We are reimagining what it means to be a man

In the age we live in, what it means to be a man is being completely reimagined. And as a result, what we are trying to do as men - particularly as husbands, fathers, and citizens - is nothing short of remarkable. We are actively reinventing, for the first time, the role of men in society.

I struggle a lot with this.

On the one hand, I am a man. Being a man is a salient part of who I am and how I view the world. This may indicate, to some at least, that I’m less evolved and not as “woke”, if that’s the right word, than others among us. I’m not able to hold a world view that gender is entirely a social construction or that we should create a world that ignores the very concept of “men”. I’m not entirely sure what being a feminist or male ally entails, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that, exactly, either.

At the same time, I reject what being a man means today. And I’m not comfortable with the grotesque baggage that being a man is inseparable from. The criticisms of men and masculinity are legitimate, and that’s an understatement.

Men have controlled and abused women, for most of known history it seems - whether it was politically or through sexual violence. Marriages between men and women, generally speaking, have not be fair or equitable, ever. The glass ceiling is real - I see my women and my female colleague hindered and treated outright badly, in ways that men aren’t. I don’t want to be that kind of man.

But it seems to me, that for the first time, at least some men are trying to take on this tension - identifying with being a man, but rejecting its harmful externalities - and act differently. I don’t know if it’s a majority of men or even that a lot that are trying to reimagine what it means to be a man, but I’m certainly struggling through this tension. So are a lot of my friends and colleagues and it’s something we talk about. So it can’t be an immaterial amount of men who are trying to figure this out, right?

I love the mental model of using an OKR (Objective and Key Results) to set clear goals (you can get a nice crash course on OKRs, here). And so I tried applying it to “being a good man” - this is what being a “good man” means to me:

When I was done, I had a “whoa” moment. The OKR I created, I realized, is quite different than what I would assume the stereotypical man of the 20th century would create if he were doing the same exercise. Hell, it’s quite different than what my own father would probably create. Like, can you imagine the men of 1950s sitcoms (or even 1990s sitcoms) talking about fair distribution of domestic responsibilities or parenting without fear tactics?

I can’t. Most of the protagonists in those shows had wives who didn’t work outside the homes - the contexts in which those characters were cast is wildly different than our own.

And that’s what makes what we’re doing remarkable. We’re trying to envision a different future - and live it ourselves - without having any sort of role model on what this reconception of what it means to be a man can look like. It’s even more remarkable and complex because it’s not just heterosexual men in same-race relationships that are figuring this out. Gay men and men in interracial or interfaith relationships are also figuring out how to be husbands, fathers, and citizens in this time of cultural flux around what it means to be a man.

I couldn’t talk to my own father about this anyway (God rest his soul), but even if he was around he couldn’t be my role model for this journey. Despite my father being the most honest and perhaps the kindest man I’ve ever met, he was still swimming in a culture with remarkably rigid gender roles. All our male role models were, because that was the culture of the times.

But beyond our own uncles, fathers, and grandparents, we don’t have stories in our culture to draw from for role models, either. There aren’t novels with strong, male protagonists that are trying to redefine manhood in the 21st century, that I’ve found at least. On the contrary, every novel I’ve heard my friends talk about with male protagonists were from detective novels, historical fiction, thrillers, or from science fiction - hardly relatable to men trying to recast their male identities.

There are great male role models from the canon of 20th century literature and culture - Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, Reverend John Ames from Gilead, or even Master Yoda from Star Wars are favorites of mine - but those characters are in the wrong context to really help us navigate the process of reimagine manhood as well. Atticus and Yoda are not really dealing with contemporary circumstances, obviously, as much as I really am inspired by their example.

Honestly, it seems like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its superheroes going through real struggles and making real sacrifices are the closest role models we can look to as men trying to be better men. Maybe that’s why I like those films so much. But it’s hard and probably ego-inflating for me to relate to comic book superheroes. We need, and have to have something better than Marvel movies, right?

My wife loves the titles from Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and I honestly love hearing the stories of the novels she’s reading. All the titles are written by women and have strong female protagonists. I would love to have a similar book club, but with strong male protagonists trying to reimagine what it means to be a man. But what novels do we even have to choose from?

So fellas, what we are trying to do is remarkable. We’re not trying to navigate to a new place, as much as we’re trying to make a map to a place that’s never been visited.

We need to talk about it, blog about it, and podcast about it. Some of us have to write novels about it, or make music and movies about it. We have to leave a body of work for the next generation of men to draw upon. We have to leave our sons, nephews, students, players, and grandsons a place to start as they continue this remarkable journey of reimagining manhood that we’ve started.

To build a great team, get specific

Building a team is hard, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

What I’ve learned when trying to build teams (whether serving on hiring committees, recruiting fraternity pledges, or volunteer board members) is that most of the time we’re not specific enough.

To build a great team, we can’t just fill the role with a body. We can’t count on the perfect candidate either - there are no unicorns. Instead, we should be clear about the role, and the attributes that we can and cannot compromise on.

Here’s a video with a tool / mental model on how to actually do that.

Learning to Win Ugly

What it takes to “win” is different than what it takes to “win ugly.” In sports what it means to win ugly can be something like:

• Winning a close, physical game

• Winning in bad weather or difficult conditions

• Winning without superstars

• Winning after overcoming a deficit or when your team is particularly outmatched

• Winning by just doing what needs to be done, even if it’s not fancy or flashy

But winning ugly is also a useful metaphor outside sports:

• In a marriage: keeping a relationship alive during adversity (e.g., during a global pandemic) or after a major loss

• In parenting: staying patient during bedtime when a child is overtired and throwing a tantrum

• In public service: improving across-the-board quality of life for citizens after the city government, which has been under-invested in for decades, goes through bankruptcy (I’m biased because I worked in it, but the Duggan Administration Detroit is my thinly veiled example here)

• At work: finding a way to reinvent an old-school company that’s not large, prestigious, or cash-infused enough to simply buy “elite” talent

The point of all these examples is to suggest that it’s easier to succeed when circumstances are good, such as when: there’s no adversity, the problem and solution are well understood, you’re on a team of superstars, or you’re flush with cash. It’s something quite different to succeed when the terrain is treacherous.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of winning ugly lately because as a parent, the fee wins we’ve had lately have been ugly ones.

Generally speaking, I’ve come to believe that winning ugly is important because it seems like when the stakes are highest and failure is not an option - like during a global pandemic, or when a city has unprecedented levels of violent crime, or when the economy is in free fall, or a family is on the verge of collapse after a tragedy - there’s usually no way to win except winning ugly.

I’d even say winning ugly is essential - because every team, family, company, and community falls upon hard times. In the medium to long run, it’s guaranteed. But honestly, I don’t think most people look at this capability when assessing talent for someone they’re interviewing for a job, or even when filling out their NCAA bracket. 

Moreover, as I’ve reflected on it, I’ve realized that my whole life, I’ve been coached, actively, to avoid ugly situations. I was sent to lots of enrichment classes where I had a lot of teachers and extra help to learn things (not ugly). I had easy access to great facilities, like tennis courts, classrooms, computer labs, and weight rooms (not ugly). I was encouraged to take prep classes for standardized tests (not ugly). I was raised to think that the way to achieve dreams was to attend an Ivy League school (not ugly).

If I did all these things I could get a job at a prestigious firm that was established, and make a lot of money, and live a successful life.

What I’ve realized, is that this suburban middle class dream depends on putting yourself in ideal situations. The whole strategy hinges on positioning - you work hard and invest a lot so you can position yourself for the next opportunity. If you’re in a good position, you’re more likely to succeed, and therefore set yourself up for the next thing, and so on.

If you don’t think winning ugly matters, this is no problem. But if you do believe it’s important to know how to pull through when it’s tough, the problem is that the way you learn to win ugly is to put yourself into tough situations, not easy ones. The problem with how I (and many of us) were raised is that we didn’t have a lot of chances to learn to win ugly.

I, for example, learned to win ugly in city government, at the Detroit Police Department…in my late twenties and thirties.

There, we caught no breaks. Every single improvement in crime levels we had to scrap for. Every success seemed to come with at least 2 or 3 obstacles to overcome. We didn’t have slush fund of cash for new projects. We didn’t have a ton of staff - even my commanding officers had to get in the weeds on reviewing press briefings, grant applications, or showing up to crime scenes. Just about any improvement I was part of was winning ugly. 

By my observation here’s what people who know how to win ugly do different:

No work is beneath anyone: if you’re winning ugly, even the highest ranking person does the unglamourous work sometimes. You can’t win ugly unless every single person on the team is willing to roll up their sleeves and do the quintessential acts of diving for loose balls, grabbing the coffee, sweeping the floor, or fixing the copy machine. 

Unleashing superpowers: If you are trying to win ugly, that means you have to squeeze every last bit of talent and effort out of your team. That requires knowing your team and finding ways to match the mission with the hidden skills that they aren’t using that can bring disproportionate results. People who win ugly doesn’t just look for hidden talents, they look for superpowers and bend over backwards to unleash them.

Discomfort with ambiguity: A lot of MBA-types talk about how it’s important to be “comfortable with ambiguity”. That’s okay when you have a lot of resources and time. But that doesn’t work if you’re trying to win ugly. Rather, you move to create clarity as quickly as possible so that the team doesn’t waste the limited time or resources you have.

Pivot hard while staying the course: When you’re winning ugly, you can’t stick with bad plans for very long. People who have won ugly know that you don’t throw good money after bad, and you change course - hard if you need to - once you have a strong inclination that the mission will fail. At the same time, winning ugly means sticking with the game plan that you know will work and driving people to execute it relentlessly. Winning ugly requires navigating this paradox of extreme adjustment and extreme persistence.

Tap into deep purpose: Winning ugly is not fun. In fact, it sucks. It’s really hard and it’s really uncomfortable. Only people who love punishment would opt to win ugly, 99% of the time you win ugly because there’s no other way. Because of this reality, to win ugly you have to have access an unshakeable, core-to-the-soul, type or purpose. You have to have deep convictions for the mission and make them tremendously explicit to everyone on the team. That’s the only way to keep the team focused and motivated to persist through the absolute garbage you have to sometimes walk through to win ugly. Teams don’t push to win when it’s ugly if their motivation is fickle.

Doing the unorthodox: People who can win pretty have the luxury of doing what’s already been done. People who win ugly don’t just embrace doing unconventional things, they know they have no other choice.

Be Unflappable: I’ve listed this list because it’s fairly obvious. When it’s a chaotic environment, people who know how to win ugly stay calm even when they move with tremendous velocity. This doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t get angry. In my experience, winning ugly often involves a lot of cursing and heated discussions. But not excuses.

Sure, I think it’s possible to use this mental model when forming a team or even when interviewing to fill a job: someone may have a lot of success, but can they win ugly?

But more than that, I am my own audience when writing this piece. I don’t want to be the sort of husband, father, citizen, or professional that only succeeds because of positioning. At the end of my life, I don’t want to think of myself as someone who only succeeded because I avoided important problems that were hard.

And, I don’t want to teach our sons to win by positioning. I want them to succeed and reach their dreams, yes, but I don’t want to take away their opportunity to build inner-strength, either. This is perhaps the most difficult paradox of parenting (and coaching at work) that I’ve experienced: wanting our kids (or the people we coach) to have success and have upward mobility, but also letting them struggle and fail so they can learn from it, and win ugly the next time.

Dealing With it When Our Kids Act Ungratefully

My most guttural resentment comes when sacrifices are insulted. These moments, when an unrestrained, vindictive, anger emerges from my otherwise even temperament are also when I’m most ashamed as a father.

This weekend, I have been angry so many times I have a lingering headache as I’m penning this entry. I’m lost my temper, so many times this weekend, despite it being the first beautiful weekend of the season and we haven’t had any adversity or hardship.

It goes like this.

One of our big kids will just do something mean, either to me, Robyn, or his brother. And then, I feel such acidic resentment.

I did not skip my shower today so you could pour soap onto the carpet during your nap. I did not go out of my way to buy a coconut at the grocery at your request so you could spit on the floor or on me. I did not quit a job I liked, was proud of, and found meaning in so you could throw magnet tiles at me or punch me in the privates…I actually did it so I could be a more present father to YOU.

Your mother did not work diligently to create a part time work schedule so you could intentionally pull your brother off a balance bike on our family walk. Three off your grandparents did not leave their home countries in search of a better life so you two could terrorize each other or deliberately destroy books in front of my face because you know it makes me angry. Are you not grateful? Do you know how good you have it?

