How’d you do it?

Papa, 

That’s what our boy calls me now. I hadn’t said it out loud since you went ahead. It feels natural, like I was born for it. It has a nice ring to it, too.

I’m thinking of you today. I’m stuck in an airport and I’m going to miss story time. I’m having a hard time keeping it together. I think the bartender noticed, and luckily he’s very kind. 

Pudi’s getting married in a month. That’s why I was away - in Montreal. It was his bachelor party (don’t worry, I behaved. I always do, especially now). I think you would like that place, because it is quiet, people are friendly, and there is water. I can’t remember if you’ve been there.  Maybe Ma will know. I guess it doesn’t really matter now.

I have been wanting to ask you a question. As I sit here, I’m a wreck and only because I’m going to miss story time. That’s a good reason, I guess. But still, it’s a small moment in life. 

How’d you do it?  

You overcame so much in your life. You persisted through some of the hardest challenges I’ve ever heard of. You were a good man, an honest man, the whole way. Your capacity to sacrifice - what I’m starting to see as the noblest of all virtues - was seemingly limitless.

How’d you do it? 

You were so devoted, until the very last day of your life. You hardly ever let me down, especially on things that really mattered. And you never let me off the hook either. Even still, I feel like I’m learning lessons from you.

How’d you do it? 

And on top of all this, I didn’t even know you were molding me, shaping me. You made me think I did it myself. You never took a curtain call, never allowed anyone to give you credit. 

I feel like an imposter sometimes, like I missed getting that gene. Especially on days like today, where I feel like something so small is making me crumble.

But you just did it Pops. How? 

Wish you were here, 

Neil

Letting love in

I’ve been away from home (Robyn, Bo, Riley) more than I ever have over the past two weeks. It has been difficult, and at times excruciating. I miss them terribly. I think that’s a common feeling for many of us who are partners, husbands, and fathers.

Fortunately, the solitude has helped me learn a lesson about matters of the heart.  

I used to think it was dangerous to feel this way - to allow my own peace to be tied to someone else’s ability to fill up my heart and soul.

But I think maybe that’s the wrong way to ponder the question.  

Maybe what’s dangerous is not dependence on who fills our heart, but who opens it. If we are able to open our heart ourselves, why not let it be filled with love and peace from wherever it comes? 

This idea, of course, is predicated on the assumption that our hearts will be filled if we open them up. I’ve found that to be true, even from unexpected places or from unlikely or unknown people. Even when I’m far away from home - the universe has a way of filling our hearts if only we let it.

How we learn to open our hearts, especially when we are away from those we have the greatest intimacy with is hard.

I don’t have a great answer on how to do this. The best I can think of is to share what is in our heart.

If we share our heart - say in prayer, contemplation, self-expression, or intimate conversation - our heart is forced to open let those thoughts and feelings out. Once that happens, all we must do is keep our heart open long enough to let love in.

That moment between when my heart is opened and when it is filled is scary. It takes trust and is risky. But the alternative is keeping our heart closed. The risk is worth it. 

Mirrors and friends

“Eternity” (2014) by Montreal-based artist Nicolas Baier @ Aresenal Contemporary gallery in Montreal.  

To see ourselves clearly and fully, we need mirrors or the help of others.  

If we use a mirror, it mustn’t be warped. If we seek the help of others they mustn’t lie to us. 

That means, then, to see ourselves clearly and fully we must be committed to the craft of reflection and the craft of building trusting, intimate relationships.

Which implies that it is also an important craft to help others with the previous two. 

Character Muscles

I have come to think of character as a muscle that has to be built with exercises and training rather than a a deeply embedded trait that we have or we don’t.

If we build those character muscles up, we’ll have the strength of character, so to speak, to make the “heavy lift” when right thoughts and actions are hard to do.  

But just like when lifting something heavy, character doesn’t involve a single muscle. Rather I see character as having a few “major muscle” groups that need to be developed to be able to make the heavy lift of right thought and action. 

Those muscle groups are curiosity, courage, and persistence. As I see them at least.

