When entering into a new venture or trying to add new skills onto an existing skill base, there is often a period in the early phase where results are worse than the starting point. Then things will bottom out. Then results will start climbing, first back to baseline and then above it. The net result is a gain, but there is short-term pain that must be experienced to get there. This pattern is called a J curve (as it looks a bit like an italicized J when plotted on a graph). I describe the J curve regularly to clients who are acquiring businesses, but it is not a regular feature of my own professional life currently. Recently, I invited the J curve into my personal life.

As longtime readers may recall, curling is one of my regular seasonal recreation activities. Going into this fall season, now about three weeks old, I committed to a significant alteration in my form. Despite what you see in the Olympics, most recreational curlers use a stabilizer to support them during their slide instead of relying on their own balance with a bit of assistance from their brooms. This leads to inconsistencies in the delivery, inconsistencies that I want to eliminate from my game. It is perhaps unfortunate that I learned using a stabilizer in the first place, but doing so makes it easier to get started so I understand why I was taught using that technique. I began practicing the new technique during the spring but did not use it during competition. Now I am using it exclusively.

Results so far are mixed. My teams have been winning consistently, but more in spite of me than because of me. I’ve made a few key shots, but my percentages are lower than in the spring and I’m still falling over on some of my shots (not to mention the other variances that affect my shots that are not as visible). Despite this short-term regression, I remain committed to the change. Once I accumulate sufficient repetitions to overcome my balance issues, something I’m devoting extra practice sessions to achieving as I’m not great at halfway doing things, my delivery will be more consistent and my game will improve. This will be the upswing of the J curve. I’m not there yet, but I expect to be there within a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll keep practicing and hoping that I don’t cost my teammates too much while I struggle on my climb out of the valley.

I spent four days in Las Vegas last week attending the Rhodium Summit. It is one of the few conferences I consider a can’t miss (and also one of the few times each year I get to see any of my clients in person). I do wish the event were somewhere else, though. The hotel this year was on a more isolated section of the strip so there were fewer restaurants available. Being in a Vegas casino is always a bit disorienting anyway since there are deliberately no clocks or windows on or near the casino floor. This wasn’t helped by the daytime highs in excess of 100 degrees that largely kept me inside. But enough about the negatives.

There are no pay-to-play speakers at Rhodium. Each of the talks is voted on by the attendees. My topic about drilling down on particular client avatars did not garner enough votes for me to get a speaking spot, but I suppose that was always likely given that it is a conference for digital entrepreneurs and I run a law firm. The event is three full days of content, workshops, mastermind sessions, meals, and being surrounded by other people living a similar professional life. One of the great parts for me now is that I’m able to reconnect with people and follow along with their journeys from afar as this was my third year attending. There can be a loneliness to operating a remote business that is rarely discussed, but a conference like this is a reminder that there are others like me.

Coming back from this year’s Rhodium, my immediate business focus is on trying a few AI workflows that other people have used to great effect. We don’t prospect in quite the same way as any of the other conference attendees, but there are a few tools and methods I’m going to try in order to see how well they transfer to the law firm context. Something will work, but I’m not going to even try to handicap which thing it will be.

On Saturday, I drove down to Charlotte for the afternoon. This is not a normal day trip for me, but I had reason to do so. One of the people I’ve met through my business and with whom I speak on an almost weekly basis was visiting and it was a chance to shake his hand. Since a face-to-face connection is a deeper connection than a digital one, I made the drive to the Queen City.

I still find it amusing that no one is exactly the height that you expect based on video conferences. Camera angles can do weird things. Every time I meet someone in person after meeting them through a video screen this happens, a reminder that what is mediated through the screen doesn’t necessarily accord with reality. Sadly that can be true of much more important things than how tall someone is.

We walked around the neighborhood where I used to live and discussed business and football and why certain parts of the country are superior to others as we stopped for food and drink at a couple of places. It was jolting how much new construction there has been since I moved from Charlotte during the pandemic. It is still the same city in many ways, but there was more happening on Saturday than I remember. Of course, it was around 80 degrees at the end of September so there was ample reason to be out and about.

During dinner at the food hall that I consider the best in the state (and at which my companion still opted for a hamburger and fries instead of any of the myriad regional and global offerings), we came up with a few possibilities for new ventures. I’m excited about some of them and exploring them in the coming weeks will give me a break from the increased busyness that has finally come to the law firm.

I went to two different new places this weekend. As my mother was staying with me, it was easier to justify doing things that I would not otherwise have done. With all of the necessary caveats about a small sample size, expectations did not correspond with enjoyment.

Late morning on Saturday, I decided we would drive out of the city to a spot with a taproom and a restaurant set overlooking a river. It is a brewery with something of a cult following locally and that specializes in a style of beer that is one of my favorites. I had wanted to go for some time but wanted someone with me. Not that my mother drinks beer (she doesn’t), but she still came along for the ride. It was a disappointment. They didn’t have the beer that I really wanted to try on tap, and I would only drink one of the four that I did try again. I still soldiered through and finished each of the four samplers, but I felt a little cheated.

