Mentorship

Mentorship is dead.

It used to be like you discovered new ideas and with those ideas you found someone experienced to teach you the ways. A mentor-mentee relationship was born. The pursuit was skilled knowledge. Anyone can read a book. Learning under the leadership of a skilled person is a whole another level of learning.

Let me be clear... mentorship is not taking a class on something for a few weeks. It is a longer engagement.

When we are young, our dads are pressured to fill the role of being our mentors. Dads can be dads, they don't necessarily have to be mentors. But mentors they must be.

Colleges provide some opportunities for mentorship but you have to be lucky. You must have the real teachers and the luxury of not worrying about your degree, student loans, and shrinking job markets.

Then we get older and mentorship becomes some jargon in your office's performance plan. And few mentors in an office teach you how to think and do like an expert.

Or you go to a social organization seeking mentorship and end up contributing to a mess of networking events perpetually exchanging business cards with each other.

You could pay a "life coach" to mentor you, help you navigate your life and tell you the best thing to do in their own opinion of course.

My mentors are online. They produce wonderful educational videos and I pay to watch. Our relationship is mostly transactional. They don't live anywhere close. The other side of the pond, actually. So I search in their words for the sparks that I miss in a person-to-person interaction. The one that happens across the workbench. In real time. But I can't reach past my iPad's screen.

Serious and long-term pursuits of ideas/hobbies/skills have been pruned into a five minute DIY video.

And mentorship is dead.

Summer Rain

This summer has been brutal so far.

The Central Florida air does not move quite like the air did in Jacksonville which is a town on the coast. The air here sits thick and heavy, the sun unrelentless.

The one thing that improves a Central Florida summer is the reliable afternoon rain. It last a few hours every afternoon or evening. The air returns to being thick and hot pretty quickly after the rain.

But for a little while, during and right after the rain, it is actually quite beautiful. Here are some things I look forward to...

The mist rising off the hot black-top streets right after the rain has gone is quite lovely. I look forward to it, especially in the night being the headlights of my car. The mist lights up gracefully.

The short walks from a store front to the car without an umbrella, even in a heavy downpour is quite refreshing. The moisture evaporates off from the clothes easily. I just enjoy the cool sprays of rain made available improptu.

The sound of rain on a tin roof is probably universally loved. I have spent a few nights in campers, one of them being a thunderstorm from inside of an aluminium Airstream. It was my birthday night a few years ago. We were in the middle of nowhere in Escalante, Utah. It was simply memorable.

Tonight, we took a walk with our dog around a lake. It had rained recently, so the air was a little less humid than usual. The cool breeze coming off the lake intermittently was an extra icing. It made for a lovely walk.

Monsoon was my favorite time in India. It only rained four consequetive months of the year. The rain washed off all the dust and dirt that had been accumulating on trees, leaves, streets, and houses for eight months. The whole town got refreshed. The change was quite dramatic and beautiful.

The changes that summer rains in Florida bring are more subtle than the rain in India.
But the changes are just as beautiful.

Work Work Work Work

This weekend was particularly productive.

My wife and I went to a three hour painting class on Saturday, did an Ikea run for a bookshelf for our craft room, had dimsum, went to lunch with her father, among other things.

Outside of this, I probably put in four hours of office work each on Saturday and Sunday.

But I don't feel tired. I am ready for Monday. I even feel rested.
I shouldn't, but I do.

I think here is why:

1. I was not alone working, others including senior management were working with me.
2. We were working on crafting a story to tell our customer that best represents the work we have been doing, and the work we plan to do in the next few years.
3. We have been working on this project for several months now... and this powerpoint is the first time our customer will get to see what we have been producing.
4. We have produced a kickass deck of slides by the end of Sunday... it is relevant and meaningful, it flows with good cadence, and it is devoid of redundant detail.

I don't have to work weekends usually and I feel grateful for it.

In the off chance that I do, I have found it rewarding and meaningful.

And for this, I feel even more grateful.

Facebook Time Machine

Digital v/s IRL

I have been drawing little illustrations for about a month now. They are all for this blog and I have lots of fun doing it. I use a free app called Paper by 53 on my little iPad. I really like it.

However, I have gotten used to the undo button. A bad brush stroke or a wrong color is very very easily rectified.

In fact, the undo feature is probably the most useful feature of Microsoft's Excel, which I use probably seven and a half ours out of an eight hour work day. I could find a way to do most other things in Excel, but if you take away the undo feature, the software is toast!

I was drawing a pear in my Painting with Pastels class at the local art museum this morning. Having never drawn a pear before, never used pastel paper before, and never smudged pastel colors by my fingers before, I was desparately looking for the undo button.

There wasn't one.
The painting turned out ok. It is the best pear I have ever drawn!

Time Machine

I have participated in a few heated discussions on Facebook in the last few years. Though no immediate solution was found in these discussions I though we were having an important journey togther, me, the OP (original poster), and other commenters.

More often than not, the OP simply deleted the entire thread.
The OP turned a dial and went back in time where the conversation never happened in the first place.

