Author: tschroe

There are two stories with this one. First, I’ll get straight to the point. This is the final Friday Randomness. Before I get to that story, though, there’s the one about the Jon Bon Jovi poster.

When I was ten years old I wanted to be a rock star. More specifically, I wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi. Slippery When Wet had just been released, after all. It was a pretty big deal. What did I do to get me started on that becoming a rock star thing? What any ten-year-old hair band fanboy would do: I bought a giant poster of Jon and plastered it on my wall. My mom didn’t approve. She tore it down and threw it in the trash. I pretty much blame her for my not having become a rock star. Kidding, mom!

Fast-forward through the years… Whenever I came across a tabloid headline about how wonderful a guy Jon Bon Jovi is, I’d shoot her a text and rub it in her face. Just a little. Well, for Christmas this year a cardboard tube from her showed up on our porch. I joked with K, ‘I bet this is a poster of Jon Bon Jovi.’ Turns out, it was. Well-played, Mom. We’re almost even.

So that leads to this being the final Randomness. Of all the music I could share, I figured I’d go out with one last song called Limitless from the man and his band. Why that song? Besides being representative of Bon Jovi’s signature positive anthemic songwriting (see what I mean, Mom!), there’s this line:

There’s an open door, what are you waiting for?

Which is the other story. The story about an open door of sorts. An opportunity to get back into the creative world where I spent 98% of my almost sixteen years at REI. Before that, where I had spent my life since I was that 10-year-old kid who wanted to be a rock star, writing songs and playing them in the basement with my little sister. Taking a picture of a canon in Gettysburg and then teaching my nineteen-year-old self how to take pictures using an old Pentax camera my dad had picked up while stationed in Korea. 

At heart, I like creating things. It’s that simple. It’s a satisfying kind of hard work. Also, it’s fun. I won’t be working alone. I’ll find others who want something that isn’t quite working the corporate life and also isn’t working by themselves.

Jon Bon Jovi asked a poignant question in his song that I felt compelled to answer. He also offered a little encouragement: ‘Step out off the edge, it’s worth the risk. Life is limitless.’

ps… The agency I’m launching is called Woolley Creative. If you’re curious where that name came from or want to be on our mailing list for more randomness, you can find our little landing page here.

I did a list at this time last year with my top 5 randomnesses. It sort of felt like cheating then and doing one this year also feels a little like cheating. What I will offer before I impart the Top 5 Randomnesses of 2021 is this little something from a Best Of list in a New York Times email:

‘I also want to know the best ideas people had, the best advice they received, the most radical changes to their routines, the best walks they took or scents they smelled or conversations they had.’

I thought that was cool. Think about it for a second… What was the best advice you got from someone? The most genuinely interesting conversation? Your best idea?

Now that I’ve shared maybe something at least a little useful, here then is the Top 5. Different than last year, these aren’t necessarily mine. They’re based on the responses I received from you all. So this year’s list isn’t completely arbitrary. Only a little.

• There’s this one about Elaine Benes from Seinfeld and exclamation points.
• Or this more recent one about giving, how it’s awkward and how it really shouldn’t be.
• There’s the one about just going and worrying about how to get there on the way.
• One I catch myself remembering on a fairly regular basis about past vs. present tense.
• Finally, another admittedly favorite of mine about a UPS guy and what I call The Power of One.

With that, let’s kick 2021 into the rearview, bid it farewell, and look forward to the opportunity a new calendar on the wall may bring each of us.

Photo: Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

A picture is worth a thousand words. 

So goes the ol’ adage. What I wanted to share this week isn’t a single picture. It’s a lot of pictures. The New York Times 2021 Year in Pictures, actually.

Thinking about the year, specifically outside our bubble in little Wenatchee, Washington, a lot happened. A lot. Overwhelming, it seems. Like I feel looking through this collection of photographs, I can’t really make sense of it. It’s a good mix of here in the United States and abroad, albeit seemingly at first glance a little heavy on reality and light on hope. 