Before lunch, we took a short walk along a trail on the riverbank. It was nice to see a turtle sunning on a log, but the deluge we’d received a few days prior left the trail muddier than I wanted so the walk only lasted about ten minutes each way. Lunch was good though not spectacular enough to merit the trip by itself and then we returned to Durham.

On Sunday, we went to a jazz brunch at a restaurant in a converted car service station serving Southern food. I had come across it in searching for restaurants at some point but hadn’t had the occasion to actually go. I thought a birthday brunch would be a fine opportunity, though, so I made a reservation. I had driven past the place several times but didn’t know what to expect inside and hadn’t even looked at the menu. And it ended up being a very pleasant meal. I was even chided a little at the meal’s conclusion by the people at the next table who thought I was planning on way too short a stay at the Duke Gardens that afternoon. As it turned out, we did not stay as long as they’d suggested was necessary. It is late summer after all so there weren’t as many plants still in bloom. Regardless, I’m glad that I showed my mother the grounds.

I watched The Menu this weekend. It was a movie I’d wanted to watch for some time after watching a review on a YouTube channel that breaks down the cinematography, sound, and direction of movies. Given the dearth of movies that I actually watch, it may seem strange that I watch videos about the artistry of movies. So be it; that’s what I enjoy. This is another one of the movies I’ve watched and now written about that is not for children or the squeamish.

The Menu is about an ultra-exclusive restaurant set on its own private island, the chef, the staff, and the diners. Through a single service, a single tasting menu, we are shown the mind of the chef and so many of the things that are flawed in the world of fancy restaurants. For regular readers, you’ll remember not too long ago that I wrote about another chef-related movie (Hunger) from Thailand. The two actually pair nicely and speak to many of the same deeper themes through the lens of haute cuisine.

At a more fundamental level, The Menu is a film about obsession and the state of humanity after postmodern deconstruction has wreaked havoc. The most poignant moment of the film is the response that Anya Taylor-Joy offers to the results of this nihilism playing out before her. It does not rise to the level of Alyosha interacting with his brother Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov (almost nothing does), but it is a flickering candle of hope that perhaps some of the magic of life can still be restored. I already knew the plot before watching the film but won’t spoil it for any readers who might be interested as I would have enjoyed the experience even more had I not known what was coming next. Even then, it was a film that rose and rose and rose up to its crescendo and then landed nicely in its dénouement.

Last weekend, both members of the firm traveled to Washington, D.C. for the Southeastern Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference. It was a much larger event than I’d anticipated, perhaps 500 people or more in attendance across the two days. This was our third conference of the year so far, and our most targeted and important. Events like this one are the only times when we ever get to see our clients and referral partners in person. They are a chance to demonstrate our expertise in front of a large number of people. They are also completely exhausting for me. That is not the case for my business partner, but I write the newsletter.

Through our sponsorship, we were the only attorneys who were part of a substantive panel discussion during the event. Other attorneys acted as moderators, but unexpectedly our firm received top billing out of the law firms on the sponsor placard. I assume that we paid more for that privilege, but we wanted to present and that’s what we were able to do. There was probably a time when I would have been rather nervous sitting on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, but that wasn’t the case on Saturday. My strongest recollection was a dislike for how my voice sounded through the sound system in the auditorium, a result of sounding different to myself than to anyone else and something that isn’t unique to me. Legal diligence is hardly the most exciting topic, but I tried to keep things light by playing off college basketball preferences during the introductions since there were MBA students from four main schools at the conference.

By the time the closing reception started on Saturday in the late afternoon, I was finished. During almost every conversation I had during the weekend, I was pouring out energy and answers to whomever I spoke. It was little use for me to try to mingle with people by the end, so I spent most of the hour and a half sitting on a bench inside with a lite version of a thousand yard stare. I still had multiple people come up to me to talk about either the information I’d discussed during the diligence panel or about how they’d enjoyed our ongoing webinar series we’re doing around legal issues in small business M&A. I had only positive interactions the whole weekend, but it was not a weekend filled with rest.

Something I did several months ago to try to regain more control over my time was to add friction to my experience of watching YouTube videos. I removed the YouTube app from both my phone and my television. I also installed a desktop extension so that I no longer see recommended videos. I only see the channels to which I’m subscribed and if I want to watch something else I have to type it in the search bar. Those things may seem silly, but they helped me cut down massively on the time I spend mindlessly watching videos.

This weekend, I was in a location with the YouTube app installed on the TV. It offered a great reminder of why I deleted the app from both the TV in my apartment and from my phone. On both Saturday and Sunday, I spent way too much time watching I don’t remember what travel or urban planning or whatever other video I picked to watch. This only added to the malaise I’ve been feeling, which was the last thing I needed. At least I’ve returned to a place without that particular black hole so I can start building again. We also now have enough work to let me feel productive most days, so I will lean into that and regain some solidity.

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.