samng.me

Posts posted in 2025

Hospitality in life

My sons,

We’ve been discussing the concept of hospitality, first generally and then as it applies to work. We shift our focus now to how it applies in life.

I’ve always desired to be hospitable. When I was younger, I lived in a tiny 500 sqft studio apartment, but would regularly host groups of 4-5 of my friends to have a home cooked dinner and to play board games until late into the evening. I didn’t even own a dining table, so we all sat cross legged on the floor around my coffee table, which doubled as our board game surface once dinner was done. Every home I’ve had since then has been purchased with a view of how I can entertain people, and how I can grow the set of things as I learned to be more hospitable.

The more I’ve learned though, the more I’ve discovered that my view of hospitality was limited and very, very incomplete.

For whatever reason, my view of hospitality was that it was simply the willingness/desire for people to host others in their home. This was almost a direct reflection of a few traits:

• Willingness to clean up after people leave
• Enjoyment of making food or having food delivered
• Comfort letting others into your space

As I learned more about what it really means to be hospitable, I realized that hospitality is not just about your willingness to physically serve others. It is a mindset. The hospitality mindset is one of putting people at ease, of being more interested in the lives of others than in telling others about our own lives, and of having the thoughtfulness to think of others even when you’re not physically with them.

How to cultivate a mindset of hospitality

One of the hardest things to do in this life is to adjust one’s mindset. There are a myriad books out there that talk about this - Think Again by Adam Grant and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath are two of my favorites and provide great insight into the psychology of our default behaviors as well as some greatly actionable advice on how to challenge and change our own thinking and behaviors.

Once we’ve identified, acknowledged, and determined the need to change our mindset and have understood the mechanics of changing our behaviors, we need to determine what new habits to instill, and what the goals of those habits are.

1. Build a rich thought life

One of my favorite books of all time is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I first read this book in my teen years, and again many times since, but that very first reading changed my life. In the book, our hero Edmond Dantes is wrongfully imprisoned for several years, and during that time he meets a prisoner that has been there even longer than he, yet who seems to have discovered a way to avoid the madness and depression that isolation typically brings. Instead, he has developed a rich thought life, one that keeps him busy studying, inventing, analyzing, and exploring, all within the recesses of his mind.

I loved that example and aspired to have that same richness in my thought life. As a teen, I realized that there were any number of mundane times where I was left alone without anything to distract. Whether it was sitting on the bus on the way to school, showering every morning, or the minutes dozing before falling asleep at night, there were many daily spaces that could be utilized better, so as often as I could remember, I started making adjustments.

I started small. I simply got myself to think about an idea instead of a situation. Instead of reliving the day on my bus ride home, I’d take an idea and work it out. Instead of imagining waking up early and playing my favorite epic video game (Final Fantasy 2) while falling asleep Friday evening, I’d think about the themes of the game (loyalty, betrayal, love) and ruminate on how I’d seen those themes play out in my life.

Over the years my thought life has developed to the point where I no longer experience boredom acutely, and where I welcome times of inactivity throughout my day so that I can spend time expanding on these ideas, themes, and debates in my mind. This is constantly challenged by the temptation of picking up that little rectangular device and being entertained by it, but the combination of identity (I believe that I am not a person that wastes time on my phone) and habit (I have a daily ritual of reclining in my Eames chair with a glass of wine to read) has helped me fend that off pretty effectively.

2. Put yourself in a position to experience hospitality from others

There are many great things about our hyper connected world and the technologies that enable it. One down side however, is that it enables - nay, causes - our world to become smaller. Why go through the discomfort of striking up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop when your little rectangular device enables you to interact with people you already know? Why put yourself through the stress of not understanding everything on the menu at a new restaurant when you can eat at your favorite haunt again, or can eat at home on your own?

By shrinking our world, we experience the hospitality of others less. By staying in the same small social circles, we limit our understanding and experience of hospitality to those we already know.

In contrast, expanding our world allows us to experience new ways of being hospitable. By trying new restaurants, by meeting new people and being invited to share in their hospitality, and by going to different countries to see how other cultures behave, we grow our awareness and understanding of hospitality and further our own style in how we demonstrate it to others.

3. Talk about it with others

In many ways, hospitality has fallen out of fashion in our modern world. Just the other day, we went to a digital food court. The whole idea is that you order your food via touch screen and the machine assigns you a locker number. Once you’ve ordered, someone somewhere prepares your food and deposits the food into the locker through the back and triggers the notification so that your locker lights up and you can open the front door to retrieve your food. Completely contact-less.

Why this is a feature and a desired experience I don’t know, but it was a reminder of just how much technology has enabled our world to become less hospitable.

As such, it becomes incredibly important for us to discuss, to share our experiences, and to talk about our ideas of hospitality with others! We are a social species. We learn from others. We think through talking. If we want to grow our mindset of hospitality, we need to be discussing it with others.

Making magic

Hospitality is about making magic for others. It is about caring for another’s experience. It is about thoughtfully surprising others with how valued, cared for, and known they are. And it is contagious!

Every child has wanted to be a magician at one point in their lives. Some entertain the thought for a mere minute while others spend summers at magic camp. But regardless of how intense the interaction, when one experiences the pure delight and joy that magic brings, one immediately desires to replicate and to be able to perform such feats themselves.

So too is the magic brought from hospitality. When we experience a truly magical moment of hospitality we are compelled to share it. Let us then discuss these moments with others, and let us arm ourselves with the skills to recreate these moments so that we can bring more magic to our world.

Hospitality at work

My sons,

Anything in our world that is worth doing requires teams. We are past the age where any one person can do something truly impactful on their own. Yes, we can tinker, we can prototype, we can come up with ideas on our own (that too is arguable - whether any thought is truly done in isolation is debatable, but that’s another topic for another day), but we cannot build anything worth mentioning on our own.

We need teams.

I’ve been in the business of building, managing, cultivating, and leading teams for almost two decades now, and have been in the study of excellence on the subject for at least as long. I’ve read books and articles dedicated to the subject, listened to the leading experts in the fields of leadership, human psychology, and business, and have experimented with many approaches within my teams. The undeniable truth about all the best teams is this: they have a high amount of psychological safety.

The best of the best actively and intentionally cultivate, nurture, and grow that safety, and are proactive in weeding out individuals, practices, and experiences that take away from it. At the root of that safety is a strong web of relationships built on trust, humility, and shared experiences.

Learning from the best

I once sat in a large exec review with our Senior Vice President with about 20 other people reviewing our organization’s roadmap doc, a small section of which I was responsible for. As we reviewed, our SVP had a question about something in my section. After I answered, he looked over at me and said, “hey, sorry, I know we’ve met before cause I’ve seen you in these meetings a bunch, but we haven’t actually been introduced. What’s your name? … Great to meet you, Sam. Okay, so, I know you know your stuff, and everyone else seems to be nodding at your answer, but I don’t get it yet. Do me a favor will you? In the next month or so, write me a quick doc explaining this to me.”

I would follow that guy anywhere.

In a room of 20 people, probably 6-7 of which were VPs themselves, he took the time to make me feel seen and heard. It took him all of 2 minutes, and I’m sure he’s done that a thousand times and doesn’t remember the incident, but for me, that was magic. That is a moment that I will likely remember for the rest of my career.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons he’s so beloved and successful is that he has intentionally cultivated a practice of hospitality. I’m sure that not only has he reaped the rewards of that, but he has brought that same type of magical experience into the lives of many others.

