Author: tschroe

During our last workshop with a group of managers (some of whom are part of our little email family, so if they read these things they may get a kick out of this), I brought up the idea of having to take all the blame and pass off all the praise. It garnered a sort of visceral reaction. I was okay with that. This is why:

Let’s remember another time in 4th grade when I was small and would cry a lot because I was timid and we had field day and I was very sad about that and we had to shoot basketballs and I could not make a basket so another kid from my class was on my team and he told me he would shoot for us both so every basket he made he said “Good job Anna!” and every basket he missed he said “Aw darn I missed” that kid was a good kid I hope he’s doing good

That was a story Katie’s cousin shared on The Gram. She’s in her mid-20s, so that was probably fifteen years ago. Just like Beth’s story about Christopher Walken, Anna still remembers.

One night a couple weeks ago, K was relaxing while I finished up writing some stuff. She had picked a Netflix series called ‘Explained.’ Specifically, the episode about (wait for it)… exclamation marks. Coincidentally, I had just seen this Instagram post by Tim Urban (aka the Wait But Why guy). I’m haunted by exclamation marks, so I stopped what I was doing and settled in next to her to watch.

It kicked off with the narrator saying: ‘Every day around the world millions struggle with the same question… two exclamation points or not two exclamation points.’ 

Those simple little upside-down lowercase i’s can be friendly or, well, too friendly. They can lighten the tone or make you seem unprofessional. If you don’t use them? Maybe you’re just mean. Heck, Elaine got dumped over exclamation marks in a classic episode of Seinfeld.

Arg!!!*

I relate with Tim Urban’s dilemma and tend to follow the one-exclamation-mark-per-email not-a-rule rule. That’s me. What should you do? Sorry, I can’t really help except to offer, as the Netflix episode ended (spoiler), anything kind of goes.

* That use of three ! was 100% intentional as I felt it accurately represented my feelings on the matter…

I was on a call this week with a bunch of alumni from the OIA Future Leadership Academy. Whitney Conner Clapper from Patagonia was sharing her story of how she got from growing up in a college town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to now. As she started explaining what she did for Patagonia, she talked about working with folks who run non-profits. Something she mentioned about them struck me:

She said how grassroots organization leaders work a full day, put the kids to bed, and then get to work doing what needs to be done for their non-profits.

Her point was they needed help, and that’s where she came in. But I was stuck on that thought about what I did after Katie and I put Sefton to bed. For me, it runs the gamut from definitely putting in hours for Sendline (like I am now, in fact) to working on house or creative projects to sometimes, yeah, relaxing. 

The question I’m throwing out to consider is what do you do after you put your kids to bed? This actually doesn’t require you to have kids. Short of literally doing that, in other words, what do you do when you have a break from what you think you needed to do?

This also isn’t about cramming in productivity from the minute you wake up until you go to sleep. It’s okay to relax. I just thought it was a cool way to think about how I spend my downtime and thought I’d share.

A while ago, my older brother Cosmo posted about email on his blog. A sort of History of My Email Frequency story. He confessed:

I’ve always loved email, ever since that day in college when I learned it was possible to send messages around the world… for free! 

My brother is kind of a dork. Even if he won’t admit it, which I’m pretty confident he would, I can say that because I’m his little brother. Case in point: ‘for fun’ (his words, not mine), he built a chart of his email history, dating back more than twenty years. Something about it struck me, besides the fact he sent a lot of emails:

I take way too much time stressing over every word I say.

From what I remember, email was first used as a way of communicating short bits of information between universities. Keyword being ‘short.’ It seems safe to assume that ‘short’ could also imply ‘curt.’ But humans are weird and read into the words and punctuation, and email has naturally evolved as it’s become more of a staple way of communicating to anyone and everyone.

Enter me, grappling with word choice, triple-checking that I spelled a name right, and generally taking far too long to write an email. Not that any of those are bad things. Well, except for the third one. If I have any chance of hitting my brother’s peak of fifty-two emails per day, I need to be faster at choosing what I say and checking it twice. Also, not stressing so much about if I make a mistake.

