Category: just thinking out loud

I did everything wrong at SCUBA class today.

Funny because I thought that I did everything else quite well today.

I got to class late because I got into a really good discussion with Jason and Andrew about how to work through some new questions that we’re posing at work. It’s a really fascinating time for me on that front. I thought that I really enjoyed creating much more than innovating. This is a problem when it comes to joining a project, and helping to be part of the solution. However, it turns out that I really have no problem with innovating, but that I just hate doing things when I think I’m perpetuating a bad state of being.

And so I’m trying to do a better job of understanding what it means for a project to be in a bad state. Is it that you read the code, and think to yourself, “Why the fuck was it done this way?” That’s one piece, but the god honest truth is that after one month when you look at any code you ask yourself why the fuck anyone thought it was a good idea, especially when you’re that anyone. We all outgrow our code.

Fine, it isn’t the code itself. Then is it that the API is too fragile to really scale? The tough thing there is, the product requirements ask that an engineer deliver functionality*. Good engineering practices ask that an engineer deliver functionality. All fine and dandy right? No. Not at all. If a product works, and if an architecture works are two completely different sets of functionality. It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you want to build a product, and have to build an engineering toolkit instead, and vis-a-versa. However, that doesn’t put things in a bad state. It creates friction. Friction produces heat. Heat produces fire, and fire leads to the Internet (just run with it, we don’t have that much server space to draw out the connection).

So fine, we have friction, but we’re not in a bad state yet. So what’s the problem then?

I think I figured it out tonight at SCUBA. You see, I didn’t realize that I had a bad O-Ring because it looked normal to me. The teacher said you have to smell that it’s off. That made no sense to me at all. You’re supposed to put the weights into these quick to remove weight pockets, and I put them in a side, zippered pocket instead. So when we went to do the ascent technique which requires throwing away your weights…. I just sat on the bottom of the pool. I was just in the wrong mind set the whole night. And that’s the problem.

A bad state is one of a discordant mind set. I felt as if this post needed some big words, so I threw those in there. But this experience in the pool tonight really opened my eyes to a wider problem. If you’re constantly solving a different problem than the one being presented to you, there’s a problem. It gets even worse when you can’t conceive of why you’re constantly unable to achieve success. In your mind set, you’re solving the problem presented to you and solving it well (in theory). However, the truth is that you’re just solving a problem, but not THE problem, and unless they are one in the same, then you’re just plain out of luck.

So, after my SCUBA fail, I think the proper resolution is to work on understanding the macro problem, and then understanding how to decompose that into micro-level actions. The challenge awaits!

I’m gonna say my piece, and it’s going to piss some people off, but then you can say your piece, and I’ll sit down and shut up and listen.

This game owes you nothing. There’s going to a come a day where the game passes all of us by. It chews us up and spits us out. Which means every time we get to play, every time we step on the field, we have to play as if it’s our last match.

When you come out here, first come with your heart. Bring passion. Bring joy. Bring beauty. Bring an appreciation for the beauty of the game.

Then mentally show up. Get here on time to warm up. During warm ups get in your touches, and work on one thing for each game. Work on your first touch. Work on your headers. Work on shooting to corners or work on wall passes. But mentally commit to being better at one thing after the game compared to before the game.

Finally physically show up. Make the runs you’re supposed to make, and surprise yourself and make some you didn’t think you were strong enough to make. Play defense with intensity. Support your teammates with passion. Ignore the ref. Play the game beautifully, and after these 90 minutes which we have, these 90 minutes where the game is still ours, let’s walk off the field and say to ourselves if today was the last time we ever played the game we did so with heads held high, with pride in our performance and with everything we have left on the field.

We did not do that today, and for that I am ashamed to be associated with this team. This game will never give you anything. We have to go out there and earn every inch. Today we just quit. I promise each and every one of you that this team won’t quit again. If you think that quitting is an option, then don’t come back next week.

