I felt old this weekend. Sure, according to many I was born old. Be that as it may, this was still a feeling I’ve only felt a few times. I was in Charleston with my family and many people from my little hometown for a wedding. The weekend was filled with seafood and the charm of walking through the city. I tried to go shopping as well, but that was a fool’s errand.

As for the exact source of my realization, that isn’t difficult to locate. It wasn’t the ceremony. It wasn’t the music at the reception. It wasn’t the conversation at my table at the reception either. No, it was that someone I watched grow up was getting married. That was a first. Even with my brother we grew up together. Talking with the bride’s younger brothers only added to the feeling. I had to look up at them as we spoke even though I can remember them as young children. I assume that these moments will become more frequent as the years go by, but for whatever reason I wasn’t ready for this one. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable weekend on the whole.

I returned to Raleigh on Sunday from my latest “work” trip (in time for week two of my Monday curling league). And while I did not neglect my work, I did other things too. This post is more of a highlights summary than the usual fare of a more detailed account of a single topic or event.

I sat alone under redwood trees in the cool mornings while my body adjusted to the time difference. These were not the giant sequoias, but they still make one feel small in their presence. That is something needed from time to time.

I drove a car remotely that was in a parking lot several miles away. That is what is now possible through the technology developed by Qibus, the client alongside whom I worked during the trip. Even with the prototype driving setup I used, it is incredible (1) that the whole thing is possible at all and (2) how close it felt to driving while physically in the car. Just don’t ask me to explain any of the underlying engineering.

I had small group dinners almost every night, an experience I have too rarely. It is remarkable what conversation among friends can bring to the spirit. The conversation was different every night, but I did try most of the time to steer things away from whatever projects we had each been working on that day.

I took the ferry into the city for a meeting with the MicroAcquire team, a beautiful ride across the bay unshrouded by its famous fog. We celebrated the closing of the first transaction they helped broker directly as we were the attorneys who represented the seller. Then at lunch, standing in a park looking across the bay, we saw some of the activity that has tarnished San Francisco in recent years. When I did some work in an alcove in a shopping mall, I was treated to even more. Take nothing away from how San Francisco looks from a distance, though, as it is something to see out on or across the bay.

I took in a jazz concert in a small community theater where we were the youngest people in attendance by twenty years or more. My grandmother would have been proud. The songs were from an earlier era of jazz than I had listened to before and while the change was nice I don’t anticipate altering my regular workday background music.

I attended an Octoberfest event that was so out of place as to be comical. Sure, there was a large tent set up with long communal tables, but they also played the chicken dance song multiple times. And the lines were so long for bratwursts that I had paella for lunch and finished my lunch before those who waited in line for sausage and cabbage even sat down. Then once I got back to my lodgings I was whisked off to evening tea and ginger snap cookies to round off the trip.

The broad outline of the training cycle at the gym I patronize is a few months of exercise programming and then tests to measure your benchmark numbers for a series of main lifts. At the conclusion of the most recent cycle none of my numbers increased. I largely blame my second bout of COVID for this, but there was a major decrease in one lift that was due to something else, something positive. That something is the subject of this post.

My hamstring flexibility has always been limited. I’ve never had any serious muscular injury, but this lack of flexibility has been and is a problem. I’m working to address this both through a dedicated stretching routine and through placing special emphasis on loading my hamstrings during weighted exercises. A key aspect of this is going through the full range of motion of the squat, something I haven’t really done in the past. Given the limitations of my hamstrings, I can lift less going through the full range of motion than if I only went through half or three-quarters of it. This caused the number on the board to go down quite dramatically. Now, though, I’ll be able to consistently perform the full exercise at weight ranges where I might finally improve my strength and flexibility after a long period of stagnation.

It’s not enough just to track metrics. For starters, you need to track the things that actually matter. This is not easy and something of a trial and error process. Then, once you home in on the correct things to measure, you need to measure them accurately so you aren’t lying to yourself. This can be even harder. Lifting weights offers some easy metrics—how much weight and how many reps. Most things aren’t so simple, but I was deluding myself to my detriment even with easy metrics available. Let this be a reminder that both measuring the right things and being accurate in your measurements matter if you want to improve something.

One of my tasks today is to mark up a purchase agreement, a routine part of my work. I have already skimmed it and know what is ahead of me. Actually, I didn’t even need to skim it to know what I’ll face. It will be a document designed to achieve three purposes: to catch out the unwary; to anchor to aggressive positions; and to increase legal bills. Never mind that time kills deals and the attorneys on both sides know the final terms will not resemble those presented in the initial draft, going through the back-and-forth of sending redline after redline is the process of “negotiating” a contract. An entire economic model has been constructed around this process, the almighty billable hour.

