Category: Newsletter (Page 7 of 23)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From 6PM on Friday to 6PM on Sunday, I consumed only water as part of a 48 hour fast. I opted for 48 hours instead of 72 (or more) to preserve my sleep, but that is still enough time to give the effects I wanted from the fast. Fasting like this is something I do 2-3 times per year. It helps me reset and recalibrate my eating habits and going through it reminds me that I can do mentally challenging things.

To accelerate some of the benefits, I spent most of Saturday walking. I walked on parts of Duke’s campus I’d never visited, including the chapel that is the icon of the campus, and discovered a new dim sum/boba tea restaurant that just opened and I will visit soon. I also made some real progress on an audiobook I’ve been listening to and managed to get a little sunburned after the clouds parted early on during my jaunt. Sunday afternoon was a bit of a drag. I was not as productive as normal during my Sunday afternoon admin session prepping for the upcoming week. I expected this, but it was still annoying as it made Monday morning a little more chaotic before my Monday meetings began.

Now for the bit of irony from the weekend. I watched Hunger on Netflix. Yes, that is the real title. Yes, I was thinking about food even more than usual this weekend. The movie is a taut thriller that had been on my watch list for a while. It is in Thai so for the full experience you need to be willing to read subtitles, but it is worth the extra effort. The show is about a young female cook working in her family’s noodle restaurant in Bangkok who is noticed by a junior sous chef of a famous chef who only cooks at elite private events. I won’t spoil the plot, but it is a cinematic ride with plenty of twists and turns and one that made me reflect on the costs associated with pursuing a singular greatness. It also made me even hungrier by the time I broke my fast on Sunday with some bacon and brisket.

I continue to grab new experiences when possible as a means to expand my horizons and perspective. A few weeks ago, this meant traveling across the Atlantic to attend a European business event. This weekend, it meant going to my very first professional cricket match, a T20 match between the Washington Freedom and the LA Knight Riders.

T20 is a version of cricket that lasts about as long as a major league baseball game, and if you are familiar with baseball you can watch a few explainer videos on YouTube and be ready to watch a cricket match even if you’ll still have a few questions. The action of T20 cricket is at a more regular cadence than a baseball game—six balls per over, about a minute between overs, twenty overs of batting per team, and a thirty minute break in between.

There is a T20 league in the United States that is in its second season. The league splits its games between Dallas-Fort Worth and here in the Triangle, both areas with large South Asian diasporas. The epicenter of T20 cricket is in India, home to the Indian Premier League. The weather on Sunday felt like I could have been in certain parts of India. It was over 100 degrees and humid when the first ball was bowled. I huddled under an umbrella for some shade as I sat in my foldable camp chair watching the action. Almost everyone in attendance knew the rules, but there were a few brave souls who sat there in the heat needing explanations of what they were watching. Ample respect for them.

I had wanted to go to Friday’s match to see a few stars that I’ve watched in various highlight reels, but the weather had other plans and that match was rained out. I therefore went to the weekend’s other match instead. There were still plenty of international players on display. In addition to Americans, there were players from the Caribbean, England, New Zealand, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Australia on the pitch. The crowd shared a similar level of diversity.

I sat with a side-on view, the equivalent of sitting down the baseline at a baseball stadium instead of behind the plate, which made it a little challenging to tell how the ball was moving. It certainly seemed like the ball was moving faster than it does when I’ve watched cricket on a screen. I was also zero for two on my assessments of whether challenges to the umpire’s decisions would be successful, so there were a couple of different forms of humble pie that were served to me as I sat there.

The match itself was not very competitive. Washington’s bowlers blew away LA’s batters leaving them with a below par score. Yes, the teams supposedly represent different cities even though the matches are only played here and in Texas; no, there isn’t a team name affiliated with North Carolina. Washington’s opening batsmen, both Australians, then made light work of the chase and the outcome was never in doubt. That was secondary to the overall viewing experience. The crowd was maybe 2000-2500 people. There were food trucks offering concessions. It was too hot for me to want a curry, but a mango lassi might have been a great option if I’d seen it before I was walking towards the exit.

I’m continually trying to improve my work processes. As part of that, I am almost always reading at least one business-related book at any given time. Currently, that book is The Effective Executive, which may seem an odd choice for a small business owner. Regardless, it is the exemplar of the Lindy effect in business management books and so I decided that now was the time. I’m not quite halfway through it as I’m focusing on content output, but the second key concept of the book (the first is that effectiveness can be learned) is that to be in control of your time, you have to know how your time is spent. This seems obvious, but it is something I haven’t done in the last five years.

