My company sorta takes the week of July 4th off. It started as an almost-everyone being offline for a week; it lingers as we tend to take the week simultaneously. Coming back not having missed much is a small gift. In the explainer for this practice, the HR people wrote, "taking time off is productive." The crank in me wonders, is it, really?
It takes a while to understand the meaning of events. It seems to me that it takes even longer in the places where our immediate knowledge of the facts is the quickest. The relentless updates from ESPN on the tv in my office breakroom probably have the lowest signal to noice ratio, even though, if you want to know the latest about sports, you'll want to watch ESPN. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but it's not that great of a draft. What makes the first draft so rough is its vastness: immediate and omnipresent reaction from all journalists (and pundits) to everything in real time. With the basic facts of events seemingly up for dispute, it can take years for the dust to settle and our understanding to become clear.
When I started at HubSpot, I joined everyone newly hired to the customer success team for a two-week stint of product training. The culmination was a presentation, where we had to demonstrate a fully built marketing effort for a fake business using HubSpot's marketing software. We had to configure a website, set up forms, create some email automations, and, if I recall, publish some social posts. The big boss of product training would review our setups and pass (or fail!) us at the end of the first two weeks. Nothing focuses the mind like a real deadline—when we learned that we had to pass the test, we focused intently on the product training team's workshops.
What if the more strongly you react against an idea, the more that idea comes to define you?
In Hidden Valley Road Robert Kolker summarizes one line of thinking about a source of schizophrenia as the inability to tune out very much of the constant stream of incoming stimuli. The theory goes that most of us can usefully ignore a lot of the noise of life—we hear less of the wind to focus on what people are saying or we give more credence to our actual plans than our fantastical daydreams—while some of us are unable to triage amongst these incoming stimuli, giving equal attention to everything and thus losing the thread of what actually matters. I have no idea if this is a good summary of the research or if the research has moved on in the years since, but the concept of subliminal abilities to screen out or focus on some of what we encounter in the world is intriguing. Is our internal filtering trainable? Is it adversely trainable?What could the things we automatically ignore be telling us? How might we adjust what we are able notice?
When Marc Andreessen said that "software is eating the world," we all nodded along. It was (and is!) true that 'businesses are being run on software' and 'delivered as online services.' In the longer view, what software has eaten is less the business or industry and more their information flows. Software is a whole lot better at bytes than atoms. Want proof? Just look at what my almost-self-driving car does on snowy road: its systems shut down because their sensors can no longer identify the lane. (As a highly addicted downhill skier, my minivan is on snowy roads more than you'd advise.) The software is great until there's no data.
Any political coalition has groups that you'd rather not be near. To be a coalition of any significance or real power is to include some divergent opinions. On the left you might see this best when the people who think campus politics (“occupy the library!”) actually matter unite with the indigent poor; when I worked in right wing politics, it was the guy with the knight helmet talking about medieval values or those oddly fixated on immigrants or the gold standard. There were always people that you didn't really want to associate with. Effective coalitional politics takes knowing when to associate or disassociate with those people. Eventually some of the people that you thought were crazy are going to turn out to actually be crazy, but it's hard to say that you knew all along. Especially when, in order to exercise power or build influence, your people engage with those potentially crazy people.
I hadn't looked at work emails all weekend. That fact matters for what happened on Monday morning. It was early Fall in DC. With the windows finally open, I woke up early. After breakfast and coffee, I walked to work through our neighborhood, still feeling a little brisk. Getting to the office building, I was boisterously greeted by the receptionist, buzzed in, and, instead of the elevator, I took the stairs. Quickly up four flights, breathless, I barged into our office. About half the desks were already full. Not surprising, but the few who also worked for my boss greeted me with an odd look. He called me into his office with a question, "did you see my email?" I hadn't, I was sorry, what did I miss? "I told our team to come in early; I don't have time to catch you up; don't let this happen again." Somewhat deflated, I walked over to my desk amidst the smirks from the strivers on our team: not even 9 am and Yellis is already in trouble! I found the email: a classic Sunday evening missive. It was a few vague paragraphs: the organization generally had a lot going on, there were many (unlisted) important things to do, we should all be fighting hard, so can everyone come in early tomorrow?
The boots and skis are all cleaned and in their closet; we packed up the chairlift snacks to avoid feeding summer mice; on Monday night we drove off into the sunset from another excellent ski season. My kids found new challenge and independence on the hill. They made ski friends and, on more than a few Saturdays, we set them loose for the day with a pocket sandwich and a walkie-talkie. We had a few long runs down through the trees and fields out beside the mountain, behind the house; we hiked to the summit when the lifts weren't running, skiing down alone; the older two tried the end-of-season pond skim. I mounted and remounted several sets of bindings on different skis, finally emerging with a lightweight uphill setup for ski touring. There were the usual ups and downs of praying for snow only to see rain and of thinking nothing was coming, only to ski in a snowstorm all day. What a pastime!