May 27, 2017

The most important class I took in business school was not a traditional MBA course. The course was a practicum and had three components: trying to launch a business using the lean startup method, working with an executive coach, and working with Dr. Melissa Peet on exercises related to a field she’s pioneering called Generative Knowledge. All were really life-changing, but let me tell you a bit more about what Dr. Peet taught us.

To start off the class, we did a very simple exercise, which turned out to be incredibly insightful, despite its modesty. The exercise is in three parts, and all it requires is a large room. If you want, you can try it as we go.

First, walk around the room like you do when you’re in “problem solving mode.” Act as if you’re trying to fix something, or like when you’re working on a big, serous, urgent group project at school. Spend about a minute walking around in the problem solving mindset.

Now that you’ve done it, think about what it felt like. What did you notice about the room? How did your body feel? What were you thinking about?

Next, walk around the room for another minute or two and pretend you’re in “social mode”, as if you were relaxing, hanging out with friends, or just taking a walk for fun. Ask yourself the same questions - how did it feel?

Finally, for the last round, walk around the room like someone who is radically curious, like the most curious person you can be. And kiddo, really push yourself to be radically curious. After you’re done, ask yourself those same questions. What did you notice about the room, how did your body feel, what were you thinking about? But this time, add one more question: what was different about each round of the exercise.

You probably felt very differently at each stage of the exercise, both mentally and physically. One of the biggest changes you probably noticed between the three rounds was speed - of your walking, of your heart rate, and of your mind. When you walk around in problem solving mode, everything is fast. It’s the pace of “getting stuff done.” Which, by the way, is an expression I loathe, but that’s a story for another time.

When you’re in social mode, it’s not as fast. But it’s certainly fast compared to the mode of radical curiosity. When your headspace is not just curious, but radically curious, everything slows down. Radical curiously is incredibly intense, but slow.

The lesson is an obvious one, but still difficult to practice: to be curious we have to slow down. To learn, your mind, body, and heart need to be open and absorbent, and that requires slowing down. In the world you are being born into, son, slowing down is hard. It’s something you are never taught. In the world today, you will be trained, cajoled, and incentivized to do the opposite - the world will do everything it can to get you to go fast. But you don’t have to always acquiesce.

So many people I have met, that will have children in your peer group, are obsessed with “getting things done”, doing more with less, hustling, and the like. It’s practically a national obsession right now to want to maximize time & effort, doing more with less, or squeezing in as many bucket-list items, and experiences as you can.

Have caution my son, because it is a trap.

Don’t fall into this trap, and I will try to help show you how to avoid it. It was a trap I was in, after all, for probably the first 28 years of my life. If you do fall into this trap of busyness it will be difficult for you to develop radical curiosity, which will make it difficult - in turn - for you to be able to choose a life of goodness rather than power, for reasons that we discussed earlier.

I encourage you to do the opposite of be busy - practice slowing down. I’ve tried to do this a lot in my life and so has your mother. It’s hard, especially because we are both problem solvers (read: we are crazy people) and rather social. And I’m definitely not saying to leave problems unsolved or be antisocial, it is important to be in those modes during your day-to-day life. There is a time and a place to move fast.

The mistake I see a lot of people making, and that I’ve made a lot (and still do) in my own life is that they never stop or even slow down. As a result, because you will inherit at least some of our genes and habits from me, you will probably have a hard time slowing down too.

These are some of the techniques that I have tried, which I hope work for you. Remember son, slowing down is learned behavior. This is frustrating because it has to be learned and isn’t exactly natural. It is a blessing, however, that it can be learned.

Get Outside
The easiest way I know to slow down is to get outside. In the sun, in the rain, in the hot or cold - it doesn’t matter (but dress appropriately). Nature isn’t constrained by petty human concerns. Nature moves at its own pace. Take a walk outside for no reason other than to walk. Being in nature is incredible restorative, and fortunately incredibly slow.

I didn’t realize this in my adult life until the first camping trip with Uncle Jeff and Uncle Ellis a few months after I graduated college. We were in the high peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, and I had no idea what I was doing. They were my guides.

There’s a moment I distinctly remember during that adventure, it was probably about 20-30 minutes into our hike and something happened that I had never experienced before - I couldn’t hear any cars. Until I was over 20 years old, I had never been far away from civilization to not hear cars or the traces of other people!

