The Ballet Mindset

Training as a dancer, particularly in ballet, influenced how I move through the world. The way I’d describe it is a “joyful and graceful intensity.”

Ballet cultivates this mindset in a dancer because…

Ballet is emotional. In ballet you are expressing, through movement and the body, deep emotions. Ballets tell moving and powerful stories, that dance on the boundaries of human experience. Telling those stories takes a special type emotional labor, because expressing emotion and telling stories without dialogue is a unique challenge.

Ballet is technical. Dancers don’t seem to float, soar, and spin effortlessly because they’re “just born with it”. It’s practiced and drilled. As a ballet dancer, I spent almost half of all my classes at the barre, developing technique. And during a ballet class the first skill you practice, over and over, is learning is to plié - which is literally just learning how to bend your knees. Seriously, as a ballet dancer you spend a remarkable amount of time learning something as simple as bending your knees properly. And from there it builds: it’s technique around pointing toes, posture, moving arms, jumping, landing from a jump, body positioning, body lines, turning, and so on.

Ballet is athletic. Miss Luba, my Ukrainian ballet teacher, used to say that as a dancer you could be doing the hardest jump, lift, or arabesque, but to the audience it always has to look easy. To do that takes tremendous strength, power, body control, and endurance. Ballet is so hard on the body. Of all the sports I ever played, a really tough ballet class was a special kind of physical and mental beatdown. If you don’t believe me try it. Stand on your toes on one foot, hold your arms out from your shoulders, or just jump continuously and see how long you can do this without stopping or grunting in anguish. There’s a reason why ballet dancers are jacked.

Trying to be emotional, technical, and athletic all at the same time takes intense focus, To boot, ballet dancers cannot just go through the motions or rage uncontrolled through a recital. They must perform: physically, mentally, emotionally, artistically, and technically. And the ballet dancer’s craft shapes their mindset into one of joyful and graceful intensity.

As Americans, our culture often emphasizes winning, aggression, strength, dominance, and power. At extremes, I wonder if that encourages, bullying, hostility, and violence.

Being king of the hill isn’t the only way to live and make a unique contribution. It’s one of many choices.

For me moving through life with a ballet mindset, rather than one of dominance, is a contribution in itself. Because acting joyful and graceful intensity is what brings beauty into this world.

I’m grateful to my teachers and dance peers. Because of them, I know that a seemingly paradoxical orientation of joy, grace, and intensity is even possible.

The unmeasured life

The way I think has been a bit of a trap, at least historically.

I have a lot of angst, shame even, that I am not as professionally successful as my peers. No matter how hard I try, even on vacation, I can’t get away from thinking about whether I measure up - either to my peers, or even to the career trajectory I thought I would be on.

Which is all foolish, by the way, because I don’t even care that much about career. Where I intend focus most of my energy is family, community, and character. And yet, because I have been trained in the realm of organizations, business, management, and leadership I am always going back to that foolishness of measuring myself up. 

Because that’s what many of us who are professionals by training - whether in business, law, public service, health, athletics, or anything else - do. We measure things and maximize them, because in our professions the result is what matters.

Again, for me this thinking is a trap. It’s the relentless pursuit of more, and my ego wants me to be cooler, professionally speaking, than I am. And if I use my peers (and my own egotistical visions) as a yardstick, I don’t measure up to that expectation. 

And so I try to cope, probably in a way that’s irrational. Because I try to cope with the fact that I don’t measure up professionally, by counting the ways I think I measure up in other domains. I always think - “I have a loving marriage and family. We have a dog. We have a home we like. I get along with my parents. I have a BMI that stays at a healthy level. We have kids with good hearts. I may not have a fast-track career, but I measure up. I measure up. I measure up.”

And that is the trap. Measuring my non-professional life is the trap. Because what I’ve realized is that, my life is not an enterprise judged by it’s measurable results. My family is not a business unit. It isn’t in the nature of a soul to be benchmarked, standardized, or process-mapped to ensure it has optimal peacefulness.

And by trying to “measure” my non-professional life, I’m propagating this pernicious, unsustainable mindset that my life must be measured. I’m locking myself into a mindset that keeps me anxious and makes me live in a constant state of needing to quench my egotistical desires.

The whole mistake I’ve been making is to try applying the principles and methods of my profession (i.e., focusing on measurable results) to my life. I can’t live at peace with my own thoughts if I try to replace the measurable career results I’m not achieving with an attempt to measure love, family life, children, happiness, faith, peace, experiences, stories, or moments of ordinary joy. Doing what I’m doing locks me into a place where I’m always on the verge of a stomach ache. What I need to do instead is let go of measuring my life.

Because life is something, I think, that cannot be measured.

The problem is, I want so desperately to be able to grab hold of something. My lesser self wants some morsel of incremental progress to remind me that I’m not wasting my life. Some mile marker along this long walk that makes concrete the messy path of life I have ahead and the road I have already traversed. Some interim report card that shows I am doing well at living out the life and that I won’t fail the final exam on my deathbed.

And this is the trap. It’s akin to the plight of Sisyphus. He was rolling a rock up a hill that could never be summited, and I trying to measure my life - something that is not only immeasurable, but that defies measurement.

But after all these years of acculturation and training - how do I resist the near-natural urge of measurement, and instead live an unmeasured life?

I admit now that I should not try to look for mile markers, or anything that charts progress along a fixed path toward a final destination. Because after all, my life has no fixed destination, duration, distance, or pace. Life defies measurement.

But perhaps there is some consolation.

