Category: Life Lessons

One of my favorite quotes if from Arron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”:

Dan: The distance is always 100 miles between first place and second place. You know, Jackie Robinson had a brother, and he ran the 200 meters. At the Olympics, he ran it faster than anyone had ever run it before, and he still came in second.

ABBY: I didn’t know Jackie Robinson had a brother.

DAN: That’s because it was the 1936 Olympics, and the guy who came in first was Jesse Owens.

Robinson’s exceptional performance, just a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens, relegated him to a historical footnote. Because they get so much attention, we assume that the first-place finisher is fundamentally better than the second. This pattern isn’t limited to sports but is prevalent across our culture. Consider, for instance, that pinnacle of invention. The most brilliant inventor, Thomas Edison, and his most famous invention, the light bulb.

In the book The Work Ahead office workers save the world with their knowledge of optimization and 80’s trivia. The protagonist happens to be blind. His blindness is only mentioned once in the book. To sighted readers like me, he seems just like you and me. It’s written by my friend Sameer Doshi. Sameer is an executive at Microsoft. During his interview, he forgot to tell anyone that he was blind and no one picked up on that fact. This made me think, “If he could tell a story where the protagonist was secretly blind, and he could interview for a job and no one noticed that he was blind, where else are there ‘secret blind guys’?” Amy Schumer has a joke about this in her Netflix special Emergency Contact:

Before he died, Richard Feynman said, “By the time people die, 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 Zaid died a decade ago on December 20, 2012. After I had an accident skiing, Zaid surprised me with a visit.

Intro: One of my friends told me that at 33, married with a baby, she’s doing some soul searching. She thought at some point that she’d be set and have figured out her career, but she’s realized that things never settle and it’s all journey. This makes her a little sad and confused. Here’s my response:

Willy Wonka: “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted.”

Charlie Bucket: “What happened?”

Willy Wonka: “He lived happily ever after.”

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I used to think that there was a way to win the game of life. I thought there was a general scheme to the world and if I just worked hard enough, things would work out awesomely. This worked for a while. If I worked hard at school, I would get into a great college. If I worked hard in college I would get a great job. I thought this is the way that life worked too.

It was December 19, 2012. I’m horrible with dates but I remember this one. My grandparents, Bubbie and Zaid,⁽¹⁾In Yiddish Bubbie means grandmother and Zaid means grandfather. had come over. They came over about once a week. We had these good Jewish grandparent/grandkid fights around how much food they should bring. They wanted to bring 2 chickens a week, some pastrami, some latkas, a quart of matzo ball soup, and then maybe something for us to eat that night when they came over. We had to explain that the fridge was already full from last week’s delivery so maybe they could just bring one chicken that week.

I was excited to give Zaid his Hanukah present. I’d gotten him a limited edition “subscription box” box from a company called Quarterly. We were getting a box curated by John Maeda. Maeda is my favorite digital artist/designer who has a wonderful way of looking at the world. When he was the President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) he said, “America is a weird country. It’s like I was a waitress somewhere, and now I’m in a movie—a futuristic astronaut cast in a new kind of Wild West picture. [At RISD] I get to make, like, a Space Western.”⁽²⁾Maeda’s box was part of a RISD initiative called STEAM. STEAM = STEM + Arts & Humanities.

We had a sad day for America this week. Rioters stormed the capital to disrupt the election. Everyone has a right to protest but it’s the way you protest that matters. At its heart, a good protest is about getting your voice heard while letting other people give their voice as well.⁽¹⁾The Woodward Report, Yale University’s decades-long policy on protest, has a good summary of why you should do this. This wasn’t a protest, it was an attack on the infrastructure of democracy.

I’ve always thought that free time was the best thing in the world. What could be better than staying at an all-inclusive resort and sipping margaritas with nothing to do? But free time can be painful if it’s in the wrong context. Don’t believe me? Think about your last trip on an elevator.