Make Things Well

I'm learning.

“Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.”

The goal is to kick ass.

New

No New Years Resolutions.

Don’t resolve to do things.

Just do them.

Doubt in Transition

Written two and a half years ago.

June 16, 2009

I’m afraid. Leaving for boarding school has left me in uncertainty, a feeling of nothing being the same or right all around. Close to home, it’s beautiful and the people there seem nice enough. It’s a necessary change, I tell myself. Nothing will allow me the same opportunity of going wherever I want for college. Another school of higher caliber can’t be found, and I can go for free. It’s overwhelmingly clear, facts and advice from those close to me backing it all up, what I should do. Yet, I still feel that silent tremble, the slight shiver that passes through me when I imagine the place. It is still strange and unfamiliar, and I can’t be any more fearful than I already am, no matter how excited, proud, or happy I know I should feel.

Change is a funny thing: we may cheer for it, fight for it, or put all our hearts behind making it happen, but still — we have a sense of hesitance behind the wall of optimism and support. It is our nature to be cautious, and we are programmed with mechanisms to guide us away from the new, whether it is beneficial or detrimental. That resistance to try, to discover if it hurts, both hinders and helps us. Those who can push past that initial distress are more often the ones who are successful; through that discard of anxiety, they reap the opportunities that change brings. The freshness of air and cleanliness of life, the letting go of the old to find the exciting and new, is theirs alone.

The world is littered with examples of this natural coding, but there is not a better example than that of organizations; they are, after all, composed of people who feel that reluctance inside themselves. Large companies make decisions daily that affect their future, much like we do individually. Similarly, they enjoy the comfort of sticking with their familiar, battle-tested methods of profit and process. They become complacent in their riches and perceived prosperity, and they choose to stay the same, never venturing to try anything different. They are afraid of losing what they already have, failing to see what they can gain.

Like the bigger corporations, smaller businesses feel that doubt to act on any unproven way of gaining profit or revenue. Yet, unlike their larger brethren, they do not have that fog of contentment to cloud their decisions; their eyes are on what’s ahead and not what already has past. Though this is often how it works, it is not always the case — large companies occasionally take these risks as well, but only when their success is guaranteed — it is the company that can grow big, stay focused, and be daring that becomes a great company.

Steve Jobs is returning to Apple at the end of this month, back from his hiatus to deal with his health problems. People are relieved that he’ll be back running the company that he built as a young man and resurrected years later. But, imagine what will happen when Steve is gone, a few years from now. Will the company crumble or lose sight of what it is, like it did in the ‘90s before he came back the first time?

No.

Apple has been built from the inside with people that he chose himself, with similar values and visions for the company as he has. He trusts them to continue the high-quality, great experience culture of the company. Though Steve himself won’t be there, his knowledge and taste will. It is a risk, a change of power that will happen. But Apple has shown before that they are willing to be undaunted; they released the iPod when Napster had just been shut down and the digital music market didn’t exist. The iPhone was their first entry into a mature market that they had never dealt with before. The Macintosh was the first computer to actually transcend the fuzzy green text on a screen to become the first computer you could actually interact with. The opportunities to succeed were there and they seized the chance to try and get them. It’s in their DNA, in all the people that run the company; they overcome that proverbial hump of doubt to to the amazing. So when Steve Jobs does retire, whenever that will be, I know that Apple will still be as gutsy and smart as it has been in the past — they are made of intelligent people who know what works and when to try something different. In an Apple without Steve, they’ll have the chance to try something divergent, something even he couldn’t see; possibilities to create more fantastic work than before.

As people we are built to adapt and flow with the changes; likewise, we are also made to resist it as well. We can’t just stay as we are, stuck in the mud and immovable. That fear inside can’t hold us down; it can’t keep me from going to boarding school. Because if we look ahead and see what opportunities are there, we can fight the cold shiver, overcome that natural instinct. Then, with an audacious feeling and a sharp plan, success isn’t far.

I know that doubt is natural; it is beatable. I can see the opportunities now, the positive where I only saw negative before. The excitement is rising for what can be, what I can do at this new place. And when that uncertainty creeps back, I acknowledge it and walk past. I smile, just waiting, anxious for what’s to come.

The Airport

There’s a jingle down the corridor.

My head jolts up quickly, and I twist to the left. The hall has walls white and smooth, and high ceilings lit by yellowing bulbs lit in hanging metal rafters. The red fuzz of his coat is illuminated by the warm rays. He looks like one of those mall-santas. Maybe a bit more respectable. He’s boot step down heavily as the bell on his hip jingles. He has a belt buckle with big swash letters that spell “Santa” in gold colored metal. Maybe not as respectable, I rethink. His hands are holding on to the a clear plastic cup with a green logo. There’s nothing but ice left, and he’s holding it close to his chest above a bulge of a belly. I imagine that an amber liquid had been there just moments ago, a bit unfairly.

