Author: James David (Page 25 of 27)

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?

Last week saw the first few days and nights of cooler weather here in Raleigh. Daytime temperatures returned to the upper 80s early this week, but there was a glimpse of the onset of my second favorite season (my birthday is in April after all). It is still too early for the kitschy fall activities—picking apples or pumpkins is still a while off and the leaves are still green—but it isn’t too early to get out in the cool morning air that is now with us.

I capitalized on the lower temperatures by listening to extended podcasts while taking long walks around some of the small manmade lakes that double as public parks here. There are paved trails around the bodies of water and nice facilities that anyone can use. I was not the only person on the trails, but I rise early enough that crowds aren’t a problem.

This may not be the best way to walk, sure, but I haven’t found a conversation partner yet so for now these walks provide me time to take in new ideas and then unplug my earphones and reflect. Many of the greatest minds in history thought as they walked for hours at a time. I don’t have the hubris to equate myself with such men, but I can at least emulate them. I really enjoy long walks in crisp air. I’ve had regular walking routes in Cambridge, in DC, and in Charlotte. I haven’t yet nailed down my route here, but I’m sure I will soon. My family sometimes reminds me that they have had to tolerate wind noise picked up through my headphone speaker when I have called them on these walks down the years.

Again, no crazy connections between spurious things I’ve read or watched this week. Just take the opportunity for an early morning or sunset walk this week if the weather is finally turning cooler where you are. Bring a good friend if you can and leave your phones in the car or at home. You won’t regret it.

Traveling to new places is one of my favorite things to do. I have done so alone, with friends and family, and with groups of strangers. This is true even when many of those around me don’t understand why I would ever want to visit certain places. And I see little that will cause my passion for this sort of exploration to abate. Unfortunately, though, events of the past few months have fundamentally changed the situation for the worse in one of the places that I have periodically dreamed of visiting. I understand that few of you ever thought about visiting Afghanistan as a tourist, but I have. I now doubt that that will ever be possible.

I have not followed much of the news coverage—what little I have watched or read seemed more focused on a domestic political blame game than anything else and I see little utility in that. That isn’t what this post is about either. Instead, I will use these events as a case study demonstrating the power of a story in a world inundated with information.

Statistics and numbers don’t register for most people. Our brains just aren’t programmed to comprehend large numbers. But we do latch onto individual stories. The story of a single person is thus more powerful than all the facts and figures in the world. This is why most PowerPoint presentations fail and why the most effective politicians are those who compose the most compelling narratives.

A travel vlogger I watch has visited Afghanistan on multiple occasions and has recorded a series of videos showing a way of life very different than what has been portrayed on our television screens (and sadly, different than what is to come for those same people). He fell in love with the people and the landscapes of the place and his love for Afghanistan shines through in the way he presents his video essays. On each of his trips, he had the same guide, a man with a wife and two young children who spent the last decade as a guide for Westerners visiting Afghanistan. When cities began falling to the Taliban, he went into hiding along with his family. Through the power of those very YouTube videos, he was able to obtain Australian visas and made it out of the country just before flights were halted entirely. From a hotel room in Melbourne, the vlogger and the guide have an interview/conversation about their exodus. It is a different sort of heartbreaking than some of the still images that have circulated, and this is yet another testament to the power of storytelling.

Very few of the people reading this newsletter will experience anything like what has transpired in Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean we can’t extract some learning that we can apply to our own lives. I won’t touch on any of the geopolitical considerations or potential lessons, but instead on the power of storytelling. Whether you are hiring employees, seeking investors, or selling your company, you need to know that you are selling a story. The same is true if you are interviewing for a job and you need to explain why everything that has come before makes you the perfect candidate for this position right now. It is also true within a family or even within your mind as the narrative you craft for yourself can create so much momentum in your forward trajectory, whether positive or negative.  

P.S. If you want to watch the video interview discussing their exit from Afghanistan, it is HERE. If you want to watch a few videos of the same vlogger’s time in Afghanistan before recent events transpired, click HERE, HERE, HERE, or HERE.