Hospitality pays

We live in a world where a large majority of our GDP is coming from the service industry and that the most important capital in our world is human capital. It is widely recognized that companies and industries rise and fall because of the teams of people that they are able to hire, attract, and retain. In that world, people matter. Teams matter.

And yet these skills are as undervalued as they are important!

Why do so many companies and teams undervalue these traits? The simple answer is because they are hard to measure, especially in the short term. It’s hard to quantify the gain that we get by investing the time and resources necessary to create a hospitable culture because culture is not a yes or no thing. There’s no measuring before and after because that distinction is binary, and cultural change is a gradient.

There are many examples of companies and industries that are moving towards building sustainable, helpful, fulfilling businesses in a way that values culture and integrity as much as they value profits. In his book Screw Business as usual, Sir Richard Branson talks about the work that he and many others like him have been doing to rethink the way we build teams, companies, and industries, and the impact that those endeavors have on local and global communities. While most of us will likely never be able to build multiple companies and industries in our lifetime, there are many lessons that we can learn from those that do.

1. Make sure everyone knows the goal.

The first and foremost important thing is to ensure that everyone on your team knows what the goal is. The goal is not to build a great product. It is to build a great product that customers will love, so that they will love your brand and the impact it has on their lives and will purchase, so that your company can make money. The goal is not to create a great recipe that is delicious. It is to create a great recipe that is delicious, so that the front of house can offer it to guests at a rate which guests will love, so that guests have a great overall dining experience, so that they will recommend the restaurant to their friends, so that their friends will come and pack the house, so that the restaurant will make money.

Even if you are working at a non-profit, there is the uber goal of the organization that everyone needs to be keenly aware of so that they can take ownership of their space. It is only by knowing the true goal that individuals on our teams can see how their hospitable practices move the needle and impact the thing that really matters.

2. Give lots of credit where it’s due.

Give credit where it’s due. No matter how much value you bring to a team yourself, it is to the team. When there are individuals that do great work, go out of your way to recognize that. As a leader on the team, you naturally get enough spotlight and attention - take every opportunity to shine the spotlight for greatness in other people’s direction.

As leaders, we need to take pride in creating an environment where greatness can happen and can flourish - that is the mark and reward of a great leader, and is the mark of a team that people love, take ownership of, and do their best work for.

3. Deeply understand what it means to be right a lot.

This one tends to trip people up a lot. Especially if you’re a tech person, you’ll have been bombarded with messages telling you that being right is critically important. At Amazon, it’s even one of the leadership principles.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being right about the topic at hand. It’s a good thing to have good instincts and intuition, and to be objectively right. But there’s much more to being situationally right than just the objective debate at hand.

Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. This is true in our personal relationships as well as our professional ones. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re objectively right. This is always going to be best in the long run.

This is especially hard in the business context, because we often believe that when we’re seen as being in the wrong, it will reflect poorly on our performance. This is multiplied if your manager is the one that is seeing you as being in the wrong. This is amplified further if you’re seen as wrong in a large meeting with multiple stakeholders/leaders.

I am fundamentally a long game player, and the long game is all about relationships. Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re clearly right.

I’ll go even further.

If you’ve corrected someone because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.

The common response to this is that “sucking it up when I know I’m right feels demeaning” - yes, true, but the benefit you get to the relationship far outweighs any you lose from making a so-called mistake, especially if/when the other party realizes or discovers that they were actually wrong in the matter. The feeling you leave them with is a far greater testament to your impact than you proving that you are right.

I’m not saying that we should not go back and correct the error - do that, but do it in private. And do it in a way that preserves, and even strengthens the relationship.

Being right a lot isn’t about being objectively right. It’s not about being seen as right. It is about being relationally, long term right. It is about having the tact to know when to correct, and how to continually strengthen the relationship. And that is the definition of hospitality at work.

Hospitality

My sons,

We are a relational species. Whether we like it or not, we are wired for connection, for relationship, for feeling. In my younger years I tried to shed that; I tried to argue that intellect and reason were far superior to feeling. I took pride in this.

As I’ve grown over the years, my personality trait scores have drifted. In my youth and well into my early career, I scored very clearly in the INTJ bucket (for those unfamiliar with the Meyers-Briggs personality tests, INTJ is Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judgment and is pretty much the quintessential engineer). Over time, I drifted from an “I” to an “E” (ie Extrovert), but that was still fine.

But then came trouble.

One fine day, I tested as an ENFJ! Horror of all horrors, I was a feeler! That test had to be wrong. So I took the test again. And again. And a fourth time. And still, ENFJ. I went home from work early that day. I cried inside.

But as the stages of grief kicked through to acceptance, I realized this was actually a natural evolution for me, and a beneficial one at that. That famous quote from Maya Angelou resurfaced in a strong way:

”People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I realized how true that statement was in my own life, and realized that without knowing it, I had grown into a person that desired to impact people more than I cared to say, do, or build great things. And the best way to do that was to make sure I was thoughtful about how I made others feel.

Thus began my journey to better understand this concept of hospitality.

Understanding hospitality

When I first encountered the term, I thought it applied to the service industry only. As I dove into the concept and read about the giants in the space, my understanding evolved. Reflecting on my experiences, I realized that among my friends there were certain homes that I liked visiting more, and there were certain people that I enjoyed lingering with, laughing with, and simply being around more. It never occurred to me that this was hospitality applied to my social circle.

In his book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara, former owner of Eleven Madison Park, describes his journey of understanding hospitality. He began by asking many in the service industry a simple question: “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?” He shares one of the best answers that he heard:

“Service is black and white - hospitality is color”.

Love that. Service is about ensuring the napkins are folded properly, that all the children’s toys have been put away, and that all the food is perfectly made, timed, and served. Hospitality is about ensuring that those coming over for dinner know that they belong, are seen, and feel heard. Service is about efficiency, correctness, and promptness, while hospitality is about effectiveness, experience, and connection.

Put in those terms, everyone can be hospitable.

We all live in the mundane, the day to day, in the valleys of life. Hospitality is an opportunity to transport someone to the mountaintop, to elevate their experience, and to make a wonderful memory that lasts. It is an opportunity to bring magic into their lives. It is an opportunity to create a moment that will last in their minds - a moment of pure joy, of perfect alignment, where they’re able to suspend reality, if only for a moment.

Hospitality requires intention

Turns out being hospitable isn’t easy, nor is it natural for most of us. While skill, practice, and environment are all helpful elements, the most important ingredient of hospitality is intention. Intention means that every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters. It is a mindset that begins with a posture that no detail is too small to be ignored, and no task is beneath us.

Being intentional requires focus and effort. It is not easy, nor is it common. It is not obvious, nor is it natural. It requires skill, and it requires practice. It does not have a high barrier to entry. It simply requires a mindset of growth and learning combined with a desire to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to help people. When I was in College, I spent a bunch of my time helping younger students; whether it was being a TA, running study sessions, or just hanging out and showing others the ropes, I spent my time trying to guide and shape others just as some that went before me poured into my life.