Like a lot of things, it takes a second look to see more. Like anything of meaning, looking through these forces me to pause, to reflect, to think of the part I can play.

Fittingly, in the words of Amanda Gorman from way back in January…

For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

I recently went through The Purge. I suppose since I’ve done it before and it’ll happen again, I should call this more aptly ‘A Purge.’ Of email subscriptions, that is. After hitting Inbox 10k (of unread emails), I figured it was time to curate all the lists I had joined or been forced to join. The irony doesn’t escape me that I’m saying this while typing an email.

Anyway, there were a handful of subscriptions I intentionally kept. One of them is from this guy, Scott Galloway. Or Prof G as he calls himself. He is a professor, after all. Also, a really good writer. His emails are usually long and almost always incredibly informative.

I like that. I may steal it for these, although that’s sort of been the intent all along.

To that point, his last email was a doozy. So with this email, I’m sharing his email. He titled it, ‘Love Persevering’ and you can read it here. In it, he confesses:

‘… Time is the most relentless force in the universe: No matter what we do, its thievery marches on (I like that). For the rest of my life, I’ll have sons. But I no longer have the baby who sat on a blanket with us in the backyard, the toddler who made an alliance with his dog to disappear his vegetables, or the 8-year-old who rang out a particular laugh only the dog could inspire.’

I liked and didn’t like that, mostly because it’s true of course. So then, I have to remember to ask myself from time to time: What am I doing to make the most of the present without losing sight of the past or the future?

I guess I’m writing about another movie we watched this week. Like 14 Peaks, this one was also really good. After this, I’ll be done talking about movies for a while. Maybe.

‘Is it possible to anesthetize the children?’ diver Rick Stanton texted his friend and anesthesiologist, Dr. Richard Harris. ‘Absolutely not. It’s not possible,’ he replied.

The documentary is called The Rescue and retells the story of the 2018 rescue of the Thailand football team trapped inside a flooded cave. Admittedly not having closely followed the events as they unfolded three-and-a-half years ago, we watched it to learn as well as it was directed by the husband and wife team that created Free Solo, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.

What caught my attention in The Rescue wasn’t quite as profane as what caught my attention in 14 Peaks, but just as profound. Despite Dr. Harris’ thinking it was impossible, Rick persisted. When he mentioned it to Captain Mitch Torrell, a US Air Force officer, he was told, ‘I think that’s a horrible idea.’

‘What if it’s the only idea?’ Rick asked.

That question ultimately is what led to the successful rescue of every single boy in that cave. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Asking ‘what if… ?’ in my opinion is one of the most powerful questions possible because, well, it unlocks the impossible.

‘There’s a new mountain movie on Netflix,’ K said this past Tuesday evening. What!? I stopped in my tracks, found  it, and plopped down on the couch right then to watch it with her. It’s called 14 Peaks and tells the story of Nepali alpinist Nimsdai ‘Nims’ Purja. It’s really good. So good in fact, I added it to my random list of 31 things that do and do not have to do with leadership. This film definitely has to do with leadership. 

Through his narration, he talks about it often, and about being a leader. Feel free for judging me because, of everything he mentioned, this is the thing that stood out:

‘Sometimes you feel like you’re f*cked. But when you say you are actually f*cked, you’re only like, what, forty-five percent f*cked.’

In the scene, he’s talking to a group of climbers at basecamp who had just been defeated by K2. It was a heated moment and he was attempting to rally them back up the mountain. Also, it didn’t sound like he was asking that last sentence in the form of a question. He was making a statement.

The reason this stood out to me was (1) when I’m in a situation where I’m frustrated I tend to lose sight of the possibility there’s still likely a solution and (2) I can think of a lot of those kinds of situations. Thanks Nims for that little tidbit, as well as for showing the world through your leadership that the impossible might just be possible.

