A flaw I carried around with me for many years was not being great at “checking in.” I’ve worked remotely for a long time, and while I’m good at communicating high-level strategy and giving reports when needed, I’ve often fallen into the trap of communicating only the bare minimum necessary. I’ve never liked being micro-managed (who does, right?), and I’ve often chafed under onerous reporting requirements – I preferred to just manage my own affairs and deliver on my promises. While some of those requirements have indeed been too onerous, I have to admit that good management often needs more data than I was providing, and there have been plenty of times when I should have checked in more than I did.

But not lately. Lately, in fact, I’ve gotten more than few compliments from people that I’m a great over-communicator. That I go above and beyond in keeping people in the loop and connected with what I’m doing.

My reaction was… huh? Me?

Since I’ve always known that was a flaw of mine, and it remained stubbornly so despite my attempts at correcting it, I’d mostly abandoned the idea of improving that metric (I know, shame on me!). Instead, I’ve tried to just be so valuable in other ways that it washes out; I’d made peace with the idea that my idea of ‘sufficient check-ins’ was going to be different than others’. So what suddenly changed that after years of trying to improve and then giving up, would I suddenly be great at it with no deliberate effort?

Oh yeah. I started blogging every day.

Put another item on the list of benefits that this blog has generated for me. Without even realizing it, I’d been training myself to talk about what I’m doing in a public way, every day. I don’t do a “recap” blog once a week or twice a month. I blog every day. That habit is strong. And it cleared the road to doing that in other ways, like making sure to send frequent updates to the rest of my team.

You can train yourself like this for anything. You can give yourself small, daily tasks that have similar skill requirements to things you want to improve on. It’s one of the reasons I say “When in doubt, work.” You never know what other skills you’re teaching yourself that you didn’t even realize.

I’m a big believer in visualization.

In the same way that the hardest stage of a rocket is the first, the hardest part of the trajectory of an idea is the stage where it leaves your brain and makes the jump into the world. The brain cleanses itself; it forgets things, rewrites them, convinces you that ideas weren’t good.

Once it’s on paper, the brain can’t do those things to it anymore. It’s escaped the brain’s gravitational pull.

There is a distance between “an goal in my mind” and “a goal I wrote down;” call that Distance A. There is also a distance between “a goal I wrote down” and “a goal I accomplished.” Call that Distance B.

I’m telling you that Distance A is way, way, way greater than Distance B.

Is your self-esteem lower than it should be, given objective facts about you? Have people told you to “tell yourself that you’re great!” Well, that’s hogwash. You’re the one telling yourself that you aren’t great, so at best you’re evening the scales.

Instead, write down that you’re great. Every day. And hang it up where you can see it.

Because unless you’re writing down that you’re a loser every day and hanging THAT up (and if you are, you know, stop), you’ve not put the good thoughts in a tremendously advantageous position over the bad ones. (By the way, this includes words you post on social media or anywhere else.)

You can say “I want to lose weight.” But another part of your brain is saying “sitting on the couch is easier.” Those scales are even, so inertia breaks the tie and you do nothing. Instead, write down your goals. Make a plan on paper. Commit to it publicly. Take the good thoughts and ideas and barricade them outside of your brain, where they’re vulnerable to all the biases and flaws of our psyche.

Outside of your brain, somewhere you can see them, these thoughts will gather power and momentum. A wall will slowly fill with pieces of paper you’ve taped to it with goals and positive words. A word document or excel spreadsheet will grow and grow with things you’ve accomplished or wisdom you’ve gained.

Maybe a blog will gather entries like a snowball rolling downhill.

And before you know it, you’ll have a combined sum that is far greater and more powerful than any passing, fleeting negative thought. “Man, I feel like such a loser today. Oh wait, here’s this list of 547 things I’ve accomplished in the last two years. Never mind, I’m cool.”

Write down something today. Anything good. A thing you did, a thing you learned, a thing you want to do that’s positive. It doesn’t matter, just write it down, right now. Comment on this post if you want, and you’ll have an instant cheering section. But wherever you write it, write it where you’ll see it, and do it right this second.

Then do it again tomorrow.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to meet an artist whose work I’ve followed and enjoyed for more than a decade. He’s brilliant, and he’s given me tremendous insights into the world over the years, as well as more than few Darmoks that I’ve been able to use with friends. In fact, I’ve even met new friends due to shared appreciation of his work, so you could definitely say he’s had an influence on my life.