If we know how to look for them, there seem to be where God gives us a window into our inner-compass, to remind us whether we are heading north toward home, or whether we have veered from the righteous path. 

The other day, I had one of these moments. Myles got into a spat with his older brother. He, as a 1.5 year old occasionally bruises his nearly four year old brother. And Bo was sad. And we said, “Myles, that was not nice. It is not kind to hit your brother. You need to say sorry.” And he pondered for a minute. Bo gave Myles a glance back, unsure whether Myles was heading in his direction for reconciliation or to continue the bruising.

But there Myles went, arms outstretched, toward his brother. And it was, without any words or babbles, as sincere of an embrace as I’ve ever seen between two people. It was a moment where my soul reminded my body that it was still in there. It was a moment where God gave me a look at my inner-compass, and it reminded me I was on the right path. 

I never know when those moments are going to come, and sometimes they’re reminders that I’ve veered. But when those moments happens, I am consoled. Because even though they aren’t the mile markers of progress that my egotistical self craves, they are reminders that I am on the right path, heading toward home.

And as much as I would like to, I can’t put moments like that into some sort of scorecard or graph. Those sorts of moments,  where God shares the light see my compass, and reminds me to look, defy measurement. There are so random and nuanced, they can’t be counted or formed into a pattern.

But at least those glimpses are there, consolations to help orient us in a life we want to measure but can’t. It’s still so hard. Because we, who were once young men, are trying so hard not to waste this life, and trying so hard to put one foot in front of the other and eventually reach home. All I want to do is measure something to prove I’m not failing, but what I’m realizing I’m left with is unexpected trail markers which signal whether I’ve veered from the right path or not.

Because at the end of the day, life defies measurement.

High Standards Matter

I’ve been part of many types of organizations in my life and I’ve seen a common thread throughout: high standards matter. 

Organizations of people, - whether we’re talking about  families, companies, police departments, churches, cities, fraternities, neighborhoods, or sports teams - devolve into chaos or irrelevance when they don’t hold themselves to a high standard of conduct. This is true in every organization I’ve ever seen. 

If an organization’s equilibrium state is one of high standards (both in terms of the integrity of how people act and achieving measurable results that matter to customers) it grows and thrives. If its equilibrium is low standards (or no standards) it fails.

If you had to estimate, what percent of people hold themselves to a high standard of integrity and results? Absent any empirical data, I’ll guess less than 25%. Assuming my estimate is roughly accurate, this is why leaders matter in organizations. If individuals don’t hold themselves to high standards, someone else has to - or as I said before, the organization fails.

Standard setting happens on three levels: self, team, and community.

The first level is holding myself to a high standard. This is basically a pre-requisite to anything else because if I don’t hold myself to a high standard, I have no credibility to hold others to a high standard.

The second level is holding my team to a high standard. Team could mean my team at work, my family, my fraternity brothers, my company, my friends, etc. The key is, they’re people I have strong, direct ties to and we have an affiliation that is recognized by others.

To be sure, level one and level two are both incredibly difficult. Holding myself to any standard, let alone a high standard, takes a lot of intention, hard work, and humility. And then, assuming I’ve done that, holding others to a high standard is even more difficult because it’s really uncomfortable. Other people might push back on me. They might call me names. And, it’s a ton of work to motivate and convince people to operate at a high standard of integrity and results, if they aren’t already motivated to do so. Again, this is why (good) leadership matters.

The third level, holding the broader community to a high standard, is even harder. Because now, I have to push even further and hold people that I may not have any right to make demands of to a high standard. (And yes, MBA-type people who are reading this, when I say hold “the broader community” to a high standard, it could just as easily mean hold our customers to a high standard.)

It takes so much courage, trust, effort, and skill to convince an entire community, in all it’s diversity and complexity, to hold a high standard. It’s tremendously difficult to operate at this level because you have to influence lots of people who don’t already agree with you, and might even loathe you, to make sacrifices.

And I’d guess that an unbelievably small percentage of people can even attempt level three. Because you have to have a tremendous amount of credibility to even try holding a community to a high standard, even if the community you’re operating in is relatively small. Like, even trying to get everyone on my block to rake their leaves in the fall or not leave their trash bins out all week would be hard. Can you imagine trying to influence a community that’s even moderately larger?

But operating at level three is so important. Because this is the leadership that moves our society and culture forward. This is the type of leadership that brings the franchise to women and racial minorities. This is the type of leadership that ends genocide. This is the type of leadership that turns violent neighborhoods into thriving, peaceful places to live. This is the type of leadership that ends carbon emissions. This is the type of leadership, broadly speaking, that changes people’s lives in fundamental ways.

I share this mental model of standards-based leadership because there are lots of domains in America where we need to get to level three and hold our broader community to a high standard. I alluded to decarbonization above, but it’s so much more than that. We need to hold our broader community to a high standards in issue areas like: political polarization, homelessness, government spending and taxation, gun violence, health and fitness, and diversity/inclusion just to name a few.

And that means we have to dig deep. And before I say “we”, let me own what I need to do first before applying it more broadly. I have to hold myself to a high standard of integrity and results. And then when I do that, I have to hold my team, whatever that “team” is, to a high standard of integrity and results. And then, maybe just maybe, if the world needs me to step up and hold a community to a high standard of integrity and results, I’ll even have the credibility to try.

High standards matter. And we need as many people as possible to hold themselves and then others to a high standard, so that when the situation demands there are enough people with the credibility to even try moving our culture forward. And that starts with holding ourselves, myself included, to a high standard of integrity and results. Only then can we influence others.