Curiosity gets us to learn about character and whether we have it - a quest with little extrinsic motivators. Courage gets us to do the hard work of transforming ourselves - because we will inevitably find that we are not perfectly good if we are curious. Persistence gives us the endurance to stick with the hard work of transforming ourselves - which never happens overnight.

The way I figure it, if we can intentionally develop these three muscle groups - curiosity, courage, and discipline - we will have the strength of character needed to do the right thing, even when it is heavy. 

The key question is how.  

I hope they’re wrong

I am on a business trip right now, and I miss my wife. And my son, and my pup too.

When the conversation comes up, I say to my colleagues, “It’s really hard to be away from my family for so long.”

And folks will kindly suggest that I’m a newlywed and a new father. That the feeling of longing will wear off, and that I’m still influenced by the newness of these relationships. And that in a few years, I’ll look forward to business trips or nights off or some other kind of time away from them.

And they may be right, but I hope they’re wrong. Right now, being away for even one day is too long, and I hope it stays that way.  

It’s hard to be the yogurt

Being Indian, I have seen how yogurt is made, up close. My parents would make it at home. Here’s how it works.  

First you put milk in a vessel. Then, you take a spoon of yogurt (you need the live culture to start the reaction) and put it in the vessel. Then you add gentle heat to the vessel; my parents always used a yogurt maker.

Then you give it time. The heat helps the culture from the spoonful of yogurt react with the milk. Eventually the milk becomes yogurt. 

This is how culture change really works. A new active idea enters a stable environment, and slowly changes it over time. This is harder than it sounds.

Culture change requires steady heat. In organizations, this equates to a leadership team that allows change to happen and provides the time and money to support it.  

You also need the spoonful of yogurt with its strand of active culture. In organizations, this is the change agent that’s willing to be different for a long time, slowing changing the environment to something new, one interaction at a time.

It’s hard to be the yogurt. But for the culture to change, someone has to be.  

Becoming good / Leg day

Philosophy isn’t enough. Arguments about hypothetical moral dilemmas aren’t enough. Biographies of people living exemplary, moral lives aren’t enough either.  

I need, and I think we all need specifics. Like athletes, I think we need training regimens as if our character were made up of muscle groups to be worked on with specific exercises.

The funny thing is, I love reading moral philosophy, arguments, and case studies. In fact, I need those ideas to push my own. But after all this time thinking and writing letters to my son about goodness, they aren’t enough. 

I’m bad at most things, okay at some things, and good at a few. But this one idea, might be what my voice was made for.  

I really, really believe we’re missing something when we talk about becoming better people. It’s not just about what is right and wrong, it’s about becoming. For us in the real world, the becoming is the whole ball game.

Becoming, in any domain, requires deliberate practice. The question is what do we practice? What are the exercises that strengthen our character? And why does it matter?

I think of curiosity, courage, and persistence as the three major muscle groups that make up our character. But how do we cultivate those three characteristics within us and within others?

That’s what I’ve been working on figuring out for almost two years now. And, I can’t wait to share it more.

The shortcut isn’t worth it

If I am happy. If I am thriving, or at peace, what’s the point if it’s just me? What’s the point if my family or my homies aren’t there with me? Or if my neighbors aren’t there, either, in that state of peace and contentment? 

How can I really be satisfied if I’ve left someone behind? On the contrary, it eats at me to see other people, my people, suffer. That feeling, however, brings with it a ton of effort, stress, and responsibility.

That belief requires explanation and defense, but for now, I’ll just own it as my own feeling. 

Admittedly, there is a shortcut. A shortcut to avoid the feeling of guilt and ownership when we’ve made it to a state of peace and our people haven’t. A shortcut around the giving of ourselves to others. A bypass of the sacrifice and hard work for the community. A secret passage that circumvents our responsibility to the world around us. 

That shortcut? Making the tribe around us smaller. Reducing the people we expose ourselves to, and cutting out those that require more from us. Favoring the folks that make us comfortable, cool, and wealthy, and avoiding the others. 

