Month: October 2022

I woke up on Saturday and decided to drive into the high country for a change of scenery and a mental refresh. Along with the late spring, October is the best time to be in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The temperatures are finally cooling and the landscape is aflame in yellows, reds, and oranges. The differences in elevation mean that different parts of any view will have more or less color depending on the timing, but there are bands of bright colors for nearly a month as the color descends down into the valleys.

On my route, I crossed into Virginia and then looped back to Boone via the Blue Ridge Parkway, a road designed for a slow, leisurely ride. There are also lots of helpful pullouts at any curve where there is an open vantage from atop the ridges. The whole time, I had the music off. For stretches, I listened to the wind with the windows rolled down and the cool air flowing about me. I stopped at several of the pullouts to take a short walk or just to stand and take in the scenes laid out before me. At one stop, there was a short walk down to a waterfall crashing over a steep rock face. I stood watching it from below for several minutes as well. It was almost jarring to come into downtown Boone, crowded as it was with visitors and college students alike. I decided not to linger and so after a single down and back along King Street ate an early dinner and drove back to Raleigh.

It was a lot of driving and time spent with my own thoughts, but it was what I needed. Throughout my life I have taken drives like this. As early as high school there was a classic country radio show on Saturday nights that I used for the purpose. I even rented a car a few times when I lived in DC just to achieve the same environment. You don’t have to drive nearly as much as I did, though, to get out and let nature nourish your soul this fall.

I was in Las Vegas last week to attend a conference. I could go without visiting Las Vegas again at any point in the near future, but it was a great conference full of people operating and servicing digital businesses. As I was the only practicing lawyer in attendance, I’m hopeful that it will also be fruitful for business development. At the very least, I met some interesting people doing interesting things and will build upon some of the relationships I started.

As this was the first time I visited Las Vegas for more than a few minutes, I walked along the Vegas Strip and through some of the resorts. I wanted to see places like Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio in person after seeing them in television and movies for so many years.

In order to walk through any of the Las Vegas resorts, you must walk through part of the resort’s casino. Doing so subjects you to a deluge of lights and sounds. The video machines, whether slots or otherwise, seem to have coalesced around the same design language and so they all look the same with slight variations (e.g. the Game of Thrones version had some loud dragon sounds). Then there were the table games, which were often tame as I walked during off-peak hours but from which still emanated the occasional cheer.

I have a rule that I don’t gamble in casinos. It is a decision I made once and a decision I will never have to make again. It is a meta-decision so to speak. There is a logic to this that extends beyond just wanting not to lose money. People only have a certain amount of mental energy. It can wax and wane during the day and through different periods of life, but it is never infinite. Implementing meta-decisions saves some of that energy. In this example, I didn’t have to pull my mind away every time I saw the shining lights of the slot machines or someone hit blackjack. I had already made the decision not to gamble and so just kept walking. The same dynamic exists for things like brushing your teeth. This decision making savings is also part of the reason why Steve Jobs wore the same clothing every day—that was one less decision he had to make.

Now, I am not recommending that everyone adopt a fixed wardrobe, though I have trended in that direction in recent years. No, my call to action is something else. Look for the places where you can make your life better by implementing a meta-decision. It is much harder to eat handfuls of candy if you don’t buy candy at the grocery store. It is easier to take a walk in the morning if you set out your exercise clothes every night. It is easier to study language flashcards if you always study them while you eat breakfast. Any way you can save your daily willpower by making positive things automatic with one larger decision is a good thing. I encourage you to spend a few minutes and think of a meta-decision or rule you can try out over the next week.

I felt old this weekend. Sure, according to many I was born old. Be that as it may, this was still a feeling I’ve only felt a few times. I was in Charleston with my family and many people from my little hometown for a wedding. The weekend was filled with seafood and the charm of walking through the city. I tried to go shopping as well, but that was a fool’s errand.

As for the exact source of my realization, that isn’t difficult to locate. It wasn’t the ceremony. It wasn’t the music at the reception. It wasn’t the conversation at my table at the reception either. No, it was that someone I watched grow up was getting married. That was a first. Even with my brother we grew up together. Talking with the bride’s younger brothers only added to the feeling. I had to look up at them as we spoke even though I can remember them as young children. I assume that these moments will become more frequent as the years go by, but for whatever reason I wasn’t ready for this one. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable weekend on the whole.

I returned to Raleigh on Sunday from my latest “work” trip (in time for week two of my Monday curling league). And while I did not neglect my work, I did other things too. This post is more of a highlights summary than the usual fare of a more detailed account of a single topic or event.

I sat alone under redwood trees in the cool mornings while my body adjusted to the time difference. These were not the giant sequoias, but they still make one feel small in their presence. That is something needed from time to time.

I drove a car remotely that was in a parking lot several miles away. That is what is now possible through the technology developed by Qibus, the client alongside whom I worked during the trip. Even with the prototype driving setup I used, it is incredible (1) that the whole thing is possible at all and (2) how close it felt to driving while physically in the car. Just don’t ask me to explain any of the underlying engineering.

I had small group dinners almost every night, an experience I have too rarely. It is remarkable what conversation among friends can bring to the spirit. The conversation was different every night, but I did try most of the time to steer things away from whatever projects we had each been working on that day.

I took the ferry into the city for a meeting with the MicroAcquire team, a beautiful ride across the bay unshrouded by its famous fog. We celebrated the closing of the first transaction they helped broker directly as we were the attorneys who represented the seller. Then at lunch, standing in a park looking across the bay, we saw some of the activity that has tarnished San Francisco in recent years. When I did some work in an alcove in a shopping mall, I was treated to even more. Take nothing away from how San Francisco looks from a distance, though, as it is something to see out on or across the bay.

I took in a jazz concert in a small community theater where we were the youngest people in attendance by twenty years or more. My grandmother would have been proud. The songs were from an earlier era of jazz than I had listened to before and while the change was nice I don’t anticipate altering my regular workday background music.

I attended an Octoberfest event that was so out of place as to be comical. Sure, there was a large tent set up with long communal tables, but they also played the chicken dance song multiple times. And the lines were so long for bratwursts that I had paella for lunch and finished my lunch before those who waited in line for sausage and cabbage even sat down. Then once I got back to my lodgings I was whisked off to evening tea and ginger snap cookies to round off the trip.