Month: June 2019

Accomplishments and Stepping Stones

Celebrate good times. Come on!

If you’ve been to any party or other social gathering with a boombox, you’ve likely heard this song.

And you probably saw someone too old, too overweight or too uncoordinated — or maybe all three — gleefully letting loose on the dance floor to Kool and the Gang’s upbeat rhythms.

It’s an odd mixture. Big smiles, cringeworthy dance moves and a song we rarely listen to on any other occasion.

Yet, it’s as much a part of our culture as Apple Pie and Fireworks on the Fourth of July.

For we are wired to go all-out to recognize accomplishments. To rent out that hotel ballroom, put on our formal wear, hire the expensive DJ and invite all our family and friends to come join us.

We do this for weddings, birthdays and graduations. For anniversaries and reunions. If there’s an accomplishment to be had, it will be celebrated with glamour and gusto.

At first glance, it all seems innocuous enough. After all, what’s so wrong about one night of fun?

A lot, it turns out.

There is a phrase making the rounds. One still riding the embers of the afterglow, a decade after it went viral.

That phrase? Start With Why.

Simon Sinek introduced the phrase to the world through a TEDx Talk and a bestselling book. And many of us have been finding our Why ever since.

On the whole, this is a good thing. We operate better — as people, corporations and social systems — when we have a clear North Star.

Purpose drives passion. Passion drives productivity. And productivity drives results.

But the Start With Why model is not a panacea. It’s a finite resource, meant to be used in moderation. And we’ve spread it way too thin.

Consider this. Many 5-year-olds these days will have a Pre-K Graduation. They’ll put on a miniature cap and gown and pose for pictures. All in front of their beaming parents.

What is the Why behind this celebration? Those kids in the caps and gowns haven’t even gone to school yet. The experience of sitting in those tiny desks, reading what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard — it’s all foreign to them.

No, these Pre-K graduations are all for the parents. It’s another photo opportunity, another chance for a social media status update showcasing their child’s latest accomplishment. Even if that accomplishment is simply being at a daycare center 45 hours a week, while their parents are at the office.

The celebration does not match the occasion.

Compare this with my Kindergarten graduation. My class had a barbecue on an early summer evening with our teachers in the school’s recess yard. Our parents weren’t allowed to attend.

I remember being nervous at first. I had hardly ever been away from my parents or grandparents after dark at that point in my life, and I didn’t know what to expect. But after several hours of running around outside, eating burgers and toasting marshmallows on a campfire, I was actually bummed when my parents came to pick me up. I wanted to stay longer.

The barbecue was a celebration. But it was very down to earth.

I don’t remember feeling as if I had accomplished anything in particular. I just remember having fun hanging out with my friends and teachers.

And for a shy, introverted kid, that was sufficient.

Our daily lives are full of accomplishments these days.

If you participate in a 5K race, you’ll get a finisher medal. Even if it takes you an hour and a half to walk the course.

If you’re a teenage girl, you get to sport a fancy evening gown and ride in a limo. Simply for turning sixteen.

And if you’re done with daycare, you get that Pre-K graduation.

These disparate celebrations have one thing in common. They’re really all about showing up.

About making your way to the 5K course. About waking up on your sixteenth birthday. About being at that daycare program day after day — even if you’re too young to have anywhere else to go anyway.

Is this really how we want to define accomplishment? As the moments we reach by default?

I certainly hope not.

For accomplishments are not about the end of a chapter. They’re not about the changing of a calendar field. Or adding another year to our age.

Those are arbitrary occurrences that occur without our direct influence.

No, accomplishments — true accomplishments — are that which we attain through transformation. They’re markers of the change we either initiate or manage. They’re our reflection after we get to the other side of that tunnel.

When it comes to our personal lives, marriage is an accomplishment. So is the advent of parenthood.

On the work side of the equation, earning a promotion to a new position can be an accomplishment. And if your work leads to a positive change in society, that’s an accomplishment as well.

Simply showing up is not sufficient. To realize an accomplishment, you have to give something more.