It’s damning. It hurts so badly and makes me so angry when my sons - or anyone really - takes the sacrifices I’ve made, the sacrifices that I’m trying to make quietly and keep quiet, and throws them back in my face. It’s insulting, infuriating, and maddeningly saddening.

My sons don’t realize any of this, of course. They don’t realize the gravity of the sacrifices that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have made so they could live the life they have. Hell, I didn’t get it at their age and probably don’t fully comprehend the degree of my ancestors’ sacrifices, even now.

Most of the time, I don’t want to tell them either. I, nor my parents and grandparents, made sacrifices in our lives to be able to tell great stories about ourselves and seek the applause of others. 

I wouldn’t want my sons to feel some deep shame about their fortunate circumstances, either. After all, it’s not their fault they were born into a loving and prosperous family. And, I don’t want them to have to know what it feels like to be broke and wondering whether our family will lose our house. So yes, I don’t want to throw the sacrifices I’ve made in their face - spiking the football is not what we do, so to speak.

At the same time, hearing stories of my parents sacrifice - especially from others - gave me a halo of sorts. I felt so loved and so compelled to honor their sacrifice by working hard and not taking it for granted. It’s part of being the children of immigrants - when we hear about the sacrifices of our parents and ancestors it is a unique kind of affirming love, that motivates us to try to be better and to not let their sacrifice be squandered. Honoring their sacrifice, builds confidence and inner strength.

I often worry about this at a societal level. 

Every person knows, deep down, I think that the most celebrated people on earth; the people who are loved, respected, and admired are not really exalted because of their accomplishments. They are lauded because of their sacrifices. This is as true for common people as it is for celebrities.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like our species has this radar and fascination with people who make sacrifices for something larger than themselves. We don’t, after all, tend to celebrate people who are born rich or with some sort of advantage from genetics or birthright.  We celebrate people who work hard and make huge sacrifices to contributed whatever it is that they’ve contributed. We may fixate and envy the successes of others, but we don’t revere the successes themselves. We revere those individuals’ capability for sacrifice.

Making sacrifices builds character and confidence. If I can make a sacrifice for something bigger than myself, if I can endure suffering. If I can persist for the greater good, if can do deed cut from this cloth of sacrifice, I have proven my inner strength. Nobody else has to know it, so long as I know it.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. If I haven’t made sacrifices, I also know that. I know that I am untested. I know my inner strength is unproven. I know that I might be weak. And that’s a devastating,  absolute lead balloon for building confidence. And I would imagine that lack of confidence and inner strength has to be compensated for somehow. If I know I am weak on the inside, I have to make up for it with my outward presentation to the world.

At a societal level, I think this has huge consequences.

Imagine if one generation of parents made big sacrifices during their lifetime and prepared them to make sacrifices during their own lifetime. Imagine if another generation tried to build the most comfortable life possible for their children, protecting them from ever having to make sacrifices for others. Those two generations, I think, would leave monumentally different marks on the world.

It’s such a paradox, I think. I don’t want to make noise about the sacrifices I’ve made, but I don’t want my sacrifices to be insulted by ungrateful children. I don’t want my children feel deep shame or know intense suffering, but I also want them to have opportunities to build inner strength. In some ways I need to tell stories about sacrifice, but in other ways that’s counterproductive. What’s a parent to do?

The only solution I can think of is to tell stories about the sacrifices of others. Instead of talking about my own sacrifices, I can tell my sons the sacrifices that their mother and grandparents made. I can let others tell my story, or let my sons ask me about my story and tell them the truth when they do. This is at least one way out of the paradox.

I hope, too, that elevating and honoring the sacrifices of others helps me to relieve myself of this searing resentment I have when our kids are so unintentionally insulting of the sacrifices we’ve made for them.

Getting Process Out of the Black Box

The first three weeks after Emmett (our third son) was born, were unusually smooth. And then I went back to work.

Maybe I’m just a novice and I should’ve expected brother-brother conflict while our two older sons, Bo and Myles, jockeyed for new roles in the family. But when I went back to work, and perhaps coincidentally perhaps not, snap. The good times were over and their relationship flipped, seemingly overnight.

This rattled me. I don’t have a sibling and I was resentful toward my sons - that they didn’t realize how lucky they were. I made this known to them and performed several other magnificent feats of faux-parenting, including yelling, calling out mistakes, ignoring the bad behavior, ordering them to “work it out” - and probably several embarrassing and obviously ineffective strategies.

I was particularly frustrated with our older son, who was more frequently the instigator of conflict. Why doesn’t he get it? How is he not learning from this?, I thought.

After a particularly bad episode, involving a modest but intention punch to a defenseless brother’s chest, I accidentally had a small breakthrough. I AAR’d my son.

An AAR is an After-action review that I learned about when reading some books about the US Army’s approach to leadership. Basically, a unit should debrief right after a mission using four simple questions. These questions vary depending on where you read about it but they’re roughly this:

• What did we intend?

• What actually happened?

• Why?

• What should we do differently next time?

It turns out, even at 4 years old, Bo was pretty responsive to the AAR. He was capable of thinking through these questions with some modest support and he actually learned something. But the takeaway of this story is deeper than to “AAR your kids.” The real lesson is that important “processes” like helping my sons learn from a mistake shouldn’t be improvised; for the important stuff I shouldn’t be winging it.

—

Let’s simplify the world and say there are two kinds of organizational processes, explicit processes and implicit processes. I’m going to start with family stuff as an example, but as we’ll see shortly it applies to professional life as well.

Explicit processes are ones that are worked out, down to specific, simple steps. Explicit processes are the sorts of activities that everyone in our family has a mental checklist or process map for in their heads. In some instances, we even have simple diagrams drawn up on a whiteboard in our kitchen.

Here are some examples of explicit organizational processes in our family:

• The routine at dinner / bedtime

• The routine for how we get ready in the morning

• The routine for how we get ready when we have to leave the house

• The routine for drop-off and pick-up from school

• The routine for cleaning up toys

• The routine for feeding the dog

• The meal plan for the week

To be sure, we don’t have perfect processes worked out for all these routines - we’re always learning and improving. But having any process that are explicitly understood to the entire family does two things: 1) we avoid rookie mistakes (and at least some toddler meltdowns), and, 2) we have a starting point for process improvement. For explicit processes, we’re decidedly not winging it. We have a plan that is explicitly known to everyone.

Implicit processes are the situations that we haven’t thought through in advance or taken the time to make specific, simple, or known to everyone. The way these processes work is in the metaphorical black box - they happen, but it’s not clear how or why - we’re essentially winging it on these. Some examples in our family, past and present, are:

• How we coach our kids when they make mistakes

• How we share information with our kids and family

• How we learn and adjust as parents

• How we resolve sibling conflict (and when we intervene as parents and when we don’t)

• How we determine how much of a plate needs to be eaten before dessert is allowed.

Most of these are at least a little squishy in our household. But during the heart of Covid Robyn and I took something implicit - how we communicate a day-care Covid exposure and quarantine - and made it explicit. By working through the process and trying to make it simple, clear, and essentially into a checklist a few really good things happened:

• We were calmer (because we had a plan to lean on)

• We executed faster (because we knew our roles, and cut out unnecessary steps)

• We executed better (because we didn’t panic and forget really important, but easy to miss steps like getting complete information from our day care provider about the exposure)

Making the implicit process explicit is a game changer, because routines that are made simpler and clearer go much better than when we wing it. And as I mentioned previously, explicit processes are much easier to improve iteratively.

Of course, in our professional lives not every implicit process is consequential enough to make implicit (e.g., it’s probably okay to wing it when picking a spot for the quarterly happy hour). But in my experience lots of really consequential processes in organizations are ones where most of us are essentially winging it. Or worse, the processes are explicit but are complex, bloated, or shoddily communicated…and as a result outcomes are actually worse than winging it.

Here are some examples - how many of these are explicit processes in your organization? How many are implicit?

• How we learn from a failed project

• How we manage in a crisis

• How we hire, interview, fire, or promote fairly

• How we react to changing consumer or market trends

• How we coach and develop employees

• How we support new managers or employees

• How we make a big decision

• How we plan or facilitate meetings

• How we communicate major decisions or enterprise strategy

• How we set goals and measure KPIs 

• How we scope out, form the right team, and launch a strategic initiative

• How we make adjustments to the strategy or plan

How many of these should be simple, clear, and well understood? How many of these are okay to wing it? 

It seems to me that a simple, relatively cheap way to radically change the performance of an organization - whether at work or at home - is to take consequential processes that are implicit and make them simple, clear, and explicit.

Bad Managers May Finally Get Exposed

If I were running an enterprise right now, I’d be doubling down HARD on improving management systems and the capabilities of my organization’s leaders. Why?

Because bad management is about to get exposed. 

This is merely a prediction, but even with all the buzz about the “Great Resignation” I actually think most organizations - even ones that are actively investing in “talent” - are underrating the impact of workforce trends that have started during the pandemic. The first order effect of these trends manifests in the Great Resignation (attrition, remote work, work-life balance) but I think the second-order effects will reverberate much more strongly in the long-run.

Here’s my case for why.

A fundamental assumption a company could make about most workers, prior to the pandemic, was that they were mostly locked in to living and working in the same metro or region as their office location. Now, hybrid and fully remote work is catching on, and this fundamental assumption of living and working in the same region is less true than it was three years ago.

This shift accelerates feedback loops around managers in two ways. One, it lowers the switching costs and broadens the job market for the most talented workers. Two, it opens up the labor pool for the most talented managers - who can run distributed teams and have the reputation to attract good people.

I think this creates a double flywheel, which creates second order effects on the quality of management. If this model holds true in real life, good managers will thrive and create spillover effects which raise the quality of management and performance in other parts of their firms. Bad managers, on the contrary, will fall into a doom loop and go the way of the dinosaur. Taken together, I hope this would raise the overall quality of managers across all firms.

Here’s a simple model of the idea:

Of course, these flywheels most directly affect the highest performing workers in fields which are easily digitized. But these shifts could also affect workers across the entire economy. For example, imagine a worker in rural America or a lesser known country, whose earnings are far below their actual capability. Let’s say that person is thoughtful and hard working, but is bounded by the constraints of their local labor market.

Unlike before, where they would have to move or get into a well known college for upward mobility - which are both risky and expensive - they can now more easily get some sort of technical certification online and then find a remote job anywhere in the world. That was always the case before, but the difference now is that their pool of available opportunities is expanded because more firms are hiring workers into remote roles - there’s a pull that didn’t exist before.

Here’s what I think this all means. If this prediction holds true, I think these folks would be the “winners”:

• High-talent workers (obviously): because they can seek higher wages and greater opportunities with less friction.

• High-talent managers: because they are better positioned to build and grow a team; high-talent workers will stick with good managers and avoid bad ones.

• Nimble, well-run, companies: companies that are agile, flexible, dynamic, flat, (insert any related buzzword here) will be able to shape teams and roles to the personnel they have rather than suffocating potential by forcing talented people into pre-defined roles that don’t really fit them. A company that can adjust to fully utilize exceptional hires will beat out their competitors

• Large, global, companies: because they have networks in more places, and are perhaps more able to find / attract workers in disparate places.

• Talent identification and development platforms: if they’re really good platforms, they can become huge assets for companies who can’t filter the bad managers and workers from the good. Examples could be really good headhunters or programs like Akimbo and OnDeck.

• All workers: if there are fewer bad managers, fewer of us have to deal with them!

And these are the folks I would expect to be the “losers”:

• Bad managers: because they’re not only losing the best workers, they’re now subject to the competitive pressure of better managers who will steal their promotions.

• Companies with expensive campuses: because they’re less able to woo workers based on facilities and are saddled with a sunk cost. Companies feeling like they have to justify past spend will adjust more slowly - ego gets in the way of good decisions, after all.

• Most traditional business schools: because teaching people to manage teams in real life will actually matter, and most business schools don’t actually teach students to manage teams in real life. The blueboods will be able to resist transformational change for longer because their brands and alumni connections will help them attract students for awhile. But brands don’t protect lazy incumbents forever.

This shift feels like what Amazon did to retailers, except in the labor market. When switching costs became lower and shelf space became unlimited, retailers couldn’t get by just because they owned distribution channels and supply chains. Those retailers resting on their laurels got exposed, because consumers - especially those who had access to the internet and smartphones - gained more power.

