At Witz End

Kids Say The Darndest Things

2020-05-11T02:35:00Z

It's now been 8 weeks of having my kids out of preschool and home with us 24/7. To keep tensions low I've aimed my efforts toward listening at times where I might previously have found myself telling. It's been amazing to give a more critical ear to what comes out of my 5 1/2 year old's mouth.

Few things frustrate me as much as being ignored. I don't expect 100% compliance, but we as parents are constantly trying to reinforce the importance of acknowledgement as the very foundation of social interaction. It's very difficult to start a conversation without it. In one particularly frustrating moment of repeating myself for the umpteenth time without a wince of acknowledgement, I got down on my 5 1/2 year old son's level, put my hands over whatever he was fiddling with, and looked him in the eyes and said, "WHAT are you doing and WHY are you not responding to me?"

He stared back and simply said, "what I was doing was more important." A flash of white hot rage was quickly replaced with a cool sense of awe. His defiant indifference in that moment exemplified two values that I hope form the bedrock of his character: bravery and honesty.

Frustrating stories like this are the kinds of parenting stories you hear about most, but sometimes my kids will stop me in my tracks for the opposite reason.

Yesterday, I was setting him up for an independent activity while his sister took her afternoon nap. He asked me, "Daddy, what are you going to do? Work on your computer?" I told him yes, and followed with a question of my own. "What do you think I do when I'm on my computer?"

His answer put stars in my eyes. "You find words." He captured it so simply and so elegantly. I find words, and it's a pleasure and a privilege to do so.

Three Better Questions than "What do you do?"

2020-05-04T00:41:00Z

As I mentioned in a previous post, I hate the question "what do you do?" It's boring, and narrowly places highly complex individuals into a flat caricature of an occupation. I write down (re: steal) good questions whenever I hear them and test them in different scenarios to see what happens. Here's three of my favorites, and what I like about them:

1. What one or two things are you most excited about right now?

This is my favorite of the "get to know you" questions. I purposely leave it open ended and give the option of having multiple answers. This way the respondent can answer from any corridor of their life: work, family, hobbies, or any combination. My favorite answer to this question came from a VP at my company, who shared that she and her husband were about to launch a new business that leveraged both of their particular career strengths. Her eyes lit up when she was telling me about it, and it was an area of her life I knew absolutely nothing about prior to asking the question.

2. What can I do or not do to help you right now?

Helping people is in my nature. I still have a report card from 4th grade, where the teacher wrote, "Jonathan always wants to help me or his friends. Sometimes he can be a little too helpful." This is a kind, 4th grade teacher way of saying sometimes I just need to shut my mouth and keep my opinion to myself. This question shows an eagerness to help, but is an admission (and a reminder) that there may not be anything for me to do other than listen. By adding the qualifier "or not do" it helps center the question on their needs instead of my desire to help.

3. What's one thing you've changed your mind about recently?

Humility is not just not bragging about how awesome you are. An often overlooked component is intellectual humility - the willingness to admit that you don't know something or that you might be wrong about it. To me it's a hugely admirable quality, and learning to practice it is crucial to progressing your thinking. The ability to answer this question (and the speed at which the respondent can answer it) is a telltale sign of introspection and self awareness. I use a variation of this question to avoid expending too much energy on zealots. I simply ask, "What would change your mind about ?" If the answer is "nothing will change it," then that's a cue to disengage.

I have many more go-to questions that I'll share over time. Now that I've given you three of my favorite questions, what are some of yours?

The anatomy of a decision - a decision journal in action

2020-04-27T01:45:00Z

We make hundreds of decisions a day. It does not matter if you're in customer service at a call center for a cable company, an ER nurse triaging patients, or a database analyst writing queries all day. You are confronted with too many decisions, and 99.99% of them are not worth more than a few seconds of consideration.

In my first draft of this email, I wrote half an article about reducing the amount of decisions, so I'll save that topic for another email. Let's assume we have identified a decision that deserves careful deliberation, because it has a potentially large impact on your life or career. The template that I start from is here in the Farnam Street article, but since my actual physical Decision Journal notebook is in my desk at work, I used Evernote and adapted some of the questions into a more condensed framework that better fits this decision. Below are the steps, and in italics I've added the benefit each one generates.

