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.
Posts tagged with #Creating
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!
My sons,
The age of AI has brought with it many conveniences, productivity improvements, and new capabilities. Those that have wholeheartedly embraced the AI native life have seen drastic changes to every facet of their daily experience. Not only has AI changed the pace at which we do things, but for AI natives, it has changed the very nature of what we do, and has brought so many things that were once impossible within reach.
Gone are the days of needing to spend countless hours poring through bespoke documents to gain understanding, or the days of requiring a doctor to help diagnose a wide range of common maladies. Didn’t study graphic design but want to create beautiful and professional custom images and photo edits? AI can do that for you. Didn’t study music composition but want to record a song of your choice complete with full instrumentation? No problem.
Sounds magical, doesn’t it?
The dangers of magic
It is very tempting to outsource more and more to our AI agents. Model builders are consistently and rapidly outdoing one another with more powerful, more capable, more flexible models being released at a blazingly fast cadence. New capabilities are popping up everywhere. From reading and summarizing your documents to crafting responses to emails, from calendar management to creating and scheduling events, from building powerpoint presentations to writing code for you, these agents are no longer simply automatons that do exactly as they’re told.
Through the magic of large datasets and huge power-thirsty data centers, agents feel intelligent. They seem to be able to apply thoughtfulness, reasoning, and even empathy and compassion in their interactions with us.
And they’re helpful. Oh so helpful.
Agents seem like the perfect companion for us - super capable, very obedient, able to “remember” our preferences, able to adjust themselves at our whim. And so before long, we find ourselves depending on them, offloading more and more of our daily productivity to them. This is all fine and good, as long as we vehemently keep one thing in mind:
We cannot allow agents to replace our thinking.
It’s a slippery slope to go from asking the agent to put together a framing document for you to complete to asking the agent to write the document for you altogether. But if we give up our thinking to the agents, it’s game over.
The last bastion: writing
Writing has always been one of modern man’s superpowers. Not only did writing allow our ancestors to communicate thoughts and ideas at a scale never before possible, its very medium forced them to slow down and to carefully consider that which they were writing.
In its early forms, writing was expensive - ink, parchment, quills, storage - all of these were cost prohibitive, so they naturally steered us towards deep thought. As the cost of the medium dropped (we have the printing press to thank for that), the value in the thought behind the words steadily rose.
As AI improves and threatens to subsume our thought, we have an existential requirement to resist. We must resist the urge to have AI writing on our behalf for fear that it will silently expand to take over thinking on our behalf.
The benefits of writing
While there are many perils to outsourcing our writing, there are a number of outsized positive benefits to doing the writing ourselves.
- Writing forces clarity. Writing narratives is hard. Weaving the story in a coherent manner requires skill, practice, and effort. This is a good thing. The act of writing will force the writer to think and to synthesize much more deeply than any other communication mechanism.
- Writing increases information density. By writing long form prose on one’s own, one is forced to truly understand a given topic before putting it to paper.
- Writing tells a story. Storytelling is how our species communicates and inspires. Crafting a narrative requires the writer to deeply understand how the various points intersect so that they can take the reader on a journey.
As our world becomes more automated and runs at a daily increasing pace, it is tempting to lean further and give up writing. Resist that urge. For it is only by holding firmly to the thing that is uniquely ours - our thoughts - that we continue to stay in the drivers seat. It is only by thoughtfully crafting our words that we are able to inspire. And it is only by inspiring that we are able to change the world.
My sons,
Human beings are wired for play. In our earliest years, life basically consisted of eating, sleeping, and learning through play and exploration. If you walk into homes with young infants or toddlers, you will commonly hear the sound of laughter, of bubbly little voices excited about the brand new discovery that squishing the plastic giraffe causes it to emit a squeaking sound (both of my children grew up with Sophie the giraffe teething toys).
But something strange happens in elementary schools all around the world. We begin to change the daily environment of our children from one dominated with play and exploration to one filled with learning, memorizing, and study. Once they hit middle school, daily scheduled play time (aka recess in America) gets eliminated altogether. Free play time at home after school gets replaced with extracurricular activities and more homework. Even volunteering, which used to be a self-initiated activity stemming from the goodwill of one’s heart has become a required prerequisite by our educational systems.