It's like having access to a permenant undo button.

When it becomes normal to remove the existence of a conversation in a particular medium, the value of that medium as a place for conversations starts to diminish.

That's when Buzzfeed takes over.

We are in a Beach Vacation

Critical conversations are not sexy. There is no money in having it. Sensationalism gets the headlines and the money.

Sensationalism fuels the lizard brain. Sensationalism shows us a result right now where critical conversations give no guarantee of showing a result.

Sensationalism is the quick beach vacation with plastic chairs and shitty beach drinks. The babes wear bikinis. You don't have to do much but sit around and watch passively. It looks good in a postcard.

Critical conversations are like a long cumbersome hike. It also looks good on a postcard but nothing beyond that. Planning for the hike takes time, energy, money, and lots of thinking. Then you have to actually go. One foot in front of the other. With a heavy backpack. Sweating, hurting, and unravelling your vulnerability with each mile in front of the worst person possible -- yourself.

Sensationalism leads to hatred, one seemingly victimized group primed and ready against another.
Critical conversations could lead to enlightnment but it damn sure does not lead to hatred.

Look, they have a pineapple mojito flavored crushed ice margarita with a salt rim and an umbrella on it. With valet parking!

Understanding Minority

Unless you got your wallet stolen, you would never know how annoying it is to have to cancel all the cards and wait to get new ones.

Unless you ever had siatica pain, you just could not imagine how un-accessible relief really is.

Unless you have lost someone you love, you would not be able to imagine what tragedy feels like.

And unless you are a minority, you can never really understand what it is to live as one, let alone to die as one.

You might think you do, but you don't.

I know because I was not a minority where I grew up.
But I am a minority where I live now.

I now know this: I didn't really understand minority back then, even when I said I did.

In Defense of Routines

In defense of routines that are not created as just substitutes, here are a couple of routines I have been developing in the last few months that are actually making my life a little better.

Morning routine

I start winding down by 9:30 PM, no electronic devices from this point on (writing the blog post is the only exception)
In bed by 10:30 PM and I read one of three books at my bed side table
Wake up naturally without an alarm at around 6:30 AM
Wash my face and drink an entire glass of water
Take Olive for a walk
Make a smoothie / omlette
Scoop the cat litter
Jump in the shower and off to work
Note: no time allocated for checking social media

Gym routine

Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings are gym days (I want to add a 4th day later).
Drive to the gym, 20 mins
Warm up on a cardio machine, 5 mins
Interval cardio, 90 sec of high rev, 30 sec of low rev... repeat till I can't do it any more, which is about 20 min at this time
Weight circuit, this is designed with 10 machines and 10 aerobic step exercises, done alternately over 30 mins
Stretch for 10 mins
Drive home, 20 mins

I am staying midfull of diversions from this routine. I let diversions happen. If they seem like a good idea, I include them in the routine. I do the same to take things off the routine. The intent is to be only as rigid to develop a habit but still flexible to let it improve.

My friend Chuck recommended a Saturday routine that I will explore in the next few weeks.

What routines do you have that you really like?

Administrative Day

There is nothing like routine to pull me out of a funk.

My two subscribers will notice that my last few posts have been less cheerful than usual. It is quite challenging to stumble across an interesting person/story/idea/event randomly in my town. We have a lot of same-old same-old, and very little hustle.

Enter: Routine.
Routine needs little to no thinking, but simply mechanical action. To pull myself out of this funk, I have decided that every Tuesday is going to be Administrative Day. This is the day I process all the paper mails that I receive. Here is the process:
Step 1: Use the fancy hand-carved letter opener to open mail
Step 2: Read and take action
Step 3: Scan items I want to save, then shred
Step 4: Shred and dispose items I don't want to save
Step 5: Remember to do this again next Tuesday

It is busy-work I know but I need to do it. I maintain my work and personal email each at inbox-zero but I am really bad at processing paper mail.

I also need to get out of this funk. Something repetitive seems as good an idea as any.

I really love stumbling upon interesting people/stories/ideas/events. I hope this busy work does not become a permenant substitute.

Because I am afraid it might become a substitute.

In fact, it probably already is.

Complacency

Complacency is checking the box.

Here is a slice of cheese between two slices of toast.
"You asked for a grilled cheese, didn't you?

Not even close.

Complacency is doing the least and switching the auto-pilot back on.

Complacency is insiduous. After a while, we can't even tell what is good and what is passable any more.

Here is an example.
There is a Thai restaurant in my town. It was the only one for a long time. Anyone who wanted any coconut curry went to that restaurant. And they loved it. Only when a competitor opened a new Thai restaurant in January did most people start to realize they have been missing out on some good curry.

The first Thai restaurant checked the box for so long that it defined the box. No one could tell how a Tom Kha soup should taste when prepared well. Since most of its customers did not typically travel to broaden their taste-horizons, this restaurant was free to set the bar as low as it wanted. And what was passable food at best was seen as good food.

You can either be unhappy with passable choices, or be complacent.
Choose one.