Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men,
and anyone else that's interested.
My sons,
We live in a world that expects instant results. Whether it is startup life where companies are expected to achieve 8 figure revenues in their first year of existence, corporate life where employees are expected to turn around problematic behaviors or troublesome team dynamics in the next quarter, or personal life where we expect same day delivery, instant meals, high speed wireless internet, and every other instant gratification method we can think of, our world has been barreling down the path of bigger, better, faster, and more instantaneous.
In such a cultural dynamic, it is often difficult to pause, to take the time to think, and to expend the effort required to make decisions that are holistic and focused on the long term.
The value of patience
Fortunately, with a little bit of effort to expand our field of view, we can find many examples of outcomes that were only made possible with persistence, grit, and a steadfast commitment to stay the course. A number of age old adages come to mind:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day” “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” “Slow and steady wins the race”
Every one of these points us to the fact that nothing truly great can be rushed. Whether we’re talking about industry changing products, society changing cultural adjustments, or even life changing romances, every single thing that lasts, that is remarkable, that is revolutionary takes time.
Constant, gentle pressure
When I was younger, I believed in the epic moment, the great reveal, the climactic prestige. Everything around me pointed to it, and much of my surroundings and inputs led me to place a lot of value in it. Hollywood taught me that no matter how dire things got, a grand gesture (romantic or otherwise) can save the day, repair a relationship, or turn the tide of battle. I was repeatedly fed the myth that a hero could take any bad situation - a failed relationship, a lifelong rivalry, a generations-old conflict - and completely turn it around and be victorious. And they could do it in style, with a flair that was immediately daring and yet attainable, and all in the movie goer friendly timespan of two hours. Cue the credits.
Sadly, real life doesn’t work that way.
Real life works over the span of a lifetime. It works through the duration of a career, over the course of one’s academic tenure, and over the full cycles of our economic process. It requires a collection of little things, of the steadfast and persistent determination that is willing to do the unglamorous, of the grit required to slog it out. Not some heroic flash bang effort.
Success in real life requires constant and gentle pressure.
Slow cooking my steak
I love steak. When my brother got his first paycheck at his college internship, he took my parents and I to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. While I’ve never solved the mysteries of who Ruth is, and what a “Chris steakhouse” is, that experience got me hooked onto steak for life. Throughout my young adult years I ventured into as many steakhouses as I could afford, lucky as I was to have work pay for many of these experiences in the guise of a work trip (I’ve been to every steakhouse in Cedar Rapids Iowa, Boulder Colorado, and even Mountain View and Sunnyvale California).
As I got older and became more financially responsible, I decided to learn how to recreate these culinary delights myself. I went through all sorts of books and articles, watched any number of master chefs argue for their method being the best, and experimented with everything from the reverse sear to direct grilling to baking and using my Searzall.
But then one fateful day during the COVID pandemic, I discovered the Sous Vide, and my life was changed forever. Picture perfect steak, cooked consistently all the way through, every single time. Heaven. The secret? Constant and gentle pressure. Well, constant low temperature water bath anyway. But you get the point.
The small things
As a dad, I’ve discovered that model to be an extremely effective one that works across a myriad of scenarios raising my children. My son now pitches for his select baseball team. But 6 years ago when we started, he hated baseball. Never wanted to play catch, didn’t want to go to practices. But over those years, several times a week I’d coax him outside to throw 20 balls with me each time. Slowly - painfully slowly - he started coming around to it, to the point where much of his identity is wrapped up in baseball, in his team, in his development.
Constant, gentle pressure.
As a leader and a manager, one of my strengths is in building great teams. We live in a world where nothing meaningful can be done on one’s own. Everything requires teams, and the more effective the team, the better the outcome.
A technique I stole from the late great Bill Campbell is the practice of starting every staff meeting with 90 seconds around the room of non-work stuff. There is much research that has shown that the greatest teams are the ones that have a strong amount of psychological safety. The root of psychological safety is trust and vulnerability - you need to trust that when you share your open and honest view that your teammates will respond well, regardless of whether they agree or violently disagree with the point at hand. Freedom to express without fear of retribution.
How do we build trust and vulnerability? By getting to know each other on a human level. Turns out when you hear 90s a week about a person’s life and you engage with them on those small tidbits, over the course of a year or two, you’ve actually gotten to know quite a lot about that person. I now know more than I could have imagined about fishing, about the types of gear, the different techniques, when one fishes from a boat vs shore etc, and I’ve never held a fishing rod in my adult life because every week for the better part of 4 years, one of my teammates would tell us all about his fishing adventures.
Constant, gentle pressure.
Turning on the pressure
A few thoughts on how to effectively start your own slow cooking process:
- Be transparent about your intentions. Whether you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your team, to teach your children some great habits, or to elevate the conversations of your friend group, being transparent about your intentions up front is crucial. No one wants to feel hoodwinked, and if your intentions are good, generally you’ll get people to lean in simply by sharing with them what you’re trying to do.
- Start small. Remember, it’s gentle pressure. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows us that the way to change our habits is to start small. Want to lose weight? Don’t start by trying to cut out all your favorite snacks and move to green smoothies. Start simply by stepping on the weight scale every morning after you shower.
- Be consistent. Whether we’re talking about raising children, growing teams, or managing customers, consistency matters. A lot. If you’re a notoriously chaotic person, then you’ve got to develop systems that will help you maintain that consistency despite your personal working style.
We see this phenomenon in nature as well. Places like Antelope Canyon in Arizona are breathtaking in their natural beauty. It took hundreds of thousands of years filled with flowing water, windblown sand, and natural erosion to produce something so marvelous. Let’s take a page from mother nature’s playbook and apply that same constant, gentle pressure to the beautiful things that we endeavor to build!