Last weekend, I was able to do something I enjoy that I haven’t done in a year and a half. For those of you who have navigated to the attorneys page on our website and read our bios, you may have noticed that I list three sports that I play. This post is about one of them—curling.

Curling has always been my favorite sport to watch in the Winter Olympics. The combination of strategy and precise execution drew me in even as a child. The finer points of why they swept the ice or yelled so much eluded me, but these provide atmospherics if nothing else. I probably could have tried the sport while I lived in Boston, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind and that town is more into its hockey anyway. In DC, I didn’t have a car and so couldn’t easily get to the curling club out in the Virginia suburbs. When I moved to Charlotte, I finally had the opportunity to play. I attended a learn-to-curl event and became a club member that evening.

I eased into the sport only playing a single league during the fall but signed up for two leagues in the spring. In the fall I was the lead on a four-person team, so I got a lot of practice throwing the same shot over and over again (since I threw the first two of the eight rocks my team threw each end) and then even more practice sweeping my teammates’ rocks. It felt like an apprenticeship. In the spring I was the lead on a three-person team so I threw three rocks instead of two and I also played doubles, a different form of the game that requires different and more challenging shots to be successful and that I enjoy more. We may not have been the best doubles team in the league, but we weren’t the worst either. We also had more fun than anyone else, always trying the high-risk-high-reward shots and with an age difference of at least thirty years. The spring season was cut short by lockdowns, just as I was finding my rhythm and improving.

Now I am in a new city with a new curling club, a different schedule, different people, and a slightly longer commute. I have signed up for two leagues this fall and am eager for the season to start. It felt great to be competing again on Saturday, even if it was just a pickup game where everyone was trying to shake off the rust and the real competition was against the expectations I set for myself. Winning wasn’t bad either. Being on the ice again felt like another big step on the road back to a new normal, even if there have been some setbacks in recent weeks. So no exhortation from me this week, no connection drawn between something I saw and something I read. Nope, just some positive news that I was able to do something again that I enjoy and had missed. And if you ever get the chance, give curling a try. Almost anyone can play and it is a lot of fun once you learn the basics.

I listened to Sturgill Simpson’s new album (The Ballad of Dood & Juanita) this week. It lasts about 25 minutes and is really more a single extended song than an album. This is a bluegrass album and follows on the heels of two other bluegrass releases. It is the sort of thing I might listen to once or twice more, but not the sort of project I will come back to over and over like some of his earlier music. This shift to bluegrass music is at least the second turn in Sturgill Simpson’s genre-bending career, and his artistic choices and refusal to chase money through those choices offer a case study applicable beyond the music world.

Listening to the music brought to mind an essay I have read several times, 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly (LINK). Its basic premise is that an artist or creator does not require millions of fans to make a good living, only a small number of thousands who will stick with you no matter what you produce and will keep buying from you. It is a different mindset to chase a small number of superfans rather than to try to please the masses. In many ways it is easier as your most passionate fans will let you know how they feel, and it is easier to respond to even a negative reaction than to ambivalence.

I cannot say I’m a superfan of any musician. I listen on Spotify and attend a few concerts a year but don’t buy vinyl records or band t-shirts. Sturgill Simpson was the last concert I attended, and even at that show I witnessed a version of some fans who had hopped off the bandwagon. As his most recent album at that time was a rock & roll record more than a country record (one that was turned into an anime film on Netflix—how’s that for genre-bending?), one of the couples sitting beside me left after Tyler Childers’s opening set of more traditional country music. Sturgill Simpson’s country records had introduced them to Tyler Childers, but they weren’t willing to join Sturgill on a journey outside of country music to a netherworld between country and rock. Their loss, and it gave me extra room to stretch out too.

The principle of 1,000 true fans applies even outside artistic pursuits. For startups, a small number of true fans becomes a beachhead and those true fans will do more for your company than any advertising campaign could ever hope to achieve. Even Amazon started out as just a bookstore before it upended global retail.

