Categories
Books / Audiobooks Human Behavior Ideas Life Lessons

What a Wonderful Word

Note: You can watch the speech I gave based on this material here.

I remember the first time it happened to me. It was the first year of business school and we were working on an economics problem set. My friend Yugin had just arrived from Korea and she was correcting an answer for her economics homework.

She asked me “What’s the English word for after you erase something?”

I thought this was a philosophical question like, “What’s left of an image after you remove it?” Something like the way Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by William de Kooning to push the boundaries of art.

So I answered, “When you erase something there’s nothing left. You’ve erased it.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. Those little pink things that come off the eraser. What do you call that?”

“Hmmm … eraser shavings maybe. We don’t have a word for that in English.”

“Huh,” she said, “that’s odd. We have a word for that in Korean.”

Categories
Life Lessons

Thank You for Being a Friend

If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, “Thank you for being a friend.”
Theme Song from The Golden Girls

In Judaism, the word minyan refers to a group of 10 adults that come together to pray.  For certain prayers, most importantly prayers of mourning, a minyan must be present. It’s a struggle to find 10 Jewish men and women on a Sunday morning at our shul. On one cold day, I volunteered and was the 8th adult there. Not convinced we’d get to 10, we started the service. I was wondering why we had this arbitrary number of 10. Why are we dragging some people out of bed who don’t want to be there? Just then, surprisingly, the 10th person showed up and in a palpable way, and we were transformed. We went from praying as individuals to praying as a community. I felt like we were the lions forming Voltron.

It made me think about friendship. Friendship is about being there for one another. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend is always standing by you even when especially when things are tough.

Categories
Life Lessons

Lessons from My Grandparents

Note: This is an older version. You can see the newest version here.

I’m a very lucky boy. I had all four of my grandparents until I was 25. And I had one until this year when I was 41.  Now that they’ve all passed away and I’ve become a grand-orphan, I wanted to honor their memory by reflecting on the lessons they’ve taught me.  To paraphrase the great physicist Richard Feynman, “By the time they died, a lot of what is good about them has rubbed off on other people. So although they are dead, they won’t be completely gone.”

My Bubbie died in January. A couple of months before she died, she told me, “I’m a fighter.” At the time I didn’t want to tell her that the fight wasn’t going well. That an 87-year-old with heart and kidney failure was not winning the battle to live forever. She could hold on a little longer but eventually, as with everyone, death will win. Looking back, I realize she was fighting for something else. She wasn’t fighting for everlasting life, she was fighting to live a good life. It would have been easy for her to just go with the flow and coast off into the sunset—being that woman who just plays bingo and watches Jeopardy until she dies. But to really try to lead a good life—that takes effort.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address called This is Water (or more fully This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life) where he tells the following story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

To me, this story is about fighting against the current of the water to live a good life. All of my grandparents showed me where the water is, how to separate myself from it, and how to focus on what’s important.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from my mother’s parents, Nana and Papa (Florence and Barney Liebman), and my father’s parents, Bubbie and Zaid (Connie and Norman Schlaff).

Categories
Life Lessons

Fiction is the Lie That Tells the Truth

When my Bubbie died in January, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. People kept telling me that, “She lived a good long life” and “Her memory will live forever” but this wasn’t helpful. I know that she lived a great life and I know that I was very lucky to be 41 when my last grandparent died. But how should I deal with her death? What do I do now?

Categories
Life Lessons

My Eulogy for My Bubbie

Below is my eulogy for my Bubbie, Connie Schlaff, who died on January 9th, 2019 (1/9/19):

There’s a video of the great physicist Richard Feynman. In the video, his friend Danny Hillis said, “I’m sad because I realize you’re about to die.”

And Feynman said, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as bad as you think. By the time you get to be my age a lot of what is good about you has rubbed off on the people and so … although I will be dead, I won’t be completely gone.”

And that’s the way I like to think about Bubbie and all the little things she left us. Like some of her favorite things. I remember the last things that Blake and Ari did with Bubbie. These might have been Bubbie’s two favorite things. Ari did a crossword puzzle with her and Blake asked Bubbie if she would watch his new favorite show, Jeopardy, with him.