It’s not, well, ever that our little town of Wenatchee, Washington makes national headlines. As proof, a search for ‘Wenatchee’ on the New York Times yields about ten results: one from 1995, another from 1972, and the rest from the 1950s and earlier. Frankly, this is just too good to pass up.

It got 60k upvotes on Reddit. The same number of retweets on the ol’ Twitter. The BBC did a whole segment. It’s so good, the late show hosts also, well, couldn’t pass it up: Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. 

The musician-in-a-bag solution from the band teacher, Eric Anderson, is so creative I’m going to award him the #leadershipindisguise hashtag award. Which means now I need to come up with that award. In the meantime, it’s a proud moment to be a Wenatcheean. I’m not convinced that’s a thing. Or even a word.

Why am I sharing this? Because these Friday randomnesses are, well, supposed to be random. Also, as Jimmy Fallon put it: ‘Because it’s funny.’

Working with a new client, I sent their group of managers a survey through Google Forms. Google makes it easy, after all. The trouble is I have roughly 1.3 million Google accounts, each for one thing or another. Despite my thinking I checked and double-checked from which account I was sending the form, I didn’t use my thom-at-discoversendline-dot-com. A few days later, I got an email from one of them telling me they had found it in their spam folder. Oops.

This made me think: why don’t I just build a form on my website? Why, in other words, don’t I do something better?

Boom. Done. But only because I screwed up. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have asked that question. Making mistakes, duh, are what push me to not make them again. To be better.

As a manager, this was one of the toughest things I had to learn. To let those who called me their boss screw up. It’s the same with my kids. The lesson Google taught me this week was a good reminder of why.

Oh yes, more communication-type stuff this week. My thought: past tense and present tense.

It’s Thursday morning and I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike for this week’s random thing. It just did. I was writing to my buddy Trey. He and I worked together at REI and I’ve always respected him as a boss and as a leader. He’s one of the good ones. He recently had to make a tough decision to leave the company and heads out in about a week. In my email, I told him:

No wonder folks looked up to you as much as they did.

Then I caught myself. Wait, so they don’t anymore like that was in the past? I fixed it to be more accurate:

No wonder folks look up to you as much as they do.

Yep, that’s better. Heck, I’m pretty sure there’ll be folks in his future who’ll look up to him, too.

This is for all of us who have spent way too much time over the past twelve months staring at ourselves and lots of other people through our computer screens. For futzing about how we look, stressing about what we’re going to say, feeling like we have to figure out how to become an actor. It’s to celebrate awkwardness, the kind that happens because life can be awkward and it’s best to embrace it. It’s to take a minute and chuckle, or if you’re like me, bust out laughing for way too long and catching your breath because you’re sort of choking.

Behold, if you haven’t already, the I’m not a cat guy.

Admittedly, I’m only sharing this because he embraced his awkwardness and hoped it would bring some much-needed laughter. That it did. Thank you, Rod.

I was writing to the founder of 4by6.com to let him know again how much I love his service. I realize, time and again, I tend to write the way I think. Which is to get straight to the point. So in my email to him, I jumped in and blurted out why I was writing. At the very end, I tossed in an ‘I hope you’re well!’

When I reread it, I realized I had it backward. So I cut out that sentiment and pasted it at the very beginning. Duh.

This happens to me a lot. I do this when I’m writing copy for Sendline, an email to someone, even notes to myself. I’ll write a bunch of stuff to try and make a point, and when I go back to reread it, realize I’ve put the most important thing at the end. So same drill: I cut it and paste it to the beginning.

For an example, last year I came across this letter from Adam, the CEO of Innovex, to Steve, the CEO of VF Corp. Not wanting to get into the debate it kicked off, I couldn’t help notice how the letter began. A bunch of facts. A page-and-a-half of them, in fact. Fast-forward to the middle of page two, the second paragraph from the end, where Adam writes, ‘At this point, you may wonder why I am directing this letter to you… ’ Boom! That seems to be the most important piece, yet just like me, he put it at the end.

Like using the word ‘but,’ or ‘just,’ I’ve become hyper-aware of this little fault of mine. The good thing? After catching it and giving myself a facepalm, I correct it.