If you are a creator or building a startup, think about how cultivating a small audience is an alternative to trying to be all things to all people. The internet has made distribution easier than it has ever been and there are no longer any gatekeepers preventing you from sharing your work and ideas. If you are a startup, get your MVP ready and take it to your target customers. Then make contact with these first users regularly to solve their problems and develop a core of rabid proselytizers for your product or service. And if you are a fan, support the artists and creators who bring a little joy into your life. Your support allows them to devote themselves to the work and to produce more and better versions of what you enjoy from them.

I have been a member of a gym here in Raleigh for about 5 or 6 weeks now. The format is semi-private training and my workouts are with anywhere from 2 to 5 other people. It is a consistent crowd and we now have conversations while we go through the workouts together. It is the first time in several years that I have performed many of these lifts, but the technique instruction has meant no close calls on injuries thus far. Last week was the first max week under this training protocol. My numbers weren’t great but should improve with better technique and increased flexibility. Even this week, though, there have been benefits from last week’s workouts. Now I have numbers on the board (and there is a massive whiteboard to track each member’s numbers) and benchmarks, things I can look to with an aim towards improvement. Already this week the workouts have been better and more challenging with actual numbers to measure against as opposed to guessing what 60 or 70% of my max would be for the main lifts.

Reflecting on this, I have thought about how I try to extend and can further improve extending this principle to other areas of my life—the success of various methods to attract clients, my Spanish vocabulary, etc. Knowing where you are makes it much easier to try to get where you want to go. You still need to decide where you want to go, but the best map in the world is useless without knowing your present location. This is why those giant maps at malls and theme parks always have a dot that says “You Are Here.”

I encourage you to consider your own little experiment with this principle of measure, aim, improve yourself this week. There are a few steps in the process should you choose to take me up on this. The first is that you have to choose what you want to track. Many people and businesses focus on the wrong things and are counterproductive as a result, so getting this right is critical. If this is your first foray into this sort of thing, I encourage you to start with something really small and easy to measure so you can build the habit. Once you decide what you want to track, you need to actually track that thing. Since this step requires adding something to your routine, it also poses a compliance challenge. Lots of apps and hardware can aid you here, but I’ve found that pen and paper work best for me. The final step in the process is to evaluate the data you have collected. You collected the data so you’d be able to use it, so schedule a time to evaluate the data in advance and block off that time in your calendar. Look for trends, try to see what is working and what isn’t, and see where progress is or isn’t being made. Then make changes to your process or actions as a result of your evaluation. Once you have made some changes, repeat the cycle so that you continue to improve with each iteration.

I have been in my new apartment for six or seven weeks now. It took a few weeks to retrieve everything from storage and to have a new couch delivered, but now I have almost all of the furniture and decorations I will have here. I have also finally put up most of those decorations. Some of the elements are in very similar places to where they were in my last apartment; others have found new homes. The only new decorations are handwritten birthday cards from my younger cousins whom I wrote about a few weeks ago. Having new things isn’t necessary. What is necessary is to make the space mine and make me feel at home in it.

The exercise has reminded me of an admonition from Jordan Peterson to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. The impetus is to bring more of the ideal into your world, to immerse yourself in the ideal as much as possible so that you strive to build that ideal in the rest of your life too. The way my apartment is laid out, the kitchen, dining room, and living room are all combined into one great room. This means I have to do quite a bit, but the effort has placed reminders of people, places, and things I enjoy all around me when I am cooking, eating, reading, or watching television. It would all be better if I kept the dishes clean and put away, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In a small way, decorating my great room has elevated me. I certainly feel better in there, surrounded by images to conjure memories and paintings I enjoy, than I do as I sit here in my office staring at two computer monitors with a blank beige wall behind them. That probably means I need to decorate my office too, but I haven’t got around to that yet.

So this week I ask that you consider going through the exercise yourself. You don’t need to be as ambitious as to attempt to redecorate your great room. Even beautifying a small reading nook will have a positive effect. And if you have been living in your current residence for some time and have already decorated as you see fit, consider moving a few things around so that you have a different perspective on them when you view them. You may find that the way the afternoon sun hits a piece gives a much more pleasing effect than artificial light can muster.