One of my advisors gave me some sage advice that has stuck with me to this day. “Sam”, he said, “if you really want to impact others, you’ve got to plan for it. You’ve got to walk to class early, you’ve got to keep a fairly clear schedule, and you’ve got to recognize that none of it will happen on your schedule. You can’t plan when others are going to go through a tough time and need to talk. You can’t predict when a seemingly mundane conversation sparks into an hours-long one where someone bares a part of their soul to you. If you don’t plan for space to be available to others, you will not reach them.”

Every memorable connection that was built during my time in College happened in those spaces. From walking a friend home just to end up chatting until the wee hours of morning about life things to overnight study sessions ending in running outside to catch the sunrise, from standing outside GameStop at 2am waiting for the release of Halo 2 to commiserating with a friend on a deep heartbreak over coffee, each of the magical moments in those years happened because I had the time and space for those moments to happen.

Over the years, I learned that hospitality is about more than just creating space and margin for others; it’s about intentionally thinking about what they need, about how you can show up for them, and how you can bless them. That that requires thoughtfulness and intention.

Hospitality is a virtuous cycle

In our world, there are many vicious cycles out there. Shame, hate, anger, violence, suspicion, just to name a few. In contrast, there are fewer natural virtuous cycles, and far fewer examples of them going around.

Hospitality is an opportunity for us to change that.

Perhaps I’m an optimist, perhaps I’m naive, or perhaps I simply want it to be true, but every time I see a charitable act, a display of hospitality, or a picture of generosity, my soul lifts a little and I’m inspired to do the same, if only a little. But that’s it, isn’t it? By being intentionally hospitable to others, we lift them and everyone around them up just a little. Over time, as these little increases build up, it inspires them to turn around and do the same, if only for one person.

That’s the definition of a virtuous cycle and is exactly the type of thing our world needs.

The more we experience hospitality, the more we are motivated to be hospitable ourselves. The influential thinkers of our age have known this all along. From Aristotle to Confucius, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to David Brooks, all the greats speak about this. In Atomic Habits, James Clear lays this out explicitly:

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And your systems are largely shaped by the people and environments you surround yourself with.”

By surrounding ourselves with hospitable people, we shape our systems, our mindset, and our actions to be more hospitable ourselves. By being hospitable, we shape the systems, mindset, and actions of those around us to be more hospitable as well. And maybe just maybe, we can bring a little more magic to our world.

There is no substitute for books

My sons,

One of the biggest joys of my life is the ability to read, and the immense trove of literature that I have access to. It has immeasurably enriched my life and is very easily the single most important factor of making me the person that I am today. It has the ability to stretch your mind, to transport you to places you’ve never been, to challenge your beliefs, and to bring new perspective.

Reading lifts the spirit. It brings flight to the soul. It gives wings to our minds, and allows us to unleash the full potential of the human experience.

It is arguably one of the most impactful technological advancements in our world history. Combined with the printing press and mass publication/distribution, it has enabled the thoughts and ideas of the great thinkers of each era to be shared and consumed by most of the world’s population, in their lifetime and those that followed.

All of the greats in our world read. Tech and non-tech giants alike attribute much of their success to reading:

• Bill Gates reads ~50 books a year
• Mark Zuckerberg launched “A year of books” where he challenged everyone to read a book every two weeks
• Elon Musk famously said that he “was raised by books. Books, then my parents”
• Oprah’s Book Club is arguably one of the most influential movements in the world
• Warren Buffett said that “the more you learn, the more you’ll earn”
• Nelson Mandela said that “one child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world”

And yet reading across our world is declining.

Twenty years ago, 51% of American children ages 8-18 reported that they “greatly enjoyed reading” or “got a lot of enjoyment from reading”. That number dropped to 34% in 2025. In 2011, 79% of Americans said they read at least one book per year. That number dropped to 64% in 2024. The numbers vary slightly in the UK and the EU, but follow a similar trend.

What’s happening?

A belief of inherent value

Our current era of raising people has created a batch of incredibly self-confident youngsters, many of whom have been taught all their lives that they are unique and invaluable simply because they are who they are. We have taught them that their lives are interesting and worth broadcasting, that their thoughts are important and worth sharing on a global scale, and that their opinions, regardless of how weakly formed, have value.

This has led to an epidemic of shallow living, of people who are content to talk about themselves, events, and activities, who shy away from the deeper, richer, topics in life. This in turn results in a generation who experiences the world in the frame set by the likes of their social media icons and models. A life that is constantly looking for post-worthy activities is one focused on and consumed by the superficial, and therefore does not seek to nor feel the need to read.

I suppose if you’re reading this, that isn’t you.

Habitual book reading

Something that the monks, religious leaders, and philosophers figured out centuries ago is that habits are important. That’s an understatement. Habits are paramount. Not only because they help us achieve their goals, but because regular exposure to something changes the way we think about that thing.

We’ve all heard sayings like “fake it till you make it”, “practice makes perfect”, and “slow and steady wins the race”. This wisdom comes in many different sayings and teachings, but is essentially the same: by doing a thing regularly, you will become someone who does that thing regularly.

C.S. Lewis said it best in Mere Christianity:

“When you are behaving as you loved someone, you will presently come to love [them].”

The obvious question then, is this: what does the habit of reading produce in a person?

1. The practice of different perspectives. Regardless of whether you’re reading fiction, non-fiction, or anything in between, the daily habit of picking up a book and actively immersing yourself in a perspective other than your own is immensely valuable.
2. The practice of stretching your mind. A healthy book list stretches your mind and your beliefs as you consider different topics and areas that you would naturally not encounter. Because we’re reading well-researched, well thought-out works by people who have spent their careers dedicated to the study of the topic as opposed to (ahem) random musings from an average mind, we can be sure that our minds will be stretched by the perspectives of the greats in each of their fields.
3. The practice of developing a rich inner life. The more we read, the richer our inner life becomes. We become adept at building cathedrals in the sky, at exploring the vastness of space with intricate detail and nuance, at delving into the psyche of our favorite literary characters, and at living - no, feeling - every thoughtful and beautiful word of poetry in our minds. Books open our minds to the wealth to be found within and allow us to develop a rich thought life.

Framing our experiences

These in turn shape the way we experience the world. Instead of standing on the edge of the Thames wondering how to take the best selfie of the Tower Bridge, we ought to stand and admire the majesty of the human spirit that built and maintained such beautiful things. Instead of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon wondering how to frame ourselves in a photo to capture the best angle of our face while still capturing the canyon, we ought to stand and be blown away by the awe of such a natural beauty and grand vista. Instead of figuring out how to capture a selfie with our faces lit enough but not too much so that the northern lights appear in the background clearly with us, we ought to be contemplating the celestial wonders that allow such beauty to be experienced.

Reading expands our minds, causes us to introspect, to extrospect, to ponder deeply about the mysteries of our world and our galaxy, to question and to examine life, and to wrestle with our purpose for being. It frames our travels, our conversations, our relationships, and our interactions. It gives us a variety of perspectives by which we can derive meaning from the experiences of our lives.

So please, my sons, read. I implore you to read. Not just my thoughts (although I am honored that you have decided to do so) or the thoughts of our contemporaries, but the thoughts of the greats. Read the classics to appreciate the beauty and honor of a bygone era. Read fiction to expand your imagination. Read philosophy to deepen your thought. Read biographies to increase your empathy and understanding of other perspectives. And above all, share all the way that the things you read have changed your life with those around you.

