Poke, poke, poke

I've been suffering from a general level of apathy for my professional pursuits for the last couple of months. It's boredom with my assignments (which are keeping me from pursuing more interesting side projects) and fatigue with the tedium and arbitrariness of my MBA studies. I'm just not interested in what I'm doing right now. Even a breakthrough in a problem that I've been dealing with for over a year has done little to assuage my ennui. I'm feeling stagnant.

I'm not particularly motivated to workout (but that doesn't keep me from hitting the gym or going on runs). I don't even have a very strong inclination to write this blog post. I'm writing to fight back against this blah that has been gradually dragging me down. Pursuits that I once found valuable have lost a bit of their luster.

I've learned that these low phases are just part of a cycle. There are better times ahead if I can just keep moving. Moving makes things possible, introduces a bit of disorder and chaos into things. The best stuff rarely comes from where we expect. It's those minor things that spawn the most satisfying parts of our life. If I don't keep poking around, they're not going to show up.

Going Deep

I've spent a great deal of my life being abundantly aware of what I thought of myself, but largely ignorant of what other people thought about me. I'm always aware of my intentions, preferences, and desires. The people I interact with should be aware of these things as well, implicitly, without any real input or communication from me. That perspective has been my unspoken (and largely unacknowledged) guide to personal relationships. My life is arid and desolate when it comes to me telling people what I think about them in either word or deeds. My likes and dislikes, needs and desires have been a closely held secret. I never let people know what I thought about them, that I found them interesting or liked to spend time with them. I never expressed affection. It was so much easier to remain aloof.

The rational bent of most of my posts here echo this predilection. Thoughts, thinking, ideas, are so much easier to discuss than feelings and opinions. Even all this business school stuff is about analyzing numbers and basing decisions on a careful analysis of the facts. I can't help but look at this business data and make parallels to the data I generate in the lab. Conventionally sound management is rooted in facts because facts are assumed to accurately reflect the environment. Facts are facts, but the environment contains the facts and all the assumptions and underlying behavior that went into generating that fact. There's also an entirely separate body of unseen and unaccounted for stuff that is the basis of some fact. My research in the lab is all about figuring out what's the unseen and unaccounted for stuff that is the basis of some observation. Business facts just seem to be taken for granted without too much thought about what it all means.

I think I've gone about as far as I can go with my highly rational approach to life. The next step in my career demands more. The next step in my life demands more from me on a deeply emotional level. What's going on behind the scenes, the real motivation for people's behavior, is far more important than what we see at the surface.

If you're edgy, shouldn't you have something to say?

I was in line for a slide at a water park this morning when I heard the people behind me talking about telling one of their friends that she is bourgeois. They were laughing that she didn't know what it meant and she thought it was an insult. I'd be insulted if something told me I was bourgeois. I don't think of myself as conventional, but when I look at my life, it's hard to argue with that assessment. I live in the suburbs, work for a giant corporation, I'm working on an MBA, and I'm married with two kids. Why should I be insulted? I love my life. My wife is gorgeous, my kids are fun (most of the time), and for all that I bitch and moan about my job, I find it largely rewarding on most days. So some hipster from Williamsburg or Austin might not find my life appealing, but I derive a great deal of pleasure from the live my wife and I built out here in the suburbs.

The label of bourgeois is insulting because it implies that my life emerged from the passive acceptance of what my socioeconomic position offered in a particular moment rather than an active pursuit of something that appeals to and fits my desires. A passive acceptance of my life's circumstances would have landed me in the military. That's the path that my family has traditionally taken. That's the life that I knew as a kid. I have tremendous respect for the military, but I knew that was not my path. I made the decision to pursue something different than other people in my life. 

So I decided to pursue a conventional career in a well established company in a mature industry. Well, I may work for a giant corporation, but I would argue vehemently that my career is conventional. So much of my career angst is rooted in my aversion for the conventional career path. I can see that path and what it has to offer. It's a nice clear trail that's served plenty of people well over the years. I just can't bring myself to take it. I've recognized the expediency of heeding the precedent of that path, but I've sought a way to take that path in a manner that feels right for me. The opportunity that is sitting there just waiting for somebody to grasp it would be considered highly conventional to anybody in my company, but I think the secret to success in that role is to take a highly unconventional approach. That's taking advantage of an opportunity. That's not embracing the accepted standards and holding them as your own. 

So I'm married. I've been with my wife since we were 19. I'm not exactly pushing the edge when it comes to the primary relationship in my life. Hell, I've been seeing a therapist for the last 6 months to help me be a better husband, to in essence make me better at serving the role that traditional society expects a man to fulfill. Ah, here we get back to that idea of accepting versus choosing. I have had plenty of opportunities to make a different choice. My desire to deepen my relationship with my wife has nothing to do with any societal expectation that I be a good husband. I WANT to have a deeper relationship with my wife. This is an expectation that I put on myself. It's a choice that I make. It's a choice that I make everyday. I got a salad at lunch today to show my wife that I understand and appreciate her struggle. I've made the choice to do what is best for her rather than what is best for me. I did that for her. I could care less what conventional norms dictate. 

Maybe I don't visibly reject societal expectations. Maybe I choose to have a comfortable life in a place where my kids can thrive. So be it. That's the choice that I've made. It's a choice. I have not simply accepted what was expected of me. My choices are my own. Say what you will. 

Which path?

A long awaited opportunity to move up a level or two in my organization has finally presented itself. At first glance, the opportunity feels entirely wrong for me. It's not the position that I've been waiting for. It's a role firmly rooted in what people know needs to get done. The job description is entirely conventional, corporate, and uninspired. It just reaffirms my expectation that the job will be conventional, corporate, and uninspired. But why do I feel that way? I'm extending how I see current managers running their groups and assume that my task would be to emulate their approach. For whatever reason I assume that the current practice is optimal and my approach to routine tasks will pretty much match what's being done now.