And two things happened when consumers gained more power: some retailers (even large ones) vanished or became much weaker, and, the ones that survived developed even better customer experiences that every consumer could benefit from. It’s not a perfect analogy because the retail market is not exactly the same as the labor market, but switch “consumers” out with “high-talent workers” and the metaphor is illustrative.

Of course, a lot of things must also be true for this prediction to hold, such as:

• We don’t enter an extended recession, which effectively ends this red hot labor market

• Some sort of regulation doesn’t add friction to remote workers

• Companies and workers are actually able to identify and promote good managers

• Enough companies are actually able to figure how to manage a distributed workforce, and don’t put a wholesale stop to remote work

I definitely acknowledge this is a prediction that’s far from a lock. But I honestly see some of these dynamics already starting. For example…

The people that I see switching jobs and getting promoted are by and large the more talented people I know. And, I’m seeing more and more job postings explicitly say the roles can be remote. And, I see more and more people repping their friends’ job postings, which is an emerging signal for manager quality; I certainly take it seriously when someone I know vouches for the quality of someone else’s team.

So, I don’t know about y’all, but I’m taking my development as a manager and my reputation as a manager more seriously than I ever have. If you see me ask for you to write a review about me on LinkedIn or see me write a review about you, you’ll know why! I definitely don’t want to be on the wrong side of this trend, should it happen - you probably don’t.

Bad managers, beware.

Radha, My Sister

Her hair would’ve been actually black, I think, two shades darker than mine. My hair being dark-dark brown, but which most people think is black from afar. Though a different shade and sheen, her hair would’ve had equivalent thickness and vigor. And, for some reason I know that she would’ve worn that black, thick, hair of hers just above the shoulders.

Until recently I had only been able to visualize the back of her head - I don’t know why - and get a single breath, though a full one, of her essence only from time to time.

I am an only child; I literally have no siblings, but yet she is my sister. My younger sister, I should specify. She was never born, never conceived. And yet, for years now I’ve had a strong intuition that she existed, even if only as a spirit in the spectral realm. I have not even seen her in a dream, but I still knew of her in a dream, and I knew she was my little sister.

Over the years I’ve discerned more and more about her. Sometimes memories of our relationship come to me in a daydream, or I might feel her presence, usually manifested in the intermittent, but often forceful, breeze of early springtime.

She would’ve been two and a half inches shorter than me, and built with a broader, sturdier frame, more like our father’s than our mother’s. An athletic build, you could say, though she was not athlete. For some reason, I knew she was quietly enamored with art and art history. She was able to sketch and draw, and was a handy seamstress, like our mother. She is the one who inherited the wanderlust of our father, and would’ve moved to a place like New York or San Francisco so she could be close to museums, culture, and cuisine.

For some reason, I know her name is Radha, and that Radha is serene. Stoic and of remarkably even temperament. But every now and again, I know, her charm would shine through unrestrained. Flashing a smile, and patting my back after listening patiently to me vent about something irrelevant - softly but sheepishly interjecting, “That’s how it goes sometimes, big brother” before sashaying off to the kitchen to get us both a glass of water.

Radha and Robyn would’ve had a wonderful relationship. Radha probably becoming an ally and collaborator of Robyn in her pursuits to make work more supportive of caregivers and mothers. Robyn probably becoming a role model and an informal mentor to her for navigating marriage and family life. I think they would’ve been close, confidants even.

And to the boys, she would’ve been a doting Aunt, taking them to the latest exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts whenever she was in town. And she would tell them stories about her and I growing up together, and stoke their interest in our Indian heritage. For some reason, I know she is more assured in her identity than me. And, I also know, for some reason, that she would find safety in the fact that I was her biggest cheerleader and loudest supporter.

I have been thinking about Radha lately because the past few weeks have been a magical time in our family. Our sons are forming a bond of brotherhood. Bo and Myles have taken Emmett into their pack, wordlessly and without initiation. They, even though they have now been brothers for five weeks, still spontaneously erupt into a chant of, “WELCOME HOME EMMETT! WELCOME HOME EMMETT! WELCOME HOME EMMETT!” Without prompting or notice.

And as I’ve seen our three sons become a cohesive unit, images of Radha have come to me - because I’ve finally been capable of it. I see their sibling bond, up close. I see and realize, in them, the relationship Radha and I would’ve had. It is like Bo, Myles, and Emmett are a portal into a sort of semi-real-semi-dreamworld - the past I could’ve had, with my sister who was never born.

For my whole life, I’ve had moments where I’ve so desperately missed Radha. But I am lucky to have had brothers and sisters who were not my siblings. Robyn’s siblings treat me more like a brother than a brother-in-law, even though we have no shared memories of childhood. And it sounds corny, but some of my fraternity brothers, really have become brothers to me.

I, too, have a deep bond with many brothers and sisters - which most other Americans would call cousins - despite geography and age. In Indian culture, we call our elder brothers “Bhaiya” or “Bhaisahib”and our elder sisters “Didi” or “Jiji” - it’s a sign of respect. It is one of my great gratitudes and joys in life to have people that I can call those things and really mean it, rather than just “cousin”.

And yet, I still think longingly about the time with Radha I never had and the memories that could’ve been. She would’ve kindly but firmly reminded me who I was when I was floundering in my early twenties. And I would’ve been her rock when our father died and her stoic personality succumbed to her broken heart.

I do feel more than a few shreds of ridiculousness talking about what to many might seem like an imaginary sister. And yet, there’s something of Radha I know exists. She is not a ghost. There’s a little speck of her soul I feel I am always carrying with me, as if my spirt had a charm bracelet with a link to her on it. My words here are merely animating and coloring her into a quasi-corporeal form that she will never take. But, still, she is real.

What a wonderful thing it must be to have siblings, in the real world, I mean. It truly injures me when our sons get into childish arguments. If they only knew what it was like to be the without-a-sibling-will-be-an-orphan-someday type of alone. I know in my head they will grow out of their intermittent terrorizing of each other, but I hope they someday go beyond that and sincerely appreciate the beautiful gift - a brotherhood - that they’ve inherited.

It is a bizarre thing to have a bond with someone who doesn’t exist, but it’s remarkably affirming and comforting. For Radha and me, it was not meant to be in this life. All I can do is hope that she’s listening or reading my blog, I suppose. And that whatever part of her spirt that is able to be carried is something I possess.

And someday, maybe just maybe, I will meet her once I pass from this world onto the next. I will meet her and she will be as I’ve imagined her. Waiting, with my father, at the front door of a bungalow atop a hill. The hill is grassy, like that of a mountainous, western state. And as I climb the hill, up the cobblestone walkway, she will be there with two glasses of water. And she will flash her unrestrainable charm, and say, softly but sheepishly, as I’ve always known her to: “Welcome home big brother, It’s so like you to be exactly five minutes late.” 

Is the company designed fairly?

Would I be willing to switch jobs with anyone in the company? For real, would I?

To the philosophically inclined reader this question rightly feels familiar. It’s a version of the Rawlsian thought experiment which utilizes the “veil of ignorance” to examine the design of a society.

Rawls was a 20th century political philosopher who was interested in ideas about justice. His most discussed work was A Theory of Justice. That work explores whether a society is just, not enterprises, but the idea is still helpful for corporate types like me.

The idea, in broad strokes, basically goes like this.

Let’s imagine that we were designing a society from scratch, with a totally blank slate. We’d have to make all these decisions about how people are treated, how the economy works, and who has what rights and privileges. Really important stuff to decide, right?

But there’s a catch. We don’t know what our own role in this new society will be. We could become a street sweeper, a musician, a stay-at-home-dad, a CEO, or a veteran wounded in war. As Rawls puts it, we’re designing this society from behind a “veil of ignorance” because we don’t know what our specific situation will be while we’re making all these decisions.

Rawls’s thought experiment isn’t a proposal for how to design a society - it’s obviously not practical and basically impossible to actually deploy. But it is a good test. In the society we’re designing, would we be okay with essentially being randomly assigned to a role? If so, the society is probably just because it is fair.

Which is where the question opening this post comes in, it’s loosely based on Rawls’s veil of ignorance thought experiment: if I would be willing to switch jobs with anyone in the company, the enterprise is probably designed fairly.

Just about every organization I’ve observed or been part of fail this fairness test, though I suppose some are more “fair” than others.

What would have to be true for a company to be “fair” and “just”?

In my experience, the main points of contention around fairness and justice in companies are between front-line employees and management. The paragraph below is how I imagine many front-line employees view the managers and executives of their company. And I’ll own it - this paragraph is absolutely informed by own experiences, from my first job slinging popcorn at a movie theater to being a middle-level manager in a fairly large enterprise today.

I would love to switch places with those people at corporate. They don’t do any of the “real” work in this company. People like us make the products and services for the customer. People like us are on the front-lines generating all the real sales to the customer. If the people who “manage” or work hum-drum desk jobs left, the company would keep running. If we left, the company would fall apart at the seams.

And yet, we are the ones getting screwed. We are the ones who bust our bodies in factories and do hard physical labor. We’re the ones getting yelled at by customers. We’re the ones working nights and weekends. And of course, we’re the ones who get paid less. We don’t get stock options, bonuses, or generous benefits. We’re also the ones who get cut first in a recession, unlike the people working at the headquarters.

And on top of all this, we are disrespected. In the company, people don’t even share news of what’s going on and they talk to us like we’re dumb. The higher-ups are condescending towards us. And, society itself looks down at us, even though, again, we’re doing all the real work to make the things they buy at the store.

It’d be one thing to deal with all this nonsense, too, if the higher ups actually knew that they were doing. They don’t. We’re the ones who know what all the problems are, and those corporate people just come up with their own ideas and never listen. They make bad decisions which get us into problems all the time. And I’ve hardly ever had a “good manager” in my whole career, and for all this talk about “leadership development”, nothing changes. People like me are held accountable for our job, and we get fired if we’re not cutting it. But nobody holds them accountable for being bad managers.

So yeah, if you ask me if this company is designed fairly, I’d say absolutely not.

Obviously, that passage is fictitious and a bit on the nose. But I do think it hits on a lot of the tensions that make enterprises unfair and even unjust. People who work on the front line have extremely difficult jobs, but they’re often paid much less or at a minimum are disrespected. People with cushier setups get paid a lot more, have much higher status, and yet they often aren’t held to a high standard.

I am not above reproach on these issues, though I hope my errors are not intentional or gratuitous. To me the lesson is pretty straightforward, and applies largely to people, like me, who are in the management class of organizations.

If I am lucky enough to work a cushy job with cushy benefits, I have to hold myself to a higher standard. I have to earn those spoils. I have to be good at my job, I have to always treat others with the utmost respect. I have to make good decisions. I have to lead and develop others. I have to take responsibility for the team’s success and be held accountable for bad calls.

Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that managers and executives don’t get a fair shake, but I think that’s unlikely. It’s also not unreasonable to argue that if people get into management positions via a fair process, it’s not the company’s fault that opportunities in society are unevenly distributed. And again, the veil of ignorance is simply a thought experiment and not a practical strategy, regardless of whether it’s applied to designing societies or designing enterprises. All this is to say, my setup here isn’t squeaky clean or clear cut - I acknowledge that.

But I don’t think the conclusions of the exercise are unreasonable either: we should treat people with respect, we should compensate people fairly, and if we’ve got a cushier setup than average, we should earn it by holding ourselves to a commensurately high standard. 

Those takeaways apply to managers and executives (myself included) more than anyone.

---

Sports Are Designed To Be A Cultural Juggernaut

On my way home from a restaurant lunch last week I wasn’t upset, but I was a bit flabbergasted - how did we talk about sports almost the entire time?

It’s not that I’m disinterested in sports. On the contrary, I like sports quite a bit. But if I walk into a room, especially if the majority of the people present are men, I’m almost always the person least interested in sports. 

Which isn’t miserable, but it’s also not fun to be that guy. Being in the company of others, barely having anything to say because everyone else has a seeming encyclopedic knowledge of every game, player, and offensive scheme is legitimately boring.

When I originally envisioned this post, I imagined it as a cultural critique of hyper masculinity and the need for our culture to be more worldly. In my head I imagined, with full-on Yosemite Sam voice, posing this question as the post’s title: why does everyone talk so damn much about sports? Finally, I thought, I could have my emotional release as the sports novice arguing a greater cultural relevance for my preferred domains: like the arts, politics, and religion.

But when I actually thought about that question - why does everyone talk so much about sports - I realized there are tons of reasons why. Sports are designed to be a cultural force. Rather than berating sports (which is what I expected to do in this post), I’ve changed my mind, maybe other aspects of culture should actually be more like sports. 

