Author: James David (Page 18 of 20)

I recently read A World Without Email. It is one of those dangerous books by an academic (Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown) that has some suggestions for things that could be implemented in the real world. I was so taken with some of its ideas that I also had my law partner read it and we had a discussion yesterday about how we could implement some of them, at least on a trial basis.

For any clients who may be concerned, no, we won’t be deleting our email accounts and you will still be able to contact us that way. Our experiments are going to be more internally focused. There are various methodologies used in software development that we are going to experiment with in a law firm setting. We have already adopted a task flow tool to help us visualize what tasks need to be accomplished next for each of the multiple matters we are juggling at any one time. We are still refining the template for what that tool will ultimately look like, but it’s basically some version of a digital whiteboard with a bunch of sticky notes on it. Another experiment we are conducting is to run daily “stand-ups” each morning. We don’t actually stand up during these short meetings, but we do go through each of our outstanding matters and update each other on what progress has been made and what tasks need to be accomplished next. This allows us to set our work agendas at least for that morning and better ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. We are still too reactive in the afternoons for my liking, but progress is progress and great systems take time to build. It has already cut down drastically on internal emails and at the expense of just a few minutes a day and a few phone calls a week.

We are still toying with blocking off certain times during the week for dedicated Deep Work Sessions (to stick with the Cal Newport terminology), but that has not yet been formalized. It’s just so draining to have a half-hour meeting every hour on the hour all day and I’m willing to experiment with batching things as much as possible to boost my productivity and sanity. And don’t expect to see our firm or me personally on Twitter any time soon.

Not only do I recommend reading through this book, but I also recommend thinking about how you can take ideas that you see working for other people in other industries and mold them to improve your own work. Many of the greatest innovations have taken place when people transport an idea from one field to solve a problem in another. When you expose yourself to ideas outside your core competencies, you never know what you might encounter.

I spent most of last week in vacation mode. I made an early break for it on Tuesday afternoon to reduce the amount of time I would spend sitting on I-95 and after a late night phone call upon arrival I put work on hold other than a few maintenance items each morning. Mom had announced our Thanksgiving plans in the most passive-aggressive manner possible, and that she did so unknowingly made it better. At some point in either late October or early November, well before I would have made plans on my own, I received an email calendar invitation for a restaurant reservation on Black Friday. No advance communication—just a calendar invite. That is the sort of direct communication style I appreciate but that most find off-putting. It was a restaurant we had tried to eat at on our last several trips but couldn’t get a table since it’s still the hot new restaurant in a food scene with limited options. I wasn’t expecting Asian fusion to be combined with a raw bar at a restaurant on the Georgia coast, but the octopus was the best I’ve ever had.

We don’t do Thanksgiving in the way many others seem to partake. We have never had massive gatherings with extended family. It was usually just the four of us and Mamaw and Papaw. This time there were five of us as my future sister-in-law joined us, but it was a low-key affair. We didn’t even eat turkey. Ham was the main dish for our Thanksgiving meal (and my subsequent lunches). Store-bought turkey is just bland after you’ve eaten organic, free-range wild turkey that you yourself harvested, and cooking it in an unfamiliar oven would do little to help that situation.

The best parts of the week were the times between the end of dinner and the start of whatever Hallmark movie was debuting that evening. I am no fan of any of the three or four Hallmark plots that are cycled and so when that came on it was my signal to go upstairs and read. During that hour-long interlude each evening, there was no television and most stayed off their phones and iPads. It was just conversation. The topic of discussion varied from plans for the upcoming wedding to new jobs and new apartments to potential hunting trips and travel destinations. That wasn’t exactly the point (though I want nothing to do with planning my brother’s wedding), but it was more just having people to talk with at more than a cursory depth. That has been the thing that this period of restrictions has limited the most. It is why I spend a couple hours most Saturday mornings on a zoom call with a group of friends from law school. I hope you too were able to avoid explosive topics and to have meaningful and enriching conversations over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I attended my first crypto-meetup last Thursday. I’m glad I did as I was exposed to parts of this burgeoning world about and some people doing interesting things. Tiptoeing into this world is a chance to be on the steep gradient of a learning curve again just as I’m finding my feet in the world of corporate transactions and startups, so the timing is great to keep my mental energy up.

