Month: February 2019

The Common Code

I consider myself a communication enthusiast.

This might seem intuitive, given my background. My bachelor’s degree is in communications. I spent nearly three years as a TV news producer. I’ve shared my thoughts for years on Words of the West.

Yet, my passion for communication goes far deeper.

I am fascinated by languages. I learned Spanish in school, and I do my best to stay proficient in it. I also enjoy listening to languages I don’t speak — Italian, French, German, Japanese, Chinese — and picking up on the different patterns between tongues.

I enjoy web coding. I’ve become ensconced with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The ability to change the look and feel of an online asset with a set of keystrokes is as fascinating as it is terrifying.

And I enjoy numbers. I consider the ability to solve problems and make predictions using a universal ruleset to be eye opening. And the impact these actions have had on our understanding of the world continues to inspire me.

Language. Web code. Numbers.

These seem to be a diverging diaspora at first. A set of interests that stray further and further from my passion for the written word.

And yet, I feel they are intrinsically linked.

You see, I view all of these disciplines as communication subsets. While each subset has its own context, they share a common purpose.

Language, web coding and numbers all serve as information transfer protocols. They all represent actions that lead to intended responses.

One can speak numbers just as well as one can speak with prose. And the impact of sharing this information can be just as profound.

Yet, these talents are not universal. We don’t have the innate ability to understand language, code websites or solve algebra problems.

Such abilities must be learned. We must put in hours upon hours of practice to gain proficiency.

This is no easy task. It’s rife with false starts, growing pains and frustration.

But when we attain mastery, we enter an exclusive club. We gain the ability to share information with others who are just as proficient. And we can use these powers to connect, collaborate and achieve.

This is the holy grail of communication.

It’s the backbone of human development. The neural network that drives innovation. The key to unlock that which has long been beyond our comprehension.

Communication, in all its forms, is essential to success. Albert Einstein couldn’t have shared the theory of relativity without the vehicle of math. Google and Amazon couldn’t have changed the way we search and shop without a code standard in place.

Yes, it can be frustrating that the protocols are scattered. That Portuguese is incompatible with Korean. That HTML code is different than algebraic expressions.

But those divisions can be a blessing in disguise.

They allow for context-specific innovation. Innovation that is first incubated within a particular culture or area of expertise.  Innovation that can only be shared outside of these circles with those who make the effort to learn the underlying protocols.

I believe this arrangement allows for greater diversity of thought. I believe it provides for a wider expansion of ideas than would be possible if everything was under one unifying code.

And for the intellectually curious, this arrangement ignites the passion to keep exploring. To learn, grow and discover.

These benefits overshadow the inconveniences of the communication diaspora. They underline both a common truth, and a call to action.

Communication, in all its contexts, is worth understanding.

Let’s expand our horizons.

Don’t Be Stupid

One of my favorite stories my father tells is of the time he first met his future father-in-law — my grandfather.

This took place in my mother’s childhood home in Queens, New York. The home was under the flightpath of LaGuardia Airport, and whenever my father heard a plane overhead, he would duck instinctively.

My grandparents and mother stared at him like he was from Mars each time this happened. Years of roaring jet engines overhead had numbed them to the sound of low flying planes.

Once my father adjusted to the engine noise, the conversation began in earnest. My grandfather — a longtime New York City Public School math teacher — asked my father what he planned on doing for a living.

My father, who was finishing up college at the time, said he hoped to work in advertising.

“That sounds alright,” said my grandfather. “But you should really think about teaching instead.”

He then listed off the benefits of the profession — steady pay, long summer vacations, union protection, and so on.

Eventually, the conversation moved to a new subject. But the exchange left an impression on my father. He would later say this was the first time he experienced my grandfather’s ethos:

You can do what you want and be stupid. Or you do it my way.

 

Even though this story happened before my time, I enjoy hearing it each time it’s told. I enjoyed telling it again just now.

It’s hard not to chuckle at the thought of my father ducking every few minutes as an airplane flew overhead. Or to smile when imagining my grandfather effectively saying Don’t be stupid… in a thick New York accent.

Sure, my grandfather didn’t say those exact words. But the message was very New York — blunt, edgy and filled with tough love.

Yet, the story also gives me pause — for several reasons.

