I went for a walk in one of the state parks near Raleigh on Sunday morning. It was part of my exploration whose goal is to discover the places that I hope will make me feel at home here. The walk itself offered nothing I hadn’t experienced before—a dirt path meandering through a few miles of woodlands with the furthest point on the loop trail overlooking a small manmade lake. I stopped and watched centipedes, frogs, and other small animals, but the stroll was mainly just me and the trees in the cool morning. Being in nature is refreshing, so much so that doctors in Japan sometimes prescribe forest bathing for stress-induced ailments. That wasn’t the best part of the morning, though. Not this day. This day was about seeing new territory, a new park, a new place.

Exploration and goals are essential. I’m sure that I’ve heard Jordan Peterson talk about the subject, but I have felt it directly. When I’m not pursuing something, everything starts to drift and to drift quickly. To my occasional physical detriment (and to the detriment of those who have traveled with me—just ask my family), I have walked and walked and walked and walked in order to see over one more hill or around one more corner. It is a compulsion, something that gives me life.

The events of the past year and a half curtailed much of my exploration of new places. I also let those events limit my exploration of meaningful ideas. COVID limitations continue to dissipate, and I have been jolted by my move to a new place. I want to throw myself into many new things all at once now that I can do so again, but I also know that there must be balance between exploring the unknown and staying within the familiar. In any event, I’m getting antsy.

I know that many other people have experienced similar versions of a quarantined cabin fever. They may not have felt it as acutely as me, but I have discussed the topic with plenty of others. Do something this week to face this problem head-on. Shake up your routine or try something completely new. Maybe it is a hike on a new trail as I experienced this weekend. Maybe it is a new recipe that you saw on a cooking show you watched last week. Maybe it is a new book to read or film to watch. Maybe it is an airline ticket for a trip next spring that you can start anticipating and planning in the coming months. Whatever exploration means to you, do some exploring this week. You’ll be grateful you did.

I watched the final of the European Championships between England and Italy on Sunday. The match was in London in front of a packed Wembley Stadium, the largest gathering of people in England since COVID lockdowns began. The stage was set for an English carnival, and less than two minutes into the game England took the lead. It was pandemonium in the stands. That goal was also England’s only shot on target during the entire match. England’s mentality changed after the early goal and were willing to sit back and defend. Italy grew into the game and bundled home an equalizer midway through the second half and won the trophy on penalties. England had set out a team to make speedy runs behind the Italian defense, but after the goal abandoned this approach. In relying upon what was already achieved, England set in motion its eventual defeat.
 

Watching the game and thinking about it through the evening brought to mind similar ideas that have been percolating through my mind through COVID. One is about the process of writing, an area where I am working not only on this newsletter but also on two other projects that will see the light of day in the coming weeks. It is a short passage from Stephen King’s On Writing. Well, when I looked at the passage again it is really just a parenthetical, but oh well—“kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Editing is hard. It is difficult to look at a sentence or paragraph that you wrote, knowing full well that you wrote it, and cross it out or delete it. Yet editing is also when the muse can make its appearance to sprinkle some magic on the words you write.
 

The second idea that the match brought to my mind is from Seth Godin. He specifically mentioned a law degree when he said it, but the idea doesn’t just apply to me. The idea is this: Sunk costs are gifts from our past selves; our present selves get to choose whether or not to accept those gifts. Easier said than done, but it is a thought-provoking paradigm nonetheless.
 

In my professional life, walking away from litigation, the field where I focused my energies and spent the first years of my legal career, to pursue this corporate practice was the implementation of these ideas. It was me evaluating what I had written into my autobiography, saying thank you, and moving onward to the next phase of my life. The process was not easy: It was so difficult that it took the economy shutting down for months for me to initiate and even then I could only do it in stages, yet it has already been vindicated by our early success.

Turning towards my readers, your business may require a similar process. Perhaps you had an idea of what your product-market fit will be and you expended time, energy, and resources to chase that market. If it turns out that you gain traction in an unexpected niche, then consider turning towards that new opportunity. Maybe you launched a new product that was supposed to take your business to the next level, but something just isn’t clicking with customers. Wherever your business is in its journey, remember to always be iterating, always improving, never resting on success already achieved. If you are unsure whether your business needs to change course, seek the perspective of someone you trust who is not involved in the day-to-day grind. If that is one of us, great. Send us an email and we’ll schedule a meeting. If that is someone else, then reach out to that person (or people). They are likely to be eager to help you in whatever way they can. 

In preparation for an internal strategy meeting this week, I reread a short essay that I recommend to anyone who has any control over his or her own work schedule or over the work schedules of others. It is an essay I have returned to several times and have gained new insights on each occasion. 
 

Quick summary—the standard business schedule is that of the manager. Every hour, there is a new activity or meeting and planning a new activity is as simple as finding the next available open hour in the calendar. Then there are people who make things, people who can spend entire days working on a single project and who need those extended periods of focus to attain true productivity. There are tremendous costs when these makers are shoehorned into a manager’s schedule.
 