Categories
Life Lessons People

In Praise of Humility — The Forgotten Story of Edward S. Harkness

The Residential Colleges were created 85 years ago. Though they have the names of many famous Yalies, the donor of these colleges is nowhere to be seen. Why?

What is a Yalie? When I think of the archetypical Yalie, I think of two things. First, a Yalie is someone who will do great things and change the world. Second, a Yalie has great human qualities of humility, philanthropy and caring for others.  While Yalies are always reminded of our great alumni and donors plastered across campus we rarely see the humbler and more human side. That’s why it’s important to remember Edward S. Harkness.

Categories
Ideas Life Lessons

How to be Happy — Yale’s Most Popular Class

This year Professor Laurie Santos created Yale’s most popular class of all time. The class is titled Psychology and the Good Life but it’s really a course on how to be happy both in the short and long term. I was excited to hear that Yale was offering the course but even more excited to see that the class is available online. She expanded on the class with her Happiness Lab Podcast. While there’s little I hadn’t heard before, it did a great job of focusing me on what’s important and helped me get into the practice of being happier.

Categories
Life Lessons Product Management

The Checklist Manifesto

While I was writing my other post The Power of Checklists OR I Don’t Care How Many Years You Went to School, You Still Have to Follow the Process I was trying to learn more about Gawande’s view on checklists. So I started rereading The Checklist Manifesto. In the introduction of the book, he actually writes an actual manifesto which I’ll try to summarize here — quoting liberally.

In the 1970s, Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay called “Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility” where they looked at the different ways that doctors fail. They broke it down into two categories: ignorance (not knowing something) and ineptitude (not able to do something well that you knew how to do).

First, let’s look at ignorance:

I was struck by how greatly the balance of ignorance and ineptitude has shifted. For nearly all of history, people’s lives have been governed primarily by ignorance. This was nowhere more clear than with the illnesses that befell us. We knew little about what caused them or what could be done to remedy them. But sometime over the last several decades—and it is only over the last several decades—science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

Consider heart attacks. Even as recently as the 1950s, we had little idea of how to prevent or treat them. We didn’t know, for example, about the danger of high blood pressure, and had we been aware of it we wouldn’t have known what to do about it. The first safe medication to treat hypertension was not developed and conclusively demonstrated to prevent disease until the 1960s. We didn’t know about the role of cholesterol, either, or genetics or smoking or diabetes.

Furthermore, if someone had a heart attack, we had little idea of how to treat it. We’d give some morphine for the pain, perhaps some oxygen, and put the patient on strict bed rest for weeks—patients weren’t even permitted to get up and go to the bathroom for fear of stressing their damaged hearts. Then everyone would pray and cross their fingers and hope the patient would make it out of the hospital to spend the rest of his or her life at home as a cardiac cripple.

But now we’ve conquered a good portion of ignorance — and greatly increasing the amount of ineptitude:

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it’s “eptitude”—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians. Furthermore, whatever the chosen treatment, each involves abundant complexities and pitfalls. Careful studies have shown, for example, that heart attack patients undergoing cardiac balloon therapy should have it done within ninety minutes of arrival at a hospital. After that, survival falls off sharply. In practical terms this means that, within ninety minutes, medical teams must complete all their testing for every patient who turns up in an emergency room with chest pain, make a correct diagnosis and plan, discuss the decision with the patient, obtain his or her agreement to proceed, confirm there are no allergies or medical problems that have to be accounted for, ready a cath lab and team, transport the patient, and get started.

What is the likelihood that all this will actually occur within ninety minutes in an average hospital? In 2006, it was less than 50 percent.

And this goes beyond medicine:

Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result, so has our struggle to deliver on them. You see it in the frequent mistakes authorities make when hurricanes or tornadoes or other disasters hit. You see it in the 36 percent increase between 2004 and 2007 in lawsuits against attorneys for legal mistakes—the most common being simple administrative errors, like missed calendar dates and clerical screw ups, as well as errors in applying the law. You see it in flawed software design, in foreign intelligence failures, in our tottering banks—in fact, in almost any endeavor requiring mastery of complexity and of large amounts of knowledge.