As he passes in front of me, a girl walking down the from check-in smiles brightly and says to him:

“Merry Christmas.”

His face tightens up and puts on his voice.

“Merrrry Christmas!”

His stomach bulges a bit. He holds his drink higher up near his face.

“Ho, ho, ho.”

His voice trails off as walks left and out of my view, going where ever an Airport-Christmas-Santa goes.

A lot of people dislike the airport. They hate the process of checking in. They hate the invasion of privacy and the lack of respect that comes with the security measures of ill run government agencies. Who doesn’t? They don’t like the smell or the food or idea of sitting on a flight for a few hours and being off, up in the air. They don’t like it on principle.

For me, though, airports feel good.

Everybody is waiting. They are waiting to be home for the holidays. They are waiting for their wives or their girlfriends at the airport to greet them with a small peck on the cheek or something a bit more passionate. Brothers picking up sisters, smiling widely as they see their counterpart after months away at school or their own, new homes. Kids flying to relatives, little ones lost looking for their gate nervously. The businessmen have their computers open, working a bit as they bide their time. One guy’s asleep, big black headphones being slipped off by gravity as his head tilts back. And we all wait.

The airport is a place where we are all in transit. It’s not really a place, but something between places.

It’s a place where minds can be clear.

The Gift

I’m staring at a picture frame. It is wooden and cheap, painted matte black and leaned awkwardly against one of my desk lamps. The picture in it is skewed like its left side is falling down, and the white edges of the paper touch the side of the frame in two places. The photo is really one made of four: it’s from one of those photo booths they always seem to have at the mall or at the county fair in lake October. I remember looking at the equipment from the outside and finding it funny that a printer and a computer were hidden behind a small black curtain. I could see some of the recently taken pictures and see the expressions of the people in them. They showed grins and open gapes and manufactured looks of fear or surprise, and some showed simple smiles that seemed to be directed at me, radiant.

There was a box on the corner of the booth’s seat that had a mishmash of random accessories and goofy decorations that looked like they had been plucked from a costume shop. A weird little top hat made of purple and gold and green glitter was in there. I placed it on my head and pulled my girlfriend in, and we sat down to wait.

Flash.

We took four pictures, four corners of this photograph that I’m looking at once again. Smiles as we look away from the camera, accidentally forgetting where we should look. A mouth agape, pointing at the found-again lens poking through the wall in front of us. I am holding a balloon shaped and decorated like a microphone. Smiles, beaming, teeth white. She smiles even harder as she holds a clenched hand to her chest. I hold on. Expressions of joy leap at me. Even now, you can feel that energy, happiness.

I’m going home for Christmas. I’m lucky to be one of the few that can leave by Friday.

One of the things we overemphasize during holidays, especially those of us that celebrate Christmas, is the importance of things. It’s weird that we build a whole culture around a holiday that glorifies the transaction of things.

Toys. Gadgets. Clothes and kitchenware.

“What should we get you for Christmas?”

“What should Santa deliver?”

“What do you want?”

Want. It’s a powerful idea that we’re supposed to want things. Even though most of what we receive we’ll never use or fully appreciate. In most cases, the addition of that object may even be detrimental. More physical clutter means the thinning of attention (which is already pretty damn thin). Our lives gets worse with more things, not better.

It’s important to not limit our definition of what we want. I don’t want things.

I want time. I want the ability to sit down and cook a meal for my family and my girlfriend, to smell the pot of bone marrow stew wafting through the kitchen. I want to make things for them, to show that even though I am so far away, I am still close. That I care, and will keep caring. I want to feel happy with the people I love.

Those moments, I think, are the greatest gift I could ask for.

Impulses

Chemistry threw me off kilter. You’d think that a pleasant feeling (or at least a more pleasant feeling than I had felt on those awful practice exams) would translate to a good, or acceptable grade on an exam.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this time.

An impulse is defined as a:

sudden and involuntary inclination prompting action

A billion impulses pass through a normal human brain everyday (and not even the kind of impulse neuroscience defines). We live and get affected by things and that we interact with, that flash out the corner of our eyes as we’re walking through a crosswalk, that break up with us in the most cutting ways, and that fail us on university courses. You can’t exist without changing. Without being pushed into different mental states that often bear impulses.

If you have a shit day, you’re gonna have more impulses that’ll probably make your next day worse. You throw up emotional stop gaps to stop the yourself from leaking joy:

“This chapter is boring? Put on a movie, set your feet up on the table, and forget about it for a while.”