The shortcut is ignorance and exclusion. And that may make our lives easier for awhile because it reduces who and what we are responsible for. But in the long run it costs us love, meaning, and perhaps a bit of our souls. Ignorance and exclusion may shelter us from doing difficult deeds and having difficult feelings, but is that really a life worth living?

I’m not yet at a point where my heart is big enough to wrap it around the whole world. And I’m not suggesting we’re all failures if we don’t become brothers of all humanity.

But our choice is if our ethos will be to expand our hearts wider or close them off. Over the course of a lifetime, that choice makes a very big difference in what we, and our world, become. 

Learning to smell

I didn’t dawn on me until we had Bo, that I didn’t grow up, per se, I was bred. To go to college, to get a job, to get money and status. Bred to get the next thing.

I think a lot of us were.  

That was fine, save for the lonliness. And then I met Robyn, and I had a reason to stop and smell the roses.  

Except, I didn’t know how to stop, nor how to smell them. I think that’s why sometimes the emotions I get when I am with my family, close friends, and extended family are so wonderful, but almost painful. Overwhelming.

But it doesn’t have to be my family, it could be something smaller - a sunrise, a song, a quiet moment, a deep breath. Those are roses too.

The smell of the roses is just so beautiful. It’s so joyful. It’s so special. I never knew.

I don’t know how to handle these very strong emotions because I never started learning how, until we met - I’d say I’m still learning actually.  

Better late than never. Much better late in fact, just hard and lots of tears. 

Finding Nemo, Role Reversal

I went for a run his afternoon. And when I came back, Robyn, Bo, and Riley had Finding Nemo on. It was right at the jellyfish scene as I entered the family room. 

About two minutes ago, right when the pelican tells Nemo how his dad is crossing the ocean to find him, it hit me.

I used to watch this movie from Nemo’s perspective. Now, I can’t help but watching it from his father’s. The roles have reversed, and it’s honestly a very different movie to watch this way. The shape of a father’s heart is different than a son’s.

I guess that’s growing up. 

Do you meditate? I’m becoming a true believer.

In a very short time, meditation has significantly improved my life. As you may have read, the past few years of my life have felt dark. I was lucky Robyn thought of and let me start using her Glo subscription so that I could take app-based meditation classes. 

Now my mind is clearer, I sleep better, and my anxious and depressive tendencies are slowly moderating. I’ve been more responsive and attentive with my family. I even have better digestion.

I was only slightly surprised to find there’s a growing body of research that validates the benefits of meditation I’ve been feeling myself. In the social sciences we often say there’s no “silver bullet”, but meditation is as close to one as I’ve ever found.

My interest in meditation actually started as a job-related pursuit - I’ve been contemplating whether meditation could be an antidote to gun violence. If a community meditated at scale, and had less overall stress, would it reduce shootings? I think it might.

But I want to learn more about meditation and meet more folks first. Do you have a meditation story? Do you know folks who are true believers in meditation? What do you think about meditation?

The 5x rule for leading innovation

During my time working on innovative and transformational projects at DPD, I’ve come to learn something new.  

When doing something innovative in an organization, we have to communicate (and listen) 5 times more, with 5 times as many people, and 5 times more clearly than we originally think we need to.

Bringing people along with something new and different takes much more emotional labor and communication than we think.

I’d add, this is probably also true for marriage, raising kids, and anything else new and difficult that’s worth doing.  

Simple Prayer

Thank you for today. Thank you for Robyn, Robert, and Riley. Thank you for our parents and our siblings. Thank you for our extended family and our friends. Thank you for our home, our neighbors, and the strangers who treat us with kindness.  

Only a simple prayer today. Please, God, watch over us and give us as much time together as you can.  

Radical change requires radical action

When it comes to changing a culture, I often consider depth and magnitude.

To change a culture the magnitude of the intervention we must make is inversely proportional to how deeply ingrained the feature we are changing is to the culture. The closer to the core you are, the less provocative the tweak has to be, and vice versa.