I learned to hate time tracking when I worked at a big law firm. I had to record every task I completed in six minute increments. It was a task that I frequently neglected, leading to a regular scramble at the end of each month to record all of my time. I was not alone. The problem was so widespread that there were several policy changes about inputting time during my stay at the firm. A lingering dislike for the tedium of time tracking is a secondary reason why we use flat-rate billing for our client work.

Anyway, it’s time for an experiment. For the next four weeks, I’m tracking all of my working time. I want to know totals and breakdowns, but also I hope that I’ll find dead spots that can be reallocated and that I’ll be more able to reflect on how different tasks at different times affect my energy levels. I’ll write about my conclusions whether anyone else finds them interesting or not when the analysis wraps up. I hope that I’ll be able to make some educated changes to how I handle my schedule by mid-August.

Next on the business book list is going to be re-reading $100 Million Leads as one of my upcoming content projects is to create targeted lead magnets. If anyone has other recommendations for resources in creating lead magnets, I’m happy to include them in that effort as well.

I’m about halfway through the third season of Clarkson’s Farm. For those who haven’t seen the show, the premise is straightforward. Jeremy Clarkson, longtime host of Top Gear and an individual who is banned from many countries for having insulted them over the years, moved to his countryside estate in the Cotswolds and began farming full time just before the global pandemic. To paraphrase the man himself, he is the world’s worst farmer. And there is a film crew with him to record the lunacy. And it’s hilarious to watch. This is especially true when he gets lectured by Caleb Cooper, his young farmhand who is in many ways the show’s real protagonist, for his latest ridiculous idea.

This season is framed as a competition of sorts between Jeremy farming all of the non-arable land on the farm and Caleb farming the arable land to see who will have the best balance sheet at the end of the year. Jeremy tries all sorts of things—pig farming, mushroom cultivating, berry harvesting, planting mustard, and selling (well, trying to sell) nettle soup to name a few so far in the season—and Caleb takes a few risks of his own to save on costs. Caleb has a lifetime’s knowledge of how to farm, though, so that is a major advantage over Jeremey who spent much of his life in London.

Beyond the hilarity of it, the show does a very good job documenting how difficult it is to make a living as a farmer and has received a great deal of recognition among the farming community in the UK for that reason. That sets it apart from other shows that lean hard into voyeurism but lack any redeeming value (e.g. reality television). Since it is grounded in reality and peppered with a bit of cowboy bristling at government overreach, the show is worth a watch if you are in need of escapist entertainment this summer.

Wednesday was the main business day of last week’s London trip. We had both breakfast and lunch meetings with nice meals and good discussion at each. The networking event that was the raison d’être for the trip was Wednesday evening. My desire to speak to as many people as possible is why I pushed for my business partner to join the trip. The event was packed and the ultimate success of the trip will hinge on how well we build on those conversations. There were several that were promising. That said, the event was over four hours of constant conversation and completely drained me. My business partner has a temperament that handles such environments much better than I do.

I built the event up, but I had decided we should fly across an ocean to attend so that probably isn’t surprising. I hoped for immediate results, but that was never going to happen. As with almost everything we do, we are playing a medium to long-term game and chasing short-term wins isn’t the way to succeed. Anyway, to help recover mentally and physically we finished the night with a kebab and lemon Fanta. I wish that I could have that meal here too.

Thursday brought a reversal. When we’d discussed what we might want to do while in London, my traveling companion named only one thing. He wanted to see a play in the West End. Based on a recommendation, he chose Hadestown, a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I went into the show having done only cursory research and hoping to see great production value, the equivalent of watching an expensive live action Hollywood blockbuster. He had done ample research and was hoping to watch a show that would have enduring artistic and literary value. One of us got what we wanted. Well, as long as you don’t count the subpar fish and chips that we ate beforehand.

Since we did not book any additional business meetings for Thursday or Friday, we had more time to be tourists than we’d originally planned. So we ambled about different parts of the city from Thursday to Saturday—Westminster, Southbank, Battersea, South Kensington, Regent Street, Soho, Exmouth Market, Liverpool Street, Hyde Park, etc.—eating as we went but without going in anywhere that required advance tickets. It was the sort of whirlwind overview walking tour of a place that I have moved away from in recent years. I’m sure I’ll visit London again, but I have no immediate desire to return and was ready to depart when we did. Then on Sunday we awoke at 5:30 and headed off to Heathrow.

