Category: Personal

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 UniversityThis 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.

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?

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.

Searching for Simple

I had a friend in college who was an accomplished musician. His problem was that he kept comparing himself to Maurice Andre and concluding he was a failure. My friend got over using the wrong comparison to draw the wrong conclusion, but I’ve held onto the story as a reminder to myself to be careful about how to process the feedback you give yourself.

I’ve been fretting about what I’ve produced from my writing practice. Aware of the trap of misleading comparisons, I fall into them nonetheless. It’s easy to tell your friends to not be foolish. It’s so much harder to do so looking in the mirror. Especially when you’re doing the same stupid things they’ve been doing but just differently enough to pretend that you’re special.

While I think of myself as largely an instinctual writer, I’ve also delved deeply into the wisdom and advice about the nature of creative work. Two elements of advice that turn up pretty much everywhere is that your job is to show up and to finish what you start. The promise is that if you manage those two things, the Muses will worry about inspiration and quality (see, for example, Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius)

i’ve concluded that I’ve only been keeping half the bargain. I’ve been showing up. Finishing is where I’ve been falling short.

Wiser folks than I warn of resistance and perfectionism as the enemies of finishing.

And, I want to reject their counsel.

I’ve always been comfortable filling a blank page or screen. And no one who knows me would accuse me of perfectionism of any sort.

But these folks are wise. So I listen some more.

And conclude that resistance and perfectionism take clever forms. The enemies of creation aren’t beholden to obvious tactics. They are more than happy to play dirty. They discern my strengths and weaknesses to tailor their attacks. They throw up speed bumps and trip wires optimized to take advantage of my unique weaknesses and idiosyncrasies.

My habitual response is to look for the smart thing to do to solve my problem. I like to think that “smart” is what I do. But my enemy knows that all too well. What I need to do is seek out the simplest possible things that might work. I was thinking that rhythm and cadence were the things to look at. Now, I wonder whether that’s the “smart” talking.

Now, we look for simple.

 

McGee’s Musings turns 23

Last year when I noted this moment, we were about to leave Portugal and head to Durham, NC. We’re now about to celebrate our first anniversary in North Carolina. A lot has been going on.

I’m still sorting out what I want and expect from this stage of my life. A dear friend recently gifted me Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, which is offering some useful input and perspective. This particular experiment at sharing my thinking will continue. Writing is one of the ways that I work out what I think.

Putting myself on the hook to share the results is a forcing function that raises the quality of my reasoning. Adjusting my quality filters is an ongoing process.

Limits to learning from success

It’s more effective to learn from failure than success. Possibly more painful, certainly more reliable.

I had early success as a sprinter. Strategy is simple at 100 yards. Drive out of the starting blocks, stay in your lane, don’t look left, don’t look right, run as fast as you can, run as smoothly as you can, focus on the finish line. Repeat until you lose.

If (when) you do lose, tweak something until you win again. Don’t even think about looking to your left or right. Try a new pair of shoes or spikes. Run through the finish line. Lean a little more. A little less.

You learn from what you repeatedly do. Run a bunch of sprint races and you learn that set of lessons. You can see that this might not produce the life lessons you need. Not that you can appreciate it at the time. If you take these lessons into the rest of life, you’re setting yourself up for trouble.

Very little in life is as simple as a sprint. But you can fake a lot of life with the simplicity of sprinting. If it’s the only strategy you know and you generally get away with it, it can take a very long time to recognize that there might be easier or better ways to get the same results. Or possibly even better results. But the first thing you need to see is that there are other options. All or nothing is appealing in its binary way. But it closes off as much as it opens.

The problem with these lessons, however, is that they are embodied. They operate at a level deeper than lessons from books or wise counselors.

You’re told “life is a marathon not a sprint.” But running a marathon is a lot of long and hard work. And training that is equally long and hard. You nod politely and continue to compete by sprinting. You can actually run pretty far just by sprinting if you’re okay with breaking things up into bursts of effort coupled with equally short bursts of recovery.

But you aren’t building other capacities that you will need later. Worse, you can’t yet see that there are capacities you are missing. You have to trip over limits to see that they exist. Real learning requires failure as well as success. Probing for limits takes courage that I’ve sometimes refused to summon. Why try a new strategy when one more sprint might save the day?

Maybe saving the day should no longer be the goal.

 

 

 

 

Does it need to be slow and steady wins the race?

“It’s a bit unorthodox, but it will speed up your rehab.”

This was nearly sixty years ago, so consider this a reconstructed version of a conversation in the Emergency Room with my first orthopedic surgeon.

It was late January and I had spent most of the last twelve weeks in casts. I had broken my femur in a football collision. During a practice no less, so no sympathy from the sidelines. The first cast was a body cast that started at my ribs and went down my right leg to my toes. That was then replaced with a leg cast from hip to toes. That cast had been removed ten days earlier and I was learning how to walk again.

If you immobilize a joint for twelve weeks it’s going to freeze up. You’re also going to lose muscle mass. You go to physical therapy to rebuild the muscle mass and restore full range of motion to your knee and ankle.