The main event was a speaker discussing various elements of decentralized finance, an amalgam of protocols that has the potential to change the way money flows through the economy. That was a fire hydrant of new information for me and one I still have not sat down to process as I furiously took notes of different things to look at as part of my self-taught curriculum.

The topic of discussion during and after the main talk was ConstitutionDAO. I had not heard of ConstitutionDAO before Thursday, but it offers a powerful example of what these new technologies could enable. The exegesis of this organization was an original copy of the United States Constitution, the only such copy that is privately owned, coming up for auction. In the space of a few days, ConstitutionDAO came together and raised something like $47 million in order to bid at the auction. No crowdfunding campaign in history has raised that much money so quickly. We set up a TV and watched the auction live on YouTube—who knew that was even possible, but I should not have been surprised. The group did not win (the organizers decided they would be unable to purchase insurance if they bid any higher), but the final price was more than double Sotheby’s estimate.

So what is a DAO, you ask? DAO is an abbreviation meaning decentralized autonomous organization. Exactly how they will work in practice is still undecided and they don’t fit into any existing corporate legal form so there is residual uncertainty about them. That said, there are already DAOs with more than $1 billion in capital, so I can’t ignore them if I want to be on the cutting edge. They aren’t yet decentralized and count me a skeptic as to whether they can ever function that way, but the basic idea is that the governance of the organization will be handled using rules coded into smart contracts. I am not technically sophisticated enough yet to delve into more detail and even that brief description may be slightly incorrect, but I plan to learn more about these structures. The new world of Web 3.0 is going to offer all sorts of new and weird and exciting things. This was a strange introduction for me, but it is just the beginning of a journey.

I went to the Miami area this weekend to visit my brother in his new apartment. He moved there for a new job a few months ago and I had a free weekend, so I booked a flight. I was greeted with South Florida humidity as soon as I left the terminal, and it felt like I was back in Latin America again after a few years away.

I ordered in Spanish for dinner on Friday. Fair enough since the place was Venezuelan food, but I was disappointed in the arepas. We watched the US beat Mexico dos a cero and talked about how his new job is going working to improve the efficiency of giant cargo vessels to and from ports throughout Latin America. He is the only native American in his office and none of the routes he works on serve American ports, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

Saturday we drove to Wynwood so he could see the street art and murals of that artsy neighborhood for the first time. It is one of those neighborhoods where developers cannot build apartments fast enough, the sort of neighborhood where the feel will change and become more sanitized. I had been there during my previous trip to Miami and ate better food that time, but it was fine to be walking around in shorts and t-shirt in November. Then we drove out to Miami Beach and up Collins Avenue a few blocks from the water. Ocean Avenue is now pedestrian only along most of its length, which was the correct decision even if it meant I didn’t get to ride past the famous art deco hotels this time. The traffic was terrible there and everywhere else around the city. The volume is one thing, but even more than that is that the traffic rules are treated as mere suggestions. People weave in and out of lanes, cut you off even when it’s unnecessary, and generally act like driving is one big game of bumper cars. It grated on me just as it did when I drove the judge around during my prior trip to the city. I want no part of that in my everyday life.

Sunday morning we went to Don Pan, which roughly translates to Boss of Bread. I had some refreshing passionfruit juice, but what was more notable was the setup of the bakery. Inside it were three separate additional businesses, a travel agent, locksmith, and money order business. We were also the only ones speaking English and the place was full. It gave new meaning to the trope that the best thing about Miami is that it is close to the United States. None of this bothered me, but I did find it annoying and a little soul crushing that we had to get in the car to go such a short distance from the apartment. Six lanes and never-ending strip malls may be the norm in Florida, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

We drove down to Key Biscayne and out to its end where there is a lighthouse. My brother just had to get his beach fix for the week even though I was with him and wanted no part of being on the sand. It was also part of his efforts to continue to explore his new home.