A lot is constantly happening, and it comes to be overwhelming at times. I do a really bad job in those instants of stopping and just taking a breath.

Today was one of those days where I just needed to take a breath, and not let the world overwhelm me.

In my ideal world, people do things for the right reasons. They do it right the first time. One takes pride in one’s work. I spent a lot of time working through what I thought was a simple problem last night trying to help someone who I don’t think holds my same beliefs on effort and integrity. And it drove me absolutely insane.

I got pulled off of the cliff, but then dove right into another trap.

This time what got to me was the that it felt as if the theory of doing the right thing was more important to understand than actually doing the right thing. I didn’t do a good job of processing the lack of grounding. I know the value of understanding how to do it is important, but sometimes I just want to do, and see what happens. My problem here is that I’m the perpetrator of  the discussion, and the tangent. I do it to myself. And I need to stop, and just do.

It was all just driving me crazy, and so I stopped and took a breath, and exhaled. Friday night is a good night to get the chance to just hit the pause button on life.

This is Boncuk’s last picture. She was put to sleep today because of a large tumor in her brain. She came to me and left me in the exact same manner – Sleeping. In my lap. Without a worry in the world.

In early April, 1999, my dad and I went to the flea market looking for a puppy. The flea market in Raleigh used to house a section for dogs, rabbits ferrets, and whatever else one could own as a pet. We saw a family of Boxer puppies who were gorgeous. My dad wanted to be knowledgeable, and so we went to the local library to do some research. I found a book on dogs and started reading. He walked around a bit so fara s I know, and then asked me what I’d found out.

Nothing.

If you give me a book, then I’ll slam through it. If you take me, or at least the 15-year old me, to a library, then you’ve just dropped a coke addict in the Columbian Jungle. No research done – just knowledge consumption.

Given that failed task, we headed back to the flea market. On arrival, the Boxer pupies were gone. It was a good thing too because in the next stand over were two jack russell terrier puppies, 6-weeks old sleeping in a pen.

I picked up the girl, and fell in love. She fit in the palm of my hand. I couldn’t put her down, and five minutes later we were in the car, heading home, blasting Celine Dion with a sleeping Boncuk in my lap.

My mom named her Boncuk.

A boncuk is a pendent of protection found throughout Turkey with the main element of the design being a set of concentric circles forming an eye. Boncuk’s are also known as “evil eyes”, and protect against “nazar”, or evil intentions. Things like jealousy over a new car, resentment at a new house or animosity towards a new child.

Our Boncuk was so named because her whole body was white except for a single black dot on her lower back.

In life her bark protected us from whoever was at the front door, and in death only God knows what she saved us from.

11 years passes by in the blink of an eyelid, but there are always memories that stand out. When Boncuk was 12 weeks old, we went to Oriental, NC to check out where the Turkish contingency of the Special Olympics would be staying. My girlfriend at the time, Sarah, came with us. We were walking Boncuk on the beach when she stopped in the middle of nowhere and used the bathroom. We didn’t know what to do, and so we buried it in the sand and ran away as fast as possible. On that first beach trip, we couldn’t get Boncuk to come swimming with us, and she never changed her mind about water.

She did however love toys, or at least she loved tearing them apart. I think we all tried to teach her to play and not destroy. She never caught on. She did however love this one bear because it had a squeaker in it. He lasted longer than the others, but eventually found the same fate.

She went to many a soccer tournament, shopping on Fifth Avenue in New York City and spoke at least three different languages.

My french exchange student, Anthony Fachaux, who the ladies loved by the way, tried to teach her tricks. She never caught on.

When Boncuk was Boncuk she had two very distinctive traits

1) She was loud
2) She licked you to death

Garage door opens, and she’s already in the laundry room barking up a storm ready to remind you that she was the first one to realize that you were home.

Sit down on the couch and she jumps up and starts licking you until you pay attention to her. I always tried to remind her that I was supposed to be the boss, but… you guessed it, she never caught on.