By the time that child graduates from college, free play, which used to consume the majority of their days, has been transformed into something that we relegate to our 3 weeks of vacation a year if we’re lucky. That child now lives in a culture that serves the god of progress and achievement, a god which happily will take any and all time that we do not fight to hold onto. They are told that excessive play is immature, and are in an environment that regularly reinforces that their only purpose in life is to make progress.
The benefits of progress
Let’s be clear - I’m not advocating for us to play constantly and to ignore our responsibilities in favor of that play. Our world is increasingly complex and requires increasingly dedicated, educated, and creative people to continue to make it better for us all. And let’s make no mistake about it - our world is infinitely better than the one previous generations lived in, across any and every measurable metric.
Average lifespans worldwide are longer. Many deadly diseases have been either eradicated or made treatable and non-fatal. More people are being educated. There is greater (although not perfect) gender equality. There is less violence and crime. The number of people in the world who have electricity has increased from 70% in 1990 to 90% in 2022.
I know there will be some that argue that the world is a more dangerous and terrible place than our past - to those I will highly recommend two books: Steven Pinker’s ~The better angels of our nature~ and the late Dr Hans Rosling’s ~Factfulness~.
On a more local scale, we have persistent access to the internet. We have a plethora of options of electric cars and carbon-zero household products. We have the ability to say goodnight to our home assistant and have her turn off all the lights, close all the garage doors, lock all the doors, lower all the shades, and turn off the bed warmer that was keeping our bed at a balmy 80 degrees for us to climb in. (Okay, maybe that last one was just princess Sam in action).
No matter how you dice it, that progress has many benefits.
The evolving conditions for progress
Unfortunately, our conveyor belt approach to equipping our children to carry on that mantle of success is in need of an update. While it is true that decades ago our assembly line approach to education produced workers skilled enough to work the machines of the day that propelled our world forward, our world has evolved, and the needs and conditions for that progress have changed.
As our world continues to move from physical and manual work to knowledge work enhanced by greater automation, the need for creativity, imagination, and ingenuity have become the new baselines for advancing our world forward. And as it turns out, creativity cannot be taught, it must be fostered and nurtured.
Intentionally unproductive
As a child, I found myself constantly bored. Whether it was sitting in a boring Canadian history class (I must have read about Vimy Ridge, the one important thing Canada did in WWI a thousand times) or sitting at home after school with no access to video games and on-demand TV/movies, I was constantly bored. I strongly believe that that boredom played a huge part in helping me achieve much of what I have accomplished in my life.
That boredom was the fertile ground that enabled my brother and I to invent games to play. It gave me the time and space to dream up worlds and explore them in my mind’s eye. It gave me impetus to read, to imagine, and to dream. It allowed my mind to wander into all sorts of places and situations.
Granted, there were down sides as well. I got myself into a lot of trouble because of that boredom (my mom and my principal were on a first name basis…), and I found myself more often then not finding creative ways to be mischievous. While running around with a can of WD-40 and a lighter lighting spiderwebs on fire and flushing out ant hills wasn’t particularly useful (or safe, really), that time of non-productivity was a launch pad for all sorts of creativity.
It turns out that our subconscious minds are much more capable than our conscious ones. It also turns out that our conscious minds are much louder than our subconscious ones, so if we’re constantly engaged, our subconscious minds have little time to be active and to make connections on our behalf.
DaVinci knew this. Excerpts from his recovered notebooks showed that not only did the grand master paint and create timeless works of art, but he allowed his mind to wander to all sorts of unrelated and fanciful topics. In 1485 for example, he imagined the first parachute three centuries before an actual parachute was made and deployed successfully, and he detailed out specifications for it in one of his notebooks. It was constructed in 2000 and demonstrated to work successfully at 10,000 feet! He also imagined a submarine, a helicopter, and solar power among many other things.
How did he do all this?
He had intentional unproductive time. He knew that his mind needed rest, space, and margin to do its best work, and he actively created time to daydream. He would often go for walks with nothing on his mind and nothing in his hand but a pencil and a notebook and presently realize that he had filled many pages with seemingly unrelated thoughts. In 1994, Bill Gates bought one of DaVinci’s notebooks for $30M. Other notebooks have gone for $5M or more.
Creating margin
I will never be a DaVinci or a Gates. Neither will you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the greats of our world and integrate some of their practices into our lives. It turns out there are many studies that show a plethora of benefits of having margin and allowing ourselves to daydream. A few benefits:
- We become more creative. When we daydream, our subconscious minds make connections between seemingly unrelated topics, letting us maximize the learning and benefits we get from our experiences.