A big box of books arrived this past weekend from Darryl and The Mountaineers. I confessed a couple weeks ago to having a hard time accepting gifts. One of the books I had chosen was Brendan Leonard’s ‘Bears Don’t Care About Your Problems‘. With leadership, there are always plenty of serious things to talk about. But I didn’t want these random thoughts to always be serious. It’s also important to have fun. Since it’s the day after Thanksgiving and I hope you’re doing something not serious, I thought I’d share some funny stuff from that book.

Full transparency: just flipping through it and reading an essay here and there had me literally rolling on the floor. Not that you have to or will find any of these as funny, but you might. Just in case, I’d suggest finding a big open space before you continue reading.

Ten Basic Rules For Adventure
1. Don’t die. Prior to his attempt on K2 in 1995, American climber Rob Slater famously told a climbing magazine, “Summit or die, either way I win.” He summited, but died on the descent. To each their own, but if I were to adapt Slater’s quote to reflect my own ideals, it would be something more like: “Summit or live another several years to eat deep-dish pizza, either way I win.”

Ten Ways To Talk About Powder Skiing
5. Exaggerate. “It was so good, my friend Eric literally drowned in pow. I mean, he died. On the lift line under Chair 8. I could have gone back up to look for him, but sorry, that’s just how seriously I take powder days. Sorry, Eric.”

Twelve Ways To Make Friends At The Campground
10. Play some music on a stereo. You like your music, so everyone else probably will, too.

How To Pack For A Big Trip
Don’t worry about food. Another cool thing to do last-minute is remember that oh, yeah, you might need some food for the trip. Head to the grocery store at 11 p.m. and just grab a bunch of random stuff. Better yet, pack little or no food, and don’t tell anyone until you’re out in the wilderness somewhere, preferably dinnertime. When everyone else is starting to cook, say something like, “So, could I eat some of your food? I was going to bring some, but I just ran out of time.”

And last but not least, also along the lines of food…

Less Serious Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2017
WRONG COFFEE PACKED
Wyoming Wind River Range, Cirque of the Towers
On September 5, two climbers (male, 26 years old; female, 26 years old) left their tent to begin preparing for a climb of the Northeast Face when they discovered one of them had accidentally purchased and brought decaffeinated coffee. The climbing trip was aborted.
Analysis: Proper assessment of conditions can be the difference between life and death on a climb, and these climbers showed appropriate prudence in their situation. Although a decaffeinated ascent of one of the Fifty Classic Climbs would have been quite savage.

There are plenty of times I’m grateful for humor. If you found any of those amusing or that you did indeed roll on the floor laughing, I’d encourage you to get or gift a copy to someone if you or they may also be grateful for humor. Happy Thanksgiving!

‘During that speech, I’m saying something and you have the activists clap. Then I say something and the scientists clap. The beauty of it is that… at the end of it, everybody was clapping.’

K and I recently watched the documentary ‘Fauci’ on Disney+. He was talking about a speech he gave to a group of Act Up activists and scientists during the AIDS epidemic. The similarities between that and the COVID pandemic are striking. So are the differences.

What mattered then, what will always matter, was how Anthony Fauci made the difficult choice to engage with his critics. The ones who disliked him, those who thought he wasn’t working fast enough to find a cure. They were blown away when he came to them. When he asked to hear about their experiences, their ideas. Humble and vulnerable, and holy shit I can’t imagine how unbelievably hard.

As the documentary pieces together his work then and his work now, without giving anything away in case you haven’t seen it, Dr. Fauci talks about the $15 billion for which he advocated to globally fight AIDS. How, when President Bush announced the news to Congress, both Republicans and Democrats crowded in the House chamber applauded. Just like the activists and the scientists, for years at bitter odds.

Through his words and his actions, Dr. Fauci brought people together. He, as the recent Harvard Business Review article about crisis explained, ‘reminded people who disagreed with one another that they needn’t be perpetual enemies.’ That’s leadership.