You also start hobbling around to get back into the rhythms of regular life. A few hours earlier, I had gone to watch my classmates playing basketball. As I was leaving the gym, I limped onto a patch of ice in the parking lot and fell.

Two things happened. I broke my fall (and my wrist) by reaching back as I fell. I also twisted my leg underneath me. Now, I was back in the Emergency Room to discover whether I had done any new damage to my leg.

What I had done was to break loose the adhesions in my knee, restore full range of motion, and compress weeks of rehab into a few seconds. Scarcely the recommended plan of action. But effective in its own warped way.

The danger here is to confuse good fortune with strategy and discipline. My internal sprinter was happy to cross this finish line ahead of schedule. That slowly maturing part of me that hates they very thought of a marathon wonders whether this was a missed lesson. The more often you get away with powering through, the longer it takes to develop sustainable habits. The longer it can take to recognize that you might want to invest in developing sustainable habits.

That’s where I now find myself. Working through the implications of adding more “slow and steady wins the race” to my well-grooved habit of taking the shortest path.

Fitting tools to brains

I was somewhere in my mid to late 40s when I worked out that I had ADD. At that point I had a degree in Statistics, an MBA, a doctorate in organizational design, and was a co-founder of a successful consulting firm. I was also seriously depressed.

The simplest explanation was that I was simply the latest example of the Peter Principle; I had finally been promoted to my level of incompetence. Even it that were true, it wasn’t a conclusion I wanted to accept. I sought professional help.

I had worked with therapists before over issues of the heart and my role in failed relationships. Now we were taking a look at performance. I began to dig into the literature and to work with therapists who specialized in ADD. We experimented with the common medications None proved helpful.

ADD/ADHD is a bit of an umbrella term. My issues are not with attention deficits, they are with attention management. I tend to oscillate between boredom and hyperfocus. These states are triggered by my own interests and priorities. I am often oblivious to social cues and constraints on what I ought to be focused on and when. Put me in the right environment and hyperfocus is a superpower not a handicap. In the wrong environment the situation can reverse.

I’m not going to change how my brain is wired.

What I can potentially manage is my environment. Some of that entails choosing environments with an eye towards how they interact with my wiring. Whether I suffered or thrived was a function of how well my brain meshed with my environment. By happenstance and circumstance I had stumbled through a series of environments that played to my strengths. Could I make that something more intentional than accidental?

What can I do to make any given environment a better match to my wiring? This is the real promise hiding in the ferment of today’s technology. I say hiding because the creators of technology are pursuing as large a market for their wares as they can imagine. The notion that any one neurodivergent brain might craft its own fit between brain and environment is foreign. You have to learn to ignore 99% of the marketing pitches, which are all about fitting yourself into the norm envisioned by some product manager.

Your task is to adapt the tools to your brain, not your brain to the tools.

Doing the work when the work matters

 

The hardware in my shoulder is now old enough to vote.

What was to have been a short bicycle ride turned into a year long rehab project. We were “training” for a cycling tour of Ireland to celebrate my wife’s 50th birthday. We were learning how to use cycling shoes locked into the pedals and had been told to expect some falls as we got used to the new equipment. My first, and last, fall occurred 250 feet from our house. After a trip to the emergency room, initial X-rays, a sling, a long weekend waiting to talk to my doctor, a visit with my newest orthopedic surgeon, an MRI, and still more X-rays we had a correct diagnosis. I had a “closed, comminuted, fracture of the right proximal humerus”. In lay terms, I had transformed my right shoulder into a jigsaw puzzle that now needed assembling.

One bit of good fortune was that I am left-handed. The other piece of good fortune was that the surgeon was able to repair the damage with a steel plate and a distressing number of long screws that put all the pieces back into proper alignment.

After the surgery, it took nearly a year of physical therapy to get back to about 90-95% of full range of motion and function. I’ve had enough encounters with orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists over the years that I understood that you need to be diligent about putting in the work if you want to get the results.

Physical therapy is one of those areas where you can effectively monitor and measure progress. And where the entire system supports the connection between effort and results. I’ve become skeptical about the apparent simplicity of this equation. We like to pretend that this connection between effort and results is universally true. Do the work, get the results. How do we tell that we’re in a setting where the equation breaks down? Where do we learn to see situations where we’re better served by taking a broader look? Can we do less work and get the same result? Better results? Different results we hadn’t even thought to ask for? Some people seem to have a talent for looking at existing systems and seeing new options. Is that a special talent or is it a perspective that can be developed?

The obvious answer is that this is the realm of innovation. And it is a realm that has attracted considerable study. But even here, we seem to want to celebrate effort. We’re very suspicious when someone tells us we’re working too hard. I’d be happy to get better at seeing times when I’m working harder than I need to. And learning to ignore the judgmental glances that hint that I’m not putting in the effort they deem suitable.

I want to get better at doing the work when the work matters. And not doing the work when it doesn’t.