Here are some examples of how the sports industry is designed to be culturally significant. Imagine if politics, the arts, or religion took on some of these attributes. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they’d have more cultural relevance than they do:

• In sports, there’s are much data and statistics that are shared transparently about games and players. Anyone who wants to can study those data to develop expertise and fluency about their favorite sports.

• Different “channels” have differentiated experiences that are catered to the audience. Going to the game and watching it on TV can both be terrific for different reasons. People talk about those awesome experiences, and word spreads.

• Announcers guide the audience and explain what’s happening in a supportive, non-pretentious way. That helps novices understand the game and experts engage more deeply.

• Anyone can become a fan of any team - it’s easy to opt in. There’s no test or application to submit. This is incredibly inclusive even if some artifacts like jerseys and hats come at a cost.

• Sports are highly localized, one can become a fan of their local team and watch a live game within driving distance of home. Sports teams are not geographically isolated from their fans, rather they’re highly integrated into their local community. And, fans can play sports in their own neighborhood with their friends and family!

• Though many leagues have ethical issues of many sorts, the integrity of the game is taken seriously. In major sports leagues, fans can trust that the game isn’t fixed, and athletes who gamble on games are harshly punished.

• Similarly, during games rules are tightly enforced, with referees who are highly trained professionals. For all the griping sports fans do about refs, it’s hard to claim they’re corrupt. And conduct that distracts from the game, like fighting or flagrant fouls, get players ejected.

• Players and coaches are highly visible and accessible, relative to other professions. There are press conferences, in-game interviews, and lots of fan events where regular people can interact with their hometown heroes.

• Even commentators on television networks seem like fun, everyday people. They comport themselves with professionalism and seem like a blast to be around. Who wouldn’t want to spend a day hanging out with Shaq or Michael Strahan?

• Athletes and coaches have compelling personal stories and they actually act like themselves on camera. The human storytelling element is a huge part of sports, which gives people a personal, emotional connection to the game. The 30 for 30 documentary series by ESPN is a great example of storytelling in sports.

• Sports have partnerships that cause intersections with huge swaths of culture: journalism, fashion, health and wellness, community service, social justice, politics, and commerce. 

Sports is incredibly accessible and multi-dimensional. It’s an industry designed to be talked about, shared, and culturally pervasive. It’s no surprise that sports has huge cultural influence relative to its size as an industry.

Of course, sports has its problems and dark elements - especially around the labor relationship between players and owners. There are also clear imbalances and issues to work out around the difference in treatment and compensation of male and female athletes. Personally, it’s also incredibly frustrating to me when people I know (usually men, many of which are my buddies) use sports as an instrument to project dominance and act with a pompous air of condescension and exclusivity. I acknowledge and agree that sports culture has serious shortcomings.

But dang, as a cultural force the sports industry really has it figured out. I wish that domains that I personally care about more - like the arts, politics, and religion - took note from sports. 

For example, wouldn’t it be an interesting experiment if the “game day experience” of church was more thoughtful for both in-person services and virtually? Or, what if political parties voluntarily hired independent referees to self-regulate “fighting” and “unsportsmanlike conduct” so that elections were less yucky to the average citizen? What if artists were much more accessible to fans and embraced partnerships outside their mediums as much as athletes and sports franchises do? If the arts, religion, and politics took a page from sports organizations, maybe they’d have more cultural relevance and more enthusiastic participation from their constituents.

Either way, I’ve started to appreciate the sports industry more in the past few months. Even if I still roll my eyes at how much cultural bandwidth sports consumes and how my guy friends don’t shut up about the last weekend’s games, I can’t help but respect how sports is designed to be, and truly is, a cultural juggernaut.

Where Compassion Starts

We said goodbye to Apollo, our family dog of 17 years this weekend. We adopted him my senior year of high school and I’m grateful that he had a long and generally healthy life. I’m also grateful for his friendship and love, especially for the company he’s given to my father and mother since I moved out of my childhood home.

This passing was different than that of my father, which was sudden and chaotic. Apollo’s passing, rather, is one that I had seen coming for almost two years now. Because of that, I feel like his loss is one that I’ve accepted and grieved already, for the most part - as much as one can anyway.

I don’t mean for this post to be a eulogy, however. But I wanted to open with his passing because I work out my feelings with words and I am sad that he’s no longer with us. More than that, that he’s gone ahead is important context for an unexpected moment of compassion.

The Doctor, and the staff surrounding here, who administered his final medication were obviously compassionate in all the ways I expected. Like in the tenderness of their words and body language, their expression of sorrow, the gentleness in their voices when walking us through the process and paperwork.

Then the Doctor, Dr. Preston, I think her name was - surprised me with an act of quite unexpected compassion.

The final dose of medicine was given through injection. To administer this, Dr. Preston carefully and gently shaved a bit of Apollo’s hair from his hind leg. Makes sense, I thought, much easier to find a blood vessel that way.

But then she sterilized the area with an alcohol solution, not in a robotic, I-do-this-a-dozen-times-a-day sort of way, but in a way that was peaceful and more deliberate. It was if she was acknowledging the gravity of the moment by performing this unnecessary act - Apollo had no medical purpose to avoid infection because he was about to die - and doing it anyway. This gave the whole affair, a welcome sense of respect and dignity.

And then he received the dose. It was done. And about 10 minutes later Apollo had gone ahead.

But then, again, Dr. Preston surprised me.

She informed us that his heart had stopped. She let a moment pass, letting us exhale. And then she covered his poke point with a little bandage and a little turquoise bandage wrap. The same sort of dressing, a healthy dog would’ve received. He was already gone, but she still bandaged his leg. Medically, it was totally unnecessary, but she did it anyway.

It was one of the greatest acts of compassion and respect I have ever seen.

“Thanks for wrapping him up,” I said, sincerely and matter-of-factly, with my upper cheeks quivering.

And then I asked if she needed anything else from me. She gently and politely said no, and then I left.

I have been thinking a lot in the past 24 hours about Dr. Preston’s unexpected act of compassion. It instantly made me feel hopeful, seen, and loved even.

How does someone find the grace to act, and be, like that that? How did Dr. Preston? How can I be that compassionate in my life? What might the world be like if even 1% more people regularly showed compassion like Dr. Preston had so unexpectedly?

Surely part of that is just circumstance, and probably practice. But even given those explanations, the compassion Dr. Preston shared was still remarkable and uncommon. 

And I really don’t have a precise answer on where compassion comes from. But I got a sense of where it might start while reflecting on, of all things, my trip to the grocery store today.

I was weaving through the aisles briskly, picking up supplies as I usually do. A piece of fish at the butcher counter. A bottle of ketchup. A carton of strawberries. The usual. But I also happened to need some water chestnuts, because we’re making a simple stir fry dinner one night this week. Luckily a store associate was stocking the shelves just as I got to the international foods section.

As I was driving home, I was remembering the interactions I had at the store. I had asked the person at the meat counter for about a pound and a half of salmon, but l didn’t even really remember her. The associate near the water chestnuts seemed unusually meek and quiet, that I noticed. But instead of saying good morning I just awkwardly snuck between her supply cart and the shelf to pick up my can of water chestnuts and went on my way. I think was polite to the self-checkout manager, but again, I had more or less forgotten my interaction with her.

During my run to the store, I had done nothing that different than anyone else. I was focused, efficient, and cordial enough to anyone I happened to speak to. But to not even be able to remember anything about those people? That indicated something overly transactional and not fully human.

I had left home, was weaving through the aisles of the grocery store, but had remained fully engaged only inside the world of my own mind, and my checklist. I had let the invisible people around me stay more or less invisible. My choice wasn’t improper, perhaps, but it wasn’t imposed upon me either. I didn’t have to stay so locked in my own world; so determined to complete my shopping trip as efficiently as possible.

Compassion is an act between people. It’s not something we experience when having an exchange with say a toaster, blender, or lawn mower. We don’t experience compassion with machines. And yes, I don’t know exactly why or how Dr. Preston was so disarmingly compassionate toward me.

But, what I do know is that she was there. She was fully there. She wasn’t going through the motions of her veterinary checklist. Her actions acknowledged that there were other living things she was engaging with. At a minimum, she was in a position to be compassionate, just by choosing to do that.

To be compassionate, we must withdraw from the inner world of our thoughts, chores, checklists, and daydreams. Even if I don’t know much about compassion, I do know this: we have to be fully with the people and creatures around us to be compassionate. That’s where compassion starts.

The Power of Goals We Can’t Achieve

The difference between non-verifiable goals and verifiable goals are the time-scales under which we’re operating. Verifiable goals are goals that we can measure and accomplish during our lifetimes. 

Non-verifiable goals are also measurable, but are intended to not be achievable until well after our lives have ended. Reasonable people disagree on the practical definition of concepts like “mission”, “purpose”, and “task”, but here’s an illustration to make the concept of a non-verifiable goal less abstract.

Because non-verifiable goals, by definition, are goals we don’t expect to be around to see the fruits of, some interesting things happen when we set them.

One, we can dream bigger when we set non-verifiable goals because we aren’t constrained by needing or expecting to achieve the goal within our lifetime - we’re free to swing for the fences. Two, non-verifiable goals tend to be other-focused because by assuming we’ll be dead by the time they’re achieved, we’re less anticipatory of the way our achievement will make us feel personally - we’re free to think about results, ideas, or causes bigger than ourselves.

Finally, we tend to apply more discretionary effort and act more courageously in pursuit of a non-verifiable goal. If we expect to be long gone we don’t spend our days worrying about being recognized for our work. people and teams accomplish incredible things when nobody cares who gets the credit. When setting a non-verifiable we’re free to focus on doing the work, and making as much forward progress as we possibly can - we don’t care as much about who get’s the credit if we know we won’t be around for the victory party anyway.

It is a bit morbid to talk about non-verifiable goals - death is an uncomfortable topic - but we should set them for ourselves personally and for the enterprises we lead. Non-verifiable goals obviously don’t replace verifiable goals that operate on shorter time-scales, but they are important complements.

As an individual, setting non-verifiable goals - that are so big that I can’t even hope to accomplish them on my own or during my own lifetime - is transformational. In a sentence, pursuing a purpose makes life feel meaningful. This is consistent with what’s broadly reported (and accepted) on finding meaning and purpose in our lives, so I won’t argue the point further here.

In enterprises, non-verifiable goals are also transformational.

Non-verifiable goals that transcend products, services, profits, and promotion discussions provide a “north-star” that all stakeholders in an enterprise agree on and care about. Once that north-star is clearly articulated, it allows every stakeholder to make decisions more autonomously and with greater confidence because there’s alignment on the bigger purpose everyone is striving to achieve.

Non-verifiable goals which appeal to something bigger than the enterprise’s products, services, and profits also tend to be more motivating - because they are of greater consequence than simply making money and skew toward being other-focused. As a result, a company’s stakeholders give discretionary effort beyond the bare minimum needed to avoid getting fired. The increase in alignment and effort that comes with setting a non-verifiable goal tends to makes enterprises perform better and people feel better about their contribution.

A relevant question is, “how do I set a non-verifiable goal?” Practically speaking, non-verifiable goals still benefit from generally being SMART (maybe not as time-bound, though), but it helps to ask a different set of questions. When setting a non-verifiable goal for ourselves as individuals those questions might be something like:

• What’s a result I care about so much that I don’t care if I get credit for it, as long as it happens?

• What’s something important, that’s so big that I can’t possibility be more than one small part of it?

• What’s something important, but so difficult that not even the most powerful person in the world could achieve it on their own?

• What’s something that will take decades, if not a century or two to solve? Of those challenges, which ones have I already made sacrifices for without even knowing it?

• What’s something important enough to try contributing to, even though I’ll more than likely fail?

• What is so important that I’m committed to not just doing the world, but mentoring the next generation that follows?

For enterprises the questions might be along the lines of:

• What a societal measure (e.g., murder rate, obesity rate, suicide rate) that we want to positively impact when we do business?

• What’s an ideal or cause we have competence in that all our stakeholders - employees, owners, customers, and communities - care deeply about?

• What’s an important challenge that will take the consecutive efforts of several CEOs/Senior Management teams to make a dent in?

• Does this enterprise need to continue existing for the next 100 years? Why? What contribution do we need to make to justify our very existence?

• What’s something that our stakeholders a hundred years from now will be grateful we started working on today?

• What’s something important enough to stand firm on, even if it meant a bottom-line hit in the short-term?