Then we went home to eat wings and watch football. This was the first football game I have watched in its entirety all year and will probably remain so until at least the opening round of the playoffs. Yelling at the television together, though, was enjoyable. A little while later I got to deal with the chaos that is the Miami airport. Miami is not my town—it’s too loud, too brash, too showy—but that’s okay. I got a reminder I didn’t need but got to see my brother making the most of a new start. That alone was worth the trip.

Have you ever had a dog look at you as if you were an idiot? Well last week I did, several times. I traveled to Northern Kentucky for some upland bird shooting with Dad and a few others from home.

To watch a bird dog at work, running back and forth in front of a line of hunters and periodically stopping to raise its snout so that it might better pick up the scent being carried on the wind, is wonderful theater. They are happier working a field even than when their owner returns home after a long day at work; this happiness makes a mockery of the lives that these same breeds of dogs have in city apartments. Just in case I needed a reminder of why having a dog is a bad idea at this point in my life, I got one.

When the dog knows a bird is close, it points—tail straight back, head forward, body rigid—and it will stay that way until the bird flushes. It is a statuesque pose that is developed through substantial training. As the youngest member of the shooting party, it was my task to kick up the bird after one of the dogs pointed. In tall grass, game birds are almost impossible to see and these birds held tight as a survival strategy. This meant I had to trounce through the tall grass kicking about until the bird finally flew up into the air. Whenever this required more than one pass, I looked back at the dog to get my bearings (the dog always pointed towards the strongest smell of the bird) and each time I looked at the dog it was judging me. Can’t you smell it? It’s right there you idiot. I would then go back to thrashing about and eventually the bird would flush and at least one member of the shooting party would get a shot.

In law school, there was befuddlement among some of my classmates when they found out that the late Justice Scalia regularly hunted upland game birds with Justice Kagan. There was a dissonance in their minds about Justice Kagan enjoying the activity; Scalia was too far gone as far as they were concerned. I never asked what their mental holdup was, but I always chalked it up to not appreciating the beauty that is watching a bird dog work a field and not understanding how much fun upland hunting can be. I have only done it a few times myself but now that I have more control over my schedule I expect that number will increase. I plan to not only take many more short trips like this, but also to try entirely new activities both here and elsewhere. That, after all, is one of the reasons I left BigLaw in the first place.

Last week, one of my cousins and her husband were in town to see a hockey game. He is a Boston Bruins fan (not sure how that happened since he grew up in Eastern Tennessee) so when they realized tickets are cheaper here than in Nashville they decided to make the trip from Knoxville and buy me a ticket too. This was only my second professional hockey game and I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the sport, but that wasn’t the purpose of the evening. Our seats were about five rows back from the glass in one of the corners, much closer than I would have selected but with a great view of half the rink.

We got there nice and early to watch warmups and soak up all that was on offer in the arena. For me, the arena offered way too much. Mainly, it was too loud. This may have been due to our seat location relative to the direction of the speakers, but you shouldn’t have to raise your voice over artificial noise to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you at a sporting event, especially one that hasn’t even started yet. Even more frustrating was how they pumped music through the speakers any time the puck wasn’t in play during the game itself. For most of my audience that has not been to many hockey games, this would be like music blaring between every pitch at a baseball game or between plays at a football game. It completely destroyed the rhythm of the spectacle. Is the average attention span really that short now?

Sitting there through the third period (the outcome was sealed by then with the home team dominant), I thought some more about how my experience was hampered by the music preventing me feeling the rhythm on the ice. Just a few moments’ quiet would have done so much to add to the atmosphere, if only to increase the tension before a face-off.

There are not many parallels between the experience at a hockey game and the client experience in working with our law firm. I’m not going to try to force a connection. Just let my experience be a reminder for you as well as for me—as a business owner you must always focus on the client experience. How you make your customers feel is often more important than even the results they achieve from using your products or services when they need your products or services again.

In a change from my recent reading fare of all nonfiction, I virtually picked up a Hemingway book this week. He is one of my favorite authors and his writing style has heavily influenced my own. I don’t write with the “write drunk, edit sober” ethos attributed to him, but the directness of his prose is something I try to emulate. I am not reading one of his great novels that I first read in high school or even one of his myriad short stories that packs such a wallop. No, this is Green Hills of Africa, a fictional book that it is in many ways more real than nonfiction. Several of Hemingway’s books are like that and the best fiction always is.