The rare second chance we all have

As our family “gets back to normal”, I’m having to relearn how to get on with other people. Like, literally yesterday we had a few people over for a 5k and pancakes after and my muscle memory was rusty; I shook hands without making eye contact. I’m just out of practice, and I think most of us feel this way.

As I’ve gone through these growing pains, I’ve come to be skeptical of this idea of “getting back to normal.” After all, prior to the pandemic I was not a perfect husband, father, citizen, or friend. And if I wasn’t the best person prior to all this, why would I wan’t to just get back to living that life or back to being that guy?

Most of us crave second chances in life, and now we all, simultaneously, have one. We all have a mulligan on our relationships. We all have an opportunity to make a new sort-of first impression. We all had a long pause our social relationships and now we have the chance to be better versions of ourselves as we rekindle old ties and nurture new ones. We, all at the same time, have this rare opportunity to have a soft-reset in our social and community lives. 

Instead of just “getting back to normal”, I want to be a better friend than I was before. Because, how often do second chances come along?

I want to not let rekindled relationships with college friends just fizzle out. I want to stay open to meeting new neighbors while on walks, instead of just waving hello and keeping it moving. I want to be a better listener, and put my phone away when I’m with others. I want to send more, “hey, I was just thinking about you” texts. I want to be more courageous and really share deeply and make others feel safe enough to share, too. I want to keep deepening with the family and friends that we leaned on (and leaned on us) in the past year.

And before the pandemic, too many of my social were relationships were comfortable, because most people I know act like me, think like me, and talk like me. Maybe that’s not what I want to do from now on. Maybe I could really dig in and pen my heart to those people that are good souls, but make me uncomfortable in some way. And maybe too, I can let go of relationships of obligation faster and let some folks simply pass by on their journey; it’s okay to just cross-paths once with some.

And yet, before the pandemic I started to subscribe to the idea of “no new friends.” Because honestly, I felt stretched and I couldn’t nurture the friendships I had enough. Maybe, just maybe I can dig deeper and find a way to nurture whatever friendships I have - whether they’re strong or weak ties - in a way that is sensible and caring, without hiding behind a door that’s closed to new people. 

Maybe this time around I can be better than the friend I was before. 

It’s just astounding to me how rare a second chance like this can come around - it’s a chance to be better without the fear and shame that can often come in tow with personal and cultural transformation. 

Instead of thinking of this spring as the time we all “got back to normal”, I would rather think of it as the time we, after a long and lonely winter, emerged wiser than we were, and got back to the important work of creating a world we are proud to pass on.

A choking son; My brother’s keeper

I knew it was only a matter of time until one of our sons had a real choking scare. And it finally happened yesterday, when one of our boys put a quarter into his mouth, playfully, but then couldn’t breathe.

It was while I was cooking breakfast. The boys and I were in the kitchen and I was turning some hash browns over in a cast iron pan. And my back was turned to them for maybe 10 or 15 seconds. When I turned to check back, he was doing the sort of quiet, gasping head bob when you’re trying to dislodge something in the throat.

I struck his upper back sharply once. Then twice. And the quarter - and I’ll remember it forever, it was one of those state quarters for Idaho - popped out. And just like that, in another few seconds, it was over. My son and I melted into each other, him in shock, me trying to be stoic and calm, even though I was coming back from a feeling of free-fall inside.

It was the shortest worst moment of my life. I was about the same age when I choked on a hard candy lifesaver and I remember it vividly, still. He and I will both remember this, forever, I think. I woke up from sleep last night and couldn’t stop replaying it in my head for 30 minutes straight, until I tried reimagining us taking that quarter between both our palms, while on our knees intertwined in the kitchen, using magical energy to make it disappear away.

—

The scariest part of choking is that it literally makes someone helpless. As in, the act of choking makes it impossible to shout for help, and therefore makes one help-less. To even notice someone is choking you have to be very close to them, any more than a few yards away, literally or figuratively, and you can’t see or hear their signals.

I knew this day would come, someday. So when I’m on duty with the kids, I don’t like being away from them for any measurable period of time. Even if I’m immersed in something, like cooking breakfast, I always have one eye and one ear in their direction. Because I knew this day would come, and knowing it would has haunted me since our first son was born.

The scariest part of someone choking is that it makes them helpless. To notice someone is choking you have to be around to notice them. That’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past day straight.

And it has led me to reflect more broadly. Who am I choosing to notice? It is just my wife and kids? Is it my family and close friends? What about my neighbors? What if I, literally or figuratively, saw someone choking and help-less at a park or while out shopping? Would I notice them? Who am I noticing? Who am I choosing not to notice?

This whole experience of choking - both living through my son’s scare and reliving my own - has got me thinking about my relationship with the world outside myself. And I think this idea of noticing rhymes with the spirt of the phrase “I am my brother’s keeper.” Who we choose to notice is our brother or sister, someone we don’t cannot be. Who we choose to notice matters. Who I am choosing to notice and not notice matters.

There’s a chasm between who I ought to  notice, who I choose to notice, and who I actually notice. It’s humbling and intimidating to think how big that chasm might be.

This chasm, it seems, is one way to represent the challenge of trying to be a good person, day to day, in the trenches of real life. Who am I choosing to notice and not notice is an indicting, messy, moral question. But it’s one, I think, worth walking toward, with intention into the unknown, instead of running away from.

Who is low-potential, exactly?

There are lots of organizations that have programs for “high-potentials”, cohorts of “emerging leaders”, or who’s who lists for “rising stars”.

But lately, I’ve wondered: if we have programs for “high-potential” talent, who is “low-potential”, exactly? It’s audacious to me that we consider anyone low-potential. 