Okay, back to our random-but-not-always-random agenda. This may be a bit scattered at first. Bear with me as I piece together for you the inner workings of my brain…

Thought #1: A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jesse reminded me about Dale Carnegie’s book How To Win Friends & Influence People. I mentioned it a while ago mostly as an aside to a story about rabbit holes. Jesse loved the book, too. 

Thought #2: That same week, my friend Beth shared with me an awesome story about her days working as an intern at a theatre company in New York City. Among the actors and actresses working there at the time was Christopher Walken. I thought it was funny how she admitted he sort of intimidated her. Heck yeah, I think he’d intimidate me. He probably intimidates a lot of folks.

Intimidating notwithstanding, she told me how she left the theater one day to head out for lunch. Walking down the sidewalk, she spied him coming toward her. ‘Hey Beth,’ he greeted her. How did she know his name!? She was just an intern! (My memory isn’t 100%, but I feel pretty confident she in fact used the word just in what I’d assume an act of humility).

Thought #3: One of the parts of Carnegie’s book that stood out to me was this:

‘(Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that) one of the simplest, most obvious and most important ways of gaining goodwill was by remembering names and making people feel important. Yet how many of us do it?’

I’ve always been terrible at names. I’ve used the excuse that, well, ‘Sorry, I’m terrible with names.’ Pretty lame. At some point, I realized there’s no excuse not to remember someone’s name, so I learned to repeat them in conversation, then jot them down in notebooks and in spreadsheets. That’s helped, but I still screw up sometimes and forget. I’m a work-in-progress.

Final thought: Christopher Walken remembered names. There’s something to it. However many years later, Beth still hasn’t forgotten.

Kelia Anne/Sun Literary Arts via AP

I had something random-but-not-random all lined up for this week. Then I heard Amanda Gorman recite her poem The Hill We Climb during President Biden’s Inauguration. It was so incredible I wanted to give a heads-up in case you didn’t catch it, you haven’t heard someone you know tell you about it, or you were on a backcountry ski tour or somewhere cool and out of information range.

You can watch it in a lot of places like here. Just as powerfully as her reciting it, you can read it also in a lot of places like here. (If you have a browser that supports a reader view, click it)

There’s so much to her poem it seems silly to pull out a single piece. That just means it’ll likely speak to many of us, in different ways. For me, this was what stood out:

We are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

Last year, I had what I thought a great call with someone from a company that had been on my ‘Companies I’d Love To Work With’ list. Our conversation felt good. They asked me to follow-up in a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks rolled by and I shot off an email, excited for the opportunity. Nothing. Nada. Ok, another week went by. I emailed again. Nope, still nothing. Disappointed, I came downstairs and mentioned to K it seemed like I had been ghosted. I’ll never forget her reply. Or, more accurately, how she replied. 

‘Yeah, that happens.’ Then she turned around and went back to emptying the dishwasher. 

She said it totally one-hundred-percent nonchalantly. How she responded, having not been invested, was an awesome reminder to me. It happens. No worries. Move on. 

Last month, K and I set out some treats for the delivery folks. Like kids on Christmas Eve leaving out cookies for Santa, we waited in anticipation. The first gal drove around to the back of our house. Strike one. A few more came and it didn’t seem like anyone got a kick out of it.

Until this guy. (If you watch the video, turn up the volume so you can really hear his excitement)

His reaction was awesome. It was a good reminder, too. What matters isn’t pleasing everyone, or trying to make them all happy. Maybe those other folks just grabbed a snack from the house up the street, or they’re about to head home for dinner. Maybe someone doesn’t like snacks. What matters is just making one person’s day a little brighter. Like that guys.

I have to remember this from time to time, running a business, trying to make an impact. Everyone isn’t going to be blown away, or find something meaningful in what I have to say. That’s okay. As long as one person does, though, that’s enough for me.

Everyone does a year in review it seems these days. Spotify. Strava, I discovered. Every single email list to which you’re subscribed. To that end, I’m sorry for what I’m about to write. As I try to do every week, though, I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Here then are the highlights, in case you missed them. The posts, in looking back myself or that I recall even when writing them, I feel now are worth repeating. In no particular order, these are five of my favorites.

