McGee's Musings

I’ve told this story before. This blog post from 2018 (Preparing to be bold in the moment) is likely the most complete version.

It was a clash with the Off-Broadway director of the original musical I was stage managing thirty minutes before the curtain was set to rise on the final dress rehearsal before opening night. Tony was panicking that we weren’t going to be ready and generally getting in the way of the controlled chaos happening on stage and in the wings. I told Tony that it was my stage at this point and he was free to fire me at 8:30 if the curtain didn’t go up then but to get off of my stage now. (I might have phrased things less politely). Tony left in a huff. The curtain went up on time. I kept the job. The show was a success.

Many people spend a lot of energy fretting about what might go wrong. Tony was certainly one.

My brain seems to work differently. Maybe it was growing up with six younger siblings. Maybe it was studying probability theory. Maybe it’s tied to the ADD I didn’t know I had. Regardless, I don’t spend time contemplating and enumerating things that might go wrong.I work with a high level plan and adapt to things as they unfold. In larger settings I surround myself with highly capable partners. So far that’s worked pretty effectively regardless of the actual mess that occurs.

I started my education in Catholic parochial schools. They were mostly very good to me. When I was about eleven there was an incident that wasn’t so positive that’s stayed with me.

We had chorus each day. Or, perhaps it was once a week. Those details are murky. At eleven my voice changed and dropped a couple of octaves. Perhaps a little earlier than some, but not unexpected. The solution from the nun running the chorus was to tell me to stop making any noise. Problem solved for the chorus.

To this day, sixty plus years later, I don’t sing. Even in the shower. I’ve taught in front of classes from twenty to two hundred people. I’ve given keynote addresses to a thousand. But don’t ask me to sing. Solo or back of the chorus. It doesn’t matter.

Perhaps oddly, I’ve spent a great deal of time backstage in the theater. That includes stage managing multiple musicals. I had cues tied to verses or key changes or other musical moments. I love music. I just can’t do music.

We all encounter these moments. Some paths close. Others open. There’s a messiness in the day-to-day that’s unavoidable. Fighting it or going with the flow are both poor strategies. Learning to strike a dynamic balance is the game. Can you recognize the notes even if you can’t produce them?

It was late 1962, perhaps early 1963, and our elementary school class was on a field trip to the natural history museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Probably the origin of my love for museums of all kinds. The only thing I recall of this one, however, was the cafeteria where we were able to choose our lunch from a vast array of offerings. I had never encountered such a thing and I was about to receive a lesson in “eyes bigger than my stomach.” I reached out and filled my tray from that vast array.

The bus ride home was not pleasant, although I don’t recall any major tragedy. Not yet ten years old, I was already the eldest of seven children. As the eldest I was often the one to first encounter new experiences. As one of seven, finances and logistics often limited what those experiences could be. There was a certain narrowness to my world that wasn’t easy to perceive. Books could open aspects of the wider world. Being good at school things brought attention from teachers. Being an obedient eldest child kept me out of trouble.

There’s a lot to be said for being left to your own devices. But it can also keep you from encountering much of the real world. Squeaky wheels get attention. Quiet ones get less. And there’s no one to notice or tell you that you are missing important experiences at navigating a world full of other people. How do you figure out what it is to be lonely when you’re in the midst of little brothers and sisters and grown ups busy dealing with whoever is making noise.

This sounds sadder than it was. My intellectual and emotional development was out of sync. I wasn’t qualified to notice. Those who might have had bigger issues to deal with. If you aren’t obviously contributing to the mess, you get to do what you please. You let curiosity take you where it will. Which can be quite a long way. With some luck, and attention from the right people, things eventually sync up.

Twenty four years ago today I made the first public post on McGee’s Musings. Going public with my writing grew out of my work teaching information technology strategy at the Kellogg School. I was greatly influenced by the examples and technologies offered by Dave Winer. When I later created a course on knowledge management, Winer graciously made licenses available to my students for Radio Userland. Radio Userland still remains one of the best blogging tools ever offered. I wish it had found the market it deserved. Like much of Winer’s work, however, it was ahead of its time.

While I continue to write for myself regularly, I’ve been less diligent about sharing that work publicly. I don’t entirely understand why that has been the case. For one thing, I think the blogosphere has lost some of its conversational nature. And the places where conversations are occurring online these days tend to promote forms of interaction I would just as soon avoid. We’ll see how it continues to evolve.

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.