With the right role, coach, opportunities, and expectations, my experience suggests that just about anyone can grow and thrive and make a tremendous contribution to whatever organization they are part of. Moreover, in my experience the most important ingredient needed for someone to be “high-potential” is that they want and are motivated to grow and be better.

It seems to me that a better approach than creating high-potential programs or leadership development cohorts that are exclusive is to design them in such a way that anyone who wants to opt-in and put in the work can participate.

And wouldn’t that be better anyway? Aren’t our customers, colleagues, shareholders, and culture all better off if everyone who wanted to had a structure where they could grow to their fullest potential? Even if not everyone ends up being a positional leader, don’t we want every single person in our companies to be better at the behavior of leading?

I don’t buy the excuse that it would take too many resources to design structures for developing potential that’s inclusive rather than exclusive. Software makes interaction much cheaper and scalable. People are really good at developing themselves and learning from their peers, given the right environment. And, in my experience most people are willing to coach and mentor someone coming up if that person is eager to learn and grow.

I definitely would want to be persuaded in a different direction,.however. Because to me, employing the best ways to prevent human talent from being wasted is worth doing, even if it’s not my idea that wins.

But again, if someone is truly motivated to grow and make a greater contribution, who of those folks are low-potential, exactly?

The Artist’s Choice

To continue as artists, we have to keep making a choice to be out there on a lonely limb. Because artists, by definition I think, break new ground. Artists explore ideas and techniques that haven’t been done before. To be artists we have to create tension and push cultural boundaries further. It’s what we do and it’s our job.

The hard part about pushing boundaries is that it requires some level of independence and that cultural distance can be isolating.  We cannot do our job pushing the boundaries of ideas and culture if we’re beholden to them. And so we have to set ourselves apart from orthodoxies or operate in the spaces between worlds. For me, this  manifests in a feeling of, “I feel like I can exist almost everywhere, but I don’t belong anywhere.”

And so the choice. We can be artists that create tension and push the edges of things or we can be craftspeople that masterfully create something that’s already accepted - not both.

To be clear, I don’t apply this definition only to who we conventionally think of as “artists.” Sure, photographers, painters, actors, dancers, musicians, and sculptors are all artists. But so are the chefs, computer programmers, corporate strategists, public servants, doctors, parents, physicists, and teachers that push up against the conventional wisdom of their domains to explore new ground.

In addition to being lonely, choosing to be an artists has frustrating trade-offs. The idea of a “starving artist” captures it well. 

It’s hard to be paid handsomely for your work when you’re pushing boundaries, because the world doesn’t know it wants to pay for this weird, uncomfortable thing we’re exploring. If we’re lucky, maybe the world will develop a palate for what we’re doing while we’re alive, or even we’ve gone ahead. But maybe it never will.

I have felt this tension in my own vocation. I don’t really fit in anywhere in a corporate setting, even though I’ve always worked in them. I don’t have a career aspiration that’s as simple as, “I want to be a CFO” or “I want to run my own company.” A lot of the time, I don’t think my colleagues have any idea what to do with someone like me, because my skill set and aspirations are bizarre and hard to fit into existing functions. 

I suspect that if I told people at work, “the aim of my work is to bring goodness to the world by creating high-performing governments and help organizations to stop wasting talent.” They’d be like, “what the hell are you talking about?”

But that’s the choice, isn’t it? We could probably be wealthier than we are, or have more status than we do now by just creating what we know people already like. 

But that wouldn’t be art.

Asking for directions, when it matters

I have probably had to ask for directions while traveling, less than 10 times in my life including trips to foreign countries. This is an incredible feat. We have Google to help us with this sort of question. And because we have Google to help us with this, I think I’ve also been asked for directions less than ten times in my life. 

And by extension, I’ve rarely, if ever, had to say to someone, “I’m lost, can you help me?” And finally, to wrap up this observation, I’ve also probably never had to ask someone, “You look lost, can I help you find your way?”

And when it comes to getting to where we intend to go, like when it’s finding a new restaurant, or getting to a friend’s house in a new city, maybe it’s not a huge deal that we don’t have much practice asking for or giving directions. Maybe it’s nice that we are rarely “lost” or see someone who appears to be lost. On the surface, at very least, this seems like a good development.

But it dawned on me, what if the stakes were higher? What if we need directions on something that isn’t easily found on the internet? Say if we don’t know where to begin on a new project, and we need directions on this. What if we’re “lost” in our marriages or in fatherhood. What if our friends or family are veering toward a dark path, and we need to tell them they look lost?

These four scenarios - asking for directions, giving directions, admitting I’m lost, or identifying someone who is lost - are hard to begin with. It’s hard to ask for help, it makes me feel foolish. And it’s awkward to tell someone, “you look lost, but don’t worry, I’d like to help you.”

If I don’t have to do these things that often because we have Google, can I be sure I even know how to? It’s unsettling to think I may be out of practice asking for or giving directions. Because there are times, I’m sure, that it’s going to actually matter.

The essential role of aunts and uncles

I have come to appreciate aunts and uncles more lately, because now I see the effect that they have on our sons. 

I am just in awe of how loved the boys feel by their aunts and uncles, whether they are blood-relatives or just close friends that care about our children as if they were blood family. And the love of an aunt or uncle is different than what we can give them, it’s something more generous perhaps. It’s as if the boys know, “you are not my parents, but you care about me and love me for who I am anyway, and that makes me feel safe and valued.”