I feel as if there isn’t a single major milestone, or memory, in my life where she wasn’t there. She’d announce any occasion that she could in a way that only Boncuk knew how. I even jokingly wished she would be the ring bearer at my wedding so that she wouldn’t miss that milestone.

It’s the strangest feeling to not have to look at the dinner table to make sure she’s not trying to steal any food.

It’s the strangest feeling to put away her leash and bowl because they won’t be used again.

It’s the strangest feeling to to know that I’ll never again be woken up by a lick to the face from Boncuk.

When I went to say goodbye, they brought her out on a towel and put her in my lap. In that instant, that single instant, I relived 11 years of my life and realized just how empty they would have been without her in them. I held her to the very end because I wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone.

And so she left me just as she found me – Sleeping. In my lap. Without a worry in the world.

Boncuk, if you’re out there, just know that I love you so much, and I miss you even more. Canim, fistikcim, good-bye.

I don’t quite understand the need to maintain a friendship at the expense of one’s sanity. Don’t work at friendships. They either exist or they don’t. It’s a very black or white situation. Take them for what they are, and not what you want them to be. Having said that, I think I may be in the extreme minority with this opinion.

I’m not quite sure why that is.

Take for example the fact that Dudum and I went to the baseball game last night, and had 3 separate conversations composed of facial expressions, eye signals and fragments of sentences. And yet, there was no question in my mind that the two of us completely understood one another. It was phenomenal.

Or, as another example, how we have a group at work who make fun of each other with a real zest for finding a solid zinger. There’s no malice. There are few hurt feelings, and when feelings get hurt the right actions are taken. The hurt individual runs away to the library, while the hurting individual apologizes a few days later. It’s only possible though because there’s an appreciation for the opposite party and what they bring to the table, both good and bad. You have to respect someone to be able to laugh at who they are without meaning to hurt them, and simultaneously have them realize that your jest comes from a place of mutual respect.

So why is it then that people work so hard to maintain friendships that are fictional in entirety or belong to a different time in our lives? The friendship lacks connection, mutual respect or even basic decency. It’s a lot easier to just be honest.

The culprit here is twofold.

One, the past has an incredible hold on us. We feel as if our past owes us the decency of shaping our future. In no way does that take into account how in the present we may have changed who we are.

Two, interpersonal inertia. People build groups, and within the group come the dynamics of the best friend, the social butterfly, the one who makes us laugh, the drama queen/king, and so on. To be honest is to break this inertia. Because we owe the others the peace and calm of a steady state we are unable to push the rock down the mountain face lest we be deemed selfish or self-serving.

And so we torment ourselves, and convince ourselves that the truth is that somehow, someway this friendship will return to what it was even though we are now who we have become.

This week’s lesson: honesty in friendships is to lie.

Last Thursday, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, spoke about the evolution behind the culture at Zappos at the Commonwealth Club in downtown San Francisco.

Some quick background on Zappos.com, and then I’ll dive right into my thoughts on the evening. There was a lot of uproar when Zappos sold themselves to Amazon over whether they wanted to sell or were forced to sell by their investors. It ultimately was published in an Inc. article that the executive team of Zappos was trying to maintain their culture, and found that the best way to do it was to sell Amazon who allowed them to maintain their raison d’être.

I’ve heard Tony Hsieh speak on video, and so the canned stories about starting a pizza business, selling LinkExchange because the culture crashed and folks asking Zappos to run the IRA that he started the evening with felt a bit cliché. I understand why he has his go to stories, and the value that they bring to the conversation, but… oh well.

I thought the format was superb. Softball questions asked by the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffery Fowler. That isn’t meant as an insult as much as it allowed Tony Hsieh to just go with it, and speak. Fowler didn’t interfere, and the jabs he threw into the conversation were really witty and often very funny. I thought he did a great job personally.