This week’s reflection is about a rough formula for startup success that I encountered via a podcast. While venture-backed startups now form a large portion of my practice, the formula illustrates a broader principle that impacts other businesses and life more generally.

The formula is this: Idea x Product x Team x Execution x Luck. Your idea includes things like the size of the target market, the growth strategy, and how well you will be able to stave off competition. Your product is your physical product or service, but it is also the entire customer experience. Your team are the few people who are in the trenches with you every day trying to build the business. Execution is probably the most important element, as great execution can overcome a lot of problems. Just don’t work to perfectly execute something that no one wants to buy—do some market research first and talk to your customers regularly. Each of these items warrants its own exposition, but this post is about the final variable in the formula.

Luck is the one thing that is out of your control. The lecturer opined that luck could be any number between 0 and 10,000 and this is entirely at random. One may quibble with the numbers, but that would miss the point. Events completely outside your control can wipe you out (or allow you to find undeserved success). It is a reminder that the stoics were onto something all those years ago—you can only control what you can control and you have to accept the rest.

I have had my own lessons in stoicism in business offered by some rotten luck. In my prior law firm, I miscalculated the size of the potential market and how difficult it would be to gain traction. Those things are undeniable and self-inflicted errors. It is also true that I was starting to find my feet in January and February of 2020 and that maybe I was going to stumble my way into something that worked. Then the world shut down. And that was that. I am in a better place now with a fresh start in a growing business in a new city, but that wasn’t the easiest time. I learned a lot, both about how business really works and about myself. Taking lessons from that time was all I could do; nothing was going to change the fact that the business model I had been striving towards could not work amidst shutdowns.

I know I am not the only one who has experienced something like this. Your experience may not have been COVID-related, but that difference is immaterial. The important thing is the perspective you have while living events and then reflecting upon them. There is nothing to be done about external events. Take the time to reflect on how you managed the things you could control, evaluate how you might change your decision-making process, and move forward to the next thing. Hard though it may be, that is the only option. So best of luck to you my readers, and keep your heads high when the dice don’t roll your way.

Some time ago, I stopped to visit my cousin and her two adorable daughters. As happens on most of my visits, the girls were excited to see me. This was especially so on this occasion as the older one had just celebrated her fifth birthday. After lunch and show-and-tell with all the new toys received as birthday gifts, the girls wanted to go outside and look at their garden. The corn was already taller than them, so they enjoyed walking back and forth in the few rows pretending that their mother and I couldn’t see them. Following that expedition, the older one announced that she wanted to go play on the monkey bars.

The girls’ technique the first several rounds of traversing the monkey bars was to reach out with one hand, grab the next bar, bring the other hand and the rest of the body with it so that both hands were holding that next bar, then repeat the process. It is an intuitive method, but it creates a problem—at each new bar, they came to a stop and had to regain their forward momentum. This requires a lot of strength, strength they don’t yet possess.

I gave some lessons on a new technique using only one hand per bar, continuing to swing forward, and maintaining forward momentum (all with the assurance of me holding them so they wouldn’t fall). The older child was more eager to try this new method, but her sister tried it too once she watched and saw that nothing terrible befell her older sister. The girls understood after a few go-rounds that I had shown them a superior approach, but it will take more practice for this new method to take hold.

Reflecting on that part of the afternoon, it offered a physical reminder of something I have heard in a few contexts—inertia is the most powerful force in the universe. This is not true in a literal sense as demonstrated by something as trivial as our ability to stand up from a seated position, but there is a deeper truth in the saying. After all, inertia was Newton’s first law of motion. Lockdown restrictions forced many things in life to stop, and now that a new normal is emerging, I have found that it takes a great deal of energy to start doing things again, whether that be reading, exercising, writing, or whatever else I want to be doing other than sitting in my recliner watching television. The hardest thing is to begin a new project, venture, habit, etc. Once you begin, you have a positive momentum that will help keep you going. It may not be enough to overcome every obstacle, but at least you will have a chance. This week, I encourage you to make a start at something you have wanted to do during the last few weeks or months. You may find that the act of starting alone takes you much further down the road toward success than you thought you would ever achieve.