When I worked at a large law firm, I was at the mercy of my bosses. If something needed to be done, then I did it on the partner’s schedule. This ruined several weekends, but it also took a toll during the workweek. Since billable hours are the key metric, though, all was well as my number of billables increased as a result of these interruptions. Then there were the weekly status meetings. Few things wreck a morning quite like those. I do my best work in the morning and now block off entire mornings where I don’t even check my email before lunch to progress on major projects. Not checking email was unfathomable in those days, but it was impossible to start a real project before the meetings since I knew I would have to stop, and the meetings were always midmorning. My hours of peak energy were thus spent giving a five minute verbal update that could have been conveyed in an email.
 

Now, there are two of us working together. I left BigLaw sooner than Bill, so I have had more time to detox from that mindset. Our scheduling practices, both individually and as a firm, are something we are still iterating. Some of our differences are personality-based and some stem from the type of projects we are completing. Scheduling in terms of weeks instead of days when possible helps as that mentality allows me to block off one or two mornings a week without impeding our busier meeting schedule or the increasing amount of production work we are doing. I don’t think we have found the proper balance yet, and the balance will shift over time. The benefit of this essay at this juncture is that its language helps us frame our scheduling discussions.
 

To read the essay for yourself, click HERE. If you do, my hope is that at a minimum you gain a better understanding of why certain people have very different work patterns than yourself. You may even want to experiment with your own schedule (to the extent you have the luxury of setting it) to determine whether blocking off half a day or a whole day for a single project helps you reach your larger strategic goals.

This week I want to introduce a YouTube channel that I found recently and have thoroughly enjoyed. The channel is Great Art Explained (LINK), and the premise of the channel is to explain a piece of artwork in a fifteen minute video. While the concept may be highbrow, the channel has over a quarter of a million subscribers so I’m not exactly on the cutting edge in discovering it. 

I have watched videos about Mona Lisa, Guernica, The Great Wave, and The Raft of the Medusa. There are others on the channel. The videos analyze the paintings themselves (elements of composition, materials, lighting, and color are discussed), but more interesting to me is that the paintings are contextualized. I knew that Guernica was Picasso’s attempt to display war’s senseless violence and that I walked into the Reina Sofia with the sole purpose of seeing the room-sized canvas (I had my parents do the same thing when they visited Madrid—the De Goya paintings in the Prado are more to my liking), but I had no idea that the image had become such an enduring symbol across many conflicts in the century since Picasso painted it. I now also have a better understanding of how seismic a shift in painting Mona Lisa was, but this alone didn’t satisfy me concerning just how long I had to maneuver through the crowd in order to see the painting up close for myself at the Louvre. 

I doubt that high-school me would have enjoyed these videos, but college me might have benefited from watching them before seeing some of the works which are their topics. Now maybe in the coming months there will be a video on Jackson Pollock—some context there might help me justify some of the minutes I have stood befuddled before his finished canvases.

I am taking Spanish lessons. It is part of an initiative that will lead to an active Latin America practice for the firm, but that practice has not yet materialized. This week, I want to share some reflections on my favorite Spanish word. It is a word that comes from Spain and its literal meaning may become archaic if current trends persist, but the word will endure. That word is querencia. Its literal meaning is the area of the bullfighting arena where the bull feels most comfortable in its struggle against the matador.

Ernest Hemingway did a better job than any dictionary in explaining a querencia:

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go in the ring, a preferred locality. That is a natural querencia and such are well known and fixed, but an accidental querencia is more than that. It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.” Death in the Afternoon

Having witnessed a bullfight whilst I spent part of a summer in Madrid, I have an experiential connection with querencia and that experience is probably what drew me to the word when I later encountered it. Even without understanding the nuances of the matador’s artistry and despite how most of the crowd waived bandanas shouting Cambie! Cambie! for most of the fight (for they were unimpressed with the bull and wanted it replaced), the whole thing was intoxicating.

Yet it is not querencia’s association with Spain that makes me appreciate the word; in many ways that link is a negative as I enjoyed too few aspects of that summer. It is instead how the word transcends its literal meaning to describe a powerful metaphysical concept. I have been in a liminal living situation for the past six months, my things in storage and no physical space I could claim as my querencia. I will be moving into my new apartment next week and am looking forward to making that space (and its dedicated home office) my querencia. That is why I have been thinking about the word so much recently. In the metaphorical sense, I have found a querencia in those moments of flow state, jazz or piano instrumentals playing on Spotify, as I have worked on a project in these early weeks of our new firm. My goal is to find that place more often and more readily in my new physical space.

Maybe spend a few minutes to reflect on your own querencia. Where are you most at ease? Where would you be most ready to make your final stand? If you want to go deeper, spend a few more minutes reflecting on how you reach your querencia state. If you find a pattern that gets to that magical place, then you can repeat it.

P.S. The bull only finds its accidental querencia during the bullfight. Maybe we too need to be in a struggle to find the place where we are most dangerous, most at ease, most ready to win.

