efforts on a limited number of segments.
• Value Proposition - There's clear research on what individuals (and businesses value), but it's not as simple as jobs and/or amenities. Perception of weather and social capital are a big determinant in what people value when they move.
• Capabilities - Civic enterprises need capabilities which fall into four categories: tangible assets, intangible assets, stakeholder networks, and management systems. There is no silver bullet, all types of capabilities are needed simultaneously.

I believe that the leaders of civic enterprises will have better results by using this translated business model framework when crafting their growth strategies.

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Where Home Is

In retrospect, the most important thing I learned in Business School had nothing to do with mental models, financial statements, or innovative business strategy. Rather, it was discovering where home is.

Home is where Robyn is, where my family is, and amongst friends old and new. It's in Detroit and Rochester. It's at my grandmother's house in India. It's reading and learning. It's in serving others and taking risks. It's telling the truth and acting with honor and virtue. It's doing God's work. It's in adventures in and out of nature. It's in a notebook, a whiteboard, or a dance floor.

Home is in my vocation, not a job. It's in hard work, not in rent-seeking. It's not in headlines or awards - better results for customers and communities is reward enough. It's in friendship and fellowship, not "networking."

Now that I'm out of graduate school, the stakes in my life and at work are higher. I'm getting married in less than a year, and I'm taking a job that will be purposeful, but also very difficult. I have a frustrating debt of student loans, so I have to spend wisely every dollar I earn. Now, my actions actually have measurable consequences.

Life, in a way, has called me up to the major leagues. Starting on graduation day I finally felt that I was ready for it. 

Today, a month after graduating from Ross, I feel one more emotion that's been eluding me for years: it's good to be home. Because of my transformative time in business school, and many hours of reflection, I finally know exactly where that is.

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Reframing How I View My Job, Career

I've begun thinking about my job and career differently; my perspective has evolved throughout and because of business school. I used to think about the job that I would like, even a job that I would be good at. A job that gave me the lifestyle, purpose, happiness, and pay I wanted. My "dream" job.

In retrospect, I consider that a self-centered view of my job and career.

But, I've learned in the past few years that true happiness comes from serving others, not yourself (the data is incontrovertible). That's helped me rethink how I make decisions about my job and career.

I figure, if happiness comes from being other-focused and how I view my career is self-focused, I probably won't be happy. As a result, I've decided to view my career in an other-focused way.

Now, instead of asking myself questions like, "What kind of job will I like?", I ask myself a different question that's more other-focused. I ask myself: "In my life, who am I excited to serve? Who's the customer I care about?" This reframing has changed how I've viewed my job after business school, a lot.

I think there are a lot of legitimate ways to answer this question, and what I've found is that it's most important is to be honest with yourself.

For example, I've chosen a job where I get to serve people in the City I live in. My customers are the current and future residents of the City of Detroit. But my "customer" is also my family. I chose a job that affords me a good (not lavish) lifestyle but allows me not to travel every week. It's a job that I'll likely have stress from, but it will be one that energizes me with optimism - I won't take negative emotion back to my family.

Maybe the customers you care about are other people in your company. Maybe it's the hungry or sick. Maybe it's CEOs. Maybe it's small businesses. I don't know, only you do. But what I'm saying, is that it's worth figuring out who you care about serving rather than figuring out what you like. If you're not excited to serve your "customer", you probably won't be happy.

Like most decisions, reframing the question I asked when considering a job / career change made a huge difference.

Who do educators really see as their customers?

I’m not an educator, but let me share an insight about education that came to me while sitting in my business school class about the “Co-Creation of Value.” I’ll leave off a description of what the class is about, for now.

Think of a good teacher. I’m don’t even mean the very best teachers. I mean good ones, of which there are probably many. Those teachers, in my opinion, see their students as their customers. They create experiences which help their students learn. Moreover, they work with their students to co-create experiences which help them learn better. They adjust to students and do amazing things. They’re able to do this, because they interact with and communicate with their students every single day. There’s an ongoing feedback loop between good teachers and students. Incorporating that feedback into their teaching practice is indicative of a customer-oriented relationship.

When you look to other institutional stakeholders in schools (administrators, school board members, superintendents, policy makers, etc.) they don’t see students as their customers, the majority of the time. Of course, they claim too, but I would argue that their behavior doesn’t back up that claim*.