Would that really be the case? I expect that I would be free to lead my group as I see fit. There is no reason why I would need to follow the protocol established by my predecessors. This is the approach that I've found so chafing and limited. The lack of exploration in solving the challenges of how the lab operates, the failure to foster a sense of teamwork and shared responsibility, a culture driven more by a fear of failure than a desire to excel are the things that I've wanted to change for the last couple years. This could be my opportunity to finally influence the shape and culture of the labs. I can't help but think that I shouldn't let this opportunity pass me by simply because it's not the ideal role that I've imagined myself taking. This opportunity is here. I need to start asking myself what I would make of it rather than simply assuming it's not the right place for me. That right place may fail to materialize.

What does my frog look like?

A popular productivity tip that I've come across in numerous places is to do your most important task before you take on anything else in your day. Makes sense. Energy levels (and enthusiasm?) are high, you get it out of the way and don't have to worry about it all day, and you make it that much more likely that you'll have a little win to make you feel good about your progress. But what is the most important task? Well, the promoter of this habit might say, it's the task that makes the most progress towards achieving your biggest goal. Well, what's my biggest goal?

I don't aspire to a particular role, at least not a role that currently exists. While I have some notion that I want to be a leader in the organization, the pursuit of a senior management role requires conforming to what the rest of the organization thinks a senior leader should be. Hiring is risky so most people take the candidate that is the least likely to fail spectacularly. That person is usually the one who has done the best job of following the established leadership track. I've dipped my toe in that pool. I work with a guy who's eagerly jumped into the deep end. I would suffer considerably in the role that he's carving out. That's not for me.

I'm drawn to the dirty work that nobody really wants to notice. I like to pursue those problems that other people wish would just go away. They mess up timelines, add risk, and dilute the power of people who want to take the conventional path to leadership, I'm working on an MBA so I can translate the value of getting those problems solved into terms that the business will embrace. There's competitive advantage in being able to solve problems that other companies chose to ignore.

I guess that's my most important task, do that which others would choose to ignore. Find value where others see complications. Become the freak in the organization that does what nobody else can do. That's what comes first. All that bureaucratic crap can wait until after lunch...

Contextually Speaking

Reading is simply the fuel of thought. We eat to get energy for life. We read to get energy for thinking. Of at least to have something to think about. I just finished reading Signal and the Noise. Prediction. I have often noticed that fantasy football or simply trying to pick the winners of the games offers some pretty good insights into trying to figure out what's going to happen next in all kinds of different arenas. That book is a very big expansion on the idea that looking at how predictions work in very select cases offer general insights into making other kinds of predictions.

While reading this book, I realized that a good chunk of what I do professionally is about prediction. We expend all kinds of resources to develop a process that can produce something with very predictable behavior. Nate Silver is a big proponent of Bayesian thinking. My self-definition of this idea is that data has context. Abstracting a series of observations as some small sample of a much larger series and drawing predictions from that information, the standard statistical approach taught in the typical statistics class, robs data of meaning. In Bayesian thinking, the more you understand the context of your data, the better your prediction.

In thinking about making predictions, I thought about what kind of things I could do to train myself to think more probablistically. I looked in a statistics textbook that I have from one of my MBA classes. The discussion of the Bayesian theorem and conditional statistics in general was about 5 pages. I'm not surprised. That textbook was a piece of highly conventional crap (which reminds me of another post I mean to write about whether more education makes you more conventional in your thinking) so I'm not surprised that it's pretty free of discussion of anything interesting. But as I was looking through this book, I realized that I'm already pretty good at making predictions in the context of existing information.

One of the biggest decisions that I've made in my career over the last couple of years was to lead the development of a few new products. I made this decision after participating in one of the first conversations that we had with a potential partner company. Having been part of the team that dealt with the company that we were looking to replace, I had a good understanding of the risks involved in this type of project. When I asked myself if the situation was likely to repeat itself with this new company, I estimated that the probability of that would be pretty low. I was warned about the risks of taking on this project, but I trusted my assessment of the situation (a situation where I had better information than the people giving me advice).

Pushing back against 20 years of stagnation

I managed to finish that career plan that had been giving me trouble. Right before sending it on to my manager, I removed those couple of paragraphs where I proposed that I lead a group that is contrarian by design. That was my surrender to staying within the safety limits of my organization. I felt that it was particularly pertinent to do that at this phase as my manager is one of the most conventional people in the organization. He cautioned me against taking on a moderately risky project (where most of the risk was really in the visibility of the project, a failure in this case would have been more costly than a failure on a similar by lower profile project). I'll need his support going forward. I didn't see the value in threatening that support for no real benefit.

I'll need to take some other steps to firm up his support tomorrow. He sent me an email asking about the status of one of my (very minor) projects. He's scared that we might get noticed. Rapidly responding to unreasonable demands is often viewed as a desirable trait in my group. Let other people set the priorities. i know that his fears are unfounded because I actually asked about the project timing. We're nowhere close to  being on the critical path for this project. He doesn't know that because he's relying on second hand information that is pretty incomplete.

I'm trying out this plan where I force myself to notice my assumptions. Asking about the project timing is one way that I have broken out of some common group think (just rely on the information handed to you from the person making the request without asking any follow-up questions). My manager's been doing this kind of thing for something like 20 years. Who am I to challenge all that experience. But he's probably been doing his job pretty much the same way for 20 something years. He found a way that gets the job done and he hasn't done anything to change that approach in all of those years. He has 20 years experience doing his job one way. He never notices his assumptions. He doesn't notice that's he's not seeing the whole picture.