For one thing, my father did eventually become a teacher. After working in advertising for 8 years, he grew to loathe the profession. So, he got a Master’s Degree and rebooted his career as an elementary school teacher. Fast forward 25 years, and he’s still teaching — although he’s “graduated” to middle school now. My grandfather’s words proved prophetic.

But more than anything, it’s the moral of the story that gets me. That heavy-handed message of Do the smart thing. Don’t be stupid.

It’s a message that fits symbiotically with its source.

My grandfather was a great man. But he was also a stubborn man who could be overly simplistic. His perspective on life was shaped by his experience living through the Great Depression, a world war and two heart attacks. However, that perspective often led to a My way or the highway approach to differing viewpoints.

It’s a bit cavalier to classify people in this way. And calling people who take a differing viewpoint stupid is downright reckless.

Yet, my grandfather was a man of principle. He was a man who stopped watching baseball for 40 years after his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers betrayed him by moving to Los Angeles. He was a man who made his own repairs in his home, rather than paying a professional to fix the issues that sprang up.

He knew his way worked. He saw it. He lived it. He believed in it.

So, in his view, the other way must have been stupid.

My grandfather had a major influence on my life. I idolized him. I’ve written about him before, and I’m sure I will again.

Yet, in the years since my grandfather’s passing, I’ve come to recognize I’m more and more like him. I have a similar wit, a similar love of storytelling, a similar frugality when it comes to money. And I even have some similar mannerisms.

What I don’t have is a penchant for calling people stupid when they take actions I wouldn’t.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Not long ago, I was driving down the road in a suburb of Dallas. Traffic was relatively light, and I was making good time when a car slowly turned from a side street into my lane, just ahead of me.

I slowed down to adjust to the newfound obstacle in front of me. But to my dismay, the driver never sped up. I tried to pass the car, but a stream of cars, trucks and SUVs in the adjacent lane blocked my path.

So, there I was, suddenly going 10 miles under the speed limit in the left lane, stuck behind a snail. At the rate I was going, I would hit every stoplight on the way to my destination.

My commute had gone from a breeze to a chore. I was less than enthused.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

The car in front of me wasn’t just going slowly. Its driver seemed to be brake checking me intermittently. I found myself slamming on the brakes at random times to avoid a collision, even though there was no traffic in front of my new vehicular nemesis.

My displeasure turned to exasperation. Was this driver texting? Were they lost? And why couldn’t they pull off the road to sort themselves out?

Finally, the driver signaled to turn. But instead of gliding into the turn lane, the driver slowed down to a near stop, while still in the left lane.

I lost it.

Behind my fortress of sheet metal and glass, I screamed You are such an idiot. Why don’t you stop being stupid and learn how to drive!

That’s when it hit me.

I call people stupid when they do something I don’t agree with. Just like my grandfather once did.

To be clear, many of us would be agitated if we found ourselves in the situation I just described.

It’s hard not to be miffed when someone else blatantly disregards the flow of traffic and drives erratically in front of you.

Yet, the actions of the driver who caused this consternation were not illegal by any means. Inconsiderate, sure. But not illegal.

So why did I jump to such rash conclusions about the driver’s intelligence? Was I being as stubborn and simplistic with my perspective as my grandfather had once been?

Perhaps.

But I don’t want to take back what I blurted out behind the wheel of my SUV that day. Not one bit.

There’s an ongoing revolt against the word stupid.

It’s a small skirmish in the greater war for Political Correctness that’s overtaking our society. But for a singular battle, Operation Eradicating Intelligence Insults has raged for quite a while.

I believe it started with the release of Forrest Gump in 1994 — a movie that showed the world how those with low IQ can still live extraordinary lives. As the 90s progressed, expanding diagnoses of autism and a crackdown on bullying helped encourage a softer touch.

By the time Millennials came of age, those who didn’t meet standards were no longer stupid. They were special.

And with that shift, stupid became just another S-word. A way to swear at those we despise, but solely in the context of name-calling.

Disagree with a politician? Say they’re stupid. Frustrated that your favorite team’s quarterback threw a game-ending interception? Call him stupid.

The word is nothing more than a form of catharsis these days.

But not to me.

I wasn’t calling the driver of the car in front of me stupid just to blow off steam.

Yes, I was mad. But if I solely wanted an outlet, I had saltier language to choose from.

No, the words I chose were quite intentional.

Just like my grandfather years before, I had a definition for stupidity. And this driver’s actions fit the bill.