Such failures carry an emotional valence that seems to cloud how we think about them. Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated. What do you mean half of heart attack patients don’t get their treatment on time? What do you mean that two-thirds of death penalty cases are overturned because of errors? It is not for nothing that the philosophers gave these failures so unmerciful a name —ineptitude. Those on the receiving end use other words, like negligence or even heartlessness….

The capability of individuals is not proving to be our primary difficulty, whether in medicine or elsewhere. Far from it. Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability.

And then we get to the manifesto itself:

Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things.

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.

That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy—though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies.

It is a checklist.

Categories
Fun Stuff Life Lessons My Writing

Questions OR Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at 40

Yale has a wonderful writing class called Daily Themes. This class has been taught at Yale for over 100 years and requires students to write a story each day of about 500 words. I always wanted to take the class but never did. So I started to do some of the writing on my own based on the prompts my friend Aaron Gertler online from the 2015 class.  My favorite one so far is:

Create a conversation between two characters in which everything said on either side is in the form of a question and every question advances the conversation. Avoid rhetorical questions and repetitions.

I hadn’t realized this but the instructor had put in a link to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “Questions” game — which was what popped into my head as well. With that preamble, I now give you…

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at 40

How did we get here?

Weren’t we promised a happy and fulfilled life if we just gave our life to the company?

Isn’t that why we went to business school?

Wasn’t that the promise once we got out?

Do you feel likely we have climbed a giant mountain up through the clouds only to see more mountain?

Do you think we are at the top of the mountain and can finally see clearly?

Are we getting close to the end?

Do you feel like we are in that Tom Stoppard play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?”

Or maybe Godot?

So what do we do now?

Should we change our focus and get off the hedonic treadmill?

But what would we do then?

Don’t Zen monks talk about this problem?

Could we leverage some of that?

Why do you always have to talk in business speak?

Aren’t you afraid of death?

Aren’t we dying every minute?

Do you think that’s the secret – living completely in the moment?

Is there any other way?

Why don’t we treat every moment as our last by being fearless and vulnerable and not afraid to fail?

Are you saying failure is good?

How can you have anything valuable without failure?

What about love and courage and accomplishment?

Isn’t that what I’m saying?

Categories
Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

Being OK With Uncertainty OR he Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (audible) is the amazing story of Robert Peace, a prodigy who grew up in inner city Newark, got into Yale, excelled there and ended up dead as a drug dealer back in Newark.

It’s a journey into a world that I’ve never really known, except for the Yale section which seems pretty accurate. The author, Jeff Hobbs, Rob’s Yale roommate wrote this story mainly to understand what happened to Rob and to share it with others. After Rob’s funeral, many people saw this amazing man as just another drug dealer but Jeff started getting so many stories that he decided to write a book. Jeff does the most amazing job digging through the story. He interviews Rob’s drug dealer friends who were forbidden from attending the wedding. He interviewed Rob’s boss when he was a drug dealer. He interviewed Yale masters and deans. And he got a whole lot of material from Rob’s secret society friends who he’d told his life story.

What’s amazing is that as much as you’d like the author to give an answer, he doesn’t. It’s frustrating but makes it that much more worthwhile. It’s a book about listening, not talking. Jeff talks about not giving answers here:

Maria Popova talks about how rare it is to not give answers and live with uncertainty in the first of her 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings. She says that we live in a culture where people are pressured to have an opinion, even when they have no basis for that opinion. Because they’re uncomfortable saying “I don’t know,” they fake it and just regurgitate something they read or saw on TV. They don’t invest the time to truly have their own opinion because they don’t feel comfortable staying in that nebulous zone of uncertainty. But, she says, “It’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.” For a great little blog post on the value of uncertainty, read Maria’s musing on John Keats and “Negative Capability.”

If you want to see the opposite, take a look at this guy who thinks he has the answer. In one of the most jarring questions I’ve seen in a long time, he wants Jeff to comment on his theory that Rob Peace had a death wish. It’s clear that the questioner is not comfortable living with uncertainty.

Read the book and wallow in this unfamiliar space with wonderful characters, no answers and no heroes.