- We can build better relationships. Something my college advisor told me that has stayed will me to this day is the truth that if you want to make connections with people, you have to make space. People don’t have crisis moments when it is convenient for you to show up for them. They don’t have breakdowns, epiphanies, or life changing events happen to them on your schedule. If you don’t have space for them, they will find someone else that does.
- We become more interesting. By giving ourselves margin to daydream, to pursue hobbies and interests, and to explore and experience without agenda or purpose, we become more interesting! No one is interested in a cookie cutter person that just eats, sleeps, and works. People are intrigued by those who go off the beaten path and explore!
My sons, I know that there is great pressure for you to be always productive. I know you’ve been told that the stakes are high. I know that without a doubt those things were told to you with the best intentions. But they don’t tell the whole story. Be productive, yes. But also make sure you spend time to be intentionally unproductive - I guarantee you won’t regret it!
My son,
As the technology of our time advances to automate more intelligent tasks, the differentiating factor becomes the ability to create, to innovate, to dream, and to realize those dreams. Our world has evolved such that success and productivity are no longer achieved by repetitive and well-known tasks. As we automate more of the routine tasks required for sustaining life, the acts of creativity and discovery come to the forefront.
It’s said that creativity is simply us discovering things that God has hidden for us.
If that’s the case, we must ask ourselves how we can discover more of these things. What lifestyle changes, what behavioral adjustments, what values and investments do we need to shift so that we’re ready and able to see what’s hidden there? What can we do?
First, we can be intentional with the time that we spend. As with any other skill, the skill of discovery and detailed observation takes practice. Set time in your day to thoughtfully observe, to ponder, to consider. Be thoughtful about your experiences, your circumstances, and the inputs that you have in your life. Examine them to see if there’s more than meets the eye there - you might find some transformative insights there. (Yes yes I know, your dad’s a Transformers nerd).
Second, find people that are interesting and run with them. Interesting people tend to be thoughtful about their interests, and tend to have reasons for doing the things that they do. These conversations help shape you, help refine your context, help polish your thought process. Interestig people also tend to have interesting friends, so expanding your circle there helps too.
Lastly, never say no to a new experience. Yes, I know there are exceptions to that rule, but your default stance should be one that is willing to try new things, to expand your horizons. This is something I didn’t do nearly enough of when I was younger and it’s one of the few things in my life that I’d change if I had to do it over again.
I’m not guaranteeing that by doing these things, you’ll end up discovering the next big thing. I am guaranteeing though that these actions will make your life that much richer and that much more full. And ultimately, that’s the prayer that I have for you every day - that God would give you a rich, full, abundant life.
My son,
I love being inspired.
One of the most inspiring things is witnessing the things man can accomplish. Watching a painter pour their soul onto their canvas, experiencing for the first time a new piece reflecting a musician's inner turmoil, reading a short story written to celebrate life's great virtues, or walking into the great architecture of the ages built as places of worship or safekeeping - all of these things inspire me to be better, to reach higher, and to aim for the stars.
It's a beautiful thing about life, this ability to create. We are all created beings, created in the image of God, in His likeness. That means we have God's spark in us, and with that spark comes the ability for us as created beings to in turn create. Now, obviously we don't have God's omnipotence, so we can't make something from nothing, but we have a glimpse of his creativity and imagination, and can in our own way create beauty where there was none before.
Whether it’s taking a year to write your own symphony or taking an hour to paint a sunset, I believe that something within us pulses stronger when we create. It is in that moment, that space where we forget about the world, abandon its distractions, and focus solely on the object of our creation that we are elevated from the temporary into the timeless. We see the world from another angle; we gain a new perspective, and with new perspective comes new understanding.
Have you ever noticed how things of great beauty are often epic and awesome in nature? Sunsets, canyons, monuments, masterpieces, mountaintops - all of these things are vast in their being, and bring us to a place of awe and wonder.
I believe that the wonder we feel is the creator in us resonating with the creation we're experiencing.
And so with that, I'll leave you with a challenge. Create! Build, paint, compose, craft; express the experiences, thoughts, and dreams that are uniquely you. Because you are beautifully and wonderfully made.
Tags: #Creating #Focus #Character #Changing the world #Epic #Purposeful Living #Reverence #Productivity