This particular book centers around narratives within the context of a larger African hunting safari, the sort of safari that was possible a century ago but would be unthinkable today—multiple lions, rhinos, leopards, and buffalo in addition to a large quantity of plains game from zebras to various antelope. The book, at least what I have read of it so far, takes place in landscapes that I have seen with my own eyes yet it is a world that I can never experience for myself. That is its beauty. It is an experience I can put myself into, the way you can make yourself a character in a great film, and for a few minutes at a time I am not sitting in my recliner but am walking through grass taller than me with nerves tensed trying to listen to see if the bull buffalo I am tracking has circled back and is now behind me.

Green Hills of Africa is not the first travelogue I have read (if I may stretch the genre to include Hemingway’s work of fiction), and I enjoy them. I don’t enjoy them so much for the descriptions of the places themselves (alas, I am a child of the television age and my mind requires video for that), but for the reflections they contain—about the places, the smells, the tastes, the people, the authors. Places change, landscapes change, but the human condition does not change so quickly and many of the great travel writings were written by people about my age and with roughly my temperament. It may be me projecting myself into the stories, but I find it helpful to read how others dealt with periods in their own lives that are in some manner similar to what I face in my own.

I chose now as the time to read this particular book to give myself a final kick of motivation to finish a personal project that is now four years longer in the making than I had planned. If all goes according to schedule, there will be an announcement about that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you want to read about a journey to a world that no longer exists written in beautiful prose and are willing to do a little outside reading about the basics of Buddhism, may I recommend The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. This was the book that got me started in the genre and has led to me daydreaming more than once about returning to the Himalayas.

We attended a demo night on Monday evening, the sort of event where a large number of organizations have individual tables in a large convention hall. The theme was Internet of Things, a concept loosely associated with the theme of a larger conference taking place Sunday to Tuesday. Internet of Things is an umbrella term that includes things as varied as water level sensors in rivers and the smart refrigerator that might be in your kitchen—any device that is communicating over an internet signal. Engineering is not my specialty and I don’t know enough engineering concepts to pretend otherwise, but we go to these sorts of events anyway because it can be fun to see new devices and projects in their nascent stages and it is only really possible to make a chance connection with someone if you are in the same room.

Alas, we did not have one of those magical chance encounters. Many of the exhibitors were also companies whose products I don’t understand—I have never assembled components on a motherboard or tried to solve for signal interference. That led to some stilted conversations, but one group was noteworthy. It was a group of high school students fidgeting at a table with a robot that loosely resembled a tank in the floor in front of their table. I didn’t have extracurricular opportunities like that and I probably would not have participated even if I had, but I was curious and so we approached the group to hear their spiel.

It was a rehearsed speech that they must have taken turns giving. I surmised that based on the level of enthusiasm, but I would have felt the same way. This was a team, maybe even from different schools, that came together to compete in a national robot-building competition where the robots are designed to compete in a designated game. This particular robot was designed as a mobile frisbee cannon with a top-loaded magazine since that was the contest for the year, and the kids were nonplussed that they were forced to turn the power way down inside the conference hall. The coolest thing for me was how the robot moved around. It was built using Mecanum wheels (yeah, I’d never heard of them either). The wheel assembly was basically a wheel with a bunch of rollers installed at an angle instead of a tread. The result was that the robot could move in any direction or even go in circles without having to turn.

This post isn’t so much about the event or even the frisbee launcher. Instead, it is an admonition to find opportunities for young people to be involved with technology whenever possible. It can be a robotics club at a school, Legos or Lincoln logs, simple Python scripts or Canva, but the tools are out there. And with the power of the internet, you can make a lot of money selling things that seem very simple. I am seeing this first-hand as our mergers and acquisitions practice continues to grow. So if you know someone of school age, expose them to and encourage them to explore technologies both established and emerging—one just might become their true passion.

During the second half of last week, I took the opportunity to travel and “work” alongside one of our major clients for a few days at their operations hub in the San Francisco area.