Write down the date, time, and some details about your mental and emotional state when making the decision. Writing it down (especially long hand on paper) eliminates the opportunity for hindsight bias to creep in
State the problem as you understand it, then rephrase it in a way that any person with no context could understand. Having to rephrase the question for someone with no context forces you to confront how deeply you understand the problem
Identify all the variables that play into the decision, and then rank them by relative importance to you. Listing out and ranking the variables reveals what you value most at this point in time. I think big decisions like job changes would be especially interesting to track over the decades we spend working
Write out in paragraph form the range of potential outcomes from most positive down to most negative, with as many outcomes in between as you need. Weighting the outcomes for likelihood prevents you from getting caught up in the most extreme possibilities. I think a lot fewer 20-somethings would move to Los Angeles if this exercise was a condition required to establish residence in the city
Write in paragraph form what you think the most likely outcome is, and if it's not your most desired outcome, write what you can do to influence the probably of reaching a more desirable outcome. Comparing the most likely outcome to your desired outcome may not only change your decision, it has the potential to completely reframe the problem
Set a date six to twelve months in the future to re-read the entry and compare how it unfolded compared to your projection.

Setting a date far in advance for reflection gives you the space and emotional detachment to examine the quality of your decision making and your "correctness" in predicting the most likely outcome

With practice, this systematic consideration of the key factors and likelihood-weighted outcomes becomes closer to your default mode of thinking, even when not making a major decision.

Thinking about thinking and decision journaling

2020-04-19T20:50:00Z

I'm a hardcore extrovert, so I love getting to know people. I find the question "What do you do?" to be terribly boring and limiting. I like open ended questions that give the recipient space to take it wherever is most interesting to them. I'll cover the topic of better questions in a future email, but one question I tested out a handful of times was, "What kind of things do you think about?" This question was often met with a blank stare, and a muttered, "I don't know, nothing?" I didn't understand. How do you not know what you are thinking?

The classic example of autopilot thinking is getting into the car, driving to work, and arriving having no recollection of the entire commute. Thinking is such an automatic and invisible process, we don't often give it much thought. A core part of evolutionary success is conserving energy, and our brains have turned transforming tasks from conscious to automatic into superpowers (even highly complex ones like driving). Living and acting entirely by autonomous thinking processes, though, sacrifices the opportunity to reflect and consciously make improvements. Some people have real hobbies, but I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about my thinking.

One of the many tactics the Farnam Street blog introduced me to for improving the quality of my thinking and decision making is called "decision journaling." The idea is to:

Write out the factors that influence the decision and determine the most important ones
Scope the full range of potential outcomes
Assigning the outcomes probabilities to determine the most likely outcome

It's a powerful reflection technique, especially for major decisions which can't easily be reversed. I followed the recommendation in the article and bought a nice, big notebook dedicated to recording all my decisions. I was going to make the hell out of some decisions. Nine months later, it sat empty. I grew increasingly frustrated and confused, because I felt like not only was I not making any decisions worthy of journaling, I was struggling to recall any decisions I was making. Here I was, supposedly far down the path of my journey of self discovery, and day after day I'm not able to tease out a basic thought process that must be happening several hundred times per day. I don't understand. How do I not know when I'm making a decision?

I still struggle with this every day, but with a lot of effort and prompting, I'm starting to see glimmers of awareness. "Oh, that was a decision!" will occasionally pop in my head. I've still only used the decision journal twice - once when deciding whether or not to take a new job, and recently when deciding whether or not to press more deeply into writing by syndicating the content of these emails to a blog.

Send a note back if you want me to share the results, and if there's enough interest I'll write about it next week. I would also love to hear your answer to the question, "what kind of things do you think about?"

When things are equal but not the same

2020-04-06T00:46:00Z

After reading the Tim Urban article from last week's email, a friend replied and asked how I felt having gone through the exercise of calculating how much remaining time I had with my kids. Did it lead to clarity? Dread? Ambivalence? None of the above? All of the above? For the second week in a row, I found my answer in math.

Do you ever feel like you know a basic concept really well, but when you try to explain it you realize how many holes and assumptions exist in your knowledge? In sitting down to write this, I realized I don't have as good an understanding of how equality works (but I'm going to try to make my point anyway).