As I write this, I am not far removed from my MBA graduation.

Not long ago, I put on a cap, gown and decorative hood. I walked across a stage in a basketball arena, and was handed a diploma cover. I posed for endless pictures, holding my smile in place until my face hurt.

In the weeks after this occasion, dozens of people offered congratulations. They talked about what a significant achievement this was, and asked me what I had planned to do next.

The thing is, I’m actually not done with my business school classes yet.

My MBA program actually holds ceremonies for summer graduates three months before the completion date of our classes. So, the inside of that diploma cover is empty. All of those well-wishes premature.

Some of my classmates speak of how odd the whole situation has been. Of how the graduation ceremony felt like a tease.

Yet, I do not share these laments.

I am still not sure what we were celebrating in the first place. Because I don’t view the act of completing an MBA program as an accomplishment.

Now, I’m sure some of my dear readers might consider this statement to be crazy. Perhaps most of them do.

After all, business school is no day at the beach. It’s challenging, stressful and transformative.

But if you boil it all down, an MBA program is a service. A service I paid for and have, at the time of this writing, nearly completely attained.

An MBA can open doors. But, as with any university degree, it alone guarantees me nothing.

So, from that perspective, considering my graduation an accomplishment is akin to getting a trophy for showing up. Not my cup of tea.

This is not to say that such celebrations as an MBA graduation are worthless.

For while I feel the near-completion of a business school regimen is not significant on its own, the opportunities it can unlock certainly are.

Those opportunities, when realized, represent the true accomplishments from this endeavor.

But they’re only possible if you go through the ringer first. If you show up and don’t give up. If you do the seemingly ordinary things that lead you to sport a cap and gown. The very things that lead to a disproportionate of well-wishes from onlookers.

Society considers the aggregation of these mundane moments as accomplishments. I prefer to call them stepping stones.

Such a term represents the long game, not the endgame. It illustrates a fluid state of affairs — one where each seminal moment leads to the next challenge.

The stepping stone analogy taps into the power of connection.

Of the ties that bind between our experiences.

Of how, in the words of Semisonic, Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

There is something blissfully pure about that concept.

I find strength in it. I’m sure you can as well.

Sure, it’s not quite as fun as throwing a party for the next milestone. And it might demand more introspection than we’re comfortable with.

But that dash of perspective keeps us aligned. It inspires us to keep climbing, keep aspiring, keep achieving.

That’s a great gift to give ourselves and those around us. 

Let’s give it.

Order of Operations

PEMDAS.

I still remember the day I first saw those strange letters on the whiteboard. I couldn’t have been more than 12 years old, and I was fully perplexed.

There I was, sitting in a middle school Algebra class, and there was no math. Just a bunch of letters — letters that didn’t even spell out a real word.

What on earth was going on?

Moments later, my teacher decoded the mystery. PEMDAS was simply an acronym for the mathematical Order of Operations.

When faced with a complicated math problem, we should solve the area in Parentheses first, the teacher explained. Then, we should resolve the Exponents. After that, we should take care of anything that needs to be Multiplied and Divided. And finally, we should handle everything that must be Added or Subtracted.

The teacher then wrote a jumbled math problem on the board, making quick work of the tangled mess to show us how to use the power of PEMDAS to our advantage.

“This is critical,” the teacher exclaimed. “You will need to know this principle to solve the problems in this class.”

My confusion turned to righteous indignation.

Up to this point, math class had consisted of conquering straightforward tasks. What’s 150 divided by 3? What’s 4 to the third power? I did what was asked of me to the best of my abilities, and that was that.

But now? Now I was expected to just do all this work on my own, just to make a problem solvable.

It didn’t seem fair to me. Why was I being asked to jump through all these hoops? To understand and apply these obscure rules about what to do when?

This is so pointless, I fumed inwardly. I’ll never have to use this in real life.

Oh how wrong I was.

It was not just another work day.

I was cooking lunch with several colleagues at the Ronald McDonald House — part of my employer’s volunteer initiatives.