One piece of evidence is looking at who has the power to hold them accountable. Administrators, school board members, etc. aren’t held accountable for their jobs and performance by kids. They are held accountable by parents and voters (who are above the age of 18). Even if a student had strong feelings about those non-teacher stakeholders, they don’t have any easy mechanism to act upon those feelings. Sure, they could protest, or lobby their parents, but that’s an extremely indirect way to foster a change in their experience. Speaking, from personal experience, it’s also very hard.

The more indicative piece of evidence suggesting that non-teacher stakeholders don’t see students as their customers is how little time those stakeholders spend with students. Good administrators (of which there are some) spend time with students and incorporate their feedback, but from my observation that varies a lot across schools. The higher up the food chain you go, the less those stakeholders interact with students. This leads me to believe non-teacher stakeholders rarely, if ever, see students as their customers. They just don't spend enough time with them and really digging into understanding students' needs, directly.

This is a problem because ultimately students are the customer, they hold final power over whether they learn. So, because so many stakeholders don’t treat them like a customer, they don’t create the best solutions which help students learn.

If someone could truly create opportunities for students to be co-creative customers in their own learning and their educational experiences more broadly - beyond interactions with just individual teachers - I think it would be a game changing innovation. Why? Because customers, when co-created with, can give the firsthand feedback required to shape experiences to be better for them. Customers are the best advocates for their own needs.

A note on “good” teachers

A good friend of mine, Sam, pointed out that as a teacher he often hears that teachers treat students the least like customers and are the least likely to co-create with them. I’d personally chalk that up to all the testing and mandatory requirements that teachers have to follow. My guess is that good teachers have their hands tied when it comes to co-creating with students because if they don’t raise test scores and get through their requirements they are reprimanded. 

So it seems that even if teachers appear to not be treating students like customers it’s probably because they’re being given directives by administrators, superintendents, school boards, policy makers etc.

Of course, there are probably “good” non-teacher educational stakeholders, too. I just see co-creative behavior much less by non-teachers.

* - For the record, I’m lucky to have had many good teachers and many good administrators while I was in school, especially as a student at Stoney Creek High School. So thank to all of those wonderful educators!

The Weaknesses We Shouldn't Ignore

These days, it's fashionable to talk about building on one's strengths at work. After all, if we work primarily in teams, it doesn't make sense to try to be good at something that someone else is already much better at, comparatively. Rather, we're advised to build on our unique strengths - and not waste time on our flaws -  so that we can increase our contributions in team settings and advance our careers more rapidly.

That may be true, but this weekend's thought-provoking piece by David Brooks reminded me of an equally important truth: we must work to improve the flaws in our character.

He says:

“Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character. But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. ”

What that means to me that if we ignore the flaws in our character, we're ignoring our humanity and a responsibility to others to try to be good. Ignoring our character flaws is tantamount to allowing our core sins to fester and permeate to others.

My deepest sin is probably lust (broadly speaking) or maybe greed. That's not a "weakness" that I'm willing to ignore, even though building on strengths is what I'm "supposed" to do.

In the workplace, it may make sense to focus our efforts on building strengths. But in life - and to be fully human - it also makes sense to work on on vanquishing the deepest sins of our character.

Why I Reflect

There are some things you can learn from a book or video - like how to make sushi, the history of Puerto Rico, or the varying methods for valuing a company. I'd argue that there are other things - like leading a team, comforting others, or making decisions in a crisis - that can only be discovered through experience. I'd argue further that the most important skills for having a good life can't be learned from a book. 

It stymies me that reflection isn't a cornerstone of every learning enterprise on the planet.

Reflection is the key that unlocks tacit knowledge, the type of knowledge that can only be discovered through experience. Acquiring tacit knowledge is different than learning from a book because it takes more than memorization of the mind and body. Instead, it takes having new experiences, failing or succeeding, and internalizing what you learn. Tacit knowledge doesn't stick if you don't internalize it, and that internalization only happens through reflection.

Ironically, reflection is something that can be learned from a book or video and practiced. For a reason unknown to me, it just doesn't seem important enough to make part of the core body of explicit knowledge we learn in school. I think that's a monumental miss.