Slowing down to speed up

My sons,

Time is the only resource in life that you can never get back. Each of us has 24 hours in a day, and once those hours are used up, we can never recover them, can never replenish them. Our days are numbered, and while we cannot control the quantity, we can control the quality.

Unfortunately, our world has created a system where most of us have generally surrendered in the fight and have accepted low quality days for the large majority. We have created a culture that is so hyper focused on achievement, on attaining things - titles, promotions, cars, houses - that many of us go through life trying to maximize the number of things we get done in a day in order to keep it all afloat. That in turn causes us to be exhausted and to have limited time resting and recovering, which in turn leads to a very poor quality about our days.

Understanding this should cause us to endeavor to slow down, to reduce the number of things that we attempt to get done in any given timespan. Not only will we have a greater capacity to pay attention to the task at hand, but we will get more done because we will not have to redo, backtrack, and regain our focus dozens of time per simple task.

The well-quoted adage telling us that “less is more” is pertinent here, albeit in a slightly modified form. Here, we must “go slow to go fast”.

Too fast

It is a beautiful thing in life to dream big, and to run hard after your dreams. One of the greatest things of our modern culture is that we encourage people to dream and to work hard to turn those dreams into a reality. It’s wonderful. Really.

Until it’s not.

Our world has taken dreaming too far. We have turned those dreams into obsessions, turned those fanciful could-be thoughts into goal-oriented must-be ones. As with many things, we have taken this beautiful, uplifting, and life-giving thing and have put it in an incorrect place thereby turning it into an unhealthy, identity-defining, stress-inducing obsession.

In his thought provoking book The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd posits that not only have the majority of us bought into this success-focused path for life, but most of us do not even believe there is an alternative path that will lead us to a great life! Achieving our big dreams is no longer a grand and lofty wish but rather a measure of our value.

A result of this mindset is that leisure no longer feels leisurely. We think of leisure as a means to an end. We run so that we can achieve a marathon. We go to parties so that we can network. We read so that we can be profitable in our endeavors. We stay home for the weekend so that we can rebuild the house. We take vacations to recover so that we can be even more productive at work.

We do not enjoy simply for the sake of enjoying!

We’ve gotten so used to running fast that many of us no longer feel comfortable at a slower pace. We don’t know how to exist if not at a breakneck speed. We cannot fathom a Saturday without 18 things on our to-do list. We even think that our default after dinner activity should be work. 8 hours of sleep a night is not only never attained, it’s never even attempted!

And as a result, we are empty, we are drained. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

Always on, always available

The advent of the internet was supposed to be a beautiful thing. Having the convenience of the world’s information at your fingertips was supposed to make our life unambiguously better. More information should lead to better, more informed decisions. Better decisions should lead to more efficiency and effectiveness. More efficiency should lead to more time and more margin.

But this has not happened.

Instead, we have simply filled the time that efficiency and effectiveness have bought us with more things, more inputs, more information intake. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that increasing the amount of information we consume comes with no costs. This is false. It comes at the cost of exhaustion. Nothing in this world is free. By increasing our information consumption, by increasing the hours we spend on communicating, writing emails, producing documents, we have inadvertently increased our fatigue. All of the things that require depth are suffering - relationship, connection, deep learning. We are pulled to the surface. We are not our best selves.

Slowing down to speed up

When we keep our minds and bodies in a constant state of fatigue, we simply cannot be our best, cannot perform at peak performance, cannot reach our full potential. We need the time and space to relax, to rest, and to recover.

So how do we do this? How do we slow down and allow ourselves to recover in this frantic, always connected, always competitive world that we find ourselves in?

A few ideas.

1. Create a distraction free space. One of my favorite things about working on the Kindle is the hyper focus the team has on building a distraction free device. If we want to slow our lives down, we need to take a page from their playbook. Create a space in your life that is distraction free. Whether this means creating a room in your house that has no digital devices, finding a spot at a local park that has a dead zone in reception that you can visit, or simply dedicating a nook in your room that is your focus space, we all need an environment that supports us slowing down.
2. Carve out analog time. This may mean creating a routine on a Saturday morning where you leave your phone at home, or a dedicated physical book reading time with your kid in the evening, or even going for a scheduled walk with a friend without devices, we need to have boundaries of analog time where we slow down.
3. Leave your phone charging in the next room. One of the worst things our digital lives have done to us is to have brought all the noise and distractions of the outside world into our most private spaces. This is especially true before we go to bed and right when we wake up. The time before bed sets the tone for your sleep. The time right when you wake up sets your tone for the day. Can you really afford to have both of those critical times be driven and determined by your digital devices?

I know these things are counter-cultural. I know these habits will be hard to build. I know you will have a million and one excuses not to do any of these. But if we’re serious about getting our time back, serious about recovering our mental health, serious about seeing the world in bright, vivid colors again and enjoying the fine details in life, then we’ve got to force ourselves to slow down.

The attention economy

My sons,

I got my first iPhone a little over a decade ago. The iPhone 4S. It was beautiful. Crisp, clean lines. Beautiful form factor. Super rich and bright screen. Blazingly fast for its time. And full of all sorts of useful apps, games, and utilities. Arguably my favorite iPhone I’ve owned (and I’ve owned pretty much all of them since then), although that might be because back then you could take off the back plate and replace it with an aftermarket one, and I had a beautifully crisp white back plate with a Decepticon logo on it (thank you Richmond night market!).

That first iPhone changed my life. I now had the mother of all Swiss Army knives in my pocket and could text, surf the web, watch movies, play games, respond to emails, manage my calendar, and oh so much more.

That day also marked the day I joined the decades long war for our attention that I’m pretty sure we as a race are losing.

The optimist in me wants to assume positive intent, that the creators of our modern mobile ecosystem had set out to build a powerful and useful set of experiences that made it ever more convenient to access our ever connected world. The realist who has read articles of executives at some of these companies pushing for revenue at all costs, employing social scientists and psychologists to study and exploit the addiction-building centers of the brain, isn’t quite so sure.

Regardless, whether we know it or not we are in the fight of our lives. It is not a physical fight that brings about death at large scale, but it does bring destruction at far greater scale than traditional wars have. It is a fight for our attention, our intention, and our focus. And it is a fight whose casualties are relationships, mental health, and living lives of purpose and meaning. It is a subtle fight, one that we’re mostly not even aware of, and it is a fight without a single, identifiable, nuke-able enemy. C.S. Lewis writes that

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.“

Welcome to the attention economy.

A world of distractions

Since the dawn of commerce, shrewd business people have always tried to drum up business by inserting themselves at opportune moments to capture the attention of passersby. Whether it was the mead vendor at a medieval fair, the jade jewelry stands set up outside ancient temples, or the smattering of random knick knacks any path to a checkout counter is littered with, we have always been bombarded with upsells and distractions.

For most of human history however, those distractions required one to intentionally engage, to physically put oneself in the presence of those distractions. Home had always been a sanctuary. The advent of the modern television changed all that, and for the first time in human history, distractions were invited into the home.

It then became a short hop to someone discovering that you could make tons of money by distracting people with the right thing at the right time. And from there, we were off to the races. In the early days, ads were designed to get you to buy things - no longer. We now live in a world where an ad is just designed to get you to click on whatever the link is. Some ads are for companies selling products. Some are for self help gurus selling you a life style change. Some are for radicals selling you subtle idea shifts. As long as someone is paying for the distraction attractor, companies will continue to find new ways to exploit that and distract us.