One of my favorite white papers, The five keys to a successful Google team, was published by Google’s People Operations group in 2015. The first key, psychological safety, relates strongly to the process of setting non-verifiable goals. In the paper, the researchers describe psychological safety in the form of a question, “Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?”

In my experience, it’s impossible to even contemplate a non-verifiable goal without starting from a place of psychological safety. If we’re scared - whether it’s because of uncertainty about our next meal, or whether our boss will harass us, or if the people around us will twist our words into a weapon - we focus on the tasks immediately ahead of us to survive. Only once we feel secure in ourselves and our surroundings can we contemplate what is worth contributing to beyond the timescale of our lifetime.

For me personally, getting to that place of psychological safety took trimming luxuries to reach a more sustainable household budget and convincing myself it was okay to not get promoted as quickly as my MBA classmates. It took having children and being forced to find simple joys in moments that my 23 year-old self would find boring. It took coming to terms with the grief of losing my father and retraining my mind to measure success by my inner scorecard instead of by what I thought society defined as successful.

In an enterprise, maybe creating psychological safety starts with getting profitable or reducing enterprise complexity so every day is not a fire drill. Maybe it means holding managers responsible for developing their teams and demanding that they don’t suck. Maybe it means ensuring hiring and promotions decisions are made fairly and with integrity. Maybe it’s exiting some non-core markets or categories so the enterprise can focus on more than just keeping the lights on.

You know your enterprise better than me, but the point is consistent - start with psychological safety before attempting to set a non-verifiable goal.

Over the course of years, I’ve talked to others about how they view their purpose in hopes of better understanding my own. I’ve come to see my own purpose as two-fold: creating generations beyond me that act with love and integrity, and, helping America become a nation where people trust each other.

And no matter who I’ve talked to, their experience with finding and acting from a place of purpose is similar to my own: discovering and acting on a bigger purpose is life-giving, motivating, and grounding. It’s hard, time-consuming work but worth the effort many times over.

A Prayer Over Our Sons (on Emmett’s Birth Day)

February 28, 2022

Today, I prayed in the early morning instead of the evening. And it was a silent prayer, just with myself, instead of out loud with our whole family before tucking in the kids. When I first had the chance to hold Emmett about an hour after he was born today, a prayer just came over me.

It started as it usually does, with “Thank you God for this day, and for the good life we have…”

But today, the day-to-day blessings of family dinner, good friends and neighbors, our family, and the fresh air outside which I usually share in prayer were supplanted by prayers for our son, still weary from his 9 month journey into our arms.

Thank you God for today, and for the good life we have. Thank you God for bringing us Emmett. Thank you for he and Robyn both being healthy and safe. Thank you for the doctors and nurses who cared for them. The opening overture of this prayer was one might expect. But then, something deeper and purer started to emerge, involuntarily in my whispering thoughts.

I pray that he has a long and healthy life. I pray that he is able to learn and grow. I pray that he is able to contribute something in his life. I pray that he has a loving relationship with his brothers. I pray that we have many days and years with him, and as an entire family. I pray that he knows love and knows joy. I pray that he is able to experience both the simple and majestic beauties of nature and our world. I pray that his heart finds his way back to you, God. I pray that we can help him grow who he is to become, teach him right from wrong, and help him see life as the blessing that it is. I pray, God, for you to help us be the parents he needs us to be. And I pray for the chance to be good tomorrow.

Though not verbatim, this was my prayer over our son Emmett, on his birth day.

Sometime around lunch time, I began realize what I didn’t pray for earlier this morning. I didn’t pray that he’d become rich. I didn’t pray that he’d get into Harvard. I didn’t pray that he’d become famous. I didn’t pray for him to become a U.S. Senator or the President of the United States. I didn’t pray that he’d become a CEO of a publicly traded company. 

I didn’t pray that he would drive a Cadillac or a Porsche. I didn’t pray that he’d live in a house 2x-3x larger than our home in Detroit. I didn’t pray that he’d be the most popular kid in his high school. I didn’t pray that he’d find his what onto a who’s who list of his profession or his metro. I didn’t pray that he’d be the first person to set foot on Mars or find his way into the scrolls of human history.

Of course I didn’t pray for all that. When we are holding our children, literally, for the first time, power, status, and riches are among the things furthest from our mind. We pray over newborn children for something deeper and purer, because we know that the truest blessings in life - the ones we ask God or whatever we believe in for help to deliver - are deeper, and purer than power, status, and riches.

But, that’s surprising in a way. Emmett, today, is literally at the point in his life where his possibilities are most limitless. He was born, today. Anything is still possible, today. His choices are most unconstrained, today. Which in some senses makes it the perfect to contemplate large, aspirational dreams and pray for them, for him. If I wanted to pray for him to have power, status, and riches, today would be the day to do it.

Because starting tomorrow, the choices we make as parents and the slices of life he begins to experience will shape, ever so slightly, his future choices and possibilities. Even after a single day, path dependency starts. Today, the possibility set of his life is at its widest and wildest.

Emmett, Bo, and Myles, I’m now speaking to you directly here. I hope someday you stumble upon this post, after you’ve grown and started to make your way in this world. Because what I’m about to say is more than just an opinion, it’s a deeply-held conviction.

When I was growing up, adults around me - my parents, my family, my teachers, my parents’ friends, everyone - asked me the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And answering that question, month after month and year after year started to shape my worldview without me evening realizing it consciously.

All those years of responding to adults about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I started to think being something and all that is related to what we be was most important. Without even realizing it, I started to believe that accomplishments were most important. That money and status, and ultimately the power that comes from being something was most important. Because, if these adults I loved and respected were asking me this all the damn time, how could what I become when I grow up not be important?

And it will be tempting for me to keep asking this question of what you three want to be when you grow up, instead of the more benign question of “what do you want your life to be like as an adult?” It will be tempting for me, because what you become reflects on me as your father. If you three become wealthy, respected, or powerful it will elevate how our community and our culture see me. 

Even though I try, sometimes desperately, to strip myself of this ego, I am a mortal man, and I haven’t reached that level of enlightenment yet. The chance to elevate how the world sees me is still a temptation.

I don’t have the data to back this up quite yet, but I have a strong intuition that’s a substantial reason why adults ask this question - our selfish desires to be praised for the accomplishments of our youth emerge. We’re only human I suppose.

Boys, listen carefully and remember this: you do not have to achieve money, status, and power for me. You do not need to live your life to prove something to me. You do not need to become successful by conventional measures of success to validate me. It is not your responsibility to help me become a respected man because I took a role in raising impressive sons.You three are not here to justify your mother and I as parents. 

You three, beautiful, honest, intelligent, kind-hearted boys - you need no justification. You owe nothing to me, directly. Your mother and I didn’t choose to be parents because we wanted something from you.

What you owe is what we all owe through our inter-temporal bonds. These are the bonds that bind us to the generations that came before us and the generations, God-willing, to come after us. We all owe something to those that came ahead and those that will come behind our time living on earth.

We owe it to those people who came before us to honor and cherish the sacrifices they made for us. We owe it to those that will come after us, even many centuries in the future, to make sacrifices so their lives may be better. That is what we owe. You do not owe that to me, we all owe it to all of them.

And the way I see it, the best way to honor our inter-temporal bonds are to live long, healthy, lives. Or to make a contribution to our communities and broader societies. It’s to experience joy, love, and nature. It’s to devote our lives to others - our families, friends, communities, and for some, 

There is a reason your mother and I pray for your health, and for time together, and for you to know love , joy, beauty, and God. Achieving riches, status, and power do not honor our inter-temporal bonds, those things are too impermanent. The way we honor these sacred bonds is to live fully, with goodness, honesty, gratefulness and grace. 

What I’ve found in my almost 35 years, too, is that life is sweetest when we live in a way which honors our inter-temporal bonds. Our culture doesn’t seem to always understand this, and maybe I’m wrong that a life of sacrifice is actually sweetest, but I’ve found it to be true in my own life.

So please, please remember boys, the wide and wild possibilities present on your birth days. Remember that you do not need to justify or validate me with riches, status, or power. Remember to really live, during your time on this Earth. And if you feel like you’ve lost your way - if you can’t remember how to really live - remember my prayers for you.

When we are finally comfortable is when we need to dream bigger

We are in the waning days of Robyn’s third pregnancy. Our third son is so close to being here. As I write this on a Sunday, he’s due to meet us tomorrow. 

Strangely, I’ve awaited his arrival more anxiously than our previous two children, which I feel guilty about.

Looking back on when Robert was born, I suppose I was in a state of shock. I was grieving my father, still. And in addition to my struggle to grasp what it would mean to be a newly minted father, I was also working a demanding job with high stakes and high stress. And so when Robert came along, even though I wanted to devote myself fully to my new responsibilities, I was incapable of it. My head was two jumbled up.

And with Myles two years later, his arrival snuck up on me. I was 3 months into a new job and it was the middle of the Christmas season. We were planning my brother in law’s bachelor party. We already had one toddler who had just turned two. I was exhausted, physically, and mentally before Myles even arrived. I probably would’ve anticipated his arrival more, had my mental energy not been so depleted.

But this time it’s different. I have greater stability at work and have been sleeping, eating, and exercising like a responsible person instead of a young man holding onto his bachelor days. And the deep introspection brought on by the past two years of Covid-related anxiety, determination, and solitude have left me feeling an unexpected clarity about my life’s purpose.

What I feel guilty about is that I’ve had feelings of anxiety and longing for our third son’s arrival, an emotion I didn’t afford to Bo and Myles. For the first time, I feel that ache, desperate for or son to arrive. Why do I feel it this time, for the first time?

A few months ago, I wondered whether I had any dreams left. Life has been so good, even amidst the crisis of Covid-19. I met and married Robyn. We have a family. We have a home. We live comfortably and without fear of missing a meal. We are stable and healthy. We get to see our extended family, and learn through travel. Granted I don’t have expensive or far-reaching desires, but everything I’ve ever really wanted, I now have. Everything else good in my life was a bonus to be grateful for, I thought.

And yet, I’m not in a place of patience waiting for his due date. On the contrary, our third son has got my heart all flustered fluttering. He’s got me feeling unsatisfied again, which I thought I had gotten over. I thought I had gotten closer to the ever elusive mindset of joyful non attachment.

But it turns out, that’s absolutely false. I’m attached. I want him to get here. He needs to be here. Our family needs him to be complete. I have been awaiting him impatiently, asking Robyn about her contractions with sincere but anxious curiosity after every deep breath she takes.

Just 6 months ago, I was ready to call it and say that I didn’t really have any dreams left. But our unborn, unnamed, little boy has reminded me how dangerous it is to feel finished and past the phase in our life where we dream. He’s reminded me that we’re never done dreaming, nor should we ever be.

Because even if I am comfortable and happy, that’s not the same as being “done”. The big world around me, or even my little world under our roof is complete. There is more work to do. There is so much left to finish. We have so much left to dream.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a jarring reminder of that this week.

I was just starting to think that everything was settling into place in the big world around us. With the waning of the Omicron variant, Covid-19 seemed to be in its last overture. Joblessness was starting to fall, wages and inflation starting to rise. Robyn and I have been growing steadily in our careers. Our children are healthy and growing into fine young men. The worst of winter, literally and figuratively, seemed to be over.

I thought that I could lay off the accelerator and coast a little, after the difficult season I thought we were coming out of. Things were going well. My garden was planted and the world was chilling the efff out, I thought, and now all I had to do was tend to my garden. I had 80% or more of my life’s dreams - I could focus on the remaining proportion leisurely. I could let it ride with the dreams I’ve already made real.

And then, Robyn’s due date crept closer. And I realized, the picture in our little world isn’t complete. There is more to plant in our garden. I want our son to get here, I thought. We have more dreams to realize. We’re not done yet, we have work to do in our own backyard. 

And with Russia invading Ukraine, it was a slap in the face reminding me there was a world outside our backyard that needed more and bigger dreams. 

And yes, not all of us need to flock to the realm of foreign politics. There is more dreaming and work to do in so many domains. In our neighborhood. For advancing literacy. For improving health. For creating art and music. For decarbonization. For restoring trust to our institutions. For ending gun violence. And yes, sadly, for preventing world wars.

This aching anxiety for our third son - just when I thought I could slow down on dreaming - has taught me something important. Even when we think we’ve achieved our dreams, there is so much left to dream for. When things are good and we are comfortable, is precisely when our world - whether our little world or the big world around us - needs us to keep dreaming the most.