Ending Social Inequity Begins With Ending Political Inequity

I can't go into the details, but a member of my family was recently preyed upon by some seemingly crooked cops. And it got me thinking about the rough set of circumstances that some people are born with. Say you were personally affected by some number of these circumstances:

• You grow up in a poor neighborhood
• You have an unstable family situation
• There were a lot of kids who try to get you to smoke or do drugs growing up
• You have an appearance which makes it hard for you to make friends
• It's hard to find people to help you with your homework
• You were not nurtured or were maybe even abused as a child
• You are not of the majority race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity where you grew up
• English is not your first language

Now what the general societal narrative tells you is that if you work really hard, make a reasonable amount of reasonably good choices, and don't do anything catastrophically stupid you'll make it and have a good life. That you'll be okay and not have to deal with an unreasonable amount of hardship.

But this is what gets me - say you are a person who has at least a handful of those statements applying to you. And let's say you work real hard, make a reasonable amount of reasonably good choices, and you do not do anything catastrophically stupid. You do everything right.

The way I see it in American today, there's still a good chance you won't make it, because you get miffed hard by the system. Because if you're one of those people I've referenced above (and maybe not even as in as difficult a starting point as one of those folks) you still have to deal with these political realities, which are totally outside your control:

• Cops are going to write you up for things that you don't deserve
• Even if you get good grades, you can't afford to pay for college or graduate school
• You get passed over for a job (or paid less) for reasons having nothing to do with your qualifications
• You are poorly represented in congress because your district is gerrymandered, and so laws and policies never slide your way
• Because of your social identity, you're never able to act like yourself - you always feel like you have to put up a front
• You never feel like you can enact political change because of the tremendous influence of money in politics (and you're not a rainmaker)
• You don't have the personal or family connections of others so you never get access to the best jobs, mentors, or business opportunities

So let me recap where we're at with this hypothetical example - you're born at a disadvantage but you work really hard and do everything right. But you know that you probably still won't make it because of how much the system is stacked against you. So whether you work hard or not, you hold the reasonable belief that your chances of being upwardly socially mobile are slim. So why even try?

If I were in that situation, I'd find it very hard to motivate myself to work hard. And even though I'm incredibly privileged because of the circumstances of my birth, I even feel politically marginalized in some of the ways I've listed.

All this makes me think that if we're ever going to resolve social inequity in America, we're going to get nowhere if we don't resolve political inequities first. Because if we don't resolve political inequities, it's disillusioning to the point of giving up hope. And, I couldn't hardly blame anyone for giving up if the political deck was stacked against them like that.

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This is all a bit stream of consciousness and written rawly. I get that. That sort of style seems fitting, given the topic.

My take on "How will you measure your life?"

I've been taking a class with Bob Quinn called Transformative Leadership, and I've been reflecting on how I live my life. Here are three observations - two truths and a lie, if you will - that I've been thinking about. Two Truths

Lately, I've been captivated by a question that Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School talks about, "How will you measure your life?"

You should definitely watch Professor Christensen's talk, but this is my take on his question.

In the biggest sense, the largest outcome we impact with our lives is the trajectory of human history. The way I think about this is simple - we can either help humanity move closer toward good (which I think of as God's glory) or we can help it move closer to evil (which I think of as wickedness).

And really, we each have a micro-impact on this very large thing. There are very few people (I'd argue none) on the planet who will ever make an aggregated, measurable impact on the trajectory of human history. That said, I do think that we each influence humanity's trajectory and that impact, however small, does matter in aggregate.

That is this idea's brilliance. By looking at our impact on the trajectory of humanity, something none of us can cause a measurable blip on, we don't have to focus on whether we outperformed somebody else. We are freed from comparing ourselves to others. Rather, we can focus on fully utilizing our own potential. We can put all our efforts into being good people, instead of worrying about being more good than others.

So that's the first truth - the biggest "measurable" in our life is whether we influence the trajectory of humanity toward good or evil. In practice, I ask myself the following question: today, did I move humanity toward good, toward evil, or was it a wash? I try to log more days in the "good" category than the "evil" and "wash" categories.

In any case, that's how I'm starting to measure my life.

But, thinking about measuring your life in terms of the trajectory of humanity is unbelievably impractical on a day-to-day basis. After all, how the heck do you know whether you are inching humanity closer to good or to evil? The short answer is, we can't. There's no way for us to know whether we are spreading good or evil.