I worked on the Kindle team for a number of years, and we measured things like long form reading (ie reading books), reading of published content as opposed to ad hoc (is social media), and trends among young people and children, and the stats are mind blowing. In the US, the percentage of teens who read books for fun dropped from 27% to 14% in the last 10 years. Only 37.6% of adults read a single short story or novel the whole year!

And yet the total reading our world is doing has drastically increased. In the US alone, social media usage tripled in the last decade, going from an average of 53 minutes to 151 minutes per day.

Clearly the distractions are winning.

Attention brings richness

What we fail to understand is that the thing that gives a rich quality to our days is our attention. It is the thing that gives depth of color to our world. It is required for building deep connections. It is required for learning. It is required for having thoughtful conversation, for being keenly aware of new surroundings, for experiencing food, music, architecture, for having a sense of wonder about life.

When we save our attention, when we thoughtfully apply it to the things that resonate with our values and our purpose, we experience a depth and quality to our interactions that is sorely missing in our world today.

Unfortunately we have a finite amount of attention resources. Those resources are used replenished when we sleep, but most of us don’t get enough sleep. This causes us to be in the perilous situation where we don’t have enough attention resources at our disposal.

There are many times where this is necessary - learning a new activity, starting a new job, being thrust into a crisis situation - these all require us to draw large amounts of capital from our resources, but this is not a long term sustainable place to be. Our brains need time to recover from exhaustion; our attention needs time to recover from overuse.

It turns out that doing things quickly and rapidly wears out our attention, while doing things slowly allows us to recover. Doing things slowly has the double benefit in that while it nurtures our ability to maintain our attention, it also ensures that are unable to fit other attention-draining fast-paced activities into our day. That truly is the secret to why monasteries are places of nurturing and healing for the soul - not the humming or the orange robes, but the culture of slowing down to get things done well.

Managing our attention

So how do we make some adjustments here? How do we make small changes and tweaks that will allow us to have more attention at our disposal, and will help us be more in control of where that attention goes?

1. Be aware. First and foremost, we need to be acutely aware of where our attention goes. There are some useful tools like Screen Time for us iPhone people that will help us tally up how often we’ve used our devices, and what apps we’re spending time on.
2. Build a plan to address FOMO. Fear of missing out is a real thing. But the reality is that most of the things we fear missing out on aren’t really that big of a deal. We live at the forefront of the age of AI - whatever plan you build to address your FOMO should include AI agents and tools to summarize and analyze the things you’d be afraid of missing so that you can have peace of mind.
3. Build a community of like minded individuals. Find others who are out to reclaim their attention, and build community with them. There is safety in numbers, there is value in walking together and keeping one another accountable, and there is great freedom in building a community of like minded individuals who are gracious to our realities that we will all miss things, and that’s okay.

Whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we like it or not, we live in an attention economy. The fight is no longer for our dollars alone; it is for our attention, our eyeballs, our time, our thoughts. It is a fight that has an unseen but sneaky enemy. It is a fight we are currently losing. But it is also a fight we can win, together.

The art of communication part 3: Build your style

My sons,

When it comes to communication, nothing replaces the value of developing your own authentic style. In a world filled with AI assistants and writing tools, there’s no excuse for poor writing—whether lexical, grammatical, or structural. A combination of LLMs (Large Language Models) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) embedded in our tools makes mistakes of this nature inexcusable. These tools remove many barriers from a language perspective, and should be leveraged for what they are - tools to aid in communication.

They are not, however, a replacement for knowing how to communicate well.

It may be tempting to use the latest LLM-based editors to generate your entire communication (I’ve seen things like performance reviews, broad team emails, and responses to feedback requests clearly written with an LLM), but that is a temptation that one must resist if one is to be a great communicator.

While these AI tools can quickly assemble coherent, detailed, well-researched, and well-argued pieces of prose, and while they can even do a good job in creating a style, there is no substitute for finding your own style and your voice as a communicator. And communicate you must.

In today’s increasingly complex world, communication and collaboration are essential to accomplishing anything meaningful. With so much noise in our midst and so many distractions vying for our attention, who and what we choose to engage will become increasingly precious. Research has shown that as the number of potential input streams increases, the number of people and entities with whom we engage in two-way communication significantly decreases. But while the number of entities has decreased, our interaction with those select entities has increased.

To put it in layman’s terms, we are more picky about who we engage with, and once we’ve found trusted sources for that engagement, we tend to stick with them and communicate much more with them than ever before.

Read

Despite all the advancements in all the world - from cutting-edge AI tech, advancements in robotics, space travel, and everything in between - reading remains the most impactful, world-changing medium we have. The collective impact reading has had on our world history is astronomical and is second to none.

Whether we’re talking about scientific advancements, religious beliefs, moral and philosophical exposition, or even practical applicational topics such as cooking and engineering, all of these ideas are best conveyed through the written word. The written word has immense power; power to change one’s mind, power to change one’s stars, and power to change one’s world.

So read.

Read and learn from the greats. Learn from their style, learn from how they formulate their communications, and learn from how they lay out their arguments. As you grow accustomed to their writing, you will begin to see their personal style and flair start showing through. Some writers are dry academics; others are witty eggheads. Some are whimsical philosophers; others write with great intensity. Some write like their lives depended on it; others write without a care in the world.

Whether you’re reading Shakespeare, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Bible, or Harvard Business News, each piece of literature that you pick up will give you a broader understanding of what is possible with the written word. You will find yourself gravitating towards a particular writer or writing style. You will find yourself up late unable to put down their work. You will find yourself tuning into their particular brand of communication. And slowly but surely, you will discover that your own preferences and sense of style begin to emerge.

Listen

In a world that is increasingly noisy, we have lost much of our ability to listen. Most of us listen with the express purpose of responding; instead of paying full attention, we’re thinking about what we want to say next. This type of listening is surface-level, and we will often listen without understanding.

Have you ever been in a conversation where the other party keeps interrupting you before you’ve finished your sentence? You can be sure they’re not really listening to you, and instead are thinking about their retort even as you’re making your point.

When we listen attentively without multitasking, without allowing our mind to wander to what we want to respond with, and most of all with the intention of truly hearing what the speaker is saying, something magical happens. Actually, a few magical things happen.

1. We create greater understanding. By listening actively, we notice more than the subject of their conversation; we notice moods, inflections of voice, and body language. All of these help provide a deeper understanding of the person that is speaking with us.
2. We elevate the speaker. Giving someone your undivided attention is a great blessing in our day and age. When we focus on someone, when we give them our best, we tell them that they matter.
3. We hear more than just their words. When we focus our undivided attention on others, we not only hear their words, we hear their emotion, hear their conviction, and see the roadmap of how they’re trying to express themselves. In essence, we see their style. And we pick up subtleties that we resonate with into our own.

When it comes to communication style, remember that human beings aren’t compartmentalized. Written, verbal, and non-verbal actions are all a part of our communication and are therefore all a part of our style! Listen to some of your favorite orators (if you don’t have any, find some). Not only do we resonate with what they say, but how they say it - their phrasing, their tone, their inflections, even their volume - all of these are parts of the communication that ultimately touches us and moves us to action.