The bulk of his work has been in serial comics, but he’s done tons of other stuff, from novelty items to sketch comedy to pop science publishing and even a new political book. Because of his sketch comedy, I’m not only familiar with his work, I know what he looks like, sounds like, etc. We’ve also interacted in a friendly way online a few times within the fan/creator dynamic, but that further pushed him into the part of my brain that registers “friend” rather than “public figure.”

And then this past weekend, I met him in person, in a format that was pretty casual and familiar. And I had this very strange moment of experience when I first went to shake his hand where I realized that he felt like an old friend to me, but I was more or less completely unknown to him.

To be honest, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. It felt creepy, like I was a stalker. I knew so much more about him than he knew about me, but then we were just chatting about parenting and board games and stuff. I felt dishonest. Normally one of two things is true about another person. Either:

1. You know roughly the same amount of information about each other in terms of volume, OR
2. You don’t ever actually interact.

It’s one or the other. I know way more about Donald J. Trump than he knows about me, but we also never talk so it doesn’t matter. I talk to my sister all the time, but she knows about as much about me as I know about her so I don’t feel weird in our interactions. This was a new experience for me. I started to even use this idea as a conversation-starter, but even that felt creepy. Saying, “Isn’t it weird how you don’t know anything about me but I know so much stuff about you,” felt like a line from a horror movie. Thankfully there were lots of other things to talk about. Also thankfully, he was a super cool guy and really great to interact with, which lessened the awkwardness considerably.

The whole experience made me reflect on all the different levels of information asymmetry we encounter every day. How much more you might know about some subject than someone else. I think we mostly walk around thinking that human knowledge is spread pretty evenly, and that even expertise only represents a small increase over the norm. In reality, you probably have many orders of magnitude more knowledge than the median within a few areas, and virtually none in most others. It’s a yawning chasm, and it can give you some vertigo to look over the edge.

I love hearing about other people’s experiences. I love the everyday minutiae, and I love the big formative events. I love culture, down to the individual level. Many times, I dive in – if someone starts telling me about things I’ve never experienced myself, I’m very drawn to try those things out. It’s very easy to convince me to try a new book, restaurant, musician, etc. Just suggest it and I’m practically there.

Sometimes, however, I’ll learn about experiences that I don’t have any interest in trying first hand. I don’t want to smoke meth. I don’t want to kill a person. Things like that. That means, though, that when I hear someone has done something like that and is willing to talk about it, I’m all ears.

I will hopefully never learn about the experience of meth smoking, person killing, or similar unpleasant things directly. And the people who have done them are probably not as likely to cross my path naturally as someone who hasn’t, simply because of the common consequences of those things. So they represent “rare information” to me. I can read about meth addiction and the criminal justice system from the safety of my office, but that isn’t the same at all.

I also, however, don’t want to seek out murderers and meth heads and strike up conversations with them. But that’s because I have a preconceived notion of what a “murderer” or a “meth head” looks like. I have no idea if those stereotypes are true.

Quick aside: I’ve interacted with – in fact worked with – at least one person I know to be a murderer. They served jail time for it. They paid their debt to society and rehabilitated. Then they were my awesome co-worker. But apart from knowledge that the event occurred, it was never really appropriate to discuss it, so I didn’t learn much. Except, perhaps, to challenge my assumptions.

Quick aside #2: I’m not some morbid person obsessed with locating killers to talk to. That’s just an example.

My point is, humans have a strong tendency to pre-judge and form opinions on what people must naturally be like based on certain criteria, and then if we miss that window to pre-judge we can be really weirded out by it.

Let’s say you’ve formed the opinion that everyone from HokeyTown is a brain-dead jerk, stupid and mean no matter what. Low-brow, no culture, etc. All things you dislike. Then you meat some wonderful person named Sam, and Sam is the love of your life. Erudite, sophisticated, kind and nurturing. You fall in love together and have plans to get married, and Sam says they’d love to have the ceremony in HokeyTown, because it’s their home town.

Blam, ton of bricks. You’ve got to reconcile these two ideas. “Everyone from HokeyTown is an idiot jerk” and “The most wonderful person I’ve ever met is from HokeyTown” don’t jive; the ideas can’t coexist.

The best case scenario is that you say, “Wow, I guess I was wrong about my very strong opinions on the residents of HokeyTown – and in fact, maybe my deeply-held priors could all use a little review.” The worst case scenario is that you conclude that Sam has somehow tricked you, hiding their true nature as a malicious moron in a deliberate attempt to deceive you, and in fact this itself serves as further evidence for your bias.

Most people land somewhere in the middle, unfortunately. They keep their opinions on HokeyTown in general, but come up with some excuse or exemption for Sam that makes them “no true HokeyTownie.” Of course, that won’t solve the problem for long – Sam probably doesn’t share your dismal view of the residents of their home town, and if you insist on holding fast to your bigotry then the relationship is unlikely to persist.