Given this practical quandary, I thought about what a good, practical, indicator that is a good proxy for whether I'm influencing humanity toward good or toward evil. After all, if you list out your values, you can look at them every day and reflect on whether you lived them out.

It seems to me that if I choose a strong set of values to live by, and have integrity to them, I feel pretty confident that I'm positively affecting the trajectory of humanity. So more practically, that's what I try to ask myself and practice on a day-to-day basis - whether or not I'm living my values.

To be sure, living my own values is not a trivial matter. It's very hard. In fact, it's probably the single hardest thing to do on a day-to-day basis. But that brings me to the second truth - living your values is the hardest challenge we have every day, but it's also one of the things we have the most control over. As John Steinbeck talks about in East of Eden, we have timshel - we have the choice of conquering our sins (see an excerpt below). We have a choice.

This argument is why I'm starting to think character is the most important thing we can teach. If you do that, I believe, everything else starts falling into place.

A Lie

In this scenario I've created - centered on living our values as the practical proxy of positively influencing the trajectory of humanity, it becomes very disillusioning if you feel like you don't have character or agency. After all, if life comes down to living out your values and you don't feel like you can, then that's the ball game. If you can't live your values, you might as well hide under your bed and give up.

But that brings me to the lie, that we can't change. We can change. We can live our values. We can be less wicked. It's hard, but we can.

Hope (or lack of) is a powerful narrative. If you have hope you can change, and therefore become more good than wicked, and therefore positively impact the trajectory of humanity. If you don't have hope, you don't think you can change and you regress yourself into destructive behavior. To me hope is the belief that we can change into being better than we are.

I think it's a lie to believe that we can't change. Why? Because we do, all the time.

In any case, this is what I've been thinking about over the past few weeks.

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On timshel, excerpted from East of Eden, pulled from: http://timshel.org/timshel.php

“After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’ The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek.”

Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”

“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.

What we'd presumably have in common with space-faring aliens

I've been trippin' out over the Fermi Paradox lately. Indeed, it's hard not to. And I've been contemplating - if we were to encounter a space-faring alien civilization in our travels across the universe a few hundred years from now, how similar would they be to us? More similar than we'd want to admit, I think.

They'd probably have senses to detect different things like we do, like light, sound, touch, and others. Maybe their senses wouldn't be exactly the same, but they'd have to have some way of understanding the world around them. They'd probably have discovered and developed some of the same materials that we have, after all, the types of elements in the universe are fixed.

They'd probably have some mechanism in their bodies for capturing, storing, and expending energy. Their bodies would probably have some sort of waste or disease. The universe after all, is not efficient and it is certainly prone to random mutations. They'd probably have some mechanism for reproduction.

If they were space-faring explorers of the universe, they'd probably have a large population. After all, it would be difficult for a single alien or small group of aliens to develop the technology needed to explore space. As a result, they'd probably have some sort of language and some set of social issues arising from many beings having to live and work together.

Surely, it is captivating to think about an alien race's similarity or dissimilarity to us, but here's what gets me. Despite how much we have in common with an alien race, we have much more in common with other humans.

Our emotions, psychological biases, our notions of beauty, art, and God...something, even many of those things have got to be unique. I'd hope that our full humanness is not something that could be replicated by aliens. Human life is special.

At the same time, let's assume that we never find any other space-faring alien civilizations. That even more so makes me believe that humans are special. We could be the only life in the universe that's left. And even if we aren't alone in the universe, we may be the only civilization that ever explores the universe.

So whether we are alone in exploring the universe or whether we aren't, I can't help but think that human life is special. Which means we are all special beings, endowed by God with something magnificent. Which makes me wonder why we treat each other so badly sometimes. I just don't get it.

To whom would your life's work be dedicated?

To Nakul, who in death teaches me every day how to live. If I were to ever write a book of significance, Nakul is who I would dedicate it to. He is my brother, my teacher, and my inspiration.

If you were to write a book of significance - meaning one that you put your heart and soul into - to whom would you dedicate it?

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A friend from school, Heather, pointed out the dedication in our Professor's text book. The dedication in his textbook is here:

Money is everything, money is nothing

Money is everything, and money is nothing. This is one of the most interesting insights I've had since starting business school. For a company, meaning the LLC-CCorp-faceless-legal-mumbojumbo contractual relationship, money is everything. Companies exist to generate a profit. Money is the means and the end. There is no reason to have a company if it does not make money. To be sure, it's not unfortunate if the company does other things instead of make money, but that's not the most function of a company.

