Month: May 2020

I should rely on our toddler, Sefton, to come up with randomness more often. The kid is a walking, talking random machine. This week he was watching, in toddler-speak, ‘The Ladybug Movie.’ In adult-speak, the often-hilarious French animated shorts that collectively go by the name ‘Miniscule.’ He loves these little videos. Admittedly, so do my wife and I. There always seems to be a theme: The spider doesn’t win.

Exhibit A: This one about the Mommy ladybug who drops off her three little ladybugs to all play with some child’s toys. It’s probably my favorite. Spoiler: Poor, poor spider.

ps… If you just want to jump to the best part, it starts at 2:16…

My trusty journal, the one I started back in September 2018, just ran out of pages. Time for a new one. So I was reading up on bullet journaling. No, really, it ran out of pages. It’s not just another cliché New Years resolution to journal more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m a huge fan of writing stuff down and already love dot journals because they’re basically the perfect compromise between a ruled and a blank journal.

In digging around, I came across this guy Neil Gaiman. A writer. I never heard of him before and was intrigued. I found a page where he listed 8 good writing practices. I do in fact want to finish a few photography books I’ve started, including ones that date all the way back to my wife’s and my wedding and honeymoon four years ago. Yeah, it’s time to knock those out. Consequently, these practices were a good find in that respect.

I liked Neil’s list. Of the eight things he wrote, I liked the last one the best.

8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Neil Gaiman

Own it, basically. Or fake it ’til you make it. Or, as Brendan Leonard cleverly puts it, Make It Till You Make It. Good advice for the new year, or in the middle of the year, or on any random day of the year.

Since I’m on this linguistic kick, meaning last week’s randomness was about language if that makes this a kick, I’ll keep it going. Our son is here from out of town so I’ll also keep this short and sweet. It’s probably a hectic week for you, too.

Let’s talk quickly about the word ‘but.’ It’s a conjunction, which is to say it joins two phrases into a single sentence. Helpful, and certainly innocent enough. Wait, ‘and’ is also a conjunction. So there must be a distinction between the two. Digging deeper, indeed… ‘But’ introduces something contrasting with what was just mentioned, while ‘And’ connects words that are meant to be joined. Hmm. Okay, okay duh. Really, though. I want to repeat that little tidbit if nothing else than for dramatic effect:

‘But’ introduces something contrasting with what was just mentioned.

Why, then, do we use it so often? Are we constantly talking about something and then instantly contradicting ourselves? Is this phrase of speech really that useful, or have we somehow just become habituated with using it? The best example of how ridiculous this actually sounds happens to be the simple little phrase, ‘Yes, but…’. What the heck!? Yes, but no???

Here’s the deal: ‘But’ ends a conversation, a thought, or a compliment, while ‘And’ keeps all those going.

Here’s a challenge: Like the ‘Ahh’ counter in a Toastmasters meeting, tally up the times you use the word ‘But.’ Too much? How about just becoming aware of how often you use it. Eventually, become hyperaware. It’s funny because, having done this as I developed my communication, I’ve realized I don’t need to use it very often.

Bonus: The outcome can be pretty cool. Start by giving a compliment, the person listening anticipates the but, BUT!… you disappoint them by not saying it! Boom.

ps… In case you’re wondering, this scored a Grade 5 in the Hemingway Editor, and has 12 adverbs (4 too many, I guess)…

I think a lot about simplicity. Simplifying. It’s the essence of how I run Sendline and it’s at the core of my approach to facilitating. I have a strong belief that everything can be simplified, including stuff about leadership and management.

One aspect of simplifying I don’t often think about though is my language. A while back, I read a Goalcast article that talked about how Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson all use third grade language when talking about their products. I know Hemingway is often said to have written on a fifth grade level. Heck, the Hemingway app scores writing on a certain grade level. Perhaps counterintuitively, the lower the grade level, the better the writing. And better writing of course has the power to influence.

What’s really interesting about the app is the two specific elements it analyzes. First: adverbs. Adverbs essentially qualify the verb they precede, and thus potentially weaken it. Interesting. Second: the app looks for passive voice. Why? The same reason as using adverbs. Passive voice is weaker than active voice. The plot thickens. More ambiguously, it then looks for words or phrases with simpler alternatives, sentences that are hard to read, and, well, sentences that are very hard to read. It seems to be based on the notion that eliminating weak elements and simplifying make writing stronger, better, more clear.

The catch? It’s not easy simplifying. I love my adverbs! What’s worse is that when I want to sound smart, I throw simple out the window. Then immediately afterward I ironically feel like an idiot. Go figure.

ps… Hemingway scored this little piece at a Grade 6 and ’ironically’ was my eighth adverb in 269 words. It suggested kindly that I aim for one fewer. Too bad. I kept ‘ironically.’

Enter… Pantone’s 2020 Color of the Year: Classic Blue. ‘It’s what the color forecasters at Pantone have deemed to be a comforting, timeless color for a time of change,’ writes the author of the Fast Company article about the news.

They’ve been bestowing us a Color of the Year now for two decades. Each year’s color is decided through a maybe surprisingly thorough process that takes into consideration macro cultural trends. Art, popular media, movies, lifestyles, economic and political conditions, travel destinations, new technology, all somehow play into the big reveal. The trend Classic Blue is supposed to capture? Wellness, apparently.