---

The Easiest Way to Become Popular

To me, it’s not so much that being popular great, it’s that being unpopular is usually terrible. To articulate why, I look to the greatest explanatory model for social dynamics there is: high school.

I’ve been on both sides of popularity in my school days. When I was unpopular, I was constantly stressing about girls, being harassed, being lonely, or missing out on having fun. When I was popular, I flourished. I had a lot more fun and it was a lot easier to just be myself and have energy when I was liked and not constantly feeling under siege. 

I get why people, myself included, will go to great lengths to avoid being unpopular. For me, it wasn’t that being popular was great, it was that being unpopular was much worse. 

And the simplest way to avoid being unpopular is to become popular. So how to be popular? Again, it’s informative to think about high school.

One road to popularity is to be the best at something, to have a niche. It’s easy to be at least somewhat popular when you have a lane - whether it’s academics, athletics, arts, or an extra-curricular activity. If you’re the best in the school at something or have a varsity letter on your jacket you earn the respect of your peers.

Another way is to have rich parents. Which I don’t actually mean flippantly; it’s not about being able to buy “friends”. But rather, if you have access to money, you don’t have to say no to fun stuff. You can go to the movies whenever someone’s going. You can take your friends to concerts and sports games, or host fun gatherings at your house with ping pong tables, nice food, and maybe even a pool. Money doesn’t buy friends, but it creates opportunities to have fun and make friends.

In my experience, character and leadership also matter. In high school, if you’re genuinely nice and can transcend the pettiness of the cafeteria or the hallway, people want to be around you. If you can rally people around a shared purpose - whether it’s a charity drive or social change, people want to be around you. If you can stand up for injustices or do something innovative, people want to be around you.

But those three strategies - being a star, being rich, or being a leader - are actually pretty challenging. The easiest way to be popular is to be aggressive.

We have likely all seen this play out, it’s basic in-group out-group stuff. We can be popular by talking crap about people behind their back or bullying other kids. By excluding others, we can build strong cohesion with our peeps (which makes us popular), albeit cheaply and darkly. Also, if the rest of the school knows you roll deep and are willing to be mean, most would prefer to stay out of your way instead of challenge your dominance.

The easiest way to be popular is to be aggressive. Sadly, it works almost every time.

And yes, maybe in high school the stakes aren’t as high because everyone’s awkwardly going through puberty, and everyone leaves in four years anyway. Everything’s made up and most of the time, the points don’t matter.

But these dynamics don’t stop in high school. I’ve seen them play out in every organization and company I’ve ever been a part of. And after high school, it’s not just that people try to become more popular, they try to become more powerful. The stakes and consequences get bigger and realer.

And yes, in the real world - whether it’s in the workplace, at church, or just socially - some people gain power by being a star. Or they gain power by being wealthy. And luckily, in some cases people gain popularity and power by leading people toward an inspiring, noble, shared purpose.

But damn, lots of people take the easy way. Like at work, people get aggressive at the water cooler by demeaning a project team, their boss, their direct reports, their peers, or the customer. Or in social settings, people gossip about the other people in their club, the congregation, the neighborhood, or even their extended family.

A lot of times, I think people intend to lead with integrity and do start with a noble purpose in mind, like: ending the patriarchy, saving the American dream, stopping racial injustice, or preserving freedom. And they inspire people and lead them to achieve something meaningful. And then they get popular, and then they get powerful. And it’s great, because you’re doing what you think is right and you’re popular, too.

But at some point the streak ends. And not everybody is a Dr. King or a Gandhi. Not everyone realizes they have to do the work of self-purification to stay true to their principles and integrity. And then that well-intentioned person devolves into aggression, and brings in all the chest-thumping, and the outrage, and the vitriol to stay popular. And they become a bully in the end, when all they wanted to do at the start was noble and virtuous.

The easiest way to be powerful is to be aggressive and it’s so easy to fall into unintentionally. This stuff starts in high school but for damn sure doesn’t end there.

A through-line of my writing and thinking is the concept of intentional choices. Some choices we make have huge consequences for ourselves, for others, and for the culture itself. These are the choices we should make intentionally, but it’s so easy not to. How to be popular is one of these unassumingly consequential choices.

I think we all want to avoid being unpopular and powerless (because it sucks). The choice we have is how. What path will we take to avoid unpopularity? What strategy will we use to become more popular?

Will we try to be a star and make a huge contribution to earn respect? Will we use our money to create amazing, memorable, experiences that bind us with others? Will we build a deep sense of purpose and fellowship by leading with integrity? Or will we make ourselves part of the in-crowd by making someone else an outcast?

The choice of how to be popular is one we should make intentionally.

What Loneliness Feels Like To Me

I fear loneliness. More than anything. I don’t always mind being by myself as I’m happy to be in my own thoughts or take a long run, but I hate being alone. Loneliness is my darkest place. Isolation is my hell. I will do almost anything to avoid loneliness.

I recently finished listening to Will Smith’s memoir, Will, on audiobook. It’s my third venture into listening to memoirs read by their authors, which has become a bit of a hobby as it’s perfect for washing dishes. I’ve completed A Promised Land (Barack Obama), Greenlights (Matthew McConaughey) and I just started Becoming (Michele Obama). All are excellent.

One of the central theme’s in Will is fear. We must face our fears if we want to thrive. If we want to live a meaningful life serving others, we cannot let fear take the wheel. We have to conquer our fears. There is no other way.

Smith has a unique perspective on fear because of his profession. Fear is central to acting. I’m paraphrasing here, but in one of the passages, Smith describes that how fear helps an actor understand a character. Fear shapes our desires, and our desires influence our behaviors. So to play a character well, and represent their story well, you must understand their fears. Fears are central to their story.

Loneliness, therefore, is central to my story. To understand me, you must understand my fear of loneliness.

Honestly, this is something I don’t even understand. I haven’t been able to go there, even though I’ve loosely acknowledged that “I don’t really like being alone” in my own mind. I haven’t even really spoken about the stories I’m about to share, let alone writing them, until literally right now.

—

What does loneliness feel like?

I’m transported back to my childhood. I remember mental images of pay phones. Lots of pay phones. I always had quarters in my bag - whether it was my school backpack or a bag for dance class or swim practice. I always put the quarters in the outside top pocket - the little one, so the quarters would be easy to find when I needed them.

I used so many quarters calling home. It’s me, I’m done with class. Can you come pick me up? Where are you? When will you be here?

In those moments between a phone call and pickup is when the clock was always slowest. Will they make it in time before the building closes? Will I have to wait outside? What will everyone else think as their parents come, of me just standing here? Will I be the last one picked up? Loneliness was the panicking, the waiting. It was the feeling of being stranded, stuck.

What does loneliness feel like?

At our dance studio growing up, we’d have guest teachers come in for workshops. One workshop that I remember vividly was a partners’ workshop. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. Every male dancer in the company was assigned a female dancer as a partner for the workshop. My assigned partner’s name wasn’t “Michele” but let’s just pretend it was.

One of my buddies, who was a year or two older than me and admittedly a better dancer, was without a partner. His wasn’t there, she was sick or something. Michele knew my buddy better than me, too.

Michele comes up to me, averts her eyes, and tells me she’s leaving to dance with someone my partner-less friend.

“…his partner isn’t here, and he needs one…so I’m going to go dance with him...”

And there I was. Completely dumbfounded. This workshop was about to start, and my partner just left. What is wrong with me? Am I that bad a dancer? Am I disgusting? What is wrong with me? Am I ugly? Does she think I’m weird? Am I a loser? What is wrong with me? 

Within seconds, I felt the bottoms of my cheeks starting to quiver, which remains to this day the first physical reaction I get when I’m about to start sobbing. I was humiliated, and it’s still one of the worst memories to relive in my entire childhood.

Loneliness was the feeling of being an outcast, the feeling of being discarded. The feeling of being singled out as garbage. Thank God for Miss Carla, my ballet teacher, who saw this transpire and immediately stepped in to be my partner for the workshop, making it so I could pretend like nothing happened. I wish I had thanked her then.

What does loneliness feel like?

It’s so odd, but in addition to these childhood memories, when I think about what loneliness feels like, I can’t help but think about hotel rooms.

My first job out of college was as a business consultant. I still joke that it was a job I was paid too much for. Starting in November 2009, I traveled every week for almost four years. 

The routine was consistent: get up early Monday morning, catch a flight somewhere, drag my briefcase and carry-on to a client site. Then, I would work all day, exhausted from the early morning. When it was finally quitting time, I’d hitch a ride from a colleague in the team’s rental car. Sometimes we’d eat together, sometimes we wouldn’t. I’d usually get a quick run in, and work in the hotel lobby.

And then it would be bedtime. The dreaded bedtime.

I’d walk into the hotel room. It would be dark. It smelled exactly the same as the previous week. Like every hotel room I’d ever been in. The bed would be pristinely made.

But that goddamn bed. Every single week, the bed would remind me that it was just me. I was out here, hundreds of miles from home, with nothing to do but work. It reminded me that I had no partner in life. No girlfriend or wife to call. No children. No kickball game to go to with friends. Nowhere to go. I was just…gone, the only places to belong to were the hotel lobby, and that damn hotel bed. In those days, I worried that I’d always come to an empty home, which wouldn’t be a home at all.

Loneliness feels like the opposite of being home. It feels like being nowhere. Belonging nowhere. Living in nowhere. It feels like what it feels like when I’m in the absence of love. It feels like hopelessness.

—

So many of the choices in my life make sense when applying the lens of loneliness. I have gone to such great lengths to avoid loneliness.

Being a part of every club in school helped me avoid being alone. Trying to be friends with everyone helped me avoid being alone. Joining a fraternity helped me avoid being alone. 

Staying in Michigan after college helped me avoid being alone and apart from my family. Living with roommates until I was married helped me avoid being alone. Living in a City helped me avoid being alone. Having a big family helps me avoid being alone. Having music on in this house helps me avoid being alone.

Even my profession is affected by this fear. I work in the niche of business and management that works on organizations, their performance, and their culture. The nature of my works is in teams, so I never have to be alone. The work that I do helps build teams and companies that thrive - and when teams thrive, nobody else ever has to feel alone.

—

I don’t really know how to conclude this essay, because the story isn’t done yet. I am not the hero of this story. I still fear loneliness. Even tiny little things that happen - whether in our marriage, family, or community - trigger this loneliness. It’s paralyzing, still. It’s dark, still. It’s lonely, still.

One of the other recurring theme in Will is that of the “hero’s journey”. It’s something Smith draws on often in his narrative, because the hero’s journey is the most core of human stories. Basically every great book, and every great movie is some form of the hero’s journey. One of the core elements that makes a journey heroic, is that the hero suffers a terrible fate and must overcome adversity, and their fears.

We are all on a journey. We are all living out our own memoir, in a way. For our journey to become that of a hero, we must face our fears and conquer them. For me, that means confronting and conquering loneliness.

Parenting is Truly Bittersweet

I rarely take naps on the weekend. But I happened to today because I’ve been getting over a cold, though I somehow managed to avoid catching Covid-19 from my sons.

This is the exact view I woke up to when I opened my eyes from this rare occasion of a nap:

It has four examples of the complex experience of “bittersweet”:

First, the item in the foreground is exactly what it appears to be: a monkey sitting on a Paw Patrol slipper. That’s so hilarious and creative, but it’s so frustrating to be jolted from a nap by a monkey bean bag riding in a slipper. That’s must be the light thud I half-asleep-remember feeling on my stomach.

Second, you an see a facial tissue on the coffee table: It’s disgusting that Bo left a tissue on the table, but it is a relief that he uses tissues instead of his sleeve like I did for most of my life.

Third, next to the facial tissue, is a construction Bo described as, “it’s something you make that has super powers. It’s called a power-punch.” It is kind of cool that he’s making his own sort of art with household objects. Kind of looks like a caterpillar. But damn kid, why you makin’ me do even more dishes?

Finally, you’ll notice a lightsaber all the way to the right. That’s right…Bo brought his lightsaber over and was cuddled up next to me as I fell asleep, which rarely happens anymore. I was so happy to have him right beside me, but now he’s somewhere else in the house. Bittersweet.

I hadn’t thought about how complex the experience of “bittersweet” was until I started reading Atlas of the Heart. In it, Brené Brown describes the science and theory behind several dozen of the most impactful human emotions and experiences. 