Speak

The average person uses 10,000-16,000 words per day. The problem is that most of those words aren’t particularly thoughtful or intentional in practicing, honing, and developing one’s communication style. There is much that goes into one’s speaking style:

• Tempo. How quickly or slowly do you speak?
• Phrasing. Human beings are attuned to specific tones and phrasings in aural communication. Do you pause for effect? Do you use lyrical sentences and structures?
• Words used. Do you use big words? Small words? Complex ones? Forceful ones?
• Non-verbal cues. 93% of in-person communication is non-verbal. Things like eye contact, body language, facial expressions, and even relative distance to those with whom we are communicating play a role in our effectiveness.

These are but a small number of considerations. There are many others - do you use a lot of movie references? Book references? Colloquialisms? Popular culture references? All of these are a part of your speaking style and need to be intentionally crafted and developed.

A great way to practice and evolve your speaking style is to tell your story. Whether you’re telling the story of your career, your leadership style, or your personal influences, telling your story helps you refine your style and forces you to have a deeper awareness and understanding of yourself.

It has been said that you can’t know who you really are unless you know how to tell your story. I would go further and posit that you can’t have a stable identity unless you take in the incoherent events of your live and give your life meaning by turning those events into a coherent story. So much of our human experience is being able to know who we are and being able to express ourselves and to tell the story of who we are and how we got here.

As we practice telling our story and gauging the response of our audience, we can tweak and adjust our style and find the right balance to have our desired effect.

Put in the time

There is no substitute for intentional time and effort. So much of our daily communication is thoughtless. Change that. Be intentional. Get feedback. As you do, you’ll start seeing how by knowing yourself and understanding your audience, you can tailor your style to have the impact that you desire.

The art of communication part 2: Know your audience

My sons,

I have had the unnatural privilege of working closely with several great orators of my time. Powerhouse communicators who could not only take complex concepts and ideas and distill them down to their essence but inspire you to run hard after them. Leaders who could not only move organizations but could shape the industry simply by speaking. Being in the presence of leaders like Anders Hjelsberg, Elissa Murphy, and Blake Irving has given me the distinct experience not only of being inspired by the best, but of being able to witness the life changing power of great communication.

We’ve discussed the need to understand yourself first and foremost as a primary participant in communication. We’ll now move on to the second party in any communication: your audience.

Early on in my career I was lucky enough to be on a team that allowed me the opportunity to speak and present to our customers. As a part of the deal, I got to spend a bit of time with a speaking coach that helped me refine my presentation skills, and something she said to me very early on has stuck with me. She informed me that whenever you are communicating anything,

your audience will have a predetermined set of thoughts, questions, concerns, and worries that will prevent them from truly hearing you until addressed.

Whether we’re talking about a presentation to my execs, trying to convince my partner of a particular vacation spot, or advocating for my children to try something new, each of them will have a set of concerns that need to be addressed before they can hear me. So how do I figure out what those are, and by doing so address them and give myself the best chance of being truly heard?

The art of seeing people

I’ve been on a journey to build better relationships. With my children, with my partner, with my aging parents, with my brother and his wonderful family, with close friends, and with my team, I’ve been on a mission to figure out how to build deeper and stronger connections across the gamut of these relationships. I read a wonderful book last fall by David Brooks called How to know a person that discussed in depth not only how to know people well, but various character traits that prevent us from knowing others and from achieving that level of vulnerability and trust that breathe life into relationships.

So before we get into how to see people and understand them, I thought it would be fun to take a quick antagonist view at how not to see people well, and for us to honestly evaluate how many of these traps we fall into. So without further ado, the list!

1. Egotism. This is the trait that makes us simply not interested in other people. We are self-absorbed, self-interested, dare I say self-obsessed. Instagram culture (or TikTok or whatever the latest craze of the day happens to be) further exacerbates this problem, but make no mistake: this is a huge problem with our world!
2. Anxiety. Have you ever taken time to listen to what’s going on inside your head? There are many studies that show that there is so much noise going on in our own heads that we are unable to even think about other people with all that racket going on! There’s a really great book I read recently called The Anxious Generation that talks about the increase in anxiety if you’re curious to learn more.
3. Naive realism. This is the quality that believes that our own point of view is the objective truth. Youthful zeal often falls into this trap, but the reality is that we all interpret the world with our filters; we do not see the world as it is.
4. Lesser minds problem. This is a funny one. This is simply the act of thinking everyone else is dumber than we are. Sadly, this happens much more often than we’d like to admit.
5. Objectivism. Instead of seeing others as people, we see them in the groups that they belong to and detach emotion from the situation altogether. We do this at work a lot - instead of saying “so and so’s team is failing”, we say “team x is failing”, removing the human element from the interaction.
6. Essentialism. This is effectively stereotyping, boiling people down to their essential common traits instead of seeing them as complex beings with much depth and unique experience.
7. Static mindset. Also known as a fixed mindset, this is the belief that people don’t change. Once we’ve made up our minds about someone, we hold onto that frame and do not give any consideration to the changes that they undergo.

Ever fall into any of those traps? I certainly have, and it has undoubtedly prevented me from understanding others, from developing better bonds, and from being more effective in my communication with them.

The good news is that these are not insurmountable. With a little bit of awareness and a lot of hard work, we can indeed change these traits and begin to see people as they are, not as we imagine them to be, and in doing so understand how to better communicate with them.

So how do we learn to see people, to understand what makes them tick, and to figure out how to be most effective in our relationships and communications with them?

1. Be aware of your attention

We live in an attention economy. Companies and products no longer vie for our money as a primary; no, they vie for our attention. Attention is money. Monthly active users. Daily active users. Hours spent per session. All of these are metrics that any company worth their salt tracks and tries to maximize.

It is that technological and social environment that we find ourselves in, and it therefore behooves us to understand why our attention matters, and what forces we fight against when we try to control that attention.

First of all, know that there are two types of attention: spotlight and starlight. Spotlight attention is our ability to focus actively on a single task or conversation intently and intentionally, whereas starlight attention is our ability to have a longer term sustained focus on goals and objectives.

In order to really see a person, we must be able to start by applying our spotlight focus to them in our interactions, which in turn allows us to eventually apply our starlight focus. We’ve got to take a few intentional steps:

1. Be present. This is becoming so hard for people that every training or offsite I’ve attended in the last 5 years has started with a strong reminder to be present.
2. Remove distractions. In other words, don’t take out your phone. Not only does it not allow you to focus your spotlight attention on someone, it also makes them feel less important and not seen.
3. Treat attention as all or nothing. Sit up, lean forward/lean in, ask questions, and show positive signs of understanding. This may mean nodding when appropriate, or adding +1s or whatever is culturally accepted for you to do.

Our attention matters. A lot. It conveys respect, care, and consideration. It tells the other person we want to know them.

2. Be an active listener

Most of us believe that we’re decent listeners - 96% of us according to a recent HBR study, but 34% of adults in America feel misunderstood “often” or “very often”. What gives?

First, we need to understand that there are different levels of listening:

1. Self-focused listening. This is where the listener is really thinking about how they will respond more than they are listening.
2. Person-focused listening. This is where the listener is solely focused on what the speaker is saying.
3. Environment-aware listening. This is where the listener is not only focused on what the speaker is saying but on what the context, environment, other people in the room etc are doing as well.