Friday Randomness, Vol. 43… A reminder to myself not to make assumptions.

Friday Randomness, Vol. 60… Taking the time to handwrite something makes all the difference.

Friday Randomness, Vol. 25… Simplifying what I say, and telling stories, is the surest way for me to influence others.

Friday Randomness, Vol. 52… Caring about people is all that matters.

Friday Randomness, Vol. 39… There’s rarely a time I need to use the word ‘just.’

Of course, it would seem that if I’m saying these are the ones that stand out for me, the others don’t for some reason or another. That’s not entirely true. If you’ve missed any random randomnesses, they’re all up on our Journal.

With that, out with the old and in with the new. Here’s to what we can glean, both positive and not, from 2020. Cheers to new beginnings!

Happy Christmas! Here’s to a time of year to celebrate, to spend with family, and to think about the (adjectives fail me at the moment, so insert your own here) year that was 2020, now in the rearview. To listen to holiday music, like Leslie Odom, Jr. singing Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria. In Latin, even.

It’s also the time of year for Christmas cards. As we looked through our lineup along windowsills, something struck Katie and me. Of all our cards, we noticed only two included any sort of actual handwriting. Of those two, only one was a personal, handwritten note.

Why am I bringing this up? It’s the thought that counts, right? Absolutely.

This made me think, though, of my little box I keep of things from my fifteen-plus years at REI. Yes, it’s a little box. There are only a handful of things I’ve kept, after all. The email from my boss Mike. A hilarious card one of my guys made me after I ordered a Christmas gift for K from Backcountry.com. Two notes, one from Sally Jewell when she was still CEO and one from Matt Hyde when he was our Marketing Sr. VP. The reason I kept them?

They were handwritten.

Both Sally and Matt, all those years ago, carved out a few minutes from their no-doubt crazy-busy schedules, grabbed a pen, and wrote something personal to me in each of them. Almost ten years later, I still have them both. Yes, the thought counts. What counts, even more I remind myself, is taking a little extra time to write something by hand.

Happy 250th birthday, Beethoven! Well, technically as best we’ve nailed it down, his birthday was on Wednesday. It’s kind of a big deal, this year. Just Google ‘Beethoven 250’…

I could write a book about Beethoven. I’ve already written a term paper, for which I got a better grade than our class valedictorian. Just saying. If I couldn’t beat him at calculus, I could beat the guy at waxing poetic over Beethoven’s enormous Ninth Symphony.

Why this randomness? Well, certainly not all of these have really had to do with leadership, or with managing teams, or business in general. There’s more to life than work, after all. Beethoven, however, can definitely apply to that first one. When I’m pressed to define what leadership is for me, it always comes down to some form of inspiration. Someone who inspires me is a leader.

Beethoven, then, just… Yeah. He had the edge of speaking in what I think of as the universal language: Music. In this age of divisiveness, of hostility, of rancor, I’m pressed to find common ground. A universal one? Yep, music. And no matter anyone’s beliefs, or their values, or their perspectives, it’s tough not to give Beethoven even a little credit for writing music that two-hundred and fifteen years later we’re still performing, still listening to, still being blown away by.

Still being inspired by.

For those who subscribe to the New York Times, they put together a really great list of his music. If you want this guy’s recommendation for the best 8 minutes of Beethoven… Grab some headphones, turn up the volume all the way, close your eyes and absorb the second movement of his Seventh Symphony as conducted by Carlos Kleiber.

This week, I was talking to Jessica from the Chelan-Douglas Land Trust. They’re our local 1% For The Planet donor, after all. She called to thank me for our #givingtuesday donation and answer any questions. In our conversation, she shared with me some of the history around the trail network that the CDLT has been able to develop throughout the Wenatchee foothills. 

During her telling of the story, she mentioned how difficult it was initially to bring together all the various land owners who owned property where there are now trails. How folks back then had said it would be impossible to get everyone to agree, to come together and see the value of a local trail network. The proposed trails would cross all sorts of private property, from orchards to farms to rolling sage-covered hillsides.

Always, with change comes some fear.