Which, unfortunately, is what often happens. The story of star-crossed lovers who cast aside their societal prejudices in order to be with someone they’ve evaluated on their merits to be wonderful is a great tale, but it plays out less frequently in real life than I would like.

So in my head, I have this sort of mental encyclopedia entry on “meth” that says “Everyone who has ever done meth now looks like this, and no one who looks like this has ever done meth.” So if I meet a bunch of professional-looking folks at a networking event or something, my natural assumption is that none of them have smoked meth before. That’s probably true, statistically, and the assumption by itself isn’t the problem.

The problem come up in the unlikely scenario that one of the professionals A.) has in fact smoked meth in the past and B.) I find this information out somehow. Maybe they tried it once in their teens, thirty years ago, and learned to avoid it ever afterwards?

Because I have this pathological desire to learn everything about people, I’m likely to be the tactless guy that says, “Wow, you’ve done meth?! That must have been crazy! Tell me all about it!” That’s not the standard reaction, though.

The standard reaction is your brain starts sounding alarms, because if given the choice between revising an entire mental model of how you perceive the world versus throwing this one person under the proverbial bus, your brain will probably try to convince you that this person isn’t worth talking to – no matter what “disguise” they’re wearing now, they’re obviously a deranged, drug-addicted meth head. Forget about the fact that they were just telling you about their 30-year career investing in charities that help crippled children, that’s just a cover for the dangerous scum they really are… right?

The lesson here is complex. It’s not “never judge anyone, ever.” Past behavior remains the best indicator of future behavior. Contrary to folksy truisms, the cover of a book tells you a lot about the contents. The lesson also isn’t “people can always dip their toes in the pool of bad behavior or immorality and come back from it.” Sometimes they can’t – or at least they don’t.

I think my lessons here are: don’t hardline, and try to get first-hand data when you can. Don’t hardline, meaning don’t let your mental encyclopedia define things in terms of “never” or “always.” Leave a little room for exceptions. Leave room to be wrong. People are complex, and rarely entirely good or bad. Leaving yourself room to be wrong about them also leaves them the room to improve. There’s no surer way to make sure someone never gets better than to build a society that tells them they never can.

Get first-hand data when you can, because everyone is biased. You’re biased, and the person you’re getting even first-hand data from is biased, too. So it’s best, whenever you can, to not play whisper-down-the-lane and introduce a bunch of extra biases as well. Don’t let too many editors get their hands on your mental encyclopedia, and screen them well.

I’ve never murdered anyone and I’ve never done meth. But I’ve done plenty that would fall into other people’s unpleasant mental categories. And sadly, I’ve personally experienced the rapid change in opinion when someone learns of one of those things that happened twenty years ago. It makes me less likely to write someone off for the red in their own ledger, and maybe that’s enough for it to have been worth it.

When my oldest daughter was about 4 years old, I showed her a picture. It was an actual photograph, not electronic. She wanted a closer look, so she intuitively placed her thumb and index finger on the photo close together, and then spread them apart while in contact with it. She then tried a few more times and was frustrated that it didn’t change.

She was zooming in. She’d literally never seen a photograph that wasn’t on a screen before, and so she was confused that it didn’t respond to the input. At first I laughed in the way old people laugh about kids that can’t use a rotary phone, but then I realized how impressive it was. She was four years old, and her level of interaction with these devices was nearly innate. Things that adults struggle to learn will be second-nature to her.

A few days ago when she sat down with me to add a few words to this very blog, I didn’t even have to give her any instruction. She knew how to operate the keyboard – how to hold shift to capitalize letters or generate an exclamation point. When I was 7, I certainly didn’t – but I didn’t grow up around keyboards in the same way that she will.

If you’re young, never ever underestimate just how much value you can bring to the table simply because of stuff you grew up doing that older folks are clueless about. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can’t compete with more experienced people solely on that basis. I might have decades more experience than you in certain things, but there are other things that are literally second-nature to you that I have to struggle to learn. Find areas where those skills are in demand and use that to your advantage.

When Microsoft Office Suite was first being introduced, it was all the rage to be able to use it. It was a hugely in-demand skill that impressed employers and moved you along in the application process swiftly. So people caught up and pretty much every white-collar professional learned how to not only use it, but learned to indicate that they knew how on their resumes. For many people of that generation, the learning was formalized – classes or certifications, etc.