In my view, stupidity constitutes inconsiderate actions that put one at a disadvantage.

The driver’s lack of awareness of the flow of traffic and constant brake checking certainly put me at a disadvantage that day. The term fit.

In my grandfather’s view, a plumber or a handyman in his home put him at a financial disadvantage. Why pay their fees when he could MacGyver it himself with PVC pipe and some duct tape?

And why fully support his future son-in-law’s plan to enter the advertising world from the get-go? That field was ripe with uncertainty — uncertainty he knew would put my father at a disadvantage. Better for him to go with the sure bet of teaching.

So, yes. I guess I do empathize with my grandfather’s simplistic perspectives and brazen style. It might not be politically correct, but it isn’t entirely self-serving either.

I believe that to heal our fractured society, we must all get comfortable understanding the concept of stupidity — similar to the form in which I’ve defined it.

We must identify its sources, call it out and eradicate it.

This starts with identifying inconsiderate actions, and recognizing the disadvantages they cause downstream.

It continues when we spread the word that these behaviors are detrimental to our society, and are un welcome.

These actions, in tandem, will spur conscientious-yet-aloof offenders to change their ways. To stop acting stupidly and causing unneeded problems.

And when enough of them do, it will cause a sea change in how we interact with each other.

If this sounds ambitious, it’s because it is.

But even if the end result seems far off, starting the process is well within our grasp.

Contrary to the old adage, stupidity is a fixable problem.

It’s about time we get to work on that solution.

The Components of Safety

Safety.

It’s a term that instantly stimulates our minds.

It evokes imagery of a blanket. Or a lock and key.

These connotations demonstrate just how pervasive this aspect of our lives is. What else can combine images of something so warm and soft with something so cold and metallic?

Even so, it’s hard for us to pinpoint why safety is so essential. Much like True North or gravity, we seem to take its presence in our lives for granted.

I believe this assumption is less willful than it is inevitable.

We inherently know to hold safety in high regard. Yet, we can’t seem to verbalize our instinct.

Perhaps this is the case because the concept of safety crosses basic boundaries of classification. There’s the physical component, which insulates us from mortal injury. And then there’s the mental component, which insulates us from disastrous consequences.

At first glance, the physical component would seem to be the most important. After all, if this aspect were to eviscerate, so would our existence.

The physical component of safety is the reason there are railings on balconies and seat belts in cars. It explains why we know better than to jump from a cliff face onto jagged rocks below. Or why we shuffle our feet when traversing icy sidewalks in tennis shoes.

By tending to our physical safety, we prevent ourselves from getting maimed, paralyzed or killed. Perhaps just as critically, we avoid reduction of our existence to a statistic of infamy.

The list of tragic blunders is already quite lengthy. Anytime we say Don’t do that. It can kill you. it means two things.

  1. Someone did do that very thing and paid the ultimate price.
  2. Someone else likely witnessed the tragedy and warned others not to repeat the action.

If we keep safety front and center, we avoid becoming one of these cautionary tales.

So, yes. The physical component of safety is quite essential. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the mental component.

The mental component of safety is what insulates us from undesired outcomes. These can include the loss of status, the loss of income and the loss of possessions.

These circumstances are seemingly less severe than major injury, paralysis or death. While those outcomes are permanent, it’s possible to recover from the setbacks from a loss or prestige or earthly possessions.

Yet, the mental component of safety has an outsized impact on our behavior. While the physical component impacts our actions in the moment, the mental component impacts our behavior over the long term.

And this is not always to our benefit.

Consider this.

When we prioritize our mental safety, we often aim for stability. This causes us to become risk-averse to a fault.

Why? Because risk provokes change. And change threatens stability.

Avoiding risk is tantamount to maintaining our status quo. So, the safe play is the least risky option.

Yet, risk-aversion can cause us to limit our potential. It can cause us to sacrifice happiness for steadiness. It can cause us to leave opportunities on the table when they aren’t a sure thing.

The more decisions we make under this guise, the more we find ourselves trapped.

We settle for what we get. And we stick with it, even if it saps the joy and vitality out of our lives.

Worse still, our society actively reinforces this behavior.

We’re expected to work to earn the money that pays the bills. To follow the well-worn path others have walked before. To be inconspicuous, safe and normal.

Our happiness and our untapped potential don’t factor into these expectations.