Thursday was mainly work meetings and strategy sessions. My hosts picked a lunch spot and we took the food (no indoor dining in San Francisco presently) to a spot overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The wind was blowing so hard that soup flew off of spoons when the attempt was made, but I decided to face into the wind anyway so I could enjoy my wrap looking out over the bridge and the bay. Dinner for me was In-N-Out for a hamburger. It was my second experience at the west coast institution, but even though I now have a t-shirt I still don’t understand what all of the hype is about. Maybe people from California feel the same way about Chick-fil-A?

Friday was dollop after dollop of insanity. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and past Sausalito into Mill Valley, an area I didn’t know existed until Friday morning. It put me in the mind of a great western or even Alpine ski town, but one where there can be a playground shaded by redwood trees across the street from an elementary school. Lunch was a really good salmon/egg/capers combination atop a croissant. Given my inability to speak or read French, I had to play the idiot and ask the waitress for help in reading the menu. I can’t talk about the coolest part of the day yet (I anticipate big news coming soon though!), but the day also included two of the most serendipitous encounters I’ve experienced. These meetings were so coincidental that even if I described them you wouldn’t believe me; I hardly believe they happened and I was there. That was followed up by game-changing sushi at dinner that had very thin slices of lemon atop the fish. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never seen that on any other sushi menu and now I know how glorious the combination is.

Saturday was more relaxed. We took a drive down the coast, hiked overlooking the Pacific, and ate at Half Moon Bay before circling back via San Mateo. We stopped for ice cream that was meh (though the olive oil flavor I sampled was just plain weird) and drove back towards the city.

The last thing I did during the trip was to dominate at a pitch and putt golf course on Sunday. Blue jeans, sneakers, rented clubs, no distance control, and the best contact I have ever made with the golf ball—it was hilarious for me but probably not for my playing partners. I just wish I had taken them up on the offer to place some wagers. Then a rush to airport and straight to the boarding line at the gate for what would be a very bumpy flight back after the craziest few days I’ve had in a long time. Now, if only my sleep schedule had managed to readjust after flying back across the country. . . oh well.

Overall, I’m not sure I have processed the experience yet. It was great to connect in person with members of the client team since, as we have all discovered in these last two years, Zoom and teleconferencing have their limitations. On a more personal level, it was great to feel the mental stimulus that only comes with being in unexplored territory. This trip involved both physical and intellectual unexplored territory, but you don’t have to fly across the country to put yourself in a new place. A good book can do it. A great movie can do it. Even a well-made YouTube video can do it. I wish that each of you is able to experience some unexplored territory yourselves this week.

Over the weekend, I drove a few hours from Raleigh to stay with some friends. Well, more like I drove a few hours to meet their baby, but semantics. This little guy is the only “COVID baby” in my social circles, but given our activities I didn’t find out if he understands that it is the same person both with and without the mask (he is able to grasp this about wearing and taking off glasses, so that suggests he would). He isn’t quite walking, but I suspect that within a few weeks I’ll get a video of him doing so as he can just about stand up without support.

What I took most from interacting with him was how much fun babies can be when they are happy and smiling. They have an energy that doesn’t manifest anywhere else and are like a campfire given how you can’t take your eyes off them. After that, what I took from my time with him was how normal it all was. He was teething so he woke up in the middle of the night crying, wasn’t keen to go down for a nap, ate about as much food as he threw in the floor, and crawled around like someone was chasing him. COVID has had a limited impact on the little guy, and he won’t remember any of it anyway when he gets older. The world into which he will grow may be different now, but it will be the only world he ever knows and he will grow up to thrive in the world he will face.

Watching him offered a reminder of how adaptable people are and how people can accept much change and still pull through. I keep needing reminders of this myself as everything in my own life is moving slower than I would like. We continue to make pivots in the business as new challenges emerge and new opportunities arise, but I want a torrent of success while we have only a small river for now. I keep trying different ways to build the personal life I want to live here (the curling season is off to a rough start, but maybe my team will break my personal duck tonight). I am starting to travel again; this week I will be going on my first business trip in years so I can work alongside a client instead of with them over videoconference. I’m looking forward to it, to making that a part of my new normal. And so I, along with you my audience, will continue to adapt and move forward. Besides, what other choice is there?