Listening to Jessica, I thought of a question: What was the thing that led to their success in ultimately creating what is now the foothills trail system? Her reply brought a smile to my face. ‘Taking the time,’ she explained, ‘to build trust and relationships.’

Yep. I smiled because I had learned the value of that lesson years ago when I was the guy wanting to bring in a new line of business to REI. It made total sense to me and was a win-win for everyone. Why didn’t they all see it that way!? Over time and after doing a lot of reflection on that effort, I realized how much better my chances of success were if I took the time to, as Jessica shared, build relationships and trust. That meant I had to start prioritizing the little stuff. Like making time to just grab a coffee and catch up, or asking someone how their family was doing or about the vacation they just came back from and were still glowing over. In a lot of ways, the cool stuff.

Jessica’s answer was a good reminder it’s not just me. That the patience and acceptance of taking the time to get to know others is the way to go.

My first photographic effort, circa a long time ago…

To relax, sometimes K indulges in the guilty pleasure of browsing Bored Panda. This week, she came across something that piqued her interest: Rejection-Sensitivity Disorder. It’s funny that a lot of the signs are, well, traits of being an introvert. Maybe the only differentiation is in the use of the word extreme, as in it can cause ‘extreme emotional sensitivity and pain triggered by a perception that a person has been rejected or criticized by people they care about.’

Reading through the Twitter feed explaining the disorder, the part that caught my attention was this:

Your interest in it (a thing you enjoy doing) drops like a stone, you don’t want to be a part (of it) anymore. You want to go home, by yourself and hide.

Yep, that’s definitely introversion. It makes me think of a time I was, I think, thirteen. Our family was on a weeklong holiday from Saint Louis to visit Washington DC. We stopped at all the historic sights along the way, including Gettysburg. Driving through the park, me riding front and center in our six-seater Buick, a cannon along the side of the road caught my eye. I was a little too timid to speak up immediately. I waited a bit before asking if we could pull over so I could take a photo. Once stopped, I walked what seemed a long way thirty-or-so years ago now, but in reality, likely wasn’t much more than a quarter of a mile. I found the particular cannon I had spotted, framed it with my little Kodak point-and-shoot, and etched the image onto some color film.

Then walked back to the car, proud of the photograph I had taken, enjoying the moment.

When I reached the car, everyone had spilled out of it and was clearly exasperated. I don’t remember what was said, and I’d likely embellish it to save face at this point. I do vividly recall climbing back into the front seat, squeezing over to the center, and fuming. I muttered (or more loudly than I’m remembering) under my breath how I just wanted to go home, by myself, and be with our new cat. I didn’t want to be in that stupid Buick, or with my grumpy family.

I’m definitely introverted. I’m not sure I’d diagnose myself with Rejection-Sensitivity Disorder, but the similarities are striking. If you’re also introverted, or even if you’re not, you may find it interesting.

This week I was reading a New York Times article titled ‘Exploring A Timeless Wilderness, Before The Drilling Begins’ about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A friend of mine, Matt, had just tossed out a casual invitation to join him on a backpacking trip up there next summer. Wow. I can’t quite picture, or even fathom, the landscape in Alaska, that far above the Arctic Circle.

The article was a good read. Well-written and gorgeous photography. One sentence stood out to me. Drifting along the Hulahula River, they notice Caribou tracks skirting the shore, then wolf tracks following those. Somebody asks, ‘What time is it?’ Andrew George, the lead raft guide, answers simply:

‘The time is now.’

I liked that.

Aerial view of the southern edge of the Brooks Range mountains. Credit…Christopher Miller for The New York Times

Despite the fact I totally missed it, this is cool enough that it’s worth sharing after the fact. I apologize if this is something with which you’re already familiar and I’m the only one not in the know…

Apparently, November 13 (last Friday) is World Kindness Day. I am fully aware of International Mountain Day (thanks again, Mom!) on December 11 and National Grilled Cheese Day on April 12. Those are big, important days around here. World Kindness Day, however, is a new and fun discovery. Their website is full of cool stuff.

And yeah, even though I’m a week late to the party, I figure any day is a good day for a random act of kindness.