Category: Newsletter (Page 17 of 20)

I’m going to introduce another of my favorite YouTube channels. This one is in a completely different genre than the last I mentioned in these pages (Great Art Explained), and instead focuses on the construction industry. The channel is The B1M, a channel that produces the sort of 6-10 minute episodes that entertain me once a week when I eat breakfast. Its slogan is “The definitive video channel for construction,” but it is more entertaining than that description indicates. Trust me. Besides, the host is British and so all of the videos are understated in a way that would not be the case if the channel were American. Recent videos have covered Russian port development in the Arctic, a Chinese crackdown on new skyscrapers, the Second Avenue subway extension in New York, and a video on the world’s largest observation wheel in Dubai.

I am not an engineer. Even in our childhood, my brother was the one more interested in Legos. I am someone who enjoys a broad exposure to ideas, though, and I am always searching for additional inputs to improve my own communication and presentation style. Exposure to different presenters is one way I achieve that. Many of our clients are engineers anyway, even if they build software instead of buildings, so listening to an engineering brain at work helps me empathize with my clients in a tangential way.

The channel is often sponsored by software companies involved in supporting these massive construction projects (such sponsorships being a necessary intrusion given the economics of YouTube—control of distribution means control over money), but even their paid bits offer a glimpse into a world I know very little about. We have done some legal work for a company that is developing software in this industry, but a demonstration of the technology has not yet been an aspect of our legal representation. The curiosity in me wishes it were; perhaps that can be a policy moving forward. Part of the fun in working with technology startups is getting a look at the future before the rest of the world sees it, and injecting more fun into the workplace is rarely bad so long as the work still gets accomplished.

Perhaps you have already failed at your resolutions for the new year. Perhaps you are still on track. Perhaps you never set any at all. Whatever your situation may be, I want to propose something. Put real numbers on whatever goals you have at present and write them down. If you don’t have any goals, then I encourage you to sit for a few minutes and think about how you want things to be different in three or six months and what might make that world a reality. Vague goals unhelpful. I need numbers, clear benchmarks against which I can measure my progress. Having numbers also makes it clear should I fail. It is this painful possibility that keeps many goals vague, but if failure isn’t possible then success probably isn’t either.

I make my goals visible so that I encounter them several times each day. Maybe it is a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, but the comparison between the present and the state of the world as posited by those written goals offers a dangling carrot for me to chase. When I sit at my desk, my three overarching goals for the first quarter of this year are staring back at me scrawled in my own poor handwriting on the whiteboard above my desk, a whiteboard purchased for that very reason. I have juggled more than three in the past, but if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority so I am being more selective at present. The three are in different categories—one physical, one financial, and the third personal. All are achievable if only just, the sort of stretch goals that I need.

If you want to just start, start small. Take a half-hour walk once a week without talking on the phone or listening to music or a podcast. Cook a new recipe once every week for a month. Read a chapter of a book each day for two weeks. Whatever it is, aim at something you believe you can achieve, write it down so you can track your success to build positive momentum, and get started. And when you accomplish the task, make that visible too. Get a calendar for the task, use those little stickers teachers put on children’s homework, make a simple string of tally marks, whatever. You will feel better about yourself when you can see how you are stringing together the little victories that will add up to accomplishing your larger goals. We all know that “new year, new you” isn’t a real thing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t each get a little better in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

The turning of the calendar from one year to the next is a time of reflection. As part of my reflection process, I read a short blog post that I heard referenced in a podcast episode I listened to on one of my afternoon walks. The post is titled “Climbing the Wrong Hill,” and reading it a few times has beaten me over the head with a mental model I will be carrying into this year.

The blog’s starting point is a conversation the author had with a young employee of an investment bank. The young banker had decided he had no interest in being in finance long-term and that he wished to join a technology startup. When he told his bosses this, they responded by telling him about all of the additional responsibilities he would soon have (and the accompanying rewards) if he stayed. The young person decided to stick it out instead of leaving Wall Street, leaving the author disgusted.

The blog then goes into a discussion of computer algorithms to describe a more optimal solution to the problem of how to spend one’s professional life. Instead of merely climbing whatever hill/ladder/other metaphor on which you happen to find yourself, you should engage in some exploration to determine if there is another hierarchy where you could reach a much higher level. In the parlance of the post, this is the highest hill. The way to do this is to explore many different options, especially early in one’s career when the feelings of sunk costs are less, before committing fully to climbing in a single domain. And this does not preclude reaching the top of one domain after a period of several years, deciding that you no longer want to participate in that domain, and choosing another pursuit.

