Author: James David (Page 13 of 20)

Immediately following our family Christmas meal, our family sings an out-of-tune rendition of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” We have done so for over two decades now. It was my grandfather’s favorite Christmas song. He never sang it well either, but he did always sing it loudly. That song is a small way he can still be with us even after all these years.

The song is followed by an advent service organized by my mother. She always puts a great deal of effort preparing it, and we appreciate that effort even if we don’t always show it contemporaneously. Then we follow with pieces of strawberry cake (strawberry because I don’t eat chocolate) for dessert. It is one of the only times during the year when I eat cake at all actually. And then we unwrap presents, a much more staid time than it must have been when my brother and I were children. Nothing quite matches the excitement of children when it is time to open presents. I won’t get to witness that this year, but maybe I’ll be able to see some of my favorite little ones shortly thereafter depending on how the weather plays out.

I’m sure each of you who celebrate Christmas has similar traditions of your own. You may even be able to form new traditions this year if life has brought you changes in the past twelve months. As you celebrate, take a moment to appreciate those little traditions. They help keep continuity in life even in the face of incessant change.

I’m (in)famous in my family for buying Christmas gifts at the last minute. It’s become so much of a trope that I almost feel obligated to leave a little shopping until the end just so there can be familiar conversation every year. At least I tell myself that to boost my own spirits; I doubt it has much credence with anyone else. We also celebrate Christmas a week early to simplify logistics, meaning I have even less time in which to purchase gifts. In comparison with most years, I have already made tremendous progress—I am only one-and-a-half gifts short of being finished. That said, the remainder of my purchases will be James David specials as we are past any shipping deadline and I am working on a lot of different things simultaneously.

I take a modicum of pride in the gifts I give, though. In recent years, they have become much more tailored to the recipients. I will never be a gift-giving wizard, but the act of wracking my brain to generate ideas helps me appreciate the people to whom I’m giving the gifts. That may be odd, but for me it’s true. As the rest of you conclude your Christmas shopping, I hope that you experience something similar.

We have always worked in multiple time zones at Barlow & Williams, but there has been an extended project for one of our west coast clients that has taken our nascent firm into uncharted territory in regard to scheduling. It has given me flashbacks to one of the worst elements of my time working at a big law firm, working full workdays in multiple time zones. When I was at the big firm, this meant working all day on tasks for partners based in New York and then at night and in the early morning for partners based in Los Angeles who just assumed that whatever task they sent me would be completed by their morning since I was three hours ahead. It created a dynamic captured by the cliché of burning a candle at both ends. Eventually, I decided enough was enough and I embarked on the path that led me to the crazy professional life I have now.

These few weeks have not been as bad as that period. There have been world cup matches to watch during any afternoon lull (at least part of the matches, anyway) and there have only been a couple of late, late nights. Some of the angst is probably the result of working from home. I only leave my building to go to the gym or to go for a walk, and with daylight hours decreasing it has felt stifling on some days. That is going to change, though, as I’ll be traveling next week for an early family Christmas celebration. For now, I’ll just white knuckle through it and wait for the completion of the end-of-year rush.

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my immediate family near the beach—no sand for me but there were several walks in the salt air when it wasn’t raining. I did what I could to take a few days away from the computer. I didn’t quite succeed in that endeavor, but things were slow with work as counterparties were all offline. It was a time of reflection of how much the lives of almost everyone in the family have changed over the past year. While I may be living in the same place as I was a year ago, my work is different and more fruitful than what I expected. As my work continues to evolve, where I am this time next year could be just as different from where I am now (crazy as that possibility sounds given just how much has changed this year). For those who follow this chronicle closely, this will read like a repeat of last week’s missive. In many ways it is, aided by the extra time for contemplation during some long drives to the coast and back.

After the last few months, this week has been calm. That even includes my six-hour drive yesterday in an attempt to beat some of the holiday traffic going into the Thanksgiving weekend. The attempt was not as successful as I’d hoped, but my walk this morning was down to the pier, past the lighthouse, and through the live oaks instead of on the city streets in my Raleigh neighborhood.

On a broader level, this is a time of anticipation and building. There are a lot of things in development but none have yet borne fruit. I’ve had to force myself to zoom out and contemplate things on a timescale of months and quarters instead of days and weeks, and this has been frustrating given the rapid growth the business through most of this year. I’m sure many of you will have experienced similar times in your own lives. Now to keep my head down and keep moving forward through the rest of this period.