The most important function of a company is to make money. But a company is nothing without people.

For people, meaning the air-breating-love-making-hand-holding-fun-loving-soul-filled humans, money is nothing. Everything that matters in life to people is precisely not money. We care about freedom, love, justice, god, greed, stability, pleasure, pain, prestige, and truth. Money only matters because it is a way to get one of those things that we actually care about. To be sure, money is important because it's how we can get those other things.

For a person, money is a mere means that's not intrinsically valuable. But we need it.

Paradoxically, money is everything and money is nothing.

3 simple rules to reform political campaign finance

Today, I had the pleasure of catching up with one of my parents' longstanding customers, who has become a family friend. Let's call him Jack. Jack is in his eighties and without fail, we always end up talking about politics when we get together. He's staunchly conservative and his view on most issues is starkly different from mine.

Despite our differences, we always see eye-to-eye on governance issues. In a nutshell, we both believe it's better to have a government which makes decisions in the public's interest, rather than in the best interests of private political actors.

Today, he shared a few simple rules to improve elections and campaign finance schemes. I've added and modded a little bit to round out the spirit of our conversation. I think they're good rules, and rather elegant.

1. You must be a registered voter to make a contribution to a candidate or party organization
2. Registered voters are only allowed to donate to candidates / party organizations for races in which they will be able to vote (e.g., someone voting in Ann Arbor wouldn't be able to donate to a candidate representing Omaha, if you live in  Michigan you can only donate to the party organization in your state or to a national party organization)
3. Any individual donor or donating organization to any organization engaging in political activity (whether to a candidate, party, issue group, etc.) must be disclosed weekly in a machine-readable format with the donor's name / unique voter ID, donation amount, donor's company Tax ID, and date of their donation

This proposal would presumably need constitutional amendment to be legal. Is there any reason this wouldn't work well?

In any case, I re-learned something important today. There are people who care about politics because of their private interests and others who care about politics because they care about the public's interest and future of this country. Liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, it doesn't matter - people of all political stripes fall into both camps.

Jack and I are a great example of this. Because we both care about the public interest over our private interests, we are able to engage in respectful discussion even though we wildly disagree on most issues. More importantly, because we both prioritize the public's interest, we are able to find clever nuances on specific policies which allow for compromise.

Will the city benefit from economic growth initiatives? (Plus a framework)

In business and innovation, Teece's model helps you determine who will profit from an innovation. After learning about it, I got to thinking if that model - or a similar concept - could be translated to cities and regions. So I came back with a question - how do cities know if they will reap the benefits of an economic growth initiative? Here's a model to help answer that question. It's unsubstantiated by data, but it's an intuition that I'd love your feedback on.

THE MODEL

To determine if a city or region will benefit from an economic growth initiative, I propose mapping the initiatives along two axes: the type of growth the initiative intends to create and the source of new revenues created.

As it happens, the quadrant look curiously similar to the Michigan Model of Leadership.

• Type of Growth - is the growth created because of a creating a new product or services that meets an unmet market need? Or, is it a product or service that tries to steal market share from a competitor?
• Source of New Revenues - are the incremental revenues created generated from customers in the city? Or, are those revenues collected from people from another locality? In other words, are the revenues exports or not?

USING THE MODEL

Using the model is simple. Note that the "city" is a placeholder term for the economic subdivision being analyzed. You could replace "city" with state or region.

Each quadrant has a distinct flavor. I've included notes in each quadrant to help economic growth teams determine the conditions under which they can reap the benefits from initiatives in each quadrant.

1. Generate a list of all economic growth initiative for the city
2. Map them on to the model. Initiatives that are 100% new products/services with cash 100% generated from non-local customers would go in the top right hand corner. And so on.
3. Each quadrant has a distinct flavor. Look at where the distribution of all initiatives across the framework lie. Is it balanced? Should it be balanced?
4. Look at the quadrant each initiative is in. Are the conditions in that quadrant met? If so, the city may reap the benefits of growth. If not, their ability to reap the benefits of growth will be handicapped.

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Does this model made sense? As an economic development professional, do you find it useful?