For some quick history, the first Color of the Year, Cerulean, chosen in 1999, also was meant to capture a moment in time. That was the year of Y2K. WTO. Pokemon. Wow. Reminiscing and reading up about this annual phenomenon, I’m reminded holy cow: next year is a new decade. Which means we only have a little over three weeks left of this decade. Which means?… I’m not really sure what to do with that realization, other than to carve out some time and think back on the past decade. Where was I ten years ago? What was I doing? Where were you ten years ago and what were you doing?

Bringing myself back to the present and the impending calm of Classic Blue, I wonder: Is it a coincidence we just recently painted a wall in our guest bath basically this same color blue? Actually, yep. Yep, it totally is.

This is maybe and admittedly not really random, a shoutout to Small Business Saturday. Maybe not random because, well, it’s tomorrow. Admittedly because Sendline is, of course, a small business, and it’s my first year I can lay claim being part of the occasion now as an owner, too.

Small businesses are pretty cool. I’m not just saying that as a now-small business owner. I’m not just saying that because my wife Katie and I have been participating, not just the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but throughout the year, every year for as long as I can remember. We shop at our neighborhood farmer’s market, found each other’s wedding rings from craftspeople on Etsy, go out of our way to find local coffee everywhere we travel. We still laugh about a time on our honeymoon to New Zealand a few years ago. We were walking the streets of Queenstown and joked to each other after spotting a Starbucks, ubiquitous but out of place, ‘There’s gotta be a Starbucks around here somewhere.’ A Kiwi, ahead of us on the sidewalk, turned around on hearing that and, in feigned helpfulness, pointed to it for us. It was okay. He didn’t get the joke, which had its origins, in fact, a couple of years earlier in Bend, Oregon. Similarly, we were walking the streets there with our Lone Pine Coffee in hand when a group of women rounded the corner, surrounded by local coffee options. We heard one of them admonish, out of breath, ‘There must be a Starbucks around here somewhere!’ She was serious. In Queenstown, we were joking.

Nostalgia aside, I’m saying small businesses are cool because they exist for a single reason: the people who start them have passion. Passion is priceless, and infectious.

Always looking to be inspired, Sendline supports local, small businesses, too. At our workshops in Leavenworth, Washington, for example, we serve espresso and coffee from J5, bread and pastries from Anjou Bakery. Our lodging partner, LOGE Camps, is based in North Bend, and our swag is covered in the killer artwork of Leavenworth’s Ali Hancock. Their passion, every one of them, is palpable. It’s awesome.

I’m grabbing this week’s randomness from a chapter out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. If you’ve read it, you may remember this. Even so, you may not. It wasn’t one that brought forward any of Gladwell’s now-prominent points. A tidbit, really. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I read it, at least six or seven years. For some reason though I’m not quite sure, this was the thing that captured my interest the most.

In the chapter dubbed ‘The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,’ Gladwell dissects why planes crash. It’s a fascinating chapter in a fascinating book, for a lot of reasons. In it, he touches on everything from the importance of company culture, to how the typical crash involves precisely seven consecutive human errors, to how the crew talks to one another. That was the thing, the tidbit, that stuck with me. 

Linguists, Gladwell explained, call it ‘mitigated speech.’ Wikipedia defines it as ‘a linguistic term describing deferential or indirect speech inherent in communication between individuals of perceived High Power Distance.’ In looking at airplane crashes, the difference in rank among the captain and others in the cockpit is key. In real life, however, mitigated speech is everywhere.

‘We should, you know, try going around this traffic by getting off at one of the exits up ahead.’

‘I’d love to see the movie ‘The Joker’ sometime.’

‘What if we have chicken for dinner?’

Granted, none of those will result in a plane crash, thankfully. Just as thankfully, and rightly so, we show respect everyday in our relationships with our spouse, parents, elders. The reason this stuck with me, I think, was by making me self-aware of how I spoke in different situations. The power of communication of course is huge, and this seemed like a really, really simple way to develop into a better communicator. Not avoiding mitigating my speech, but rather being aware of the situation and how and when I choose to use it. When it seemed appropriate to give a command, versus state an obligation, or a suggestion, preference, or heck, when I should just ask a question. Like, to my wife, can we have chicken for dinner?

I’ve been a subscriber to Adventure Journal since day one, or at least since the first issue. Sitting on the floor in front of one of our bookshelves the other day, I randomly pulled that first issue off the shelf and flipped through it. It had been a while. There was a cool article from Jimmy Chin about skiing off the summit of Everest. Julie Goldstein’s art. Felix Baumgartner’s skydive from 127,852 feet.

The point the article about ‘Fearless’ Felix illuminated, catalogued in the journal under the header ‘Appreciation,’ was about his crippling claustrophobia.

Having to stuff himself into a space suit, it took an extreme sports psychologist, and 30 hours of training, to push Felix to the edge of panic. To get him able to climb into that suit and not tear it off. To get him to face, rather than run from, the thing that terrorized him most. Watching the footage as Felix prepared to fall from nearly 25 miles above the earth, his fear is palpable, unhidden.

‘Whatever one thinks of the Stratos project,’ the author writes, ‘his vulnerability is a welcome, even necessary, relief from the simplistic machismo expected of our heroes.’

His willingness just to climb into that suit, let alone fall from the stratosphere, is a testament to us all that we can in fact face our own vulnerabilities. That yes, vulnerability is just a different word for courage. In Felix’s case, a courage I cannot even fathom.