Our value proposition is different. We charge our clients to deliver positive outcomes no matter how much of our time it takes. We also offer pricing certainty. Those are the things clients care about and why our model will prevail. It is the difference between delivering a process and delivering an outcome. I came across a blog post this week that presented a story illustrating this. I’ll reproduce part of the post here:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young boy. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00

Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

That story is apocryphal. Nonetheless, it really was the man’s knowledge that constituted all of his value, not his time. We take more time on our projects than did the old man in the story, but we too are in the outcomes business. And even though we have lost the business of potential clients who would prefer to pay for a process, the outcomes business is where we will stay.

I ate dinner at one of the many new-to-me restaurants in Raleigh over the weekend. It was the sort of meal made possible by a visit from my parents as the restaurant serves small plates and you need multiple people to sample enough of the menu to get the full experience. The restaurant is only a few blocks from my apartment and I had walked past it many times but never eaten there. From the outside the entrance is only large, unadorned wooden doors. Inside, the space opens up into a two story dining area looking into an open kitchen. The back wall is the Instagram bait of the restaurant’s décor, a collection of Chihuly style glass in every color of the rainbow displayed from floor to ceiling.

We ordered dishes with flavors from all over the Mediterranean, from Spain to Greece to Morocco to Israel. Some were better than others, and for me the best were the short rib and the lemon potatoes, but we ended up eating in three courses as plates were brought out as they were ready. It is not normally the way I eat at restaurants, even with a group of people, but variety is good sometimes.

The food was good, though probably not good enough to justify another trip. There are, after all, many other restaurants to try in the Triangle. What was more notable, and why I chose to write about this restaurant, was that there was nothing about the place that indicated we were in Raleigh. Yes, the cuisine was Mediterranean, but that absence of place made the dining experience somewhat hollow. It may that be my own focus on trying to make this place my home that drew my attention to the way in which that restaurant would fit in perfectly well in Miami or New York, but that was my experience nonetheless.

Has anyone else felt something similar recently? I’d like some validation that I’m not the only one who has this observation that everything is becoming more and more similar regardless of where you are in the world.

I use a digital organization tool to keep a running list of my active tasks and projects. We also have a daily standup call and so each morning I am able to update the list and assign due dates for different tasks. It has been a helpful part of my professional organization system.

In recent weeks, though, the list has grown longer. I could blame this on our increased workflow, but it was more a lack of organization as I put things on the list that aren’t pressing tasks and that just sit there and fester. Over the weekend, I listened to a podcast that proposed a different way of organizing my task list. Instead of a single list of tasks, I now have four lists—things to create; things to review; emails to send; and things to discuss. This little change helps me organize my days better— send emails and have discussions at the beginning of the day during the daily standup call, create in the morning, review in the afternoon. Obviously, email flows in throughout the day and I have to deal with things that arise. At least now I feel more comfortable closing the email window while working on a task and I have a better list to which I can anchor so that I am able to drive things to completion better instead of being sucked into making progress on lots of things but not getting any single thing done.

I am only a few days into this new iteration of my task list, but so far it has helped my frame of mind. For those who use to-do lists, maybe consider batching similar tasks together yourself this week to see if it makes things better for you too.

I hosted a dinner party on Friday. Well, I’m going to call it a dinner party. It was really just having a couple friends over, but that is more than I have done previously in my current residence. The food was simple, a beef stew cooked in the crock pot served over rice with a side of roasted bell peppers. Are those complimentary? Maybe not, but that’s what I had so that’s what I made. The food wasn’t really the point anyway.

The purpose instead was live, in-person social interaction. I had very little of that during most of July and so have taken some steps in August to add more. Not much more, mind you, but more than zero. We discussed topics ranging from the mundane to the comical to the serious. I wasn’t the only one who had suffered from COVID during July, so we commiserated about that. They told me about a blowout wedding they had attended and the possibility of expanded social connections in the Triangle for all of us as a result. They did their best to get me to finally purchase a new set of golf clubs and join them on the course, something I haven’t done yet. I told them about the vision for the law firm over the rest of 2022 and about my efforts to sink some roots here so that I don’t feel compelled to leave again as I have lived the last decade mainly in 2 and 3 year stints in different places.

The conversation lasted several hours and was just the sort of thing I needed. There were even pastries from one of Raleigh’s local bakeries for dessert (and breakfast on Saturday morning). It was the sort of evening I’d like to have more of in the future.

I have reflected on my approach to reading this week. In doing so, I came across an article from one of the few blogs I check on a semi-regular basis and have been chewing on its contents over the past few days. This missive incorporates from the whole piece, but focuses on a few sentences (helpfully bolded in the original): Read old books. Read the best ones twice.