Last week offered a stark change from New York City. I spent a few days in east Tennessee surrounded by open space and very few people. There was still plenty of noise at times but noise of very different sorts than car horns and ambulance sirens.

The trip started with a multiday quail shoot on a preserve located on a bend in the Tennessee River. The hunts themselves involved walking through fields behind two dogs, a pointer and a flusher. To watch a bird dog in action is to see an animal in a state of absolute joy and it is a show just to watch it work the fields. The dogs worked in tandem. The pointer would run back and forth until it picked up a scent and pointed towards a covey of birds. Then the group would catch up to the pointer and the flusher would be released to flush the quail up into the air. The addition of the flushing dog made this hunt much less tiring than last year’s iteration where I was the one who had to kick about in the grass to get the birds to fly. The flushing dogs were also great retrievers and we didn’t lose a single bird during any of the three sessions. Dad did, however, shoot a few at such close range that there wasn’t much left to retrieve.

I then spent a couple of days with cousins and an aunt and uncle. Or more specifically, I stayed a few days with the three youngest members of the family and everyone else who happened to be with them while I was there. I hadn’t seen the kids in six months or more and they just keep growing, especially the youngest who was only a few weeks old when I saw him last. I don’t get to be around the children as much as I’d like, but I do enjoy how small their worlds are and how their worries are over toys and books and puzzles and combing their hair. I doubt I’ll ever be able to get that back. The oldest is now in first grade and has so many questions about so many things, especially Spanish translations this time, and her younger sister soaks in what information she can from listening.  It is refreshing to just sit and answer their little questions.

Last week was the longest I’ve ever spent in New York City. It was my first visit to the city in six years and I would be okay if I didn’t return for another decade or more. The way my life and business is trending, I don’t expect that to be the case but alas. Working out of a small hotel room that exceeds a dollar per square foot per night is not exactly my dream remote work arrangement. And while coffee shops and open coworking spaces function well for some, we can’t have client calls in such surrounds. That chained me to within a certain distance of the hotel and so forced me to stay in Midtown for most of the trip.

Walking up and down Fifth and Madison Avenues was more jarring than I expected. It is early November, so a few of the stores already had their Christmas decorations on display and the public ice rinks were set up at Bryant Park and Rockefeller Center. And it was 70 degrees every afternoon. The juxtaposition felt off.

I got a glimpse into life in a Brooklyn brownstone too on this trip. That was the one area I went where the noise wasn’t constant. Brooklyn is also (for now) built more on a human scale so that the buildings don’t smother you. Brooklyn has lots of other things that would make it a frustrating place to live, too, but at least this time I was able to do more than aimlessly walk around after choosing a subway stop to exit like I did on my previous visit to the borough. In any event, score a point for local knowledge.

Food is very important to me and often my travel schedule is constructed around meals. When I chose restaurants on this trip, there was a clear bifurcation. If I chose an old-school Jewish deli, then I had a very good pastrami sandwich and a mix of very good and not-so-good pickles. If I chose anything else, the food was mediocre at best. When a client or friend chose the restaurant, the food was great and the atmosphere matched. They were four for four in that regard and all very different—oyster bar; tapas; Mediterranean; Asian fusion. Score a few more points for local knowledge. Not that I needed to relearn the lesson that going with a local makes travel better, but there were several reiterations of that lesson over the past week.

This is not my first time in New York City, not even my first time staying in Midtown Manhattan. It is the first work trip to the city and the first time I’ll be hosting client meals anywhere, but that comes with my current working life. Fortunately for the clients, they have chosen the restaurants as I picked a dud last night for myself. There are still more opportunities, though, so I’ll keep trying new places in the hopes of finding one that I remember fondly many moons from now. I am handicapped by not having had the benefit of several weeks’ advance notice regarding the trip, precluding anything requiring an advance reservation.

New York has never been my favorite city, and this will be the first time I’ve spent more than about 48 hours here. I’m going to really try to enjoy this visit, but I have always had a low-grade anxiety walking here, something different than fear. The Asian megacities I’ve visited pressed in on me, especially Delhi. There were crowds of people everywhere, a wall of traffic of all sorts of vehicles in the street, and horns blaring all the time. New York is different. Sure, it has the crowds and the traffic, but the horns are less frequent and there is much more steel and glass. New York presses down on me. It’s a different shade of mild claustrophobia and one I’ve never felt anywhere else. Surely I’m not the only person who has felt that way.

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.