On Monday evening, I boarded a flight from RDU. Some seven hours later, I deplaned on Tuesday morning at LHR. I could blame the small children around me on the plane for my inability to sleep during the flight, but that would be disingenuous given my own history of not sleeping on airplanes. We took the underground into the city and made our way to our lodgings a little before 9 AM. I had harbored some ideas of sleeping for a couple of hours during the late morning, but our room wasn’t ready yet so those notions were scuppered. Instead, we decided to push through the day and not sleep until nightfall. This meant that we walked to stay awake. A lot. Miles and miles with only vague directional goals. We stopped and sat on benches in multiple parks. We ambled down some of the twisty streets in the British capital. We struggled to adjust to which way we needed to look before crossing the street (even if there are painted instructions at nearly every intersection).

We went to the British Museum in the early afternoon since it’s close to where we are staying. I even listened to a nearly four hour podcast about ancient Egypt on the flight as a way to kill the time so I listened to a lot of stories about pyramid building as I knew that there were rooms of Egyptian artifacts in the museum. The timing of the visit might not have been the smartest choice in the struggle to stay awake. Beyond the Rosetta Stone, very few of the items on display were enough to hold my attention. The museum was a good idea, but was the wrong choice for a day like yesterday when extra stimulation was needed.

We did a few of the stereotypical British things that I cannot do where I live currently but could when I lived in DC, namely eat breakfast at Pret-a-Manger and eat lunch at Nando’s. I feel obliged to say that this was the worst Nando’s experience I’ve had of the four countries where I’ve had the peri-peri chicken, which was a disappointing surprise given its cult status in the UK. That said, I still ate all of it. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

After the museum, we returned to our lodgings and handled work matters sufficiently to survive the day and create more time during which we could recover and come back to them today. Then we finished the day with a fancier dinner, complete with dessert as a reward for staying awake, at a restaurant near the top of one of the towers in Central London. From the terrace just above it, we overlooked Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral and looked across the river at the Shard as the sun began to set and drenched the city in golden yellow. London is not as pretty from above as a city like Paris or Vienna, but its oddly angular buildings do still have a certain visual appeal.

On a related note, the weather has been glorious—cooler than it is at home currently, sunny, little to no humidity, and dry. If the weather were like this all of the time, the British would have to collectively find something else to complain about. Since the word “if” is doing so much work in that sentence, though, I don’t expect the British humor to change any time soon.

Yesterday, we presented a webinar discussing letters of intent in small business acquisitions. We worked through a slide deck for around twenty minutes and answered questions for nearly an hour. None of the questions were too surprising, though a few of our answers likely surprised some as I hold some positions that run counter to those held by many others who work with members of this audience.

This was the first time I’d been on the presenter side of a zoom webinar. I’ve done several similar events times before, but those were smaller and were normal zoom meetings. This one maxed out around 130 people, which might be my biggest audience since my valedictory address during my high school graduation. The way things were set up on my computer, though, I could only see three people (myself, the host, and my partner who was also presenting) along with the PowerPoint slides we used as the lattice for our initial presentation. I did not even look at the Q&A tab as people wrote in their questions but left that to the host. In many ways, this made it very similar to the zoom calls I have multiple times per day. It’s just that this one was recorded and will be uploaded for people to watch later.

There was a time when I would’ve suffered for days in the buildup, needing to take antacids and struggling both to fall and stay asleep. None of those things happened. I have done the work to be ready to give a presentation like that as I’ve been doing these transactions for years now and have seen them shift along with market conditions. I was still anxious during the minutes before the event, though, because we hadn’t conducted a dry run of the initial presentation and my computer completely froze during a call the day before. As I’ve joked many times, technology is great until it isn’t. There weren’t any technical snafus.

My activity just before the presentation was much more limited. I wrote a few notes to organize my thoughts, but I only used them as a set list and not for substance. I watched the famous “F—it, we’ll do it live” clip right before signing on for a last little pep talk. Then I did the thing. Someday soon I’ll watch the recording and turn into my own harshest critic, but I’ll save that exercise for a few weeks after there is more distance from the event itself.