Her premise for writing the book is that we can’t emote or process our life properly if we don’t have emotional granularity. Not everything is happy, sad, angry, or tired and we need to have a grasp of the right words and concepts to describe what’re we’re feeling.

Apparently “bittersweet” is a cognitively complex phenomenon that develops gradually. Children don’t report simultaneously feeling happiness and sadness until they reach age seven or eight.

And damn, so many moments of parenting are bittersweet. Now that I better understand what bittersweet means, I feel it and see it everywhere. So many things happen where I’m so proud or so in awe of how my sons have grown, acted with courage or shown maturation. But in those moments, I also feel this remorse. Because with every demonstration of growth, they are closer to being grown.

So when I say something like, “wow, they just grow up so fast” I realized that what I’m actually feeling is bittersweet.

As I’ve thought about it more, there’s so much complexity to the statement, “they just grow up so fast” beneath the surface. I want so badly for my kids to be mine and belong to me, but I’ve come to accept that they don’t and they never have.

Yes, on the one hand I can pretend that my kids are mine and they belong to Robyn and me. We love them so dearly. We pour so much time into them. We have sacrificed so much for them. We are their parents. They are our responsibility. They are our children. They have to belong to us.

What makes this so bittersweet is even though we think it so, they do not actually belong to us. These sons of ours are growing and they’re going to keep growing. And as they grow, they’re going to affect the world around them. There are friends they’re going to help out of tough times. There are strangers they might touch the lives of without even knowing it. There are neighborhoods they’ll live in, companies they’ll work for, and causes bigger themselves they will progress forward. There are other children out there, somewhere in this world that they will marry and god-willing start families with someday. 

And if I’m being really honest with myself, if all goes to plan, our sons will outlive us and spend a significant amount of time on this earth while we’re not here. They’ll end up belonging to who they chose to spend their lives with and who they choose to devote their lives to. Not us.

So even though we raise our kids and it’s true that we’re their parents, they’re not ours. Our role is to help them grow so they can give themselves to others. Our role is to give them the gift of being good parents, and all the nourishment that good parents bring to a child. We’re merely stewards of this part of their journey on the earth. They don’t belong to us and they never really did.

What I pray for though, is that if we do right by them, and give them the gift of a good, strong, character-based upbringing they’ll want us to stick around. I pray that we do this right so that after they’re grown, they’ll choose to have us be part of their lives, even though don’t have to. They might choose us among the people they belong to. That would be a gift to Robyn and I.

Part of the unresolved grief of losing my father is rooted in this gift. When he died, I was fully grown, but just barely. I was getting to the point in life where I could choose, freely, to spend time with my parents. I realize now, that’s a gift children can give to their parents, not an obligation. I become sad when I realize that it’s a gift I always wanted to give back to my father, but I’ll never get a chance to.

There is, however, a silver lining that I try to remember. As I shared earlier, every moment where I think or say “wow, they just grow up so fast” it’s because there’s an example in front of me that our sons are growing. But even though I feel such joy to see them grow, I feel sadness that because I remember time is passing.

Those moments where they’re “growing up so fast” are also moments that show how much Robyn and I have grown.

Because along the way, our sons are helping us grow. By being parents to them, we are becoming more patient, more caring, and more selfless. By letting us parent them, they are pushing our hearts to open wider and to be more grateful for the lessons that come from suffering. They, too, are strengthening Robyn and I’s marriage by giving us a common purpose to work together on.

I feel an almost divine gratitude for the gifts our sons are giving us and the lessons they are teaching us. Even though every moment I notice their growth I feel a deflating sadness for the fleeting sands of time, I also feel so grateful that they are teaching my soul to be purer and more virtuous. It’s truly bittersweet.

When the pandemic ends, our generation has a choice to make

Our family had a nice run.

We made it through the peak of Omicron before the first member of our household tested positive for Covid-19, this weekend. Thankfully, we’re all fine so far. God willing, our nuclear family’s bout with Covid will pass in a few days and fall into the footnotes of our family’s history.

Ironically, the moment we saw the positive test, it felt like the beginning of the end of Covid-19, for our family at least. Assuming we get through this week without requiring hospitalization (which it seems like we will, fingers crossed), Robyn and I can breathe easier through the next few months as the pandemic hopefully transitions to an endemic. We’ll have gotten it and got through it. Our family is in the endgame. Thank goodness this didn’t all happen the week of Robyn’s due date.

Soon enough, the collective Covid endgame for our country and world will come, too. And when it does, I expect the narratives of what’s next to start forming. It’s what we do in contemporary human society: when crises end, we start to rewrite history.

It’s perhaps unnecessary to say something this obvious, but I don’t think the stories we’ll tell about the end of Covid will be along the lines of, “we just went back to the way things were.”

Our collective minds have changed; something inside us has snapped. We all went just went through an existentially-affective experience. Everyone has lost someone in some way. Some of our communities were ravaged. We all went through waves of lockdowns and uncertainty.

I don’t know about you, dear Reader, but I do not feel like the same person I was two years ago. Like, I feel like a very different person that I was two years ago - with different perspectives on family, work, gender equality, social policy, leadership, health, and public service.

And because we won’t just go back to the way things were, the question becomes - what will the story be? At the end of our collective reflection, what will the call to action be as we emerge from Covid-19? What narrative will be choose to accept and make real?

Speaking as a member of the millennial generation as I write these words in early 2022, the next 20-30 years are ours to lead. We’re at the age where our parents are retiring and we’re stepping in. And if the next 20-30 years are truly our turn to lead, what will our story be?

To contemplate questions with generational implications, I prefer to think in generational terms. The best judges of how we lead as a generation are not us, but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

So what I think about is what my children will say to their grandchildren about me. When Bo and Myles tell their grandchildren about how their father and his contemporaries acted between 2020 and 2050, what stories will they tell about us? As the true arbiters of our history, how will our grandchildren and great-grandchildren judge us?

I see two prevailing narratives, starting to form already. The one I think we all expect is the one typified by the big speech.

This is the story that begins with the President and other world leaders making a national address on television, ritualistically performing all the usual elements of pomp and circumstance: claiming victory, honoring the dead with semi-sincere words and and calculated phrases, and celebrating the front-line workers who carried the burden of the pandemic. In the final overtures of the speech that politician - whether Republican or Democrat - will play into our fears and darker memories of the pandemic, and vow: “Follow me, and I’ll make sure something like this never happens again.”

There will be a blue ribbon panel, scapegoats will be shamed and punished. There will be grand, short-sighted gestures implemented to help the nation feel like something will be different, whether or not they actually make things different. And then a few years will pass, the next crisis will emerge, and the same farce - muddle through crisis, posture and stoke fear, gloss over problems, and move on - will repeat.

I do not want that fear-based narrative to be how our grandchildren and great-grandchildren remember us.

The other prevailing narrative I see brewing already is that of enlightened self-awareness. It goes kind of like this.

First, there’s an awakening. Something shaken up in our heads because of the pandemic. We realize life is too short for jobs we hate and keeping up with the Joneses. We lean into our family life or our passions. We, as a generation, pursue our own dreams instead of everyone else’s. We become a generation, not of dreamers, but people who actually chased their dreams and poured everything into the relationships that meant the most to us. We become heroes because we stayed true to ourselves; the generation the finally broke the cycle and began the process of collective healing. The story is so intoxicating, and feels so familiar, doesn‘t it?

Lately though, I’ve worried about the slippery slope of that hero’s journey. If we all pursue our own dreams and build up our own tribes, where does that leave the community? Will we balkanize our culture even further? Will we put ourselves on a path of endless tribialization and greater disparity between those who have the surplus to “do their own thing” and those who don’t? Isn’t it so easy for this narrative to start as as a story of self-actualization but then end as a story of narcissism, self-indulgence, or elitism?

It seems innocuous if we individually pursue our own dreams and invest in relationships with our own loved ones. But what happens if we all narrow our focus to that of our own dreams, our own passions, our own families, and our own tribes? What will happen to the bonds that bind us? Is that a world we actually want to live in?

I sure as hell don’t want to be known as the generation who perpetuated a cycle of fear. But I don’t want to be the generation that turned so far inward that we lost the forest for the trees, either.

What I hope, is that our children and grandchildren remember the next 20-30 years as a time where our generation looked inward, and in addition to advancing own passions, families, and tribes, we also took responsibility for something bigger. 

What if in the next three decades we came out of this with an awakening, yes, but an awakening of honestly embracing reality. Where we really understood what happened, all the way down to the roots. Where we asked ourselves tough questions and accepted hard truths about our priorities, our institutions, and our sensibilities about right and wrong. 

And what if instead of pursuing quick fixes, we acted with more courage. What if we stopped putting band-aids on one big thing. Just one. Maybe it’s one issue like caregiver support or global access to vaccines. And we drew a line in the sand, and just said - this global vaccines thing is hard, but we’re going to figure this out. We’re not going to kick the can down the road any longer. We’re going to invest, and we’re going to do the right thing and do it in the right way.

And what if that one single act of courage, inspired another. And that inspired another. And another and another. What if instead of a cycle of fear, we ended up with a cycle of responsibility?

I know this is all annoyingly lofty and abstract, and probably a bit premature. But after every crisis comes a VE Day or a VJ Day or something like it. After every crisis comes a writing of history. After every globally significant event comes an inflection point, where the generation taking the handoff has to make a choice about what comes next.

For us as millennials, we’ve drawn the cards on this one. The end of the Covid-19 pandemic is right when it’s our time to take the handoff from our retiring parents, and step into the role of leading this world. It’s our time, our turn, and our burden.

When the Covid-19 endgame finally arrives, and our handoff moment is finally here, I don’t want to be swept up in it so badly that I can’t think clearly. I want to choose the narrative for the next 30 years with intention. 

And the only way to do that I can see is to start thinking about the handoff we’re about to take, right now.

And I hope the narrative we choose is not fear, nor narcissism. I hope the story we choose and the story we commit to write, in each of our respective domains, is that of courageous responsibility.

How to take more responsibility

“I’ll take responsibility for that.”

Hearing this phrase in a team setting is generally a good sign. Choosing to be responsible for something is effectively an act of leadership. And whether it’s in our families, at work, at church, or in community groups, more people choosing to lead is a good thing.

So instead of worrying about abstract concepts like “leadership development”, why not just focus on “taking responsibility”? If more folks - like us and our peers - are taking responsibility for their conduct and the needs of others, isn’t that exactly what we want?

One way to foster responsibility-taking is to make it clearer why taking responsibility is really important. This is fairly intuitive, it’s hard to convince someone to take responsibility for something if they believe it doesn’t matter. In my experience, people on teams don’t take responsibility if the challenge is unimportant, myself included.

Another way to foster more responsibility-taking is to build up competence. This is also intuitive, if someone feels like they’re definitely going to fail or have no idea what they’re doing, they don’t step up to take responsibility. For example, if someone asked me to take responsibility for making sure a car’s design was safe, I would say absolutely not. I do believe having safe automobiles is extremely important, but I am not comfortable taking responsibility for something in which I have no competence.

A third way to foster more responsibility-taking is to make teams non-toxic. I’d put it this way. Let’s say you’re in a meeting about a new problem that’s come up, maybe it’s a product safety recall your company has to do. You’re deciding whether or not to step up and take responsibility for executing the recall effort. 

If you believed everyone would dump every last problem on you and vanish, would it make you more or less likely to step up? If you weren’t sure whether your boss would constantly overrule your decisions or if it seemed like your colleagues would scrutinize your work unfairly, would you volunteer? If you questioned whether or not you’d get the money and staff to solve the problem, or felt like you’d get all the blame for a mistake and no gratitude for a success, wouldn’t you think twice about taking responsibility? 

I would, regardless of how important it was or how competent I felt. If the culture around us is toxic, we shouldn’t expect to see responsibility-taking.

In the American context, we tend to emphasize competence a lot. We like “all-stars” and “high-potentials” to save the day. There is a danger, however, to overindexing on this when assessing leadership. Competence (and also confidence) is easy to fake. It’s also easy to have hubris and think we have more competence than we really do.

I would also hypothesize there are diminishing marginal returns to competence. After a certain point, adding more competence doesn’t lead to more responsibility taking if importance isn’t clear or if a team has a toxic environment. If we want to increase responsibility-taking, competence matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.

The big realization from this thought experiment came when I put these ideas into the context of our family.

I, like many others, want my kids to take responsibility for their actions and for helping others as they grow older. In fact, I believe that I owe it to them to help them learn how to do take responsibility. But no extra-curricular activity, or online video is going to do that for me. I cannot expect our kids’ school to teach them to take responsibility.