Some of the bigger highlights included:

• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t and Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization are the two books which have really laid the foundation for Zappos’ culture
• Good service culture replaces direct marketing
• The product margins are what allow Zappos to do overnight delivery, free return shipping and some of their other perks. Hsieh said it definitely wouldn’t work in electronics or at tourist traps
• Work/Life balance isn’t an issue if you love what you do, are surrounded by your friends and work at a place where the things you do are just part of the greater culture

The only negative of the evening, in my opinion, came from Fowler’s insistence that good culture was analogous to perks. Hsieh kept going out of his way in saying that a ping pong table isn’t a culture, but the disconnect there led to some unnecessary back and forth about specifics of Zappos’ culture. It was the one part of the conversation where I felt that Fowler wasn’t listening, and Hsieh, who happens to be a very quiet, humble guy based on this appearance, didn’t assert.

The night’s big conclusion. Have a set of core values at the company, and if there are those who don’t buy into the company’s core values, then send them packing.

More comments to come on specific questions and answers, but all in all I would definitely say that if you have a chance to go hear Tony Hsieh speak, then take advantage of it.

Why is it so difficult to hear when it’s so easy to listen?

Yes, it seems like a very technical question mired in definitions and understanding, but I’m increasingly discovering that one of the hardest skill to develop in oneself is the ability to hear what others say. You see, we’ve become experts at listening to each other. If listening were an Olympic sport, then my 5-second response technique* would be gold medal worthy. But we don’t learn how to hear each other.

The distinction between the two is all about what one brings to the conversation. Everyone brings their opinion, their goals, their desired outcome. When we listen to each other, we put what we have brought to the conversation right in the thick of it all. With all of our own baggage in the conversation, there’s no way that the other person’s opinions, goals or outcomes has any chance of making an impression upon us. However, when we bring our own baggage, but leave it off to the side, then we start to hear each other. We can more clearly see the value that the opposite party brings to the conversation, and I’ve found that it makes conversations shorter, sweeter and much more productive.

So the solution is simple then, right? We just check our baggage at the door, and come into all conversations with an open mind. It turns, as is always the case, that it’s not that easy. There are folks who refuse to have a conversation without bringing to the front and center all of the baggage which they brought with them. I don’t think they consciously refuse to be open-minded, but they do consciously refuse to be swayed or to really hear what the other side has to say. I haven’t quite figured out where the line is between being open-minded and refusing to hear what the other side is saying, but I do think that both can co-exist. As an example, I don’t blame an Orthodox Jew for differing with me on topics like the Middle East Peace Process, but I do fundamentally believe that he can respect and listen to my opinion. That said, he won’t do me the courtesy of leaving his foundation and standing on mine.

All of this is coming from being a fly on the wall while a lot of different things happen around me. I constantly find the need from individuals to have others see things as they do, and be as they would be. I can now catch myself doing it as I do it, whereas before I was completely oblivious to it all. For me the advantage of having a baggage free conversation is that we get to learn and teach. We get to really make each better because we’re forced to really understand the opposite party’s perspective. I think when we stop to hear each other, we come out of the conversation as better people.

Too bad we spend so much time listening then…

* 5-second response technique is the practice of giving a neutral answer every 5 or so seconds to seem as if one is engaged in the conversation. I perfected it in high school while listening to girlfriends speak. These days, my good friend Saar Conradi is the one who constantly catches me doing it. It’s sadly become second nature

Long title. I know. I just couldn’t find a better title. I’ve been thinking a lot about the dynamics of the last few soccer teams with which I’ve played. From full-time recreational teams to much more competitive teams, I’ve really started to notice a trend, and it’s really fascinating. I’m sure if I really thought about it, I would see similar trends at the Box as well, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for another day.

The really unique thing about soccer that isn’t true in basketball is the need for a general consensus on how the game should be played. I’m picking on basketball because both sports have a strong playground, pick-up culture. Watch a pick-up basketball game though, and you’ll generally see a few studs, and then a bunch of pretty good players. The studs dominate the action. For a full 11 on 11 soccer match, I’ve never really found the same dynamic though. It could be that I’ve just never been around stud pick-up soccer players, but more often than not with that many moving pieces on the field, there needs to be much more cohesion, and a much better general understanding of how the game is played.

