Year: 2015

 I spend a lot of time in my own head, wondering what I should be thinking about what people are thinking about what they think I’m thinking. I’m trying to change that, be more in the moment, address what’s in front of me.

You know, like everybody else. 

Now that I commute by public transit, I spend a lot of time waiting. I’m trying to use that experience in a positive way.

Some days I take the MUNI subway/bus/trolley hybrid thing from the Caltrain station to the Financial District. When you’re on the platform, you can see the train at least a quarter of a mile away, and it has several traffic lights to negotiate before it arrives. It often takes awhile.

Many of my fellow travelers reflexively check the progress of the arriving train every few moments, craning their necks to make an exaggerated display of their impatience. 

“This does not include those who pantomime looking down the track as a stratagem to jump the line. Folks, you’re not fooling anyone.”

I decided to try not to peer down the track, since it certainly doesn’t help. I just look wherever I feel like, and tell myself, “When the train stops in front of me, I’ll get on it.”

Sometimes it makes me feel less rushed, acknowledging there is no point in worrying about-or even paying attention to-something over which I have no control. But sometimes the effort of not looking feels more stressful than looking.

This point was brought home to me this morning as I was waiting on the platform at Millbrae, the origination of my morning train, for the doors of the empty car to open. I was at the front of a growing line.

“Don’t think about it,” I told myself. “The doors will open when they open and you will get on the train. You have no control over when that will happen, and the impatience of the others in line does not affect you.”

Then an app on my phone beeped and I nearly launched myself forward, like a coiled spring, into the closed doors.

Obviously I have yet to attain BART zen.

photo by me

I just had an amusing Facebook exchange with one of my smartest and funniest friends, Kirk Ross. It reminded me of a cold, wet night years ago when he and I were sitting with a group of people in Henry’s Bistro in Chapel Hill.

Our friend John Cotter came in from the cold and walked up to the bar warming his hands. For some reason, John was wearing a belted tweed Norfolk jacket and a bucket hat, looking like he’d just come in from the moors, rather than Rosemary Street.

Kirk turned to me and said, “It was his dogs that found the body.”

I like it here. I haven’t written much about my transition to the Bay Area, mostly because it’s been quite a year of ups and downs. But I do enjoy it and am happy with the decision, mostly because of the people. 

I’ve had more interesting and fun conversations here with random strangers than I’ve had in any other city. People get jokes. They are ready to engage. They seem to be having fun. I like it. 

I’ve also started to recognize people; not just the nice people who make me coffee and sandwiches, but people I see on the street. In the last year I have taken pictures of at least five people who I’ve seen again. I don’t mean people in my neighborhood or near my office, I mean random folks I saw on BART or on the street.

The impetus for this post came from a woman standing next to me on the train – right now – whose photo I took months ago. I took it because her green travel mug matched her green jacket and it looked kind of cool and commutery and my intention is to take photos and decide later what to do with them, rather than hem and haw and miss the picture.

I think I took two, and in the second she is giving me a definite “why are you creeping me?” hairy eyeball. I should post the picture here but that would require a lot of scrolling and it wasn’t in focus.

Is she reading this over my shoulder? I would if I were her. I totally look at people’s screens on BART. A few months ago I watched a guy post comment spam with embedded… scripts… or something. 

Also you’d be amazed how many people on the train are reading porn novels on their devices.

San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, but only 837,000 people live here, nowhere near the size of the mellifluously-named Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Combined Statistical Area “CSA”, with its estimated population of two million plus.

I don’t know how to end this post and we’re almost at my stop so I’ll just say there’s a Japanese transsexual dressed like a schoolgirl standing near the train door, posing and checking herself out in the reflection of the window and a guy dressed in, you know, men’s clothes trying really hard to figure her out. 

I should probably take a picture. 

I’ve had a lot of roles in my almost 35 years of working. I’m still using lessons I learned as a fry cook at Golden Corral at the age of 15. But I don’t have an MBA and have never really studied business, just gotten “on-the-job training.”

Wait. On-the-job training.

A lot of what I’ve learned about managing people, for instance, came from making mistakes and missing really obvious things.

For instance, you can never communicate too much. No matter how clear you think you’ve made something, some smart, dedicated, valued member of your team has the wrong end of the stick. And as the manager, that’s your fault. 

I’m thinking about this because I started listening to “StartUp” last week, a podcast about the genesis and early days of Gimlet Media, a company that makes podcasts, including “StartUp.”

All fun meta stuff aside, it’s the fully-documented, evolving story of a new business trying to get off the ground, grow and scale. I’m learning a lot, and it’s fascinating to hear their conversations, analysis, self-doubts and fears and all the stuff that usually goes unsaid. 

Moreover, you can see the benefit that the podcast itself has had for the business itself. Talking openly about getting funding helped them get funding, despite the fact that they were very open about the challenges they were facing and their doubts and fears. 

Or did it help them get funding because they were open about their challenges and doubts and fears? I think so. Although I’m not an investor, I certainly trust them more after hearing them address their issues realistically, without hype or bluster, and work through them. 

I’ve always been fascinated by radical transparency as a corporate communications philosophy. I’ve been lucky to mostly work for companies that made genuinely good products. Most of our marketing struggles have been how to capture the value of what we did in terms that could make a good headline or fit on a postcard.

That’s hard, but it’s a separate challenge from building a great product. Great products have been brought down by bad marketing, and the obverse is even more common. 

I’m thinking about this now because at my new job, at a startup, I’m trying to find the best way to encapsulate the vision, passion, knowledge and commitment of our founder/CTO and our CEO, as well as our product’s genuine excellence.

When the two of them sit down with customers or analysts, they tell a fascinating, compelling story. But it’s hard to turn it into a strap line and three circles on a slide. “Maybe they’re just better at what they do than I am.”

What I really want to do is put a camera on them whenever they get talking and show the process and the debate. Am I putting too much trust in the marketplace, to hope transparency and honesty would trump a clever slogan, a made-up word with a trademark symbol and a big ad budget?