Last week, Darryl from Mountaineers Books reached out to me. They wanted to repurchase the rights to an image I shot years ago in the North Cascades. In his offer, he acknowledged they wanted to fairly compensate me despite their budget being limited. In addition to a check, ‘I’d like to offer a restock of your outdoor library!’ he wrote me. ‘Please pick out some books as gifts or for your bookcase. Happy to send 15-20 titles.’

We’re big book fans in this house. Specifically, outdoor books like what The Mountaineers happens to publish. It was a gracious offer and easy to pick out what turned out to be nineteen books. When I sent Darryl our picks, I offered to merely consider it a wish list. If any titles were too expensive or low on stock I mentioned to not worry about including them. I felt bad taking him up on his offer.

But why? I’ve brought up before how a lot of us––myself included––have a hard time accepting a compliment. Just as hard for me I guess is accepting a gift, even when like this it borders on compensation.

Coincidentally, I’m listening to Monty Moran’s book Love is Free, Guac is Extra. It’s his story about the time he spent as CEO of Chipotle and how he led the culture with, as the book’s name suggests, love and vulnerability. In the second chapter he writes:

‘It’s a universal truth that giving is more gratifying than receiving.’

He goes on to tell the story of how in Buddhism there’s a notion that the one who begs for food or money is doing a favor to the one from whom they beg. In doing so, they’re allowing that person to give and thus to improve their karma. 

Darryl wanted to give us the gift of books, and it must have felt good for him. I need to stop feeling bad accepting someone’s gift when it’s offered. Like a lot of things, however, easier said than done. This will be a good reminder.

This one may seem obvious or elementary. Like I recently mentioned, it’s mostly for me. Maybe it’ll be helpful though for you, too.

We were traveling to Colorado and our van’s water supply ran out on day 3. Campgrounds were still open, but all so far had turned off their water supplies. Refilling had been tricky. Planning to pass through Moab on our way into southwestern Colorado, we stopped at the rest area where I-70 meets US-191 threading south through the desert. K noticed the maintenance door was open and saw what looked like the guy who had the key milling about.

‘Why don’t you ask him if we can fill up our water?’ she asked. Sensing my hesitation in not wanting to bother him, she reminded me: ‘The answer is always no until you ask.’ Right.

So I grabbed our water jug from under the van’s sink and asked him. He said yes. In fact, he seemed excited to be approached by someone and we ended up chatting for a bit before I ducked into the little room with a spigot.

Water refilled: check. Reminder it never hurts to ask for help: check, check.

A lot has come from a four-day retreat I led with my friend Greer Van Dyck for last year’s OIA Skip Yowell Leadership class outside the little Colorado town of Meredith. Like I know most of the folks are doing, I’m also still processing what was all shared. Lucky for you, or not depending I suppose on how you view my random thoughts, I’ll be sharing some of what came up.

In the meantime, to get to Colorado and back with Katie and our two kids we drove our van. Along the way, K was reading the book There’s No Such Thing As Bad Weather by Linda Åkeson McGurk. Her review is both positive and critical. Positive in that the author’s intent that we shouldn’t be too comfortable to go outside even when it’s not sunny is good, critical in that her opinion borders at times on condescending.

That said, on page 30 Åkeson McGurk brings up an interesting idea:

Unlike in the US, where private property rights are king, and land use tends to be ruled by the risk for potential lawsuits and the premise that if something can go wrong it probably will, allemansträtten relies on an honor system that can simply be summed up with the phrase ‘Do not disturb, do not destroy.’

Sure, the context there is about land. It doesn’t seem too far of a stretch though for me to take it into our work and into leadership. Something in fact that came up in Colorado had to do with the balance of process and trust. Speaking for myself, the less I trusted the folks on my team, the more processes I put in place. Not ideal. I needed to trust more, control less. Then manage the results to make sure everyone is being responsible for their work. Sometimes tough, but always possible. Also, ideal.