Now, I hear younger people laughing about the question. Not knowing it would be the strange departure, so it seems silly to even ask. Imagine there was a 6-week certification course in smartphone use. It covered things like downloading and using apps, text message communication skills, WiFi versus 4G, etc. There’s a segment of the older population that might think that was useful, but for a young person that would be laughable.

Older people and younger people bring different strengths to the table when it comes to value-add for employers. I see both populations struggle with naming that value sometimes. There’s plenty of ageism in both directions among hiring managers, but in general I think the older folks are better at knowing the positives they carry. They know the value of their experiences, their wisdom, and their maturity.

Young people, on the other hand, often struggle to realize just how many things are second-nature to them that would represent massive investments to learn for older people. Heck, I’m 36 and the whole reason I’m writing this post is because I started researching how to make short instructional videos that don’t look like garbage and people who are 15 are cranking out stuff that would have gotten you on national television when I was their age.

If someone grew up on a horse farm, then they know more about horses than someone who never saw one in their life before they went to college and got their degree in “equestrian studies.” But the degree gives you a certain sense of confidence that you know what you’re talking about (whether you actually do or don’t). So many young people have essentially a decade or more experience in complex skills simply by virtue of their generation, but there’s no “official” or socially-accepted category for that kind of knowledge. It’s not a degree, it’s not work experience, etc. But it would be insane to discount knowledge you gained because you literally grew up around a particular subject.

Take honest stock of your skills. Pay attention to things that you do well. If you’re thinking, “this can’t possibly be a valuable skill, because it’s so easy for me” – you’re exactly 180 degrees wrong. The fact that it’s so easy for you is exactly why you can use it to add value.

I’ve never been good at sleeping.

Somehow I just never mastered the elementary skill of shutting my brain down for a few hours. I exercise and eat well, but I’ve got very persistent insomnia.

I drink way too much caffeine, but even when I was completely caffeine-free this would happen. I drink caffeine now to combat the fatigue that results from not sleeping.

Years ago I took some time off to try to concentrate on doing nothing but getting a regular sleep pattern going. No work or other responsibilities for a few weeks. I used the time to get a lot of exercise outdoors, read books, avoided electronics, and avoided stress. The closest thing I got to a natural rhythm was a stable pattern of 30 hours awake followed by about 6 hours of sleep. The only way I can sleep for 8 uninterrupted hours is if it’s preceded by at least 48 hours awake straight, or at least a week of 3 hours or less per night.

I don’t like the idea of things like sleeping pills, because I always worry that I’ll need to wake up for some emergency and be unable to. I have three young children and don’t want to be unresponsive if they need something.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts! If you’ve got any good advice, I’m all ears.

Here’s how to improve your writing: Be more direct. Use fewer words.

I struggle with this. I like to build strong visual analogies. But when you hand your work to an editor, they almost never say “you should make this longer.”

Look at your sentences. Highlight every word you could remove and still have the sentence make sense. Then remove them.

People’s attention is a finite resource. You’ll only have it for so long. Use it well.

Sometimes I’ll get an idea that I like and think has potential, but for lack of available juice it’ll pretty much stay in the back of my head. Since starting this blog, I’ve gotten a nice outlet for those ideas – I can put them here. All the potential results of this are positive:

1. Maybe it already exists! Funny anecdote – when I was a kid, I told my parents I had a great idea to save on our gas bill. I had realized that wood burns, and thought that it would be BRILLIANT to just put wood in a metal box and burn it instead of paying for gas like a sucker. So… I invented a wood-burning stove. I invented backwards. My parents swear I was a smart kid, but most of the stories of my childhood are like this. Apparently I “invented” the icebox the same way. The point is that just because you invented calculus, doesn’t mean someone else didn’t do it sooner. It’s good to pay attention to the world. So maybe this idea I’ve come up with already exists, and someone will read this blog and tell me about it, and then I’ll have the thing I want!
2. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but someone will steal the idea and make it. Why do I think this is a good outcome? Because then I’d have the thing, which is all I really want. If I was going to make it myself, I’d do it. This is me being honest that I’m not. I use a lot of juice on other stuff, and I don’t have an infinite amount to spend on every idea. I have to pick my battles, and I’m working on a lot of other things that make me happy.
3. Maybe it doesn’t exist, and no one makes it, but at some point I’ll circle around to it and do it myself. If that ends up being the case, it’ll probably be because a lot of people gave me good feedback.

I think one of the reasons you often see a lot of good ideas/innovations come from the same person or organization is because once a big part of your juice and daily life is dedicated to “develop ideas I have,” it obviously becomes easier to explore the possibilities of them when they come up. If you spend a lot of time writing, it’s easy to write something new that comes into your head. If you spend a lot of time building stuff already, it’s easy to build a new thing. Which is a good lesson in itself!