When it comes to knowledge, time is the greatest filter. What is useful is remembered, what is not is forgotten. To survive for more than a few years (or sometimes even months), a book must have something real. It need not have more than a single core idea, but that idea must have substance. Even if the examples are no longer relevant, the idea still matters. Those are the books I want to absorb. As an aside, allowing the filter of time to work its magic is also why I gave up reading the news a few years ago, a decision that continues to bewilder some but one upon which I have no intention of reneging.

I plan to begin this new course by re-reading books I have already read, or more realistically re-reading the bits I highlighted or underlined when I read them the first time. After all, returning to the highlights is why I made the effort in the first place. I still haven’t gotten to the point of feeling comfortable writing my own notes and summaries in books—one step at a time.

With my fiction reading, I am taking a different approach as it serves a different purpose. It is more for entertainment and helping me wind down and get to sleep. Even there, though, I am steering away from the newest books and allowing time to filter for quality. Now I just need to cut out some of the mindless YouTube videos so that I may set upon the path, something easier said than done after the many hours I have spent on that particular platform over the past month.

I have finally recovered, so this will be the last of three posts in a row centered around a movie/show I watched while I couldn’t do much else. At a pace of one episode per day, I watched a courtroom drama mini-series set in London called You Don’t Know Me. I cannot recommend it for children, but last week’s piece was about a show tailor made for the kids so I don’t feel too bad about that. The show starts with the prosecutor’s closing argument, and the evidence is stacked heavily against the defendant—the gun used in the murder found in his apartment, in a shoebox with his passport and some money no less, the victim’s blood recovered from under the defendant’s fingernails, CCTV footage of the defendant driving to the scene of the murder, and cell tower data placing the defendant at the scene of the murder too.

With all of that wrapped up in a nice summary package, the real drama starts. The defendant has fired his own solicitor so that he could deliver his closing argument himself. Through a series of extended flashbacks, the real story unfolds, and there is a surprise at almost every juncture. How the judge allowed him to tell the whole narrative strains credulity from a legal procedural perspective, but people who aren’t attorneys probably won’t need to suspend disbelief as much as I did. I won’t spoil anything in case people want to watch the series, but it is definitely one where you can debate the ending after the credits roll on the final episode.

This mini-series was based on a book. I commented a few weeks ago about how movies based on books are almost never as rich as the original works. Extended television series face the same problem to a lesser extent, as those who read the Game of Thrones books would surely attest. The extended television series, though, is what ushered in the golden age of television that we have experienced over the last decade or so. This is perhaps because of the genre’s ability to tell more complex and layered narratives and to delve deeper into the character’s minds than was possible before, to be more like a book.

There is a television series I have watched during the past few weeks, a series that I dare say would be impossible for an American studio or production company to get the green light to film given American mores and even laws in some states. So what happens on this show, you ask? A young child, often about three years old, is sent by his or her parents on an errand alone. The errands are things like delivering a work uniform or buying diapers or picking up lunch. A pretense is created to set off the errand, a discussion about the task (sometimes taking as long as half an hour if additional motivation is required) takes place between the child and a parent, and then the child sets off. There is a microphone hidden in an amulet that each child wears like a tiny purse. There is also a large camera crew following each child around at all times and the store owners have all been made aware of what is taking place—the children aren’t actually alone at any point even if they don’t realize that. The self-talk is hilarious, there are often moments of confusion or hesitation, but eventually the tasks are completed. The best part of the show is the triumphant walk home. You can tell in their walk that the children are brimming with confidence. They know that they have just taken a step towards growing up.

There is a careful logic to the errands. The tasks are always things the children have done before with their parents and are at places they have visited before. The parents also center the errand around some other person to provide extra motivation. The diapers are for baby brother, the uniform is for dad, the lunch is for grandma, etc. This allows the children not just to be brave for themselves, but to be brave for someone they love too.

This show illustrates what some academics call the zone of proximal development. The cliff notes version is that there is a zone of competence where you know what you are doing, know what to expect, and where you can operate on autopilot. Outside of that is a much larger area of things you don’t know or don’t know how to do. The area just beyond your zone of competence, the things you can do with a little assistance or can do but haven’t quite mastered, that is the zone of proximal development. If you stay in your zone of competence all the time, you stagnate and grow bored. If you stray too far outside the zone of competence, you freeze up and become disoriented. Growth lies in between, in always pushing just beyond the zone of competence, expanding the zone of competence. That is exactly what happens on this little show.

P.S. The show is called “Old Enough” on Netflix. The show’s audio is only in Japanese, so you do have to be willing to read subtitles to watch it. I have also seen a similar thing on British television where slightly older children navigate their way across central London, probably on YouTube.