Kids Say The Darndest Things

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?"

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 <something they have a strong opinion 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

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.

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

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

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. 

<optional sidebar> 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). </optional sidebar>

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.