Both the left and the right side of the following equation are equal:

2 + 2 = 3 + 1

When you go through the operation of adding 2 to 2 and 3 to 1, you get 4 for both. Since 4=4, 2+2 and 3+1 are equal. Numbers are just an abstract representation of things though, they have no meaning until you know what they are numbering. I'll illustrate with a few examples.

Using the numbers above, a family with 2 parents and 2 kids is not the same as a family with 1 parent and 3 kids (or 3 parents and 1 kid!). Each has a house with an equal number of people (4), but the families are not the same.
Jill has a copy of each of the 13 studio albums released by The Beatles, and Jack has 13 copies of The Best of Ricky Martin. Equal number of albums, but not the same.
Hank has 50 x $1 bills, and Bobby has 50 x $100 bills. They both have 50 seemingly identical pieces of paper, but they are not the same. If this one seems farfetched, it's because you are hung up thinking money has intrinsic value. To remedy this, offer a three year old the choice of 10 x $1 bills or 1 x $100 bill.

This divide between the concepts of equality and sameness is where my reply to my friend comes in. Calculating the number of hours left is a valuable jolt to your system, but it doesn't tell you what to do next. Understanding that each of those hours is equal but not the same, though, is incredibly empowering. Instead of being paralyzed by the dwindling count of hours, it shows that you have the agency to increase the value of the remaining time by improving the quality. It is much easier to make the existing hours better* than to try to make more of them.

*Note: In the case of kids, I'm not advocating that you devote 100% of your attention to your kids for every remaining hour you have with them. If the quarantine has taught me anything it's that this is impossible and isn't healthy for you or your children. Please send help.

A Few Hours

2020-03-30T00:00:00Z

The first time I read Tim Urban's article The Tail End, I was close to tears by the end. Go read it if you haven't - his way of thinking and articulating heavy subject matter in a simple, accessible way makes it worth the read. The gist of this particular article is that by the time you reach your 30s, you've likely spent 95+% of all the time you'll ever spend with your parents. I had to run the numbers for myself.

Age 3.5 = 21.85% (daughter's current age)

Age 5.5 = 34.33% (son's current age)

Age 12 = 74.91%

Age 18 = 96.64%

Since becoming a parent I've heard the cliche "the days are long but the years are short" a number of times, and now here it was laid out like a mathematical proof.

The new world of social distancing and self-isolation changes the numbers. My wife and I are working from home and splitting the our day into 5 hour shifts of childcare and uninterrupted work. Now our prior estimate for any weekday of 4 hours a day (1.5 in the morning and 2.5 in the evening) increases by an extra 5 hours per weekday to 9 hours per weekday. This may not seem like much. Or it might seem like way too much if you also have kids, but let's recalculate the next few weeks. An extra 5 hours per weekday 5 days a week is 100 hours per month, or 0.24% of my total estimated lifetime hours with my kids. A quarter of a percent per month! The number can seem like so little and also so much. I won't be able to ask for any extra hours at the end, so I'm going to do my best to cherish these extra ones and treat them like the gift they are.

This One is Different

2020-03-23T01:39:00Z

I was 15 and a sophomore in high school on September 11th. I had weight training first period (so jacked bro), so I didn't learn of the first plane hitting the tower until late in the morning. I showered in the field house and walked up the bleachers back toward the main school building, when I ran into John Ross. "A plane just hit the World Trade Center" was all he said.

I don't remember much else from that day. I think I remember them sending everyone to homeroom and watching the news silently in class. I don't remember if we were watching when the second plane hit, or if we were watching when the towers fell. It's hard to separate real memories from the retelling of the story over the years. I don't even remember my feelings then, but I doubt my adolescent brain would have been able to put it into words the way I could if it happened today.

Impact: We still wade through the after effects of the War on Terror every day, but largely 9/11 was a singular event, with its epicenter in New York City. Most people in the country outside of NYC didn't directly know someone who lost their life either in the tragedy or from the hazardous conditions of the attempted rescue and cleanup missions.

Blame: The perpetrators were a small (on a global scale), homogeneous group of people. A "them."