Seeing the special love of aunts and uncles in the lives of our boys, has reminded me of my own aunts and uncles. I never could put words to it before, but I feel that same special, freely given, unconditional love from them. Thinking about it in retrospect, the love and support of my aunts and uncles has been a stabilizing force in my life.

I remember when my car broke down on the way into New York after college - miles away from the George Washington Bridge - and my Masi and Massasahib and extended family rescued me from a shady mechanic shop in the middle of North Jersey. 

Or when my uncles in India deliberately ripped on American domestic policy to get a rise out of me and make sure I had some fire and fight in me. Or all our family friends who subtly reminded me I was a good kid in the middle of high school, by letting me sit and listen and hang out while they talked about scientific discovery, foreign affairs, or literature.

Or when Robyn’s aunts and uncles pulled me in and made me feel like part of the family, even from the very first family dinner I met them at by telling me stories and asking me questions. And they showed up at my father’s funeral as if they had known me my entire life.

I think what’s special about the love of aunts and uncles is that it’s redundant, affirming, and honest. It builds stability and resilience because it’s not the primary, day-in-day out sort of relationship you lean on. But it’s there, waiting to catch you, and to pick you up. And at times, it’s only an aunt or uncle who can really sit you down and get you out of the muck because they are able to have unconditional love but also enough distance and objectivity to call it like they see it.

It’s this combination of redundancy, affirmation, and honesty that makes aunts and uncles so important for a family’s culture. Theirs is a moderating influence that kicks in when things are going wrong.

And the more I think of it, the more I believe that every organization and community needs people who play the role of an aunt or uncle to thrive. In a company, for example, “aunts and uncles” are the people who take an active interest in you and give you advice, but don’t manage you directly. I can think of dozens of people who have been that sort of guide from afar, for me or others. When you mentor and develop others for whom you aren’t directly responsible, it’s such a gift to the culture of the company.

The same dynamic exists in a city. There are plenty of people who don’t have formal responsibilities over something but raise people up anyway. It could be neighbors who aren’t a block captain, but throw parties on their block and keep an eye out for neighborhood kids. It could be successful business owners who give advice behind the scenes to those coming up, outside of the auspices of business incubators and mentor programs.  It could be the elderly couple in the church parish who invite newlywed couples to have dinner once or twice a year and help to nurture them through the ebbs and flows of marriage. These little acts are gifts that build the culture of a City and make the community more resilient. Which, it seems, is exactly like what aunts and uncles do.

I organize my life around three pillars - being a husband, father, and citizen. But what I’m realizing is that “uncle” is a really important role that fits within this framework, that I want to be intentional about - despite how invisible that role may be.

Status fights and wasted talent

Companies, and really any organization, can function like a fight for status. This “fight” plays out in organizations the same way whether it’s a corporation, a community group, or a typical school cafeteria.

There’s a limited number of spots at the top of the pecking order, and the people up there are trying to stay there, and those that aren’t are either trying to claw to the top or survive by disengaging and staying out of the fray.

If you’re engaged in a fight for status there are two ways to win, as far as I can tell: knocking other people down or promoting yourself up.

Knocking other people down is what bullies do. They call you names in public, they flex their strength, they form cartels for protection, and they basically do anything to show their dominance. They become stronger when they make others weaker.

This is, of course, easy to relate to if you’ve ever been to middle school or have seen movies like Mean Girls or The Breakfast Club. However, the same sort of dominating behavior that lowers others’ status occurs in work environments.

“Bullies” in the work environment do things like interrupt you in a meeting, talk louder or longer than you, take credit for your work, exclude you from impactful projects, tell stories about your work (inaccurately) when you’re not there, pump up the reputation of people in their clique, or impose low-status “grunt work” on others. All these things are behaviors which lower the status of others. In the work environment, bullies get stronger by making others weaker.

The other way to win a status fight is to promote yourself up and manage your perception in the organization. In the work environment, tactics to promote yourself up include things like: advertising your professional or educational credentials, talking about your accomplishments (over and over), flashing your title, hopping around to seek promotions and avoid messy projects, or name dropping to affiliate yourself with someone who has high status.

Let’s put aside the fact that status fights are crummy to engage in, cause harm, and probably encourage ethically questionable behavior. What really offends me about organizations that function as a status fight is that they waste talent.

In a status-fight organizations people with lower status are treated poorly. And when that happens they don’t contribute their best work - either because they disengage to avoid conflict or because their efforts are actively discouraged or blocked. 

Think of any organization you’ve ever been part of that functions like a status fight. Imagine if everyone in that organization of “lower status” was able to contribute 5% or 10% more to the customer, the community, or the broader culture. That 5 to 10% bump is not unreasonable, I think - it’s easy to contribute more when you’re not suffocating. What a waste, right?

Of course, not all organizations function like a status fight and I’ve been lucky to have been part of a few in my lifetime. I think of those organizations as participating in a “status quest” rather than a “status fight”. In a status-questing organization, status actually creates a virtuous cycle rather than a pernicious one.

A status quest, in the way that I mean it, is an organization that’s in pursuit of a difficult, important, noble purpose. Something that’s aspirational and generous, but also exceptionally difficult. 

In these status-questing organizations the standard for performance (what you accomplish) and conduct (how you act) is set extremely high, because everyone knows it’s impossible to accomplish the important, noble, quest unless everyone is bringing their best work everyday and doing it virtuously. 

And when the bar is set that high, everyone feels the tension of needing to hit the standard, because it’s hard. Whether it’s to achieve the quest or be seen by their peers as making a generous contribution to the organization’s efforts, everyone wants to do their part and needs the help of others. 

