2025 - McGee's Musings

Sucked into the theater

I arrived at Princeton in the early days of coeducation there. After 200+ years as an all-male institution, women were now fellow students rather than weekend visitors. About 28% of my 1,000 odd classmates were women.

I had spent the previous six years at an all boys high school. Which meant minimal experience or skill at interacting with the opposite sex. I had, however, learned one odd thing I was able to take advantage of. Theater productions generally called for a pretty even mix of men and women on stage and that tended to hold true for the rest of the production as well. In high school that meant partnering with sister schools to stage shows.

At Princeton that meant finding my way to McCarter Theater during orientation week to see the Princeton Triangle Club perform some of their greatest hits. The pretty blond handing out flyers at the entrance suggested my hypothesis was correct.

It was.

While I was smitten with a particular redhead in a skit satirizing “The Dating Game”, so was every other heterosexual male in the audience. Turns out she was also a senior but that didn’t stop me from signing up to work backstage on future shows.

Over the next four years that included building sets, hanging lights, stage managing multiple shows, and going on three tours. Eventually I had possession of an unauthorized master key to the theater. I even rode the fire escape slide from the seven-story tower that housed the dressing rooms.

Some weeks I spent more time in McCarter than all of my classes combined. After one late dress rehearsal that ended shortly after midnight, the very first note from the director was to deputize two cast members to escort me back to my dorm room and put me to bed. A bed I hadn’t seen in the past 120 hours.

The theater is a place of myth and tradition. It’s knowledge that you absorb rather than study. It’s also a realm of large, and often fragile, egos. Which made it an extraordinary environment for me to learn how to navigate and operate inside complex, human, organizations. Which evolved into my life’s work.

All because I wanted to get better at talking to girls.

University days, a first home away from home

Photo of Nassau Hall Cannon Green at Princeton University This spring marks the 50th anniversary of my graduating from college. Which means it has been 54 years since I first set foot on the Princeton campus.

My dad went to the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. He was the first and only member of his family to attend college. My mother started but never finished her college degree at St. Louis University.

I didn’t grow up with any images or role models of what college might mean. I liked school and did well. Books were so much easier to understand than people. Courtesy of a wise nun in my parochial school, I ended up in a Catholic, all-boys college prep school for middle school and high school. College was now the next step on the ladder. Ladder to what wasn’t clear but I knew how to do the school thing. Come my senior year, the headmaster gives me a list of four schools to apply to including Harvard and Princeton. These were still just names to me.

Part of the application process included interviews with recent alumni of each school. The one thing I remember from those interviews is the contrast in attitudes of those two alums whose names and faces I cannot recall. The Harvard grad was all about how Harvard would set me on the path to future success. The Princeton grad touched on similar points but was mostly keen on wishing he could be in my shoes to go back to Princeton and experience it all again.

When I got into both schools with similar financial aid packages, my choice was easy. In September of 1971, I set foot on the Princeton campus for the first time. I don’t recall that college visits were a common thing in my day, although it might have been as much about the logistics of getting nine people to the East Coast and back. The same constraints meant that I arrived on campus on my own.

How I navigated those first weeks is a mystery. I imagine most everyone else was as lost and confused as I was. And as desperately trying to mask their confusion. Not that I remember it that way.

What I was building was a capacity to cope effectively with the new. As a book smart guy from near, if not on, the wrong side of the tracks there was so much I did not understand. Often, I did not understand that I didn’t understand. I muddled through nonetheless.

Testing new writing tools

This is a test post using Dave Winer's newest tool/toy, Wordland. Always interesting to see what Dave is up to. One of the first blogging tools I used was his Radio Userland. As one of the ur-bloggers, Winer has thought about this more deeply than just about anyone. I may not always agree with him, but I always pay attention to his arguments. I'd be stupid not to, and I am not a fan of stupid.

I admit that I am always a bit leery of tools that insist on running in a browser. I am old school in that regard and want to know where my data resides. I'll be keeping an eye on this as it develops. The key question for me is whether it helps me get back into a more regular flow of writing and posting. That's not necessarily a function of the tool suite.

We shall see how the tool and its value/utility to me unfold

Shaping or shaped by your environment

I am the eldest of seven baby boomers; born in 1953, my baby sister in 1961. My dad was an engineer who rose to middle management working in the space program for McDonnell Aircraft. I think we made decent money but everything gets smaller when divided by seven. I don’t recall that I had a room of my own until college except for a brief period when I was recovering from a broken leg (not a recommended path to privacy).

Looking back, one thing that amuses me was the advice on good study habits to “find a quiet, organized place for your work.” Never going to happen. Instead, I learned to tune out background noise and chaos. Getting my attention when I am concentrating can be a challenge.