Sure, we pay lip service to these factors through Christmas cards, Hollywood movie scripts and the year-end bonus system. But we are trained to be means to an end. To promote the system that keeps us all ordinary, and thereby protects us.

The problem is that all of this is a grand illusion.

No matter how safe we’re taught to play it, risk abounds. Bad circumstances continue to lurk around the bend, looking for the right moment to strike.

And since we’re ingrained with the values of stability, we find ourselves woefully unprepared to deal with sudden and unexpected changes.

When we lose our job or our home, we feel violated. And when we lose our status, we’re devastated.

These situations generally don’t leave us dead or disfigured. They generally don’t leave us in mourning over the loss of a loved one.

Even so, we end up emotionally broken.

We’re completely unable to cope with circumstance. The house of cards we built to organize our lives has been toppled by a Jenga tower. And we don’t know what to do next.

There’s only one way out of this maelstrom. And that’s to take a sledgehammer to the rules of the mental component of safety.

Only by accounting for risk can we be prepared to deal with it. That means acting a little bolder, staying a little truer to our spirit and even formulating Plan B while Plan A is humming along.

By making ourselves a little more vulnerable, we strengthen our resiliency.

And if we do this at scale, we can break the chains that bind us. We can formally reject the societal codes that leave us defanged in our volatile world.

So, let’s stop running from risk. And let’s embrace a universal truth.

Safety is important. But it’s not a panacea.

Act accordingly.

Nature Redefined

What is the best we can be?

The question is top of mind, following an advertisement that has stirred the pot quite a bit.

In the ad, razor company Gillette challenges its own tagline The Best A Man Can Get. The company addresses examples of bullying and sexual harassment. Then it challenges men to rise above this behavior, even launching a new tagline The Best Men Can Be.

This ad really resonated with me. After all, my mantra is Be Present. Be Informed. Be Better. And the ad spoke right to that third pillar.

Yet, the clunky delivery and heavy-handed message of the ad left many incensed. In one fell swoop, a company focused heavily on men’s products seemed to be attacking masculinity. To some, it seemed like a betrayal of the highest order.

On a basic level, I can empathize with this sentiment. As a man, it’s hard not to feel vilified these days. While the Me Too movement has held prominent men accountable for their abusive behavior, it has, at times, painted with a broad brush. And when it has, it’s lumped the entire male species in with the transgressors.

This bold typecasting is one of the most effective ways of sparking the discussion needed to  effect social change. The process of cultural transformation is inherently uncomfortable, after all. It’s hard to make a difference without pushing the boundaries of what we’re collectively accustomed to first.

Yet, there’s a fine line between uncomfortable and threatening. And the Gillette ad was a bit cavalier at times when navigating that line.

As such, I understand some of the backlash. But not all of it.

Why? Because many of the angriest voices seemed to be rallying around the term Boys Will Be Boys. And that is unacceptable.

Boys Will Be Boys is the line that comes up most often when defending reprehensible male behavior. It attributes transgressions to male nature, rather than conscious immorality. And in doing so, it lets the offender go scot-free.

Boys Will Be Boys is a line that serves as a license to condone fighting, womanizing and drunken belligerence. It’s a line that serves as a license to permit a hazing and bullying to flourish systematically. It’s a line that even serves as a license to shrug off sexual assault allegations levied against Supreme Court justices — the supposed moral compasses of the land.

It’s a line that needs to go.

The more we skirt accountability as men, the more our society suffers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re 15 or 55. We must be held accountable for our actions.

This includes reining in the more garish sides of masculinity. It means eradicating behavior that make women feel inferior or unsafe — the very disparities that have sparked the Me Too movement.

Now, men are not entirely to blame for these disparities. Women have not always unified to protect their rightful sense of status or safety. In fact, the level of deceit and betrayal some women levy on other women could make the most stone-faced men blush.

But in a world where men have for too long had a monopoly of power and influence, it is men who must lead the charge to heal these transgressions. It is men who must set a new standard to help promote a world that is fairer and safer for all. It is men who must resolve to be better.

It starts with burying Boys Will Be Boys for once and for all. With understanding that nature can be redefined. With recognizing that new cultural expectations can, and must, be set.

This, I believe, is the message Gillette was trying to promote. And it’s one worth listening to.

Let’s heed the call. Let’s be the change.