And as a result, the opposite dynamic of a status fight occurs. Instead of knocking other people down, people in a status-questing organization have no choice but to coach others up, which ultimately raises everyone’s status. 

If you’re on a noble quest, there’s plenty of “status” to go around and the organization can’t afford to waste the contribution of anybody in the building - whether it’s the person answering the phone or a senior executive. In a status-questing organization, the rational decision is to raise the bar and coach instead of throw other people under the bus.

And what’s nice, is that in an organization with that raise-the-bar-and-coach-others-up dynamic is that the bullies don’t succeed, because their inability to raise and coach is made visible. And then they leave. And so the virtuous cycle intensifies.

So if you’re in an organization that feels more like a high-school cafeteria than an expeditionary force of a noble, virtuous quest, my advice to you is this: raise the bar of performance and conduct for the part of the organization you’re responsible for - even if it’s just yourself. And once you raise the bar, coach yourself and others up to it. 

And when you do that, you’ll start to notice (and attract) the other people in the organization who are also interested in being on a noble quest, rather than a status fight. Find ways to team up with those people, and then keep raising the bar and coaching up to it. Raise and coach, raise and coach, over and over until the entire organization is on a status quest and any “bullies” that remain choose to leave.

Of course, this is one person’s advice. Looking back on it, it’s how I’ve operated (but I honestly didn’t realize this is how I rolled until writing this piece) and it’s served me well. Sure, I haven’t had a fast-track career with a string of promotions every two years or anything, but I have done work that I’m proud of, I’ve conducted myself in a way that I’m proud of, and I have a clear conscience, which has been a worthwhile trade-off for me.

—

Note: this perspective on equality / the immorality of wasted talent is well-trodden ground, philosophically speaking. John Stuart Mill (and presumably his contemporaries) wrote about it. Here’s an explainer on Mill’s The Subjection of Women from Farnam Street that I just saw today. It’s a nice foray into Mill’s work on this topic.

The pizza stone, snowblower, and being that kind of man

Two gifts I’ve been using a lot lately are a snowblower and a (2nd) pizza stone. Both were Christmas gifts from our parents in recent years.

The extra pizza stone has doubled our oven’s throughput for making pizza. Which is convenient for us a nuclear family, but it isn’t essential on a weekly basis. Where it makes a big difference is when we’re hosting - say close friends or family. Having that 2nd stone gives us the capability to throw a pizza party. 

Similarly, the snowblower is convenient - especially on days of large snowfall - but not essential. I can muddle through with just a shovel if I really need to. Where the snowblower makes a huge difference is for our block. 

Our next-door neighbors and we have an unwritten code: whoever gets to the shoveling first takes care of the others’ sidewalk. This makes it easier for whoever comes out second, and it clears more of the sidewalk, earlier in the day, for people walking down the block. Having the snowblower makes it much more possible for me to honor that neighborly code.

With the snowblower, I can basically guarantee I’ll be able to remove snow from our house, as well as for each of our next-door neighbors in about 30 minutes. Without the snowblower, it might take me closer to two hours on a day of heavy snowfall to manage that same task.

Receiving the stone and snowblower wasn’t a particularly flashy ordeal. Both were extremely generous and practical gifts, but it wasn’t particularly exciting to receive something so mundane, in the moment of unwrapping the present on Christmas day.

But these sorts of gifts, I’ve realized, are much more than practical. I’ve come to think of them as exponential because they give us the ability to give to others. In this example, the 2nd stone and snowblower has made the amount of times we’ll end up throwing pizza parties or helping out our neighbors over our lifetime exponentially greater.

I’ve thought recently, how humble one must have to be to give an exponential gift. When someone says “thanks for the pizza, it was great” I don’t, after all, make it a point to say something like, “You’re welcome, it would probably wouldn’t have happened if our parents hadn’t got us a 2nd pizza stone for Christmas 3 years ago.”

Or talking to our neighbors across the fence, I would never in a 100 years say something like, “No problem, I was happy to get your snow while I was out. The credit really goes to our parents who got us this snowblower. It would have been much harder to help you if not for their gift.”

And it’s not like I frequently say to our parents, “oh thanks for those gifts, it’s really helped me to be a better friend and neighbor.” Maybe I should, but that’s not really the sort of exchange I’d probably naturally have in real life.

Nobody knows the impact these gifts from our parents have had. Our parent’s probably don’t even realize it.

Essentially, when you give an exponential gift like a 2nd pizza stone or a snowblower, you can’t expect to get credit for it. This is much different than say a more novel gift that other people notice, like a consumer electronic or a very nice piece of new clothing.

Take a sweater I got this Christmas, for example. People noticed and said things like, “that’s a nice sweater, is it new?” And I could reply with something like, “oh yeah, I’ve loved it - it was a great Christmas gift from our parents.”

That sort of affirmation doesn’t happen with exponential gifts. Which is why I think giving an exponential gift takes tremendous generosity and humility, because the gift-giver isn’t recognized for it, nor might they even know how impactful their gift was.

And as I started contemplating this, I began to wonder - am I humble an generous enough to give gifts that nobody will ever know I was responsible for? And let’s put aside Christmas and birthdays and get to the big stuff.

What about in my job? Am I unconsciously holding back on making a contribution that I know won’t help me land a promotion? Am I working hard, just so I can get a pat on the back? 

Do I volunteer in my community because I relish the credit and respect it provides, or because it’s just the right thing to do? Are there things I do, only because of how someone else might see it on instagram? Am I humble and generous, or am I just a peacock and a brat who gives only to get back reciprocally?

