Photo by Nicole Avagliano.
Sandy toes
It’s the last week of August. We dropped the kids at camp and school and drove across a post-apocalyptic city, roads empty during weekday rush hour. All the city’s inhabitants are gone for one final week of vacation before we crash land into fall.
Living in a place with a long winter makes us savor the warm days. The scarcity of summer provides blanket permission to work a bit less, to cut out early on Fridays, to shuffle priorities and to press our thumbs on the life side of the ever elusive work-life balance.
It’s been a good summer, we say to each other. It’s been a summer that felt like a summer. Complete with sandy shoes, sunblock, bbqs, and warm wet towels forgotten at the bottom of the kids’ backpacks. Eww.
It’s very on trend to talk about mindfulness, particularly in leadership and management contexts. This week, bring your attention to your summer self. Find your fuck it I’m wearing shorts to the office self. Set your out of office notice, find some sand and dig in your toes.
Press down hard on the life side of the scale.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s Reading
So much of my early experience in tech started with the assumption that anything pre-internet probably didn’t apply to me or my colleagues. We had our own way of doing things and we would happily reinvent everything along the way.
All that reinvention, it turns out, isn’t free. And the longer I’m in this industry, the more curious I am about other places that have had to address or solve similar problems. While not identical, leveraging existing models often gets you several important steps along the path to figuring big things out.
At 20, I moved into a big ol’ victorian house in San Francisco. One of my (many, many) roommates was a woman of color working at a small nonprofit. These days she runs a council of non-profits and today, she shared this piece: “20 ways majority-white nonprofits can build authentic partnerships with organizations led by communities of color”.
While the title is unlikely to pass Buzzfeed’s editorial guidelines, the article jumps 20 steps ahead of most tech discussions around diversity and inclusion. If you want to know what you can do to help move the dial for diversity and inclusion efforts in tech, listen to what others have learned along the way and stop starting over.
What Johnathan’s Reading
Elon Musk in his feelings. Look, I’ll put my bias out there. I don’t like what I’ve seen about how Elon operates. I don’t like the racism. I don’t like the record on keeping their workers safe, much less motivated, engaged, and healthy. I am all for greening up the world and inspiring people with what’s possible. Very much so. But I want to believe you can do it without calling your critics pedophiles.
What’s interesting to me about this article is not the revelation that Elon is a human being and vulnerable to being depleted. Say it with me: We Are All Made of Meat. We all have needs and weaknesses. What’s interesting to me is how this seems to be big news to many people. That Elon would get teary in an interview. That Elon would have disappointments and regrets.
In our trainings we talk on day 1 about what a hard job it is to manage people well. To have all your own shit, and then to be privy to theirs, too. And one of the core things we push in those conversations is the importance of taking care of yourself. Of understanding what gets you out of The Bad Place, and building those habits. Eat healthy. Sleep. Exercise. Meditate. Therapy. Whatever your things are, I hope you’ll pause for a second and ask yourself if you’re doing them. You need them. You, like Elon, are made of meat. ❤️
Who’s Yelling in Johnathan’s Twitter Stream
It’s hard to link to a branching twitter thread but here’s an entry point into some VCs and company-builders scuffling about Lean Startup stuff. I’ve never met him but judging purely from his online conversation style, I worry that Keith is an asshole. Nevertheless if you’re doing startup-y things while reading this newsletter, it might get your brain going on thinking critically about consensus methodologies/”best practices”.
I apologize in advance that this conversation, though started by a person of colour (Andrew Chen), seems to be entirely peopled by wealthy white men. Parker’s last word (on one of the threads anyhow) is approximately where I net out.