As lunchtime approached, I took my place on the serving line. My task was to open a sandwich bun, put it on a plate, fill it with meatballs and pass it to a colleague — who would help fulfill the next part of the meal.

With sanitary gloves covering both of my hands, I prepared for the mass of people entering the dining room.

I quickly developed a routine for making sandwiches. My left hand would pry the bun open, while my right one would add the fillings.

While I did this, several other colleagues cooked more food behind me. This way, we made sure we fully covered the lunch rush.

Things were going smoothly at first. But once the new batch of food was integrated into the serving line, everything went haywire.

Suddenly, my rhythm was off. My hands no longer instinctively knew what role to play. And I lost track of what I was doing.

At one point, instead of filling a sandwich bun, I handed the empty bun to the person I was serving.

My colleague quickly stepped in and filled the order. But she gave me a hard time about it for the rest of the day.

As I reflected on what went wrong, my mind drifted to somewhere I hadn’t expected. It went back to PEMDAS.

For my experience on the food line was like a math problem. My hands were the operators and the plated sandwich was the output.

It was a simple equation, until the new batch of food was introduced. Suddenly, there was more information than I could process in real-time.

With a line of hungry patrons, I couldn’t just call Timeout to solve the suddenly more complicated math problem. So I powered through — and made some boneheaded errors.

My words from decades earlier had come back to haunt me. Order of Operations was indeed quite present for me in real life.

My serving mishap story is not unique.

Order of Operations is critical in nearly everything we do.

We rely on a proven routine, both for survival and for cultural acceptance. There is a sequence to things — a pattern we’re inclined to follow. And there are consequences for severing ties with that sequence.

This is not only true on the assembly line. It’s true in all corners of life.

If we don’t shower and brush our teeth each morning, we grace our loved ones, friends and co-workers with a foul stench. If we don’t properly prep our meals before cooking them, we waste a perfectly fine dish. If we take items from the shelves at the store without rendering payment on the way out, we break the law. And if we get intimate with someone without consent, we break the law and obliterate trust.

Whether we’re creatures of routine or change artists, we must remain vigilant to the power that Order of Operations holds. We must do what we can to avoid utter chaos.

For the costs of chaos can be fatal — either literally or through social exclusion. To survive and thrive, we must find some order in a world that’s naturally frayed.

Order defines the boundaries of connection. And connection allows us to achieve far more together than we can alone.

Even as technological advances break down established barriers — from processes to communication challenges — this principle remains as true as ever. While the tech systems we rely upon today are more efficient and expansive than ever before, there is an established protocol to each of them — both for coding them and for using them.

Order of Operations reigns supreme.

As it turns out, the day I saw the word PEMDAS on the whiteboard might have been the most consequential of my scholastic life.

It opened my eyes to a critical framework. One that could help me for the rest of my life.

Yet, I believe it could have a similar effect on all of us.

The more we are aware of the invisible processes that drive our habits and routines, the more we can use them to our advantage.

This selective mindfulness can keep us centered, coherent and consistent. These qualities can help us provide even greater value to those we impact.

So don’t mock PEMDAS.

It might be a clunky acronym, but it’s also the key to something profound.

On Heroes

Heroes.

From our earliest days, we’re wired to have them.

As kids, we sleep in Superman or Wonder Woman pajamas, dress up as astronauts for Halloween, and dream of becoming firefighters.

Heroes provide us with a guiding light. They give us something to aspire to and an example to follow. All at a time when we’re at our most impressionable.

But even in our early days, the types of heroes we choose can vary.

Take me as an example.

My childhood hero was Bernie Williams, the centerfielder for the New York Yankees.

Growing up in New York during a time when the Yankees won four world championships, this might have seemed like a natural choice for me to idolize one of their players. But there weren’t a ton of other kids who looked up to Bernie the way I did.

Bernie Williams was an excellent player, to be sure. He won a batting title, and the statistics on the back of his baseball card always looked solid.

But he wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t loud. And he wasn’t self-aggrandizing.

He went about his business quietly and with class. Both on and off the field.