I don’t know how to know this, not yet at least. I think this problem - of knowing whether our own actions are done for their own righteous sake or because of the rewards we expect for them - is one of the essential, practical, moral struggles that we all face.

But I feel strongly that it’s important to try understanding this, and acting differently - more humbly and generously - if we can. Because exponential gifts are transformational in real people’s lives, and they transform the culture we live in for the better. I want to be humble and generous enough to give an exponential gift that I never expect to get any credit or recognition for. 

I want to be that kind of man.

Dreams, from joy and the conviction of their own souls

Raking leaves is one of those chores I don’t want to do until I’m doing it.

Until I’m with rake in hand, I’ve forgotten the crispness and soft chill of the air, and the sound of the brushing leaves. It’s sweatshirt weather. But I also forget that sweatshirt weather is also “thinking weather.”

As I raked yesterday, I escaped to thinking about dreams. And my subconscious drew me not to thinking about what my dreams are, but rather, “what influenced me to have the particular dreams that I do?” And for me, so much of my dreams are wrapped up into my parents’ dreams for me.

To be a “big man” or a man of great community respect. And I wondered why they had those dreams for me, and I think it must have been, at least in part, because of how they were treated when they arrived in this country. As immigrants, I don’t imagine they ever felt accepted or welcomed, at least for the first few decades of their arrival.

And when you’re an “outsider” respect and wealth protects you from harm - whether that is rude service or dirty looks in public, or more unfortunately, a brick through your window. I imagine my parents’ pain is something that influenced me to want the dreams that I wanted early in life. Pain is a powerful influence.

But my dreams were also influenced by the broader culture whose collective opinion skews toward a hedonistic, lowest common denominator and accepted malaise . Let’s call those the dreams of “the herd”.

The herd wants me to hold its dreams as my own, because it’s a mechanism of justification. It’s harder to criticize the herds hedonistic aspirations if they convince me (and others) to be part of it. The more people the herd co-opts, the more their dreams - however dishonorable they may be - become normal. Just like pain, the herd is a powerful influence.

So early in life my dreams were influenced by two things, avoiding pain and succumbing to the herd’s mentality. That’s where “I want to be a Senator” or a “social entrepreneur” came from - those were two dreams that pain and the herd led me, specifically, to.

And I’ve let go of those dreams, not because I grew out of those dreams, but because I grew out of pain and the herd’s mentality. Mostly through luck and blessing, some very special friends and family helped me to discover joy and my own soul. It’s a journey less like climbing a mountain, and more like a long, lonely walk.

It’s a journey I am still on, but my dreams are now about a growing family, goodness, the honor of public service, and sacrifice for a community bigger than myself. I still fall into the traps laid before me by pain and the herd, I am after all a mortal man. But these dreams - borne of joy and what lies within the core of me - are a far cry from the version of myself that was nakedly ambitious, longing to be on the Crain’s 20 in their 20’s list.

Honestly though, the point isn’t about me, nor should it be.

The point is this: I can only hope - for our children, and the children of our friends, family, and neighbors - that the generation up next spends less of their life having their dreams influenced by pain and the herd than I did. I hope, deeply, that more of their dreams, and really their lives, are instead influenced by joy and the convictions of their own soul.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about how we do that.

Every culture is misunderstood

Most people don’t understand the depth of Indian culture. For example…

Most people don't understand that there’s much more to Diwali than lighting pretty candles. Most people don't understand that there's more to yoga than it being a good "work out" with an emphasis on breathing and stretching. Most people don't understand that there are a LOT of Indians (and Indian-Americans) who don't work in medicine, IT, or engineering.

Most people don't know about the rich tradition of art, music, poetry, philosophy, theology, and governance on the Indian sub-continent. Most people don't understand that the range of our cuisine is so diverse and wide, that saying "I like Indian food" is similar to saying "I like ancestrally-white people food".

Our culture goes much deeper than the caricature that most other people believe it to be.

I assume that virtually any group feels similarly sometimes. The sentiment of "our culture and people aren't stupid, you just don't understand their depth" is not unique to people of any descent - Indian or otherwise.

But I've learned two things about this:

One, if I believe any culture or community is dumb, antiquated, or backwards - i probably don't understand that culture's depth.

And two, nobody is going to understand the depth of my culture - whether it's the culture of India, America, Michigan, Detroit, or even our family - unless I welcome them with open arms and share something beyond the caricature they already have in their mind.

Terran address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation

Address to the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation, Earth Date: October 11, 3020.

Friends, it is a great honor to be addressing this esteemed body on the occasion of the 3rd Symposium of Intragalactic Cooperation. Prior to the beginning of my remarks, your interstellar translators were to set to English, which is one of the classic languages of Earth - the home planet of my species, located in the Terran system.

It thought it fitting to address you in this way, because I will be sharing with you the last 1000 Earth-years of my species’ history. Why? Because the trajectory of my species in this time is a fitting metaphor for the important decisions we are about to make as we sign the accords which outline the principles all our species have agreed to as we engage in trans-galactic exploration for the first time.

1000 years ago was the beginning of our 21st century of demarcated history. My species did not realize it at the time, but we had been deteriorating as a civilization for nearly one thousand years. The 21st century was was when my species finally starting bearing the costs of that millennia, which we now call the age of subjugation.

That millennium of subjugation was when my species came of age. We grew the population of our home planet into the Billions. We made pathbreaking progress in science, physics, philosophy, and art. To terrains living in those times, it seemed like that our species had reached a pinnacle point of thriving.

