The Things I Know Now

I’ve spent forty three years walking the planet, and a majority of them as a working professional. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about navigating time, managing teams, and being a team member. I wrote most of this in September of 2020 and never posted it, but here it is.

Living

• No one cares about you much after they stop seeing you
• You control the segmentation of your own time
• Physics and biology dictates your movement through the world, your mind dictates to what extent you capitulate and accommodate these limits.
• Home is home, work is work. Work is not a charity, its not a school
• The journey is pointless without the destination
• Every ending will start with doubt as to why something started in the first place
• Interiority is a real thing.. we process way more outcomes than can be done; learn to focus
• Singular pursuits that require 100% effort (not 90, not 98, but 100) give you perspective.
• You aren’t obligated to be miserable. It’s not a job requirement of living. If something or someone makes you feel bad, there isn’t a reason to “figure it out” or “deal.” Just cut it out. They have their own shit, and will be fine.

Managing People

• We can’t ship feelings, personalities, politics or org charts
• Work is for work. The points at the beginning and end where life and work intersect are great. Try to maximize the middle
• Pick your hills, both to climb and to die on
• Always evaluate the consequence of not doing something
• Excluding meetings and “boot time”, a person is reasonably productive 6 hours a day, five days a week. 30 hours. Don’t pollute that time unnecessarily
• Only meet when the outcome is only possible by meeting.
• If you meet, the facilitator needs to treat it like a college lecture.
• The job someone does for you isn’t the person they are to you. People exist outside of their jobs, and will continue to do so if they leave the job
• Managers think everyone is essential. The job may be, the person doing it may not be. More often than not, even the best people, if they leave are forgotten within two weeks. Yourself included.
• To that note, culture is a companies immune system. Culture extends not just to specific things a company does, but how it institutionalizes dealing with external factors (threats, macro-economy, internal politics). A strong culture has to be pressure tested and gets stronger as it goes.
• To that note, culture fit is real, and culture fit becomes harder to hire for as the company culture matures and is institutionalized. Culture is less malleable over time.
• When hiring, first-thought-best-thought. Walk in knowing how you’ll be dealing with the individual and pressure test the negative outcomes from that interaction with them in interviewing. If they are a peer, will they be able to keep up? Are they curious? Will they irritate you in how they undertake problem solving? If you’ll be managing them, will they be a “project” or ready to go immediately? Do they show the ability to grow and adapt? Are they easy to deal with? Will you actively try to avoid talking to them? If you’re an executive (two rungs up), are they curious? Will they be a champion for the culture? You never want to hire thinking about an exit, but if they did exit will everyone be stronger for them having worked there?
• Opinions: I tell my team often: “ask for the opinion or approval if its going to make a difference in the outcome. If you know what you want and my opinion isn’t essential, don’t ask.” Or rather, “ask for the opinion if it’ll change anything.” This is a big thing with my design team. You will know all that went into arriving at a decision on something, and while I”ll be happy to weigh in, if you’re process was diligent and thorough, nothing I say is going to change your mind anyway, so don’t even ask for my opinion.

Working for people and with people

• I suck at working for people. It’s why for the last fifteen years I’ve only worked for the CEO for the most part
• Managing up is about three C’s: Context, clarity, coverage. The same for managing down as an executive.
• For my boss, I provide context, clarity and coverage in order for him to make the company level decisions better. I don’t waste time with the play by play. It doesn’t matter.
• Apply the same communication rules up as down: no email before 7, none after 8, none on weekends. His time is his time. That leads to a pattern of my time being my time. That leads to my employees time being their time. For 40 hours a week, we all line up and are on the same time and when that’s 100% of our focus, magic happens. Plus we have happy home lives.
• Being the smartest person in the room means someone has to be the dumbest. Being right all the time means everyone else has to be wrong. That doesn’t lead to a good peer working relationship with other senior execs. Sometimes, it’s OK to just not have an opinion.
• Along those lines, if an email gets you so riled up that you find yourself doing multiple paragraphs, proof-reading, edits and saving drafts: do not send the email. Either go talk to the person, or let it go. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is better resolved through e-mail than in person. If time and space were no issue, your use of e-mail should be 0.
• On the email subject, e-mails are a way of exporting your anxiety to whoever else is on the To field. Don’t do it. You feel better, another person just received a multi-paragraph heap of problems they now have to worry about. More often than not, they’ll forward and CC the thing to more people to get that anxiety off their chest and in the hands of others. Before you know it, you’ve greated a snow-ball of angst that rolls down CC chains into collective misery. If you find yourself writing an email, or forwarding one as a way to get the subject of the mail out of your head, do everyone a favor and save it for the work day.

Finally

Not much matters in the end, as everyones ending is the same. We’re only on this planet for a small amount of time, and those most remembered are the ones most would like to forget.

Your imprint is consequential, but world changing is over-rated. Lean into what you can control.