While others didn’t find these traits exciting, they intrigued me. I tried to follow his example as much as possible.

Yet, something strange happened when I had an opportunity to meet him.

I was in high school at the time, and was at an awards ceremony. The ceremony was being held in a large hotel ballroom, and I was told Bernie Williams was on the other side of the room.

This was actually not that unusual. On top of being a phenomenal baseball player, Bernie Williams has long been a standout classical guitarist. He would often perform at various events around the New York area — unannounced — during the off-season. And he was supposedly going to do just that at this event.

Coaxed on by my friends and acquaintances, I started walking across the room to meet the man I idolized. But with each step, my mind was racing.

Am I bothering Bernie by ambushing him at his table? I wondered. And even if not, how could I possibly express all he had meant to me throughout my childhood?

I must have gotten halfway across the room before I changed my mind. I walked back to my table and sat back down.

I don’t look back on this incident proudly. But it does carry weight for me. For it inadvertently marked a turning point in how I viewed the concept of heroes.

Bernie Williams had an outsized impact on my early life. But I didn’t directly know him at all. Everything I espoused and emulated came from what I saw of him on television, or what I read about him in books or newspapers.

There were some degrees of separation between me and my idol. So, it was difficult to reconcile just how much of my image of him was real. And that, as much as my shyness, made me terrified in the moment of truth — the moment when I could finally come face to face with him.

Now, I do believe that what I had seen and read about Bernie Williams was accurate. I believe he was, and is, the person I have always believed him to be. But when I talked myself out of an introduction in that hotel ballroom, I ceded the opportunity to find out for sure.

My loss. Or potentially my gain.

For as I reflected on the incident, I came to realize there were others I could look up to. Others who impacted my life in a positive way, but who I wouldn’t be so sheepish about approaching.

As I pondered who these might be, two people came to mind — one from each side of my family. They were my grandfather and my uncle.

I’ve written about both of them before.

My late grandfather — my mother’s father — was a World War II Navy veteran, who later became a math teacher in the New York City public school system. After he retired, he spent more than 30 years as a volunteer for the Museum of Modern Art. He spent all the time I knew him enriching the lives of others.

My uncle — my father’s brother — is a renowned cancer surgeon and researcher in Philadelphia. He’s spent all the time I’ve known him saving the lives of others.

But it’s far more than accolades that inspired me.

My grandfather was not just a veteran and a teacher. He was the best storyteller I ever knew, with an intrinsic knack for captivating an audience. My passion for writing and storytelling came from him.

My uncle is not just a defender against cancer. He sets a great example outside of his work on being selfless, staying even-keeled, and valuing the importance of family. I espouse many of these traits because of him.

And on top of that, both my grandfather and my uncle were approachable. I knew them well, and they knew me. This meant I was comfortable asking them for advice or letting them know I was following their example.

I might not have recognized it initially, but these were my real childhood heroes. These were the ones who played an outsized role in shaping me into the man I am.

I don’t think my experience is unique. I believe many of us are more inspired by those we know well than those who we see on TV screens or in comic books.

Sure, it may be flashier to idolize a famous person or character. It provides an easier point of reference when we share that information with friends and acquaintances.

But if the spirit of having heroes is to emulate their behavior, there’s no substitute for familiarity. I believe that with all my heart.

We must be able to ask questions, iterate and grow. And it’s hard to get to that point if we’re too far removed from our idols.

So, it’s time for us, as a society, to reevaluate who we prop up as heroes. It’s time for us to reconsider who should be wearing that crown.

For in this endeavor, notoriety only goes so far. It’s the closest ties that count the most.

Getting Deep

If you’ve ever heard professional athletes discuss their craft, you’ve likely heard a variation of the same phrase.

Getting deep.

Batters in baseball talk about letting the ball get deep before they swing at it. Hockey players talk about getting pucks deep in the opposing team’s zone. Basketball players allude to the topic when they talk about splitting the defense. Football players do the same when they talk about penetrating the defensive or offensive line.