In 2008, I was wrapping up my last two semesters at Georgia Tech. I was fortunate to get a job in March during the Spring career fair, so I was on autopilot for the second half of Spring semester semester. I had banked most of my "easy" classes for the summer, so even with 15 hours of classes I was poised for a fairly carefree summer. Commencement was on a Friday in early August, and I started work the next Monday. Six weeks of training in Chicago followed, and then I was back in Atlanta, eager to start selling some machine vision systems. My territory would primarily consist of automotive manufacturers in a small sliver of Georgia and the entire states of Alabama and Mississippi. Lehman Brothers collapsed four weeks later, the banks and the auto industry got bailouts just to stay afloat, and for a long time, no one was buying what I was selling (literally - I didn't sell anything for a full year).

The damage came in waves over the next months. My primary source of news was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the more people he lampooned, the more it just seemed like everyone was responsible. In the years following the recession, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera wrote All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, which cemented my distrust for anything related to finance.

Impact: Seemingly everyone was either directly impacted or knew someone who was, but few people died as a direct result of the financial crisis. A lot of people and institutions lost a lot of money. My parents' retirement was gutted. People were forced from their homes. A decade later the country was aggressively riding a bull market to new highs, but many neighborhoods, towns, and cities never fully recovered.

Blame: There is no way to really attribute blame in such a complex system, so I'll just list people who had a hand in it. Corrupt subprime lenders. Financial organizations like the banks and ratings agencies that put market share and profits ahead of clients. Paralyzed and powerless regulators. Vulnerable (and some may argue irresponsible) mortgage borrowers. There were villains, victims, and villains that thought they were the victims.

COVID-19 is a different kind of crisis. It started as a "China problem" and it wasn't a big deal (according to our government leaders and the media). At least not until it was a Big Deal. Capital B, capital D, Big Deal. Most people like me are about to start their second week with mandatory work from home policies in place. We've left the house a handful of times for groceries, twice to pick up drive through orders from Target (kid toys, toiletry essentials), and once to take the car (and kids) through an automatic car wash; with a three and a five year old you'll take whatever cheap thrill will get you by. Estimates for how long life will be like this range from 30 days to many months. If people continue to stay home we can flatten the curve, and as long the internet doesn't break from the increased sustained load, most people will be ok.

Impact: Likely. Every. Single. Person. In. The. World. Think about that. We are barely into this event, and as of this writing on March 22 there are ~328k confirmed cases. The sheer scale of an event that impacts 7.5B people is not something easy to comprehend. In the US it will get worse before it gets better. For Americans, this won't be like 9/11, where maybe you kind of knew someone whose cousin's mother-in-law went to synagogue with a lady whose grandson was killed in the attack. COVID-19 will kill people you've met before. Maybe not your parents, but a neighbor. People who are young and single may never meet grandmother or grandfather of their future spouse. Potentially their mother or father. Businesses will close permanently. Some industries may never recover. The economy will grind to a halt, and people will be scared to leave their houses for months to come. The societal scars of COVID-19 will be visible for a long time.

Blame: No one? Everyone? Do we blame the bats in the live animal markets in China? Do we blame ourselves for invading nature and creating the demand for exotic animals that lets those markets exist? Do we blame anti-vaxxers and others steeped in denial, who call this a conspiracy and continue to send their kids to gymnastics camp and soccer practice? How about the young people who just don't fucking get it, or are just too selfish and immature to care? Many more eloquent words will be written about this than I can write. For now, stay home, keep paying the people you would normally pay even when they aren't performing their services (like house cleaners and hair cutters), support healthcare workers however you can, and say important things to the people you love the most.

Put a label on it

2020-03-16T01:25:00Z

Jim* sat at the end of the conference table, arms folded firmly across his chest. "Jim, what do you think? You're been at this the longest, what should we do?" Our bids to engage him did little to move him. It was the fourth meeting to review the recommendation on the path forward, and it seemed like we were doomed to continue spinning in circles. Jim was the most knowledgeable, but after repeated rejections of his ideas early on, he had resigned himself to giving the team the silent treatment.

"Jim, it seems like you think we aren't going to listen to what you have to say."

BOOM, the floodgates opened. "It's not that. I'm frustrated because we're spinning in circles when we know the right answer but no one wants to just make the decision and move on."

"How do you think we should move forward?"

"Well I would start by..." and we were back on our way to a resolution.