That same HBR study showed that the vast majority of us are self-focused when we listen. We are thinking about how to respond. We need to graduate beyond that! The more we are able to actively engage in listening, the more we are able to draw the other party/parties of our communication into an active partnership of give and take, of dialogue, and of common understanding.

Knowing your audience

Regardless of whether we’re chatting 1-1 with someone, hanging out in a group of friends, in a meeting at work, or speaking in front of thousands, it is on us as the speaker to understand the receiver so that we frame our words in a way that the other person can hear.

A face to face interaction requires focused attention with good back and forth. The more we actively listen to them, the more they will feel heard and will be willing to connect and further the conversation.

A group conversation requires environment awareness and perceptiveness as to each person’s state. The more we understand each member of the group’s feelings, inclinations, and worries, the more we can ensure they are engaged.

A large presentation requires understanding where your audience is coming from, what their cares and concerns are. The more we do our research and learn about the cares and perspectives of those sitting in the audience, the more relatable we can be to them.

The most effective communicators are able to understand their audience, are in tune with their cares and worries, and are able to adjust not only what they say, but how they say it to give their listeners the greatest chance of hearing deeply what the speaker is trying to communicate.

The art of communication part 1: Know yourself

My sons,

It has been said that the most important thing one can do in one’s life is to communicate. We are a social species, a communal people. We were made for community and for communion. From the moment of birth we reach for connection with those around us. From our first breath we spend an inordinate amount of energy learning to relate, to connect, to be understood, and to understand.

If that’s true, why is it that so many of us communicate poorly? Why do we go through life feeling unheard and misunderstood? And why, oh why, do our best attempts at expressing ourselves often have disastrous results? Whether personal or professional, with friends or with colleagues, communicating about our personal hopes or our career goals, we often fail to convey our thoughts and feelings in a way that produces more understanding and connection.

Why is that?

It turns out that communicating is a skill. Not only that, but it is a difficult skill to master! It, like every other skill, requires practice, instruction, correction, dedication, and effort. And like every other learned skill, it can come with failures that are often painful, personal, and potentially very public.

But it is a skill that, with the right attention and instruction, can be mastered like every other.

I’ve been a snowboarder much of my adult life, but recently I’ve decided to try my hand at skiing. Call it a mid-life crisis desire to connect more with my children (skiing feels more multi-generational), call it a desire to be lazier (skiing also feels less effortful), or even call it vanity (skiing seems to be on the rise again, and snowboarding seems to have petered out after the Shawn White years); whatever the reason, I’ve taken up skiing. And man does it hurt. It feels like three steps forward, one major yard sale backwards.

But I know I’m learning. I know I’m making forward progress. Painful as it is, I can tangibly feel the improvement after each outing. My muscles are a little less sore, my instincts a little less fried, my attention span a little less taxed. These are all signs that my body is building a new skillset and incorporating and assimilating it into its ethos. I am a skier. Or dammit, at least I will be a skier. Someday.

The same is true of communicating. Many of us tell ourselves that we’re not that good at communicating, that we’re private people, that we leave the flu-flu stuff to the artsy types. But deep down, we long to be understood. Deep down, in places where we’re not ready to admit even to ourselves, we yearn for connection, to know, and to be known, to love, and to be loved as we are.

So how do we get better at communicating? How can we develop these skills so that we too can find our identities as communicators?

We’ll talk about this in three parts: 1. knowing yourself, 2. knowing who you’re communicating with, and 3. building and practicing your personal communication style.

Know thyself

First and foremost, we need to know ourselves. We need to know our proclivities, our preferences, and our blind spots. Communication is a two-way street, and if we want to successfully navigate those streets, we’ve got to understand the role that we play in the communication process. This begins with knowing our values, our triggers, and our style.

There’s a lovely quote I read once that speaks volumes here:

”We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are” - Anais Nin

In order to understand ourselves, our biases, and our points of view as we communicate, we need to be aware of the fact that the world is not as we see it! We see things through our own perspectives, through our experiences, through how we respond to those experiences. It therefore behooves us to understand how these perspectives are formed!

Some of this is work for the therapist’s office, and I won’t pretend to know enough to walk through that. But let me share a few things that have helped me along the way.

1. Understand how our experiences shape us

We all see the world with our own unique perspectives. These perspectives are influenced by two major factors: our mood, and our experiences.

The preeminent filter is our mood - when we are not in a calm and collected mood, every input that we receive gets strongly tainted with it. When we are sad, every input is dampened. When we are excited, every input is amplified.

Recently, my little guy has been using the phrase “me no happy” a bunch - partly as a cutesy way to express himself, but also partly as a way to communicate something that he’s unhappy about. Our bedtime routine has us each sharing three things that we’re thankful for that day, but his unhappy mood made each thing he said tainted with sadness. He had nothing to be thankful for that day, and declared that he didn’t enjoy any of it. After a good night’s sleep (of ~10 hours), he completely changed his tune and happily proclaimed that yesterday was an awesome day because of the 15 things that we had done together as a family.

This is the impact of our mood - it is the lens by which we interpret our inputs from the world. While not entirely controllable, our mood is certainly steerable. The factors immediately in our control are things such as the length and quality of our sleep, our diet and nutrition, and the amount and regularity of our physical exercise. Do we get the requisite 8 hours a night of sleep? Are we eating healthy and with moderation? Are we regularly engaging in physical activity that raises our heart rate and releases endorphins?

Then there are the factors that, while still in our control, aren’t as immediate. Things like the amount of stress we have in our lives, the environments that we place ourselves in, and the quality and security of our social connections are all factors that strongly influence our mood.

Next, our experiences. In his essay “Texts and Pretexts”, Aldous Huxley wrote that

“Experience is not what happens to you, but rather what you do with what happens to you”.

Each event that happens to us is a neutral event in and of itself, but take that event, filter it through our mood, and add a response to it and you’ve got an experience. This is why two people can be present for the same event and experience it so differently! One person may be in a pensive mood and, combined with their predisposition may choose to respond positively to an event while another may have a very different response. These responses create an experience that our minds store up and accumulate. Over time, these experiences shape our perspective and become a critical part of our decision making process, and by extension our communication process.

2. Know what we gravitate towards

We all have biases. Some of these are natural, evolutionary biases engrained in our species over centuries. Some of these are cultural biases reinforced by our experiences and our environment. Some of these are personal biases shaped by the inputs and our responses to those inputs over the years that have elevated to the realm of character.

All of these strongly influence the things that we gravitate towards; the subjects we find interesting, the ideals we are inspired by, the values we desire to emanate, and the style of communication that we prefer.

It is a fool’s errand to attempt to eliminate our biases. Rather, we should accept them, analyze them, and be acutely aware of how they influence us so that when we communicate with others we can be sensitive to their impact. A helpful exercise here is to regularly reflect on our experiences and to note (or take note of) biases and trends in our responses so that we can form a holistic picture of our biases.

3. Learn how to detect our blind spots

Lastly, we all have blind spots. Whether these are technical (ie things we don’t have the knowledge about), emotional (ie feelings we haven’t fully developed yet), mental (ie ideas we haven’t fully fleshed out, learned about, and considered), or spiritual (ie pertaining to the metaphysical, spiritual, and mystical realms), we all have many blind spots and gaps.