Delegate your misery to your future self, and let the seconds tick by as you wait. Tick. Tock. Gone.

“I don’t want to study for this.”

I stood in the little room adjoining the farthest shower cubicle on the left. It had a small shelf where I tossed my clothes and stripped down. I has nothing but an iPhone in my hand and a watch with a khaki band wrapped tightly around my wrist. I let my slightly greasy thumb slide across the smooth flat glass and read a few tweets. I stood there for a while, reading about things that didn’t make me feel anything.

“I am going to fail Chemistry. Maybe math, too.”

I was probably being a little harsh on myself with the math crack. I’d done pretty well on the last few exams, and the material on this one wasn’t mind-blowing in the slightest. I should do fine, but my mind at the time kept sending impulses:

“Whoah, Urban Meyer got Dunn to reaffirm his commitment to play at Ohio State? Damn, better look up some articles on that.”

“Besides, studying can wait.”

Your mind keeps pushing you too avoid the hard problems. To slip into easy thinking, safe thinking, comforting thinking. Impulses, driven by bad days and swirling thoughts, make you feel like giving in is okay.

Perspective is important. If you can keep your eyes up, on a higher level of who you are, what you’re doing, and where you’re going, these little fighting impulses get weaker, or at least their effect diminishes.

You have to think constantly about your thinking. Shield your mind from stray thoughts. Be active about how you’re feeling and aim to change. Have intent.

You are your actions. Your actions, when your mind is thrown off track and unguarded, come from your impulses.

Don’t let your impulses make you.

Try Harder

This tea is light and clear, an almost golden tint like honey thinned to its slightest. Splenda isn’t great for me, but its better than real sugar—less calories—but for some reason I feel like the real stuff should be better. Anyway, I like the taste of Splenda—overly sweet for the amount. Just don’t take a straight lick of it.

Maybe I’ve taken too many licks of it all. I’ve been feeling unhealthy lately. My throat. No, my stomach and all the tracts and pathways that lead to it seem congested, like there’s something trapped in their walls stuck between tissue and clogging me up. I feel like burping. I’ve been trying to burp for the last two days, and I get one out on occassion. But the feeling just keeps coming back up.

I’ve been eating a lot, consistently. And it’s not even because of an excess of great taste. It’s simply neglect. Not being there as I’m chowing down on a porkchop or a couple pieces of breaded, slightly spicy pieces of chicken. Not even good chicken. The way I feel—how my day is going, how the little details of they day are progressing, make me more likely to splurge. If I’m having a bad day: “I need some food to cheer me up.” Good day: “Let’s celebrate. Live, eat.”

Peaks. Valleys. They make me hungry, and it’s killing me.

The milk is the worst thing about this cup of tea. There’s some fat on it. Screw skim milk. All the calories, all those little arbitrary bits of info on energy that don’t mean anything when I’m tired or happy and ready to sip on a nice cup of brew, are from that nice white froth. It’s made the tea light and opaque. It’s smooth. I tip the cup to my lips and see a few brown particles from the tea bag, drifting along on the edges of the drink.

My mind is a bit fuzzy thinking about it all. How am I supposed to feel about food? I want it to be a comfort. That’s how I’ve lived. But diets and evolution and the damn laws of thermodynamics sit facing me and poke at my idea. Food is sustinence. It’s the ability to live.

They say that if you make it about comfort, however, then it can become inability to keep living.

The truth is somewhere in between. Food isn’t the problem… How I measure, how I view, how I let food into my life. That’s it.

Awareness is important. Being present—eating slowly, letting the food bring you pleasure, slowly permeating the buds of your tongue—that can change how you view it. Being cognizant of the details, like I do when I code, design, or write, can make the experience more full and real. You can feel it.

Fredericco Viticci has cancer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. How do you make the cognitive dissonance of a 23 being diagnosed with cancer go away? I haven’t been able to.

I turn 19 in a week. I feel like I’ve neglected my health for too long. I’ve always been a pretty heavy-set guy, but athletics have been part of my life for so long. Fall, spring. Football for a few years, Fútbol for a few more. These things have been stop gaps for me from being active in how I treat my health. They’ve given me the ability to say: “The hell with not eating this slice of cake. Coach will run it out of me anyway.”

But there are no more coaches. I am left alone as the only one on the sideline.

I don’t want to be 23 and diagnosed with something I could’ve prevented, as much as Viticci didn’t want to be diagnosed with something he couldn’t. I can change what I do and get better. I don’t have to be scared about what I can control if I care only a bit more.

If it’s possible, why wouldn’t I? Run. Lift. Make eating about the experience, not your gut being full.

Try harder.