This story highlights the power of a technique called "labeling," which I first learned about when I read Never Split the Difference (coincidentally one of the most practical books on human psychology I've ever read). The formula is pretty simple:

It [seems / sounds / looks] like [observation or guess about what is happening].

This phrase taps into a powerful psychological principle - it's much less threatening to talk about something when it is detached from our sense of self. If we had asked Jim, "Are you ignoring us because you think we won't listen to you?" it would have immediately put him on the defensive because of the accusation that he's ignoring the team. By making the conversation about the observation, Jim feels much safer to engage. Because you're not asserting anything but rather describing your perception, it is also reduces the likelihood of escalating the tension.

This technique is one of the most versatile verbal techniques you can use to have better conversations. I plan on revisiting some of the more nuanced uses of labeling in the future, so I will end with some "starter labels" you can try:

It looks like you have more to say about this
It seems like I'm missing the mark here
It sounds like this is really important to you

*Jim is not his real name. It's James.

Interstitial Journaling

2020-03-09T00:31:00Z

I've long envied journalers because I consider journaling to be a meta-habit. The benefits spill over from the act itself to many other areas of life. It's not (always) just a bland, narcissistic record of the minutiae of your life. At infrequent intervals I've used it to increase self awareness, help with mood regulation, and to clarify my thinking on complicated topics. It takes many forms (from Morning Pages to The 5 Minute Journal, Contentment Journal, and beyond) but there's no special formula - the key is just to write what matters most and do it consistently. Like any additive habit (versus a subtractive or simplifying habit), the benefit needs to far outweigh the cost of taking the extra time to do it.

Many of the most prolific thinkers across history like Charles Darwin were unrelenting journalers. They filled tome after tome with every thought that ever occurred to them, leaving behind a phenomenal record of a lifetime of thinking. I've tried to pick up journaling in the past, and have failed at making the habit last beyond a few weeks. This made me wonder if I simply was not capable of being a journaler, until I was listening to Penn Jillette's description of his OCD in his episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Some part of a successful journaling practice may be attributable to degrees of obsessive compulsive behavior that I just don't possess (interestingly OCD also helps explain people with perfect memories). Should I just give up?

Enter the Interstitial Journaling technique. I first read about it here on Medium. If you don't want to take the 15 minutes to read the original article, here's the crux of it: start a text file (or Evernote note), and every time you switch from one activity to another write a sentence or two about what you were doing and a few about what you plan to do next. Here's two recent examples:

3-2-2020 | 11:32 AM: Feeling pretty good about what I've accomplished so far this morning. I started shaping the project Microsoft Teams site for [project x], and designed a bad ass ultra clear meeting agenda using a technique from the HBR Ideacast episode I listened to yesterday (Why Meetings Go Wrong and How to Fix Them). I framed the agenda as a series of questions so we can check in periodically to make sure we know we are making progress. Hopefully it will help keeps us on track and potentially even end the meeting early if we get the questions answered.

Next up: I'm going to sketch out the next steps and timeline for [project x] and have some lunch.
3-3-2020 | 5:05 PM: The meeting with the key stakeholders for [project y] was pretty rigid. I don't think we are really doing a good job of landing our purpose and objective for each meeting with these important people. I think that in the future if we aren't totally ready we should just cancel and reschedule the meeting because people appreciate their time back, not having it wasted.

Next up: Go home and unplug for the day

It took 4-5 minutes to write each of these, including grabbing the link for the podcast episode, and this habit pulls a lot of weight:

It forces "in the moment" reflection that provides a vivid record of what I do all week, which makes writing a weekly update much easier at the end of the week. Recording as I go also makes me much less susceptible to hindsight bias when trying to recall something later.
It helps me keep track of progress on the experiments I'm running, like with techniques for running better meetings (see below for more about that).
Context switching can be a major drain on productivity, and writing the journal entry provides a clear off ramp from one activity and on ramp to the next. It also serves as a signal of how frequently I'm going through major context shifts.
Creates space for reflection, and increases my awareness of my emotional states as I move through my day.

I'm a few weeks into the habit, and I've found it to be easy to integrate into my workflow, even if I don't record at every transition. The true test will be if I'm able to continue to prioritize it even when things become more hectic.