The phrasing might be different, but the central theme is the same. Success is tied to depth of attack.

It’s remarkable how prevalent this theme is. It transcends sports played on different surfaces and under different rules.

So, if you believe in the If there’s smoke there’s fire version of proof, a bevy of athletes preaching the gospel of getting deep speaks volumes.

Part of this commonality is tactical. As is the case in military strategy, getting past your opponent’s first line of defense in sports makes you dangerous — and makes them vulnerable. This is as true if you’re running up the middle in football as it is if you’re seeing the ball all the way to the plate in baseball. You dictate the terms.

Yet, tactical soundness doesn’t fully explain why a football player from Texas, a baseball player from Venezuela and a hockey player from Norway speak of the same concept. Growing up on three different continents, they likely learned their respective sports in different ways. Tactical proficiency might not have been part of the lesson until they got to the pros.

No, there is something deeper that ties so many athletes to the gospel of getting deep.

You see, getting deep in sports isn’t quite as seamless as rolling out of bed in the morning. Unless your opponent is overmatched, they will execute an organized resistance to your efforts. And since the highest levels of professional sports are filled with the most elite athletes, such airtight resistance should be expected. When it comes to getting deep, brute force simply won’t get it done.

How do these elite athletes get around this obstacle? Through the three P’s — preparation, pivots and perseverance.

The most successful athletes prepare. They look at how their opponents prepare for them, and then they formulate a plan to disrupt that strategy. They build advanced scouting into their routines before they enter competition.

The most successful athletes pivot. They use skills of observation to identify what opponents are doing in the moment. Then they make real-time adjustments to stay one step ahead.

And the most successful athletes persevere. They try again and again to get deep, knowing that sometimes they might not succeed. But they don’t let those failings stand in the way of success. They keep going at it.

It is when preparation, pivoting and perseverance collide that the rubber meets the road. Athletes that attain this holy trinity become difficult for their opponents to defend against. And if an entire team buys in to this methodology, that team can quickly rise to elite status in its league.

In many ways, getting deep is the secret sauce of sports. At the highest level of competition, it’s what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Yet, I believe the concept extends off the field as well.

We all have the ability to get deep. To prepare for what lies ahead of us. To pivot based on what we see and experience. To persevere in the face of obstacles, keeping at it until we see the desired results.

Yet, more often than not, we fail to take the steps needed to harness this ability.

There are several reasons why. Perhaps life is going well and we don’t have major obstacles to overcome. Perhaps we’re looking for the path of least resistance, and don’t want to put in the effort to prepare in advance or pivot in the moment. Perhaps the thought of failing demoralizes us, rather than inspiring us to get back at it.

In any case, avoiding the process of getting deep does us no favors.

For when we get deep — when we prepare, pivot and persevere — we attain the most contextual information at the point of action.

This context provides a major benefit. Instead of reacting impulsively at the first sign of resistance — and potentially sabotaging our own efforts — we can use it to make a more levelheaded decision.

Getting deep allows us to think long-term, instead of just in the moment. It helps us focus on making the most sustainable decisions in the face of adversity.

Having these abilities is a gift. But it’s a gift we give ourselves through commitment to a process.

We must work to build a base of experience before we can truly succeed at getting deep. All that time preparing, pivoting and persevering early on provides us this experience. Experience that can be invaluable later on as we face down important decisions in times of turmoil.

Much like professional athletes early in their careers, we must take our lumps early on in order to build this experience. We must put a lot of effort into preparing, pivoting and persevering — all without necessarily seeing tangible results.

This can prove to be a bitter pill to swallow. But it’s an important one to take nonetheless.

For it unlocks potential that can’t be replicated. Potential to make informed and impactful decisions. Potential to read subtle patterns that have big impacts, and leverage them properly. Potential to have a steady hand, even in times of uncertainty.

Harnessing this potential empowers us. It makes more effective as leaders, professionals and members of society.

And we can only get there by making the commitment to get deep.

Make no mistake. Getting deep is more than just a sports philosophy.

It’s a gamechanger.

Use it to your advantage.