Productivity thinking starts with controlling the environment. You design the assembly line to enable the flow you want. If the environment is not subject to your control, however, then you are forced onto a different path. Your task becomes how to be effective within the constraints of your environment. What can you control to make your work flow more smoothly?

Reflective practice makes better

The curtain goes up in 45 minutes.

Actually, it won’t do anything until I give the order. But the order will come on time. I’ve just put my stage manager’s prompt script on a music stand just off stage left in the wings. It identifies everything that will happen offstage to make the magic happen onstage; lighting cues, sound cues, scenery movement. I check in with the tech crew, the music director, the house manager. At thirty minutes before curtain, I call “half hour,” then “5 minutes”, then “places” and we’re off.

For the next two hours, what we’ve practiced and rehearsed for weeks plays out under my direction. Most of the people in the audience have no idea that I exist, much less what I am doing. As it should be. Knowing how the magic is made is rarely as rewarding as simply enjoying it.

There are some of us, however, who develop an interest in how to make magic. Taking things apart to understand how they work has its own rewards. There are any number of cliches I could use to talk about pulling off this kind of performance magic; shared purpose, shared struggle, traditions. rituals. They are cliches because they are anchored in deep truths. I could have chosen to simply continue to accumulate experience and get better over time.

Practice makes perfect.

Although I didn’t have the language or concepts at the time, I chose a slightly different path. Call it reflective pratice. Which I learned some fifteen years later. Rather than striving to perfect some technique, I opted for working on understanding and improving the techniques in parallel with practicing and performing them. A slower and less certain path to travel. But one that turns out to be better suited to a world of innovation and change.

Serving two mistresses

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life came out while I was in college. One of, if not the first, thing I read in pursuit of better personal productivity.

I was in my second year of college. I had been granted what they called “advanced standing”, which meant I was on track to graduate in three rather than four years. This was courtesy of an exceptional high school education and some natural talent for standardized tests. I was also the production stage manager for a theater group’s spring production. This was an original Broadway scale musical comedy. As stage manager, I was responsible for managing all the rehearsals of the cast of 50 odd fellow students. Finally, as part of my financial aid package, I worked part time as a stage carpenter and electrician at McCarter Theater on campus.

To say that the title spoke to me might possibly have been an understatement.

Surely, I could get it all done if I was just a little bit better organized.

I think I actually believed that for many years.

This was the beginning of a love affair with two mistresses. On one side there was the “magic of the theater.” Bringing together sound, light, and movement to create a moment. On the other side, there was the work to organize and coordinate each of those elements so that they were ready when that moment arrived; systems.

Success depends on keeping both of these mistresses happy and in balance. It’s hard to create magic if you’ve forgotten to book the dance studio for rehearsal. On the other hand, no system can help you when the lead has locked themselves in their dressing room thirty minutes before the curtain is set to rise.

The challenge here is that the systems are easy to see and easy to tweak and easy to play with. They can be measured and reported on. So, you can find lots of advice on how to deal with systems.

Figuring out where to push or nudge to make the magic a bit more likely does not yield to systematic attack. Experience and a willingness to reflect on that experience can work over time. So can frank conversations with fellow travelers. There are fellow travelers out there. Your first step is to go look for them and strike up those conversations.

Beyond productivity; seeking effectiveness

Over the last several years I’ve been noodling on what author Steve Johnson would describe as a “slow hunch.” As someone who has done knowledge work and managed knowledge workers, I’ve been trying to understand what it means to set aside productivity and pursue effectiveness instead. I’m planning on taking the next several weeks to take a deeper look at that hunch.

There’s no lack of commentary about productivity. It’s relatively easy to do but I’ve come to believe that it is anchored in a mistaken focus on the word worker at the expense of the word knowledge.

Here’s a simple example. I use a program called TextExpander on my Mac (if you’re on Windows, ActiveWords would be the equivalent). These programs let you create shortcuts for frequently used words or phrases. Their sales pitch is typically anchored in productivity thinking. Every week I get a little message from the program congratulating me on the time I have saved by using their shortcuts instead of typing out a phrase in full. The premise is that I am a machine for cranking out words and the faster I crank the better.

I don’t care how fast I type; I care about how well I think. Things that slow down my thinking are a problem worth attacking. I can never remember how to spell the word “individual.” Trying to work that out breaks my concentration and flow. I can remember to type “indv” however and let a piece of software worry about my spelling. TextExpander happily informs me of the seconds I have saved by not having to type those extra six characters. It cannot track or understand how it contributes to my state of flow when I’m trying to create. That’s the difference between productivity and effectiveness at a micro level.

It’s time to bring some sustained focus to this slow hunch that productivity and effectiveness are different. Feedback on whether I am making any sense will help.