And yet, I spent a full season this past fall and spring with a team that had a really tough time doing even the basics right. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why things were as bad as they were. There was some low hanging fruit. No subs for a bunch of games. A lack of general fitness. An ever changing set of players on the field. But really, I think, it comes down to the fact that we didn’t agree as a unit on what the basics of the game were.

So I started to think about what it takes to get everyone on the same page. I think first, and foremost, it’s a must that there be a strong leader who dictates direction. If there’s no single voice driving towards a common goal, then there really isn’t a chance for success. We had that strong voice, but I don’t think that there was a team-wide respect for that voice. I’m not sure how to resolve that issue. That’s much more of an interpersonal issue. At a company, the resolution to that problem is hire slow, fire fast. Not so sure what it is on a soccer team where you can only get 10 people to show up for a game.

Given a strong voice, what’s the next step. My summer soccer team provided some insights to that question. The next important step is a willingness to adapt one’s own style to one that fits in with achieving the team’s goal. I don’t think this comes naturally to people, nor do I think that this is very easy. I’m convinced that one can be doing exactly what they think is right for the team’s goal, but in fact they are actively working against it.

This is where I think listening and giving feedback are so critical. And I think both aspects of this final step are the hardest bits for people. We neither like giving direct feedback nor do we like receiving direct criticism. And yet, it’s the quickest way to get where we’re all trying to go. This weekend, I kept asking for the wingers to be more conservative on the weak side to help with defensive counter attacks, and yet we consistently didn’t have the weak side defender we needed. Was the thing to do to directly say, “Person A, you need to be more conservative in the attack”? Now that I think about it, the answer to that question is clearly yes. Not doing that meant that the whole team fell short of achieving its team goal.

I’m going to step up at the next match and make sure that I push others to push themselves to be better, but to also push me to be better. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve talked a bunch the last few blog posts about being better at achieving success. This whole notion of being more successful has really spawned in me an effort to understand what it means for me personally to succeed, and to try and decipher what I need to do differently to make it happen.

I’ll go ahead and answer both questions here, and then work towards gluing together a system that I hope will be one that I can repeatedly go back to when I want to succeed against a challenge.

Let it never be said that being the son of Raif nor Nur is easy. It’s tough enough being their son, but then being the first-born has its own set of challenges as well. This isn’t a rant about my parents, but instead a more matter of fact statement that good enough never was for them. And so, in that monkey see, monkey do style that all children seem to fall into, it was never good enough for me either.

That said, success for me has become that satisfying feeling of going from vision to execution in such a way that you surprise even yourself. It’s rare, and if you ask me that’s the way it needs to be. You should accomplish most of the tasks you set out to do, but you shouldn’t necessarily come out of them having succeeded. I guess that’s where I differ from the norm.

The tough bit is quantitatively being able to understand that surprise factor. It isn’t something one can measure or plan for. It almost has to serendipitously arrive as your journey ends. This is why I think success is so difficult to achieve. Not only do you have to consciously do everything to the best of your ability, but you’ve got to get a little bit lucky too.

And so coming to that realization made me ask myself if there’s anything that I can do to make the chance that I get lucky a little bit better.

As a compulsive gambler, I’m always looking for that little something extra. Step one, in my opinion, is asking does playing the “Don’t Pass” line on a slow roller give me enough cash to catch the next streak? The philosophy there is simply stay low, and do what you can to survive until you can really make a push for it when you think lady luck has made her way back into your sights. It’s painful because you’re betting against the popular choice. It’s frustrating because you only win if others lose, and often they lose big. But it can also be rewarding when you find yourself able to take advantage of the tables turning because of your patience and willing to go against the current.

I’m not sure how that translates into organization, measured progress, visible results and the like, but as a mantra I really like it. Bet the “Don’t Pass” long enough to be there for the hot streak that’s coming.