Even now, as I write this letter to you, sitting on the couch in the family room of our home, in one of the quietest negihrboods in the city, before 9am on the Saturday of a holiday weekend - your mom and Riley are both sleeping. But I still hear noises. The occasional car passing by, or the dull hum of the refrigerator or electtronics equipment that is always on. Almost anywhere you go on a day-to-day basis will have some noise produced by humans, especially when you’re inside. All those noises make it hard for me to break from being in problem solving mode or social mode.

Getting outside, whether it’s deep into the backcountry of a place relatively untouched by humans or a park in the middle of a city - like Belle Isle or Central Park in New York, or even just the sideway of our neighborhood on a sleepy Saturday morning - getting outside is one way you can slow down and reopen yourself to a mindset of curiosity.

Schedule Unscheduled Time
Before your mother and I were married, one of the challenges we had to overcome was that we burned ourselves out by over scheduling our lives. We rarely felt relaxed because we were always on the move. All our time was scheduled as “fast time” - where we were doing some sort of activity - dinner, socializing, volunteering, working, or something cut from that busy sort of cloth. Our lives were filled with time for which we couldn’t set the pace. What we tried first was saying we needed to schedule fewer things. And so we left our calendar open more.

That approach quickly failed because last minute plans come up, a lot, especially when you’re young. And when those plans sound fun, and you like who proposed them, and your calendar isn’t full, it’s easy to say yes. I’m that way, especially. Last minute plans are like potato chips to me - I can’t turn them down, even though I know they’ll make me feel sluggish the next day. Like potato chips, when a plan to socialize is in front of me, I can’t say no.

Seeing as how our “keep the calendar free” idea wasn’t really working, we tried the opposite. We started actively scheduling “slow time” instead of keeping the calendar free. Around the time we were engaged, we started calling this practice “Black-out Day.”

The idea was simple. We picked one night a week where scheduled time to have no other plans. We called it black-out day because we blacked out our calendar. Doing this made us much more likely to have slow time. It’s not a perfect solution, but it helped.

What’s important to remember about slow time, is that it’s not a time to “catch-up.” Don’t use it to catch up on work or catch up on e-mails, or “be productive.” Use it to rest and decompress - the time isn’t really worth it if you don’t actually slow down.

If you need to, do something that requires you to create something or express yourself. Write something. Bake a pie. Talk to your mother and me. Sing. All these things are great and force a slow tempo.

Take Real Vacations
If you read this while you’re still in middle or high school, you may think this is obvious, but it’s not. Taking a real vacation is not easy. Work and ambition get in the way.

When I was a management consultant, I had a surprising amount of vacation days, about 25 days in a year, I think. But I often wouldn’t use it. That’s step one. You have to prioritize vacation enough to actually take it.

When you are working a job, there will be times you think you can’t take a vacation. This probably means, however, that you’re caught in the trap of thinking your work is more important than your health, your life, and your family. Or, it means you haven’t prepared your team well enough to function without you.

When you are actually on vacation, you actually have to be there. As in, actually on vacation and actually not working. Leave your computer at home if you can. Don’t check your messages and communication tools. That is one of the reasons why I like to vacation in nature, in the middle of a National Park, it’s often impossible to be reached because there aren’t telecommunications signals available (at least not in the 2010s). And as I said previously, nature goes at its own pace, no matter what you do.

The most important aspect of taking a real vacation is freeing your mind from thinking about work. When your job is stressful (and all are in their own ways if you let them be, I suppose) you actually have to observe your own thoughts and let those thoughts leave your consciousness, so you can clear your mind for vacation. Remember, those vacation days are part of your employment contract, so use them. You’re giving money away if you don't.

In recent years, I’ve tried to apply this thinking to any day off, including weekends. Weekends, in a way, are two-day vacations that you get every week. It’s nice to treat them that way as much as you can.

When your mom and I look back at our childhoods, what we reminisce about and remember fondly are the vacations we took with our families. For your mom, it was trips like those she took to Myrtle Beach or Up North. For me it was going to India, Orlando, or New York. We both remember trips to Disney, which we will take you to, soon.

Those trips were the uninterrupted times we had with our families. Those are the times where relationships and bonds were formed - not the surface level ones, but the deep ones. And these memories, whether it’s 14-day vacations or 2-day ones that we get once a week are the ones that your mom and I can’t wait to have with you and the rest of our family and friends.

Love,
Your Papa

——— 

If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.