Maybe I, heck the proverbial ‘we,’ can learn a thing or two from the Swedes approach to land. Clearly, there are huge benefits to trusting the people and creating a space where responsibility (forgive the expression) rules.

We’re traveling this week for a retreat in Colorado. Tonight, we had Matt Manzari speak. He shared his incredible story about, as he put it, pain and suffering. ‘Pain is inevitable,’ he reminded us, then added, ‘suffering is a choice.’

After recovering from his first near-death experience wakeboarding, he was volunteering at a church trimming bushes when he was electrocuted with the same amount of current as six electric chairs. After months of agonizing recovery, he survived.

During his talk, he spoke about finding his why. Afterward, someone in our group asked him to elaborate on how he approached doing that. His answer: be like a toddler. 

I’ve thought about that approach myself as Sefton asks question after question about something as simple as the American flag. ‘Why does it have stars?’ I answer him. ‘Why are there states?’ Tougher answer, but still doable without having to make something up. ‘Why was there a war?’ Again, tough but answerable. At some point, that kid gets to a question that’s hard for me to answer.

The same is true asking ourselves a tough question like, ‘What’s my why?’

Like Matt offered, the way to get to the answer is to be like a toddler.

On our last trip to Goodwill, K bought a busload of Post-It® notes. Literally. It’s the classroom value pack. We’re set on small, square, self-sticking note-taking devices for a while. If you haven’t heard the story, the history of how they were invented is pretty cool.

All of that to say, I’m a long-time fan of the things and admittedly pretty excited for K’s find. 

They obviously have a million* uses. One way I’ve used them is by writing myself a little mantra and sticking it to my computer. The simpler the better. Personally, I strive for three or fewer words. The one I had the last few years I was with REI read: Practice restraint. That still applies today, in a lot of ways. But it’s been replaced. I can only have one, after all.

What I’ve had gracing my computer now for a while is from K. She left it for me once when she used to head over the mountains for three days to work, also at REI. It says: Play your music loud. Like ‘Practice restraint,’ that means a lot of things to me. Have fun. Don’t take myself too seriously. Also and more obviously, play my music loud when no one is home.

* give or take…

One hundred. 

I remember sitting down and writing the very first one of these. Heck, I remember coming up with the random idea that once a week I’d come up with a random idea. When I think about it now, sitting down every week to write these is one of the things of which I’m most proud for this thing I’ve called Sendline. 

The intent was to keep them simple. Short and random, worth sharing. I’ve joked with people that I really write them for myself. Little reminders and ideas to keep thinking about as I move through this thing called life. As I look back on them, I think I’ve done a pretty good job holding to that. Mostly.

Maybe surprisingly, it turns out they seem to make up a sort of portrait of myself. If you’ve read a bunch of them, you may feel like you know a little bit about me. Yeah, in retrospect as it should be. It seems easy now what in reality has always been tough for me: being known. In the context of leadership, it’s crucial to be known. Sharing one random idea at a time, I guess it’s not that hard.

That in and of itself is a good reminder for me.

ps… I listened to this song by Moby on repeat while writing this after midnight last night…

When something goes wrong and you’re alone, it’s frustrating. When you’re with someone, it’s an adventure.

That reminded me of the quote I shared in the very first Randomness.

My brother and I were backpacking last week. We were talking business while we hiked, about the differences between running a solo company and one with a team, when he shared that saying from his wife. What’s true for business can be just as true for a backpacking trip, or traveling, or pretty much life in general.

I loved it. Like the thing about failing, she’s right.

We were winding down a leadership group get-together last week. Folks started sharing random things, like Cart Narcs. Apparently, that’s hilarious. Since our teenager grew up to be a twenty-something, I’m way more out of the loop on what’s cool around the internets.