I have already experienced this phenomenon myself. After I clerked for Judge Siler, the greatest job anyone could have in the legal profession, I was an associate at a large firm in DC. It paid very well, I worked on cases that made national news, and I wanted no part of the lives I saw my bosses living. So I left. No, it wasn’t easy. The golden handcuffs are notoriously difficult to unshackle. The period since hasn’t been straightforward either, but leaving was the correct decision then and remains so today.

Now I’m a corporate lawyer who handles mergers and acquisitions in the lower middle market and acting general counsel for a few tech startups. Will any of this last forever? Given my own work history, probably not. At least now I’ve decided that that’s okay.

If you wish to read the blog post for yourself, it is available HERE. If you do, I hope that you incorporate the thinking into your strategic goals for this year (and those that follow) and that you aim for those goals that will bring you the greatest achievement and satisfaction.

I flew Southwest Airlines last week to celebrate Christmas with family. For those who don’t know, Southwest has a unique boarding process. Your ticket displays your boarding position, split into A, B, and C groups with numbers potentially going to 60 in each group. A-1 boards first and A-60 boards before B-1. Once you are aboard the plane, it is open seating and you can choose any available seat to sit in.

My strategy for Southwest boarding is simple: sit in the first available seat with space in the overhead to hold my backpack. I don’t fly Southwest across the country, so even a middle seat is okay if that means I get off the plane sooner when we land. I checked a bag on this trip which negated most of the advantage of this approach, but usually it saves me ten minutes as compared to sitting in the back of the plane.

On both flights, I was buried deep in the B group. This meant that 100 or so people boarded before me. Middle of the plane at best, I thought. On the outbound flight, I ended up in the aisle on the fifth row. There were two ladies already in the row who had left the middle seat open. I asked them if someone was sitting there, and the lady in the aisle seat moved into the middle seat. They were flying together but were trying to deke everyone out, a tactic that was never going to work on a full flight. On the return flight, I sat in the aisle in the front row. I guess other people just thought it wasn’t an empty seat. I don’t know.

My working theory is that others were too timid to ask if the seats were empty. Sure, some people would have been traveling in groups and so wanted multiple seats together and some people would have prioritized having a window seat above all else; people can have different preferences. But there is no way that I should have been able to sit in those seats when every other airline now charges a premium (meaning they know there is greater demand) for them.

As we come to the end of the year, it is a time of reflection over 2021 and some big picture planning for 2022. I could not have predicted where I am presently in my professional life twelve months ago and am trying to plan for multiple possibilities in 2022. Taking those flights last week, though, was a reminder that sometimes all it takes to make a plan come off is to ask. Sure there is the possibility of rejection, but I find that I care less and less about that as I grow older. It is an example of an asymmetric bet where the potential gain is so much greater than the potential loss. So learn a little from my airline experience if you can and take the initiative in the coming year.

I am infamous for being the last one in the family to complete his Christmas shopping each year. Many times, I have made last-minute trips to shopping malls, bookstores, and other retail establishments in order to give things to everyone on my list. And you can forget about pretty wrapping paper. I never mastered that art anyway—bags and crumpled tissue paper are good enough for me. Based on a conversation I had with my brother over the weekend, this year will be no different as he had purchased nearly all of his gifts and I have still not purchased a single one. No one who has celebrated a Christmas with me will be surprised by that.

I am not a serial procrastinator in other areas of my life. I always got my homework done on time in school and hit my work deadlines now. There is just something about Christmas shopping. Maybe it’s having to be around all the people at shopping malls (which is no longer an excuse given the rise of eCommerce and has always been self-defeating as the crowds get larger as Christmas approaches) or maybe it’s little excitement I get from the creeping anxiety that this might finally be the year I don’t have anything to give anyone on time. I cannot be the only person who feels that way.

I would be much more effective if I set an internal deadline some time before Christmas Eve to complete my Christmas shopping. There is an idea referred to as Parkinson’s Law that holds that work will expand to fill the time allotted to a task. The idea also applies to monetary budgets and many other things. If I had to complete my Christmas shopping today, then I would. Mind you I won’t be doing that, but I might set aside Friday afternoon for the task. It may be irrational to both understand why I delay my Christmas shopping until the last minute and yet not do anything to change that reality, but alas. Take my own experience and use it as an opportunity to reflect on how you complete your own tasks. A task will take as long as you allow for it, so impose tight deadlines on yourself and watch your productivity increase as your mind calibrates to those tight deadlines. It will take a bit of experimentation to figure out how tight you can set internal deadlines as lying to yourself will defeat the purpose, but as you start to think about New Year’s resolutions it may be more effective to think about New Month’s or even New Week’s resolutions instead.

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.