Rather, the responsibility lies with me. I have to explain to them why taking responsibility for something, like befriending a classmate who is struggling with a bully, is important. I have to create a non-toxic environment at home, and let them make decisions for themselves. I have to give them the time and support, and help them clean up a mess when they screw up - even if I knew beforehand that whatever they were doing was going to fail.

Sure, maybe at the margins, some sort of class, extra-curricular, or book is going to help them build up fundamental competence in some way, like say in how to run a meeting or how to manage the budget of their lemonade stand. But even then, I’ll still have to coach them - they won’t learn everything from a class, video, or book.

In a family setting, it seems to me that learning to take responsibility has much more to do with how we interact with our kids and shape our family’s culture than it does with sending them away to camp for a few weeks and assuming the “training” they receive there will be enough.

So why do we think “leadership training” at work would have different results? It seems to me that if we really want to create teams where more and more people take responsibility, having “leadership development” retreats or “high-potential talent pipelines” are a bit of a sideshow. 

What we should be doing is telling stories about why the work we do is important. What we should be doing is finding really specific training courses to build up contextually-specific competence. What we should be doing is treating our colleagues with more compassion so they can count on a reasonable level of support and respect when they step up and take responsibility for a challenge.

I’m skeptical of the concept of “leadership” and have been for a long time. It seems to me that if I want other around me to take on more responsibility - whether it’s my family, my neighbors, or my colleagues - the biggest obstacle to that is not them and their “leadership abilities” or creating more “leadership development” opportunities. The biggest obstacle is probably me, and the way I treat them.

I hope the James Webb Space Telescope changes human history

Source: NASA - https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/33433274343/in/album-72157629134274763/

As I write this in January of 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is hurtling intrepidly to Lagrange Point 2, its home for the duration of its mission, about 1 million miles away from Earth. Launched on Christmas Day in 2021, the construction and launch of the observatory was a massive undertaking - spanning 25 years, at a cost of $10B, involving a team of 1000 people, and the space agencies of 14 countries.

When it arrives at LG2, it will calibrate its instruments, which are protected by a tennis court-sized sun shield that will keep its onboard instruments at a chilly -374 F temperature. Without this protection the warmth of the Earth and the Sun would interfere with the telescope’s ability to detect infrared wavelengths, such as the ones emitted just after the birth of the universe, which the JWST will study during its mission.

The mission’s four science goals, are as simple as they are profound:

Source: NASA - https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html

The observatory’s planned mission is ten years, with its first images expected in June of 2022. Between now and 2032, I think we will learn many very important things about the universe. Perhaps even something that changes the arc of human history.

One of the deepest existential questions we ask as humans is, “are we alone in the universe?” In ten years, I doubt we will have a concrete answer to that question. But even if we had a shred of evidence, that gives us something - some clarity, a more accurate probability, something - wouldn’t that be absolutely incredible?

I am inspired and in awe of the possibility of what we could learn, rather than the reality of what we will learn. What if we learned that the proportion of habitable planets is significantly larger than what we currently estimate? What if we observe that the universe’s early formation makes it possible to predict where habitable planets will cluster? What if we learn that organic life is more possible than we thought?

If we realized that the development of other space-faring species is just a little tiny bit more possible than we currently think, it would open the door to ask dramatically new questions and contemplate exponentially more ambitious possibilities.

If we realized there were many more habitable planets, for example, wouldn’t we imagine if we could explore them? If we realized that space-faring aliens were more likely to exist than we thought, wouldn’t we try to imagine what they may be like, and how their societies may work? Wouldn’t we become more open to thinking about life’s biggest questions with more wonder and possibility?

And yet, despite all of the possibilities of what could be out there in the universe. I think the most profound conclusions we’d have if we look out into the universe will be introspective, helping us to examine life on Earth. By looking out into the expanse of the universe, the most important conclusions we’d draw could be about ourselves and about our own existence. The JWST will help us look outward, but also powerfully inward. 

For example, I think often about what I call exomorality, which is trying to philosophize about the moral frameworks space-faring aliens might have. I wonder about how resource constraints on our planet, our physical bodies and lifespans, may affect how we contemplate right and wrong. Would aliens be different? Is it possible to have a society that doesn’t have rigorous ideas of right and wrong? Why? How?

I’ll concede that my forays into exomorality are a bit of a fool’s errand and just a tad premature (but it is fun). But even if I’m 100% wrong about the morality of aliens, it’s a liberating way to reflect on our own, human, morality. Looking outward makes it easier to look inward.

Despite my eagerness to hear about the possibility of habitable worlds and alien species, the JSWT may reveal the opposite. By looking outward, we may instead learn that the universe is an even more barren place than we thought. And learning that may be even more transformative for our species than if we discovered more signs of life. 

What if we learn that the likeliest outcome is that we’re mostly alone out here? What if we learned that the conditions for organic life are incredibly and exquisitely rare?

Imagine how quickly how we view ourselves might change if we realized, simultaneously as a species, that maybe we don’t have a safety net. That there is no techno-civilization out there to learn from; no deus ex machina.  Maybe there’s really nowhere else for us to go, even if we could get there somehow. Maybe we are alone out here and this one precious Earth really is all we have.

I’m certainly not a NASA scientist, and these hypotheses are all my own. And I doubt we’ll have any absolute “proof” to validate any of the thought experiments I’ve suggested here, especially after just 10 years.

But what if we end up having 1% more clarity on something related to these deepest of the deep questions? What if we have even 0.5% less doubt about some question related to life in the universe?

If we have some evidence, of some thing, that gives us a foothold to think deeper and explore further - I think that could change everything that follows.

I love space. I have followed NASA since I visited the Kennedy Space Center as a kid and somehow got a scholarship to go to space camp. I read interstellar travel blogs, still. I think about aliens, like, 5 times a week at least (just ask my wife, ha!). Perhaps most controversially, I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, (gasp) equally. Especially for a non-scientist, I’m a space nerd of galactic proportions.

Thinking about space is what nurtured my ability to dream and dream big. Like it does for millions across the planet, space exploration gave me something, from an early age, to grab onto, that made it possible to believe in something huge and that anything may really be possible.

Just looking up, on a clear night, is as much a path to a spiritual plane to me as going to church, performing a pooja, or doing transcendental meditation. Seeing a sky full of stars from the trails of our nation’s national parks is still among the most beautiful, humbling moments I’ve ever been part of.

Our efforts to explore our solar system and our universe have already given us, as a species, so many images that have expanded what we, as a species, believe is possible. Exploring space, and going out there, into the final frontier has helped so many people across our entire planet imagine the magical and magnificent possibilities of this universe. 

Images like Earthrise from Apollo 8, which some credit as starting the modern environmental movement:

Source: NASA - https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-2383HR.jpg

Or this “small step” moment from Apollo 11:

Or this image of our “Pale Blue Dot” from Voyager 1 which Carl Sagan famously reflected on:

Source: NASA - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/

For me and so many others, what we’ve seen and learned about by exploring space has expanded what we believe is possible. And it’s expanded what we believe we can be.

I’m not at NASA scientist, clearly. So do I actually know what we might learn during the JWST’s mission? No, not really. I’ll concede that too.

But let’s remember, we’ve just launched the most powerful telescope with the most ambitious mission in the history of human kind. For goodness sakes, we will be studying the birth of the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, a few blinks of an eye in universal terms. With such bold ambitions, even if what we discover during the JWST’s mission is just 1% of what I hope it is, it could fundamentally transform how we perceive the universe and ourselves.

In 2032, we will probably still have income inequality or political strife. We will probably still have a warming planet. We may still have many of the problems which plague us today (fingers crossed, NOT Covid). But I think it’s possible that in 10 years, when the planned mission of the James Webb Space Telescope comes to a close, we may have learned something that dramatically expands what our species believes is possible. And if we learned something like that, it could change everything that follows.

---

Other Links:

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html

https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

The mindset which underlies enduring marriages

If our lives can be explained by the treasurers we adventure to find, one of my few holy grails is understanding how to be a soulmate. I search, everywhere I can, for little bits of the wisdom that can help Robyn have a marriage that endures for our whole life and for anything that exists after.

My perspective on marriage and soulmates has evolved, to something like this:

We start our lives with a paintbrush in our hands, and a blank canvas. And we start to wonder - what’s the most beautiful picture I can put on this canvas? What is the life I want to live? As we grow up we experiment a bit as we learn to paint.

Eventually, we get a pretty good idea of the most beautiful life we can paint on the canvas, and we go after it. We start to paint more feverishly as we hit our teens and twenties.

If we’re lucky, along the way we fall in love with someone. If we’re really lucky, we take a leap and marry them. And then the dynamic at the canvas changes.

A wedding, I think, is the moment two people start to paint onto one canvas.  But here’s the the trick: the moment we say I do, we suddenly have to figure out how to paint while both holding the same brush.

And suddenly, were not only painting, we’re both trying to prevent the brush we’re both holding - our marriage - from breaking. It seems like there are three ways to survive this.

First, we could strengthen our brush and make it more resilient. In a marriage, there are times when each person is pulling in a different direction, and the brush has to be strong and resilient so it does not break. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about integrity, being faithful, committing to better/worse/richer/poorer/sickness/health, having a thick skin, continuing to date, rekindling love and romance, etc.

Second, we could learn to compromise. Maybe sometimes we paint the way I want to paint. Other times, we paint the way you want to paint. We never pull in different directions at the same time. By compromising, we put less tension on the brush. By putting less tension on the brush, it does not break as readily. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about conflict resolution and compromise.

Third, we could both imagine the painting we want to put on the canvas the same way in our heads. What do we want our lives to be like? What’s the beautiful picture we want to paint together? By having a shared vision for what we want our marriage and life to be, we don’t put stress on the brush because both our hands are moving in the same direction. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about shared values, shared vision, and growing together instead of apart.

Truthfully, every married couple needs to be good at all three of these approaches. Moreover, the first strategy of having a strong and resilient brush seems like a given. I don’t know how any marriage survives without that.

What struck me is that compromising seems to be the least optimal strategy here. Sure, every married couple has to compromise at some point and compromise a lot. Robyn and I compromise, too.

But how terrible would it be to have a lifetime full only of compromise? Either you are settling for the average your whole lives, and the painting you produce is the average, path of least resistance. Or, one person dominates, and one person gets the painting they think is beautiful and the other has lived someone else’s dream. 

Compromise is necessary, but it seems best as a last resort. What seems much better is to just be on the same page about life together - and wanting to paint the same painting, constantly evolving with each brushstroke as life unfolds.

This metaphor reminds me of a fundamental tension within management. Teams - whether it’s at work, in sports, in government, or in community - fall apart if people care more about themselves than what the team is trying to accomplish together. So to in marriage. 

If I care more about what I want life to look like than I care about painting our shared vision for the canvas, and painting it together our marriage will suffer. This is no different than any team - a team only endures if its members sacrifice to advance the aspirations of the team and evolve as the team evolves.

When I first began to think about soulmates, I thought it was a question of predestination. There was a soul out there, and through God’s will I was linked to that soul. All I had to do was find her. We’d fall in love. We’d work through problems. We’d put in the work for a great marriage, and after we departed this world we’d be committed to anything that came after.

And I did, thank God, find her. But my perspective on soulmates and marriage is different now. I don’t think that it’s only about this compromise, loving each other, keeping on dating, and putting in the work stuff anymore. 

To be clear, I do still believe all those things - love, compromise, romance, and commitment - are required to be married and probably to be soulmates.

But because of my own experience being married and learning vicariously from hundreds of other couples, I now believe that there’s a key prerequisite to marriage and even being soulmates. It’s a mindset and orientation toward life that believes together is better.

We can’t just keep painting the canvas we started with prior to being married. We also can’t just find someone compatible, that we love and try to stitch our separate canvases together. We can’t even create a fully detailed blueprint for the canvas of our life and marriage, agree to it prior to a wedding, and never evolve it - life’s unpredictability certainly doesn’t permit that.

Instead, deep down, we have to fundamentally believe that the enterprise of painting a shared canvas, with a shared vision, using the same brush is what a beautiful life is. The critical prerequisite for marriage is that our mindset shifts from believing that the best way to live is being a solo artist, versus being part of a creative team.

No amount of love, destiny, resources, compatibility, or compromise can make up for not having this pre-requisite shift in mindset. For our marriages to survive and thrive - whether to our soulmate or not - we have to believe it’s better together.