Glenn shared something random I’ll loosely call the ‘Don’t Get A Question From The Waitstaff’ Game. He plays it with his family and friends when he goes out to eat. If you’ve never heard of this game and want to give it a try, here’s the basic premise:

Don’t get asked a question from the waiter or waitress when ordering your food.

‘We’d like the Seasonal Crostini to start, and I’ll take the Pollo alla Milanese along with a glass of the Rio Vista Tempranillo.’ If the waitress moves on to the next person at your table, congratulations! You’ve succeeded. ‘Would you like bread or a side salad?’ Doh! You’ve failed. Better luck next time.

The reason this quirky little game caught my attention is in how it could test my ability to think about all the options beforehand and then clearly communicating what it is I want. So much so as to leave the wait staff without a question to ask. Sort of like foolproofing what I say. 

I see a lot of opportunities for that skill to be useful. I guess I’ll need to start testing myself next time K and I go out to dinner.

This summer we’ve had four fires within a 10-mile radius of our house. None of them threatened us directly, but close enough for K and I to sit down and think about our evac plan should that happen. It was an enlightening exercise. Living in Montana, my brother and his wife recently did that, too. What he wrote me seemed to sum it up nicely:

‘When we were thinking we’d be evacuated last month, we started thinking about what stuff we’d bring. In the end, we actually don’t have any real “valuables” that we couldn’t leave behind.’

That mostly held up for K and me, too. We’d grab our (ironically) fireproof box, the hard drives that hold our 100,000+ photos, and our binders of film negatives (yeah, we’ve been photographers for a while). Maybe a few odds and ends. The point we realized is that, like my brother and his wife, we don’t have much of what we’d really consider valuable. Which made us ask the question, ‘What makes something valuable?’

I’ve done this exercise before, most recently when I left REI after 16 years. Admittedly, there were only a few things I took with me that I guess I deemed valuable. It’s not to say everything else I had there or we have in our home is crap. I think what’s important is in asking myself the question every once in a while so I can keep tabs on essentially what I’m prioritizing.

We had just pulled out on our way camping last week when something reminded K of a story from years ago. We were both working at REI. A bunch of us from Marketing were volunteering at the local food bank a few blocks north of the Kent campus. On that particular day, they had us boxing up carrots. It was always orderly chaos, with vegetables or other produce flying as we raced another company to see who could package up the most.

At the table K was working, there was an older guy she didn’t know. He was pretty quiet, she recalled. As things wound down and folks whisked as many of the remaining carrots into bags to then go into boxes, K watched that guy take a single carrot, place it in a bag, and send it down the conveyor.

A few moments later, another Katie who was running the boxing station held up the single-bagged carrot and shouted, ‘Alright, who did this!?’ Silence. My Katie remembers the guy chuckling to himself. No one suspected and the chaos picked back up.

When she’s older, K said she wants to be like that guy. Do silly things that no one suspects. Remember to have fun.

The idea of having fun at work is a big one for me. It’s tough running a solo business, even tougher cut off from the rest of the world left for the moment to put together virtual programs. I admittedly haven’t cracked the have-fun-while-facing-a-computer code yet. Her story was a good reminder to me though that it’s important to have fun. Especially at work.

I’m a fan of Harvard Business Review. I also appreciate their slightly more hip take on that timeless classic they call Ascend. Earlier this week I was reading their email about emails. It was good. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find a bit titled ‘The Fun Stuff.’ It linked to a blog with a lot of drawings about the ‘two kinds of people’ phenomenon. So I scrolled through it.

When I got to the one about the straight blinds and the crooked blinds on page 3, I was hooked. So. True.

In full transparency, I’m a straight blinds guy. For those of you who know me, this probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise. K is a crooked blinds gal. Meaning, it doesn’t seem to bother her if she comes down in the morning and, after raising the blinds around the house, one or two are left crooked. Me, it does. So I fix them.

Please enjoy your own scrolling until you find the one that’s you.