Anyway, now I feel like I wrote a lot of words about ideas in general and didn’t actually talk about this random idea I had. It probably won’t be worth the build-up, but I’m committed!

Here’s the idea: I run into a lot of emailed newsletters. Lots of people whose thoughts I enjoy have them, lots of industries that are relevant to me produce them, etc. The problem is that I don’t want 25+ email newsletters and I’ll never read them all if I get them. What I would LOVE is a software solution that lets me create an account and sign up for email newsletters through it, and then on whatever interval I request (daily, weekly, only Tues & Thurs, whatever) compiles all the newsletters into a single PDF (with links intact!) and emails that to me. Sort of like customizing my own e-zine out of the newsletters that exist. Then I can throw that e-zine on my Kindle or iPad or whatever and read it at my leisure.

Does this exist? Should it? Feedback welcome!

This isn’t going to be my normal blog post for the day, so you’ll sort of get a bonus one today. A few posts ago, I defined a term that I wanted to use in that post. The term was “juice,” and here’s what I meant by it:

Whenever you’re working on something, a lot of resources get used – time, money, effort, calories, social capital, decision-making fatigue, mental energy, sacrifices, and so on. Rather than write all of that out, I’m going to collectively lump all of that together under the term “juice.” So when I use that term, that’s what I’m talking about: the wide variety of resources, both tangible and intangible, that are required to make things happen.

I wanted to have that term defined in its own post, because I intend to keep using it (I think it’s a helpful concept in a lot of conversations), and I wanted to have a post to link back to. So I’m once again using the blog as an idea-organizer – thanks for playing along!

Today is my son’s first birthday!

While no one can predict the future, I don’t have any plans to have any more kids (I’m blessed with three, and I think we’re at capacity!), so that means this is likely the last 1st birthday I’ll be directly involved in for a while. At least until the grandkids start showing up, which is probably a ways off yet.

Buddy is a smiling, happy, active boy. He stomps little happy feet all the time, and laughs easily and often, even for a baby. He eats like a horse. He absolutely adores music, especially when his grandfather plays the banjo. He can beat on the bongo drums pretty well himself.

Before I had kids, I massively underestimated them. I had no idea a one-year-old could have so much personality; I sort of assumed they were all pretty generic until at least kindergarten. I certainly had no idea that a two-year-old could express complex ideas or be intentionally funny. And I couldn’t have dreamed that a seven-year-old could be the most interesting, fun and brave person I knew.

Added all together with the extra months, I’ve raised about 11 years’ worth of kids, given that their current ages are 1, 2.5 and 7.5 respectively. Sometimes it feels like about a hundred years.

Sometimes it feels like a few days. A blink.

I couldn’t possibly list everything I’ve learned about being a parent, every mistake I’ve made, every victory. But here are some big, big takeaways about parenting while I’m thinking about them:

1. Kids want to be good. They just want to be active. Don’t spend your precious time trying to prevent them from doing bad stuff. Point them in a positive direction and let them run. Put all your effort into rewarding and encouraging good behavior, and you’ll almost never have to punish bad. I can’t remember more than a dozen times I’ve had to actually punish a kid with a time out or something – instead we spent a ton of time creating reward games for good behavior and heaping praise on kindness whenever we saw it. It’s worked so far.
2. They are so, so, SO smart. You will never be prepared for how much smarter they are than you think they’ll be. They will figure you out fast. That also works both ways – they can perfectly understand you much younger than you think. By six months they’re not creatures of pure instinct any more, and you would be shocked at how much language they understand by then. You can just talk to them, and they’ll understand way before they’re actually able to talk back. They can also open everything you think they can’t open. At 7 months, Buddy unlocked a pin-protected phone. I mean, then the little “hacker” licked it, but still.
3. You teach them literally 100% of their behavior. They don’t do anything you don’t teach them to do. If they bug you for snacks, it’s because at some point you gave them snacks when they did that. If they cry after you put them to bed, it’s because at some point you let that cry convince you to pick them back up. You can do whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you ever find yourself exasperated and asking “why do they DO that,” just remember it’s because you taught them to. That extends to a lot of behaviors as they get older – they’ll curse if you curse, smoke if you smoke, drink if you drink. You’ll never hide it from them. Use them as your reason for being better. More than anything, teach them to love.

I’ll miss having a little baby, but not nearly as much as I’ll enjoy the person he’ll grow into. Each of my children is more awesome today than they were yesterday; they become cooler people every day, and I love being there for it.

Happy Birthday Buddy, you entire meatloaf. I love you.