Month: August 2024

I’ve started reading The Last Expedition, a book about Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s journey through the Congo to rescue Emin Pasha after the collapse of British control of Sudan and one of the last crazy explorer enterprises in central Africa during the colonial period. I’m not far enough into the story to have any thoughts about the journey, but the introductions of some of the protagonists have me reflecting already. Stanley’s own reinventions of himself and his autobiographical revisions are crazy enough, but Emin Pasha was on another level. The authors describe Emin Pasha as follows:

Though he affected the dress and manner of a Turkish Muslim and presented a résumé that included service on the staff of the Ottoman governor of northern Albania, he was, in fact, a German who was Jewish by birth though raised as a Protestant. His given name was Eduard Schnitzer.

That is an insane life story, and it is almost impossible to imagine one person going through so many transformations today. In the age of the internet, people have found themselves facing severe repercussions for things they said or did years later, and that says nothing about all of the video surveillance, fingerprinting, and DNA testing that didn’t exist in the late nineteenth century.

The potential for shifting identity and beliefs could be used for nefarious ends, yet in some ways we have all lost from its disappearance. There is seemingly less room today to explore new ideas lest someone accuse you later of being a hypocrite. Never mind how changing beliefs can be a sign of growth and maturity; ours is an era of snap judgments and cheap virtue signaling.

Now an abrupt turn to my own life. While I’ve not reinvented myself in such an extreme manner, I have changed the type of law I practice. I’ve now spent more time as a corporate lawyer than I spent as a litigator. When I first made that transition, it was painful as it marked the closing of a chapter that I’d expected would have many more pages. Even now, our firm fastidiously avoids litigation for my own wellbeing. That was not a transition that required scrubbing my past or rewriting my own history, only removing a few articles from the internet that are no longer useful. Mine was a more transition of degree than of kind. I’m glad looking back that the only battle I had to fight was internal and that I didn’t have external forces, digital or analog, arrayed against me making that shift. I’ve also not been haunted by that part of my past; if anything it makes me better at my work now, and that helps me when accusations of inadequacy start flying from the worst parts of my psyche.

I went to a live improv comedy show for my Friday entertainment. It was hosted by the same organization with whom I took an introduction to improv class last fall, so it wasn’t my first time in the endearing little black box theater with its hodgepodge of mismatched chairs making up its stadium seating. It was, though, the first time I’d returned since I performed in front of a very small audience at the conclusion of that class.

The event was billed as a game show. The competitive dynamics weren’t as de minimus as on Who’s Line Is It Anyway (e.g. points were tallied throughout the event and there was a winner), but it wasn’t exactly Jeopardy! either. The host was British, so that added an extra dimension to some of the humor on display. It also meant that during one of the games while the contestants were drawing a scene of an audience member’s day based on very incomplete information, there was some audience Q&A in a segment titled Ask a Brit. Topics there included the royal family, what to call fried potatoes, and the upcoming premier league season.

My favorite bit was a game of PowerPoint karaoke. PowerPoint karaoke is something I’d heard about before but had never actually seen. There are websites that are repositories of PowerPoint presentations. Those presentations can be about anything (and sometimes it’s impossible to even discern the topic of the presentation). In PowerPoint karaoke a presenter gives the presentation blind, that is without seeing the slides beforehand, and so completely off-the-cuff. In this version, the participants were given a fixed subject beforehand, but there are versions of the activity without that constraint. This may sound awful, but it was a lot of fun to watch as each new slide brought a new challenge to make some new random image fit into a story about either painting or computer modeling (the two assigned topics).

I opted not to participate in any of the events as an audience member as I didn’t want to judge the competitors in any official capacity and didn’t have any funny suggestions come immediately to my mind when the host asked for ideas for a few of the games. Oh well. I don’t think I’ll attend that event when they host it again in the coming months, but I’m glad I went to this one. If nothing else, it helped get me back in the mode of doing and trying new activities after a bit of a rut during early summer.

For a little over a month now, I’ve been tracking all my working time. It was anathema to me after the years I spent detailing my life in six minute increments in a past life, but I wanted data as I strive for constant improvement. So far, the results have been sobering.

I was well aware that I’ve not had a great deal of client work over the past month. This part of the summer is normally slow for M&A activity as people take summer vacations. There have been a couple of weeks, though, where the time breakdown was truly stark. The bulk of my working hours have been spent in meetings, both internal and external. Some of the internal meetings have been permitted to balloon given the paucity of other tasks, but we’re still working to establish regular agendas to tighten those up in advance of a surge in client work that should arrive soon. I’ve also padded the external meeting category through a categorization glitch/decision to have things like webinars and CLEs count in that category. My content creation stats also look good from a time perspective, but the output hasn’t matched. Part of that is learning the new website back end interface, but most of it is not dialing in when I’m working on articles. I have finally started working in earnest on one that has been in the queue for months, but it really should have been completed by now. Regardless, seeing the stats and my current content backlog offers a kick up the back side.

Dead spots also persist in my workdays, but I am getting an even better grip on when my energy levels tend to ebb and flow during a typical day. Armed with that knowledge, I’ll make a few tweaks to my default meeting availability in the coming days. Despite this apparently stuttering start, I will continue to track my working time moving forward. Doing so will continue to provide me with data that I can consider and feedback on the changes I make.