These blind spots end up impacting our communication in a generally negative fashion. At best they can create an awkward moment; at worst they can greatly impact our credibility and hence our ability to communicate effectively in the future.

A couple quick notes on how to detect these:

1. Be careful about strong opinions. When you find yourself expressing a strong opinion, check yourself. Strong opinions tend to be emotionally based, instead of being rational and knowledge based, and as such are generally indicators of a gap.
2. Check your defenses. Being defensive is another sign that there might be a gap. Especially when we’re not being attacked, things that trigger defensive responses are usually signs that we haven’t vulnerably fleshed out the topic and therefore have a gap there.
3. Listen to your believable people. Believable people are people who have proven track record of being right about a specific area. When they point out things in your life, listen to them!

Good communication requires deep understanding of the topic, the context, and the parties involved. The more work we do to understand ourselves and how we show up the more impact we’ll end up being able to have on the outcome of our communicative interactions!

Moments of clarity

My sons,

I love to travel. Partly because I love the thrill of exploring a new city, of discovering a beautiful countryside, of experiencing a new culture, and of seeing the sun set over a different horizon. But also because these new experiences allow you to be surprised, to be caught off guard, to be vulnerable.

Perhaps it is the romantic in me that puts my heart and mind in a posture for inspiration, but it is in these moments of vulnerability that we find sparks of inspiration, of clarity, of perspective. These moments bring a much needed reprieve from our day to day, that allow us to see the world differently, to reflect and retrospect on life, and to wax poetic about our place in the cosmos. These moments give us glimpses into our purpose, our place, and our meaning.

For some, these moments are to be found in isolation, in quiet contemplation, and in enjoyment of their natural world surroundings. They may sneak up on you unexpectedly - a brief clearing in the middle of a hike, an opportune moment where there is not a single skier in sight as you cruise through the powder, or even a fleeting moment at a beach where you find yourself alone and reflective, gazing out into the vast ocean.

For others, these moments are found in the company of loved ones. Perhaps a warm revelation while catching a glimpse of one’s family happily chatting over a holiday meal, a quiet moment of realization as your children fall asleep before the movie has finished, or even a moment of grief shared with a loved one.

These beautiful moments, fleeting as they are, have the potential to bring clarity and focus to our lives if we let them. Their impact can be as small as a quick thought or as deeply impactful as changing our minds about something. They can be pensive and sombre or uplifting and inspiring. And the best part is, we can shape them.

Shaping your moments

Our subconscious minds are always at work. When we sleep, when we eat, when we’re engaged in active conversation, or when we’re pensive, our subconscious minds cannot be turned off. What they’re actively working on or thinking about is one thing, and whether we have the space and margin to listen to them is another. Let’s look at both of these.

It turns out our subconscious minds aren’t magical things. They’re simply (forgive the CS term here) background processes that are always running in our brain, processing and dealing with things that we encounter. Their inputs are what we give them - our experiences, our friends, our conversations, the things we read. This is our first hint as to how we can direct those moments.

We should note that our subconscious minds are slow. They take time to do their thing. And we’re usually not aware that anything is happening at all. But when they act, their impact is big.

When I was a wee lad I was happy, and hopeful, and generally pretty positive, as most little guys are. When I went through my teenage years though, I started becoming more judgmental of the world in general. Then when I graduated from university (I’m Canadian - we call it “university”, not “college” like our friends to the south call it, or “uni” like our friends across the pond do. Just “university”) and took a job at Microsoft, I discovered that I started becoming critical not just of the world at large but at those around me; my friends, my family, my loved ones. Then I became a manager, and then the doors just flew off the hinges.

I’ve since had to do a lot of work (and a lot of therapy, reading, learning, and reflecting) to get back to being a happy, hopeful, and generally positive (but not so wee anymore) person, but it’s worth thinking through how I got there in the first place.

Turns out a large influence in my youthful years was the Toronto Chinese Christian Church community at large. Yikes. I won’t hate on that whole community too much, as I’m sure it has changed over time, and I’m sure my experiences were… somewhat unique to me, but suffice it to say that I grew up being surrounded by a whole lot of immature adults vying for power, judging one another, and generally being nasty humans without caring that the youth of the time was paying close attention.

Fast forward to Microsoft culture circa 2008 and you’ll find an incredibly critical company, one that promotes “critical thinking” as applied to any and all problems. Including human engineering problems.

And my subconscious mind picked all of this stuff as regular inputs in my life, and acted accordingly. It assimilated those behaviors and attitudes, and slowly but surely changed my view of the world, my actions within it, and my reaction to it.

We are not the sum of our experiences, as has often been said, but rather we are the sum of the way we react and respond to those experiences. If we want to react differently, if we want to be inspired in those moments of clarity, then we must be thoughtful and forceful about controlling our inputs, about cultivating the garden of our mind.

Space to listen - a moment of clarity

Once we’ve reined in our thought process and have gotten a better handle on the inputs to our subconscious, how do we allow those insights to bubble up to our conscious minds? How do we put ourselves in a position where the fruits of the garden of our minds can have their moment of impact?

The obvious one is to prioritize margin, to accommodate it, and to plan for it. Many successful executives do this. Bill Gates used to have his infamous Think Weeks where he would spend an entire week away from all distractions so that he could think and give his mind time to speak back to him. Oprah has popularized the silent retreat. John Rockefeller scheduled hours on his calendar to just sit and stare out the window.

In his book ~Stolen Focus~, Johann Hari expounds on the plethora of studies that show that the kid in the back corner staring out the window daydreaming was much more likely to be successful, learn better, and even reason better. There is much research in recent years that shows how giving ourselves space to play, margin to relax, and time to daydream is incredibly beneficial for us.

One way to orchestrate these moments is to take our vacations. Many years ago my mentor told me that if I ever worked for a company or a person that asked me not to take my vacation or asked me to work during it that I should immediately start looking for a new job. I agree. Corporate America has created a model set to squeeze every last drop of productivity from a person without realizing that leaving people as husks of their former selves is only the secondary problem. The primary is that in doing so, we deprive people of growth, of learning, and as a result get less out of them.

Make sure you prioritize taking your vacations, and for the love of God, turn off your devices and don’t check email while you’re there.

It is in these disconnected moments that life can take you by surprise. I recently took a train ride to Portland with my little dude and during that 4 hour disconnected journey, I happened to be staring out the window at a steady stream of trees rolling by when suddenly we hit a picturesque clearing. The sun was shining just right and the beautifully manicured acres of lawn sloped gently down to a turn of the century farm house painted a deep royal blue. The house stood nobly at the foot of a hill that created gorgeous backdrop, its white picket fence encircling a luscious garden on one side, and a row of 30 foot trees on the other. A lone horse stood beneath the tree, topping off that quaint, beautiful scene from a different life and a different time.

That moment, combined with my mind’s lingering thoughts from the novel I had just finished, elevated my perspective and transported me, causing me to think about the beauty of the human spirit, of the longevity and resiliency of our species, and of our ability to build noble things that can stand the test of time.

And then the whole scene was gone, covered by the steady rows of bushes lining the tracks. But not before leaving yet another breadcrumb of clarity and perspective for me to chew on for the rest of the trip.

And so my encouragement to you is to put yourselves in places where you too can allow the thoughts marinating in your subconsciousness to surface, where you can be inspired, and where you can be taken by surprise.