That’s why changing defaults from opt-in to opt out greatly affected rates for organ donation, and why changing behavior with ads often costs a lot of money.

It’s a given that radical change requires radical action - I learned that from Charlie, someone I met recently. A key question for us as change agents is which dimension it’s best to be radical on.  

Nice guys do finish last, mostly, but it’s worth it

I don’t always succeed, but I try really hard to be a “nice guy.” And by that I mean, I try really hard to be a good man. 

After many years of struggle, I do think good guys finish last. Maybe not all the time, but I think it’s rare to see a good guy finish first. I find this to be especially true in workplaces that are competitive and aggressive, which unfortunately for me is a lot of places. I don’t always finish last, but I seldom am a champion in any competition, at work or otherwise.

So what? 

The one time, literally, where I feel like good guys do alright is with love and marriage. In my experience, good guys (and good gals) find good partners and good friends, almost all of the time, in the long run.

And even if that doesn’t work out, being a good guy requires no special reward. The inner peace it brings is perhaps the worthiest human aspiration. The world also needs more folks that choose goodness to prevent us all from descending into madness.

By my calculation, being a good guy is still worth it, even if it means finishing last, or at least not first, in every respect except maybe one or two.

In fact, it’s not even close.  

A prayer for the DJ

Every time we’re back here, we’re a little older, grayer. Maybe a little wiser, but at least not too worse for the wear. When I see you, every time, here, I’m still speechless. 

Every time we’re here, the world seems like it’s spinning a little faster. No matter how hard we try, we can’t slow it down. And soon enough, without even noticing it’ll be 66 years later and we’ll be the veterans in the room. God willing that’s us.  

Most days, I pray I could pause the music, so we could just stay in today a little while longer.

But if it can be you in my arms. If we can stay with our noses close enough to where all I can see is you, with all else blurred and out of focus. If our cheeks stay close enough so that the only whispers and songs I hear are yours. 

If we have enough room out here, for each sway, twirl, dip, and sashay. If yours is the beat I’m moving to. 

If it’s you, for ever and always. Let’s pray instead that the DJ keeps it spinning, so we can dance here a little while longer.  

Storytellers and the dinosaur

Bo and I were playing with dinosaur cars this morning. More specifically, we were playing with these dinosaur cars (thanks Aunt Linda!):

As we were playing, I involuntarily started roaring. You know, because dinosaurs roar.

Or do they? 

In that moment I realized, for the first time, that I have no idea if dinosaurs actually roar. I just think they do because of every children’s book about dinos I’ve ever read, and the movie Jurassic Park.  

Who knows, maybe they chirped or yelped. Maybe they even chortled from time to time. Perhaps some paleontologist has a good conjecture about it. But I for damn sure haven’t read a book or scientific paper on dinosaur sounds. 

Without knowing it, the stories I’ve heard about dinosaurs have dramatically influenced how I play with my son.

I learned an important lesson today: it’s really important to have trust in the storytellers to whom we lend our ears. If we are a storyteller - and we all are to someone at some point - we ought to be a trustworthy one, too. 

Advice sought: How to encourage?

I’ve come to a hard-earned conclusion that redirecting what’s praised is not a good way to change the destructive praise-centric culture we live in. Instead, I intend to focus more on encouraging others, and being encourageable. An encouragement-centric culture is one with trade offs that seem more manageable to me.

But I’m a little lost. I never really had a ton of encouragement, nor did I ever really practice it consciously. When it comes to encouragement, I don’t have much practical, explicit knowledge.  

So all y’all out there that do - coaches, teachers, camp counselors, pastors, and more - could you share some practical advice on how to effectively encourage others? What about your reflections on how to be encourageable?

Any good books or videos? Everything I found online is pretty generic. 

“I’m awesome, I’m awesome”

I have a hard time admitting how much embarrassment I feel when I see stories about heroic startup founders, or the stream of notifications about people I know getting new jobs with fancy titles. I feel like because of my upbringing, educational pedigree, and cohort of peers, I should be doing bigger things. More prestigious things. More lucrative things. When I’m scrolling through LinkedIn or Facebook, I feel like a draft bust who had a promising future but never made it in the big leagues.