I rewatched a Tedx Talk this week. The whole thing takes about 18 minutes and is worth a listen/view. To access the talk, click HERE. The thesis of the talk is that there is a formula/equation/diagram that in large part explains how some people and organizations inspire and some do not. Simon Sinek, the speaker, calls it the Golden Circle. In diagrammatic form, it is three concentric circles, why being the smallest, how being a bit larger, and what being the largest of the three.

There are two points from the talk that I have revisited on multiple occasions. The first is that people don’t buy what you do but they buy why you do it. One example of this the speaker gives is a comparison of Apple and Dell. Before Apple had the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, the two companies were ostensibly equal—both made and sold computers. But have you ever seen a Dell sticker on someone’s car? I haven’t, and the reason is that while Dell sells computers, Apple sells so much more: Apple sells minimalist design, contemporary cool, and cultural cachet (that all happen to come packaged as a computer).

Differentiating our why in the market for legal services is no mean feat, but the budding relationships we are developing with some of our clients that extend beyond providing legal advice are suggesting a meaningful direction towards which we are turning. We continue to reflect upon and refine our why as we begin our business journey. Whatever your business is, I encourage you this week to take a few minutes to do the same. Think about the why at the core of your business, then keep that why at the center of everything your business does.

The second enduring point from this talk for me is that there is a difference between leaders and those who lead. To be a leader is to have a position of authority or a title. To be a person who leads is to inspire others to follow, to inspire them so much that they follow for their own sake. We do not yet have employees, but in preparation for that time (which may never come) I remind myself often of this distinction in order to strive to be a person who leads and not merely a leader. Perhaps the world would be a better place if more people did the same.

Last weekend, Bill and I attended the wedding celebration of one of our law school classmates. It was the largest gathering I have attended since lockdowns were first implemented and it was great to be with people in real life instead of through a screen. I am thankful for all that zoom has provided over the last year and change, but nuanced communication is much easier in person.

During the weekend, I had lunch with the groom and another classmate who was celebrating his COVID independence day. It was the first time he had had lunch in a restaurant in over a year. I am no social media maven, but COVID independence day is a movement that we should all be able to get behind.

When we discussed the idea of his COVID independence day after we left the restaurant, I realized that I could not remember my own COVID independence day because I had already reintegrated going to restaurants into my life. The realization came with a tinge of disappointment that I had let this moment of gratitude pass me by. So this week, I ask that you take a few moments to reflect on your own COVID independence day (whether it has already taken place or is still yet to come) and to be grateful for those little things that we once took for granted but were made impossible during the lockdown period.

A painting came up during a podcast episode I heard this week and I wish to share it with you. The piece is titled “The Listener” and it was painted by James Christensen. If you want to see the paining for yourself, you can click HERE. This is not the sort of painting I would put on my wall—the composition is far too jumbled. And that is precisely the point. It is filled with figures representing the distractions we face at every hour of every day. Unusually for a painting, the artist himself provided a written interpretation of the piece:

“Since a painting has no soundtrack, the title character at the center of ‘The Listener’ has found the best way to shut off all the noise in the visual cacophony around him by closing his eyes. Listening to his still, small, inner voice, he remains centered without being overcome. We can all find peace in this busy world, but sometimes need to be reminded that we are in charge of our destiny and each of us has the ability to focus without being pushed and pulled as victims.

“The characters found in the colorful ‘noise’ around the listener in this painting take many forms including politicians, mothers-in-law, musicians, and famous artists . . . can you find Picasso? Through it all, our listener ignores the noise in favor of his own personal tranquility.”

The painting’s protagonist is sitting eyes-closed in a meditative pose. There can be a place for meditation, but this week I ask you to take a smaller step to eliminate some of the noise of life. Try this experiment: Don’t read, watch, or listen to the news. Out of a small sample size, a week is how long it takes for the anxiety of checking your phone to begin to ease, but you can try it for three days and see how you feel. I have curtailed my own news input to basically nothing for over a year now and have no intention of returning to following the vicissitudes of the daily news. This is not a new idea. It is said that Napoleon did not read his mail for two weeks as most matters will have sorted themselves by the time he read about them, allowing him to focus his energy on the matters that truly required his attention.

If anyone takes up this challenge, I want to hear about how it impacts you. Feel free to reach out at jamesdavid@barlowwilliams.law.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have received a great deal of attention in the media over the past few months given the eye-watering sums being paid for some of these new assets. As a result, I see NFTs as a great place to start a portion of the newsletter to compile resources on new, exciting topics (audience feedback will impact how regularly this section appears in the newsletter, so let us know what you think). We are already working with clients who are active in the space and the underlying cryptography will expand into other uses in the near future.

If you want to read a quick primer on NFTs, consider this article from the Wall Street Journal or this article from the New York Times. For those of you who prefer audio, an excellent explanation was provided by Katie Haun (now a general partner at Venture Capital firm Andressen Horowitz–if you want to go deep on the subject there are a series of videos published by the VC firm here) in a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss. The whole conversation is fascinating, but the NFT discussion begins at 61:16. Links: Spotify or iTunes. If a YouTube video is more to your liking, two of the better ones are here and here.