Phthursday Musings: Catching Up, Catching On

Over the last two weeks, I managed to see numerous friends I haven’t seen in many years; I saw a band I’ve been waiting 20+ years to see; and I visited my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan, for the first time since 2006. It’s been an exciting and tiring couple of weeks.

I had a unique experience on Monday that I’d like to share first. Staff from IWU were guiding a contingent of about 15-20 students on a mini career tour. They spent the day at Argonne National Laboratory, and in the evening, a few alumni took groups of students out to dinner for casual conversations, ostensibly about entering the career world.

This is how I wound up at a Thai restaurant in Naperville with three computer science majors, respectively from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Uzbekistan.

I’ve spent almost my entire life in Illinois. I’ve done very little international traveling. What, exactly, do I have to offer a student from halfway across the world?

Well, as it so happens, they’re aspiring software engineers, and from time to time I’m able to hire software engineers, so there’s that. And we’re at a weird economic inflection point, where younger people looking to enter a field known for plentiful jobs are running into bizarre situations where they can apply to hundreds of positions and never even get an interview, and for all they know, not even get a human to look at their resume.

I’m hopeful that I was able to give useful advice, about how to tweak resumes and how to target positions and the need to network and use whatever connections they might have. What’s wild to me though is how I’ve managed to wind up in quite such a position, and it’s given me a lot of pause to consider the responsibility of it all, not just in my current job, but to the broader idea of being a “tech leader”.

It’s a concept I’ve been thinking about recently as I’ve been in a multi-week seminar through the new Institute for Transformational Leadership. Here’s an odd way to explain it:

In third grade, we did this thing where we would select poems, memorize them, and recite them back in class. I have this recollection of a day where we were doing this, and I went and found a short poem, and I stuffed it into short-term memory like it was a phone number that someone had said aloud and I needed to remember it long enough to write it down, and then I said I had another one and I recited it, and my teacher had to somehow correct me… because what I had done wasn’t really the intent of the exercise. The point was to absorb a poem enough to not only recite it but to know it. But I treated each poem like it was a transaction. Once recited, forgotten.

That recite-and-forget approach is the antithesis of transformational leadership. And it might sound like that’s not how leadership could ever work, but it absolutely does work that way. If you’ve got a factory which makes widgets, the goals can’t be reduced to making more widgets or making them faster. The people in the factory are part of the goals, and if the people running the factory don’t see them that way, then we shouldn’t be buying their shitty widgets.

I see so much talent and thoughtfulness in young people like the ones I took out to dinner… I know that the tech world doesn’t need to be as messed up as it’s become. It’s gotten to be far too greedy, far too top heavy, it’s just profoundly lost its way. With what’s going on in the country and world today, I know that we’re going to have a lot of rebuilding to do, of systems and institutions. I want to be a part of that, and to be a part of modeling that, and of mentoring others through that.

I wrote a little while ago about how our school district has a referendum on the spring election ballot. I got my hands on some door hangers, got a slice of map assigned to me in an app, and have taken a couple of short trips out in the neighborhood, first with my wife, and tonight with my goofy kid.

Halloween aside, there’s been little reason for us to ever go to door to door in the neighborhood for anything. It’s also been a loooong time since I’ve done actual door knocking… I think 2006, the last time I ran for State Representative, was the last time I did that. And here’s my sense: People really don’t want to talk to anyone. Child and I only had 3 out of 12 doors answered, and only one of them was the door opened more than two inches to be able to talk to people. And we weren’t even selling anything!

On the one hand it’s a difficult time to be putting a referendum on the ballot, what with the seeming attempts to tank the economy and the general anger in the overall political process. On the other hand, I adamantly believe that here we have a real opportunity to stand up and say, no, we’re not going to accept having everything torn down, we’re going to invest in the institutions which matter the most to us.

It does concern me though how in retreat people seem to be. Not just regarding the referendum, but also a lot of what I wrote above.

It’s in this light where I feel like making the extra effort to seek people out is all that much more important right now. Like a difficult hike, it might not be comfortable to put yourself out there, make plans, etc. but it’s rewarding. And I think a lot of where America has gotten to today ironically has to do with people feeling comfortable in retreat… not that people are happy with everything going on, but the rewards are all messed up. We’re not hamsters, we’re social creatures, but we’re broadly really out of whack right now.

Look: We just need to get the hell out there. Even though canvassing hasn’t been super rewarding, I feel a lot better trying to do at least a little something productive rather than just sitting around whining about what a loser Chuck Schumer is. (Speaking of which: Man oh man, geez, why is Chuck Schumer such a loser?)

So hey, if we haven’t caught up, let’s catch up. And if you’re like those students - brand new to me - then I guess we can’t catch up, but let’s catch on instead. You with me?

Two of the three students I took out to dinner had not had Thai food before. But they’ve spent years now eating at the cafeteria at IWU. So I asked them how they found the food.

All three of them spoke unfavorably, and not just about the food on campus.

Get this: apparently whether you’re from Bangladesh or Brazil or Uzbekistan, you tend to mostly eat fresh food. They spoke about how over-processed American food is.

Now, I have a nuanced take, my wife being a dietitian and all. (By the way, how did you all celebrate National Registered Dietitian Day on Wednesday? I celebrated by making this excellent renal nutrition word search to share with the world!) I think though that it’s fascinating to hear this expressed by young people from somewhat less affluent countries. There’s a perspective in there about America that might not be what people would expect!

I was very fortunate last week to see the legendary Bevis Frond in person, on their first American tour in 25 years.

It was inspiring to see 71 year old Nick Saloman still bringing it - a two-hour set of songs spanning almost 40 years, visiting somewhere he hadn’t been in so long and finding a full room with a deeply enthusiastic crowd. I shook his hand after the show and let me just say, in my experience, the best musicians are almost always the absolute friendliest people. Having listened to a lot more Bevis Frond in the last couple of months than I have maybe ever, I really can’t say enough about how great they are, and how overlooked they are in the U.S. Psychedelic rock with killer hooks and real pop sensibility, what’s not to love?

Here’s a video from the night of them playing one of their “two hits”:

I’m overdue to follow up on a piece I wrote a few months ago about shows I’ve seen, and I think I’ll try to get that done for one of the next two Phthursdays.

I don’t have a lot to write about it at the moment, but Little League season is about to begin, with the first practice scheduled for Monday night. I know - practices starting as early as St. Patrick’s Day, that’s super wild! I’ll be assistant coach in some capacity again and I’m very much looking forward to it. I’m anticipating a spring of baseball and soccer and running, and hoping that along the way there’s some chances to catch up… and catch on. Along those lines, our Player Piano session is pushed back to April, a more specific date to be locked down very soon, but almost certainly either a Tuesday or Wednesday night, because baseball practices will be Monday and Thursday. If you think you want in and you haven’t already told me, let me know so I can guess at what size crowd we might get.

Sometimes I get to the end of these things and realize I don’t really have an appropriate photo. I go looking to see if I’ve got something recent which works, but I’m not sure that I do. So… I’m just going to go with the picture I used for my most excellent word search. I mean, who doesn’t want happy, well-functioning kidneys?