As much as I try to think my way out of this attitude, my first reaction to these sorts of posts is a mix of jealousy and “I’m awesome too.” My first thought, honestly, after seeing a story about a mobility startup was that I co-founded a startup, with my wife in October 2017 when my son was born. I worked myself up and almost wrote an entire post about how “my startup is my family” to try to earn some perceived-lost-respect back.

But that’s pretty childish and only adds to our praise-driven culture instead of changing it. So I pushed myself to dig deeper than that reaction.

My next thought was, if we have a culture among millennials that pushes folks to signal, “I’m awesome, I’m awesome” in any way they can, let’s at least be honest about the days and weeks that aren’t awesome. Because it’s honestly not awesome all the time, at least for me.

Most days, I come home from work exhausted, overwhelmed, or both. There are days when I have cried in the car on my way in or cried in relief because I was so happy to be home with my family. Most days, I feel like I’m average or below average. I do take solace in the fact that being average at an extremely demanding and difficult job is not something to be ashamed of. I also know I’m giving it 100% and leaving my teams in better shape than when I started. But most days are not awesome. Most days, I’m not awesome and have no grounds to make a social media post about how awesome I am.

I bring this self-depreciating vignette up, not because I’m looking for praise (I’m really not), but to try my damndest to create some space for myself and others to be honest about what’s not awesome. Because when you feel like you’re the only person in your peer group that sucks at their job - or relationships, or parenting, or whatever it is - it’s lonely. And not, just lonely, it’s damn lonely.

Talking about being awesome, is great. But it is damaging to us collectively because it’s not the full story. I almost wrote a whole post about how we need to tell the full story, because I thought that I could counter the pervasive narrative of “I’m awesome, I’m awesome.”

But then I thought, is that what we really want? A constant tension between these two ideas? It’s not like replacing the narrative of “I’m awesome, I’m awesome” with one of “I’m not awesome, I’m not awesome” is a world we want either. Both ideas are a trap. Both ideas are pathways that perpetuate a culture of excessive praise*.

Our culture of excessive praise is destroying me, albeit slowly. And I think it’s destroying more than just me. Where I often get stuck is what’s the alternative? If not “I’m awesome” nor “I’m not awesome”, then what?

I realized today that want to create the space for more than vulnerability about struggles. I want to create the space for encouragement.

Instead of hitting the like button that signals “you’re awesome” it’s the message of, “I’m happy for you and am excited to help you grow even more.” When someone shares sad news it’s sharing a “I know you’re going through a hard time, but I know you can get through this problem and I’m here for you if you want to talk about how I’ve gotten through this before” instead of hitting the heart button to affirm the post’s vulnerability.

If you’re someone who shares a lot of positive stories about your career, your kids, or whatever, I’m not busting your chops for seeking praise. Hell, I do it too, even though I try not to. If you’re someone who talks candidly about your struggles, I’m not trying to shower you with affirmations of your vulnerability either.

What I am trying to say is no matter what you say - whether it’s sharing a proud moment or a story of struggle - I’m going to try to best to encourage you through it.

I think we’re damned if we perpetuate a praise-centric culture. I think we’re much better off exchanging in encouragement. That’s the culture that I want to live in, so that’s what I’m going to try to practice.

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*There a great podcast that touches on how praise and other concepts impact parenting, here. Barbara’s book is also fantastic.

Parenting as an only child

Being the youngest and only child of my parents, I had never really seen my parents parent another person. I also haven’t seen older siblings parent another person. Additionally, because my closest extended family lives 600 miles away, I never really saw anyone in action as a parent until my friends started having kids. 

Turns out, that made it a lot harder to get my bearings. But I was also coming in with fewer bad habits (I hope).

An interesting consequence of smaller family sizes and geographically distributed families will be that more of us learn to parent from our peers rather than our families. Not sure whether that’s good or bad.