For several days last week, I was without internet connectivity in my apartment. Given that I work from home and almost all of my work either involves online teleconferences or working with documents stored and accessed via cloud servers, this was not ideal. I had the benefit of being able to use my mobile data via a wireless hotspot so I was not bereft of the internet, but I was data-limited and my connection speed was reduced. This forced me to take Zoom calls on my phone while simultaneously looking at documents on my computer, a practice that I find annoying and so resented doing myself even if I had the camera stationary in order to minimize the potential distraction.

On Thursday with my internet still out, we extended what is usually a half day of being in-person working together into a full day as I drove to Durham as if I had a normal working commute. I don’t miss that part of the day, even if the absence of a commute means I listen to fewer podcasts now than I have during certain periods. My productivity was also less than it would have been on a more typical Thursday morning, but there were some broader strategic discussions that compensated for this slight delay in production work.

By the end of Friday afternoon, I had a new modem in place. It had also been a roller coaster of a day, starting off with a business pitch that went very well and ending by offering the opportunity to absorb some lessons on how to better manage particular situations (and angry counterparties). It was a good evening for a group dinner and some decompression. It was also nice to have a period of forced no-television for a few evenings, even if this meant I had to delay watching the gold medal match of mixed doubles curling at the Winter Olympics, something I finally did early Saturday morning when I couldn’t go back to sleep. Mind you, I returned to watching videos sooner than I would have liked. Maybe that is suggestive of something I can experiment with removing in order to create more time and mental space for other things.

Saturday, I found myself in the suburbs. Specifically, I was in Cary, a (for now) suburban dreamscape that is a divisive subject among residents given the number of people who have relocated there from out of state. I have been intermittently watching a Netflix show about Asian megacities, so I took the opportunity to visit H Mart to look around and have a late lunch.

H Mart is not a normal American grocery store, and while there was one in Cambridge I never ventured the short distance from Harvard to Central Square for that purpose so this was my first visit. You enter into a section of fruits and vegetables with a makeup boutique also cornered off to greet you as if you were entering a department store. The fare is more varied than what I grew up with and there is an obvious bent towards Asian varieties. I did not see rambutans, so rejecting the similar lychees I did not purchase any groceries. After walking though the fruits and vegetables, you circle around the back past the meat and kimchi. Then there are rows and rows of items where little to none of the packaging is in English, but that is not unique among international markets. The back left corner is a fish market that had some wonderful-looking salmon steaks and sashimi. The smell in the fish market section was close to some of the markets I have visited myself in Asia. Yes, it is the smells of a market that linger longest in my memory. Some have been wonderful, like the spice markets in India, and some have not, like a particular market in the afternoon heat of Saigon.

After my walking tour, I circled back through the bakery (the macaroons looked delectable, but that isn’t my area of expertise) and wandered back to the alleyway on the far right of the store to browse the menus at the built-in food stalls. I cobbled together a three-course meal for myself with fried octopus balls as an appetizer, Korean fried chicken as my main, and sushi for dessert. Not that I intended it to be a multi-course meal, but my orders were ready at different times from different stalls. The octopus was easily the best of the three dishes, meaning that the meal started with its crescendo and waned from there like an anticlimactic narrative.

The store is about a half hour from my current apartment, so visiting won’t become a normal part of my routine but it was nice to get a dose of different this weekend, however sanitized. My propensity to walk through markets and grocery stores in each new place I visit, though, will persist. I have found that to be among the quickest ways to learn about a place and its people. I like to think I inherited this habit from my grandfather, even if I never joined him in any of his own scouting visits to grocery stores.

Monday morning, I received a video on my phone. It was one of my young cousins delivering a very important message: “Hi James David, brother’s on the way and he’s doin’ fine. Bye.” Then she repeated the message after some prompting and that was that. The message was delivered with the sort of innocence that only a child can have, oversized decorative candy cane twirling in her hands and still wearing her pajamas. Her little world has changed forever—now she has a baby brother and is a middle child. Given her repeated insistence that she is not a baby, though, I’m sure she will come to embrace having someone younger in the house. By early afternoon I had received several pictures of my newborn cousin.

I no longer use Facebook and have not even responded to the text pictures, which I probably should have done. Alas, this post is my way of sharing how excited I am to welcome another member into the family. It will be at least a few months before I can meet him in person, but I look forward to holding him and just watching him sleep (fingers crossed) in my arms—there is nothing quite like holding a baby and thinking about all the possibilities for its life. A few of my law school classmates have also had children in the last month, and all of these babies have offered a stark reminder that some things matter a whole lot more than everything else.

I stopped reading a book this week—removed my yellow post-it note bookmark and returned it to the library with roughly two-thirds of the text unread, and this a work of fiction too. I have stopped reading nonfiction idea books after I read the same idea presented three different ways. Such books really should have been articles anyway. But with fiction I have persevered, stubbornly adhering to my initial decision to read the book even after it fails to grab my attention after multiple attempts. Though I derive no satisfaction from such a slog, it’s difficult to admit an error, even one based on incomplete information that has been rendered obsolete.

Several of the contemporary thinkers I most admire pride themselves on how many books they start or skim, not how many they finish. These people place books into three rough categories: books to be read and enjoyed for their own sake, mainly fiction and biography/memoir; books to be read to absorb a writer’s main ideas, encompassing most nonfiction works; and books to be studied and reread many times.

My own nighttime reading is intended to fit into the first category. I want to wind down and relax without resorting to the television screen, not send my mind whirring. It is self-defeating to persist through page after page of drudgery in what is intended to be pleasure reading. It is true that some books start slowly and build. To account for this, there is a little heuristic I once heard that you should read 100-minus-your-age pages (currently 70 for me) before setting a book aside. This particular book was well past that threshold and still hadn’t drawn me into the story.

I have been contemplating how this stop-loss ethos might apply to other areas of life. There are certain realms where it has no place, but maybe the principle extends beyond leisure and even into certain professional projects where neither results nor pleasure are forthcoming. It is something I will keep in mind anyway.

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.