But it was not necessarily an era of thriving. There were religious wars. And then wars for power, wealth, and planetary domination. Later, we began to subjugate our living environment - our atmospheric gases, our liquids, and our solid naturally occurring elements. We harnessed the power of atoms and made explosive weapons, which are primitive by today’s standards but were capable of destroying our home world when stockpiled.

And then in the late 21st century, the millennium of subjugation pushed our species to the brink of extinction. Our environment, our politics, and our morals were pushing every person on our home planet to the brink of violence, starvation, or both.

But what also started occurring in the middle of the 21st human century was rapid progression in our understanding of information computing. We started to see the beginnings of what our species called “artificial intelligence".

And what saved our species from the brink of extinction was not the computational power we harnessed, but the cultural understanding.

Terrans, as you know, are some of the most emotional and irrational beings in the galaxy. We are messy, volatile, and downright nutty. We do not possess the physical strength, intellect, logic, or discipline of any of the species represented in this chamber today. And I say that as a proud terran myself.

What we are, however, is imaginative. We have tremendous capability to envision what does not yet exist - however illogical it is. In fact, our imaginations are at their best when we are.

Which brings me back to artificial intelligence. It gave us a quantum leap in information computing power, yes, but it’s most transformative effect on our species was to make us understand what made us unique and special in the galaxy. We could not out-reason the computers we built. We could not out-compute it.

But when contrasting ourselves with information computers, we realized what our souls and emotions were capable of. Advancing information computing technology, surprisingly made us understand what it meant to be terran (or “human” as it was said in those days) more than any other development in the history of our species.

When pushed to the brink of extinction in the late 21st century, my species finally realized that we were never good at subjugating, or even built for it - we were made to imagine.

And all across our planet, we started imagining. Our planetary government stopped every new activity for 10 Earth years and spent a decade imagining what the next millennium could look like for our species, so that we would not repeat the mistakes of our history.

And what a millennium it has been, it has exceeded our wildest dreams. In the past millennium we have established peaceful worlds across our stellar system, we have made contact with all of your species, some of which that have been space-faring civilizations for tens of thousands of Earth years.

And now, all our species, together, have explored the galaxy, peacefully for the past five hundred years. We are discovering the origins of the universe itself. We are doing something my species could have never even contemplated 1000 years ago.

And here we are, today, on the eve of the signing of the accords which will govern how we - for the first time - venture outside our galaxy. Even though we now know that those galaxies could be wildly different than our own - down to the very physics that have prevailed as truth in our galaxy for billions of Earth years.

And on the eve of this most remarkable occasion, I share the history of my species with you to illustrate that audacious goals are irrational by their very definition. They are laughable. They are unbelievably scary. But in these times of extraordinary circumstance, the lesson my species has learned - when we were on the brink of inevitable extinction, when we felt most pressured to be practical and modest - is that what we must do, even though it is foolish, irrational, and scary is to imagine.

And I speaking as the representative of of 35 Billion terrans across this galaxy, suggest to you that if we let our imaginations reach far and wide, when it feels most ludicrous, we can explore the next galaxies, together, and discover unimaginable beauty, prosperity, fellowship, and peace with all those we encounter.

As we sign the accords tomorrow, let it be a sign for all of galactic history that it was a day of extraordinary imagination.

Keeping Up With the Joneses or Answering Hard Questions?

The cycle of how life is supposed to work has always been presented to me like this, since I was a kid:

How we keep up with the Joneses

• Get the best grades and build the best resume you can in high school

• Get into best college you can

• Get the best grades, network, and internships you can in college

• Get the best, most prestigious job you can in your twenties

• Get into the best graduate or professional school you can

• Get the best placement you can and rise the ranks to the highest-paid and prestigious post you can

• Have kids and move into the best neighborhood with the best school system you can

• Repeat this process again and help your kids be the “best” they can be, so they too can keep up with the Joneses

I used to think this cycle kept on going because humans had some need for domination and power, status, or both. As in, we had this evolutionary need to be “the best”.

But after having a very insightful conversation this week, I wonder if using the tried and true MO of keeping up with the Joneses is attractive because it’s simple.

One of my best friends has been thinking about meaning and shared a remarkable insight with me. My friend said it better, but here’s the essence:

Life is messy and there are these difficult but inescapable questions we’re confronted with - about life, death, meaning, and purpose. These questions are exceptionally hard and scary to answer. And it’s not fair that the only people who seem to really have consistent help with these ineluctable questions are the religious and the pious. What about everyone else?

It had never occurred to me that so many of us may get stuck in a cycle of keeping up with the Joneses, not because we’re nakedly ambitious or because of social pressure. Maybe it’s just the easiest, most obvious way to feel like we’re not wasting our lives or doing what we’re supposed to.

Confronting life’s ineluctable questions (my friend used this word in her essay, I had to look it up, but I’m using it here because it’s a perfect word for this context) is so hard and intimidating to do.

Keeping up with the Joneses has its own drawbacks, but it’s less risky than confronting ineluctable questions.

How we keep up with the Joneses is clearly defined and relatively unambiguous. Society doesn’t flog anyone who tows the line and just keeps up with the Joneses. Our institutions (colleges, schools, corporations) all reinforce these norms too. Keeping up with the Joneses is not exalted but it’s rarely rejected. In the realm of figuring out how to live, it’s the path of least resistance.

But I worry that there’s an intergenerational debt accumulating here. If we repeat this cycle of keeping up with the Joneses - generation after generation - will we eventually forget how to tackle life’s ineluctable questions? If we do forget, is that really the type of culture we want to leave to our grandchildren’s grandchildren?

For me, the answer to that question is absolutely not.