Author: drew

Amsterdam observations.

Some observations from my first trip to Amsterdam:

  • If you’re sitting alone in a busy cafe or bar, people will ask to share your table; not because they want to talk to you, just until another table opens up. This happened often, both from Dutch people and tourists. Once another table opened, they thanked me and got up.
  • The Heineken is much, much better in Amsterdam. Can’t tell if it’s a different recipe than the US version, or just fresher (or placebo).
  • The biking infrastructure is incredible; this will probably get its own post later. Only cities that are older than cars can be this good for bikes.
  • With narrow streets and narrow buildings to match, many apartments are small. People in street level units tend to stand in their doorways, with the front door open right into the living room. They are chatting with friends, smoking, or just watching the street go by. On a nice day, it feels almost like a hallway in a dorm.
  • Overall the food is not great, but the cheese is excellent. “Fancy” restaurants are expensive but the food is average. You’re better off finding a local cafe that looks crowded and not touristy, and ordering a cheese plate or sandwich.
Walking over footbridge after footbridge, canal after canal, is intoxicatingly pleasant.
The Heineken is just better there.
My little Airbnb on the canal.

The best part about a sabbatical.

As my sabbatical comes to an end, and I shift my attention to finding my next job, people have been asking me what has been the best or most rewarding part of this journey. The obvious answers are our wedding and honeymoon. But beyond those, the most rewarding thing I’ve done has been this blog.

Though I’ve fallen out of the habit lately—a dip in creative productivity that I’m taking as another sign it’s time to get back to work—when I was writing every day, a bit of alchemy started to occur.

I felt awakened to a new dimension of experience, which is exactly what I was seeking on this journey. Writing acted as an agent of sublimation for all my sabbatical adventures, pulling together experiences and relating them to each other, so a bigger picture could emerge as if through transmutation.

I hope to find a place for daily or weekly writing in my routine when I get back to work, though I don’t know what it will look like. For now, I’m recommitting to daily writing for the remainder of my time off.

Steve!

I’ve started rewatching Sex and the City. Early in Season 2, the formula is already well-established: the characters meet people, date them, and then Carrie muses and interprets it all for her column (typed on her Apple PowerBook G3, in bed with Chinese food). In one episode, Miranda is complaining endlessly about her luck with men. Guy after guy (including the one she’s interested in) is looking right past her and jumping into long-term relationships with her friends and acquaintances. Just as Miranda’s self-pity is reaching a fever pitch, and Kelly and I were both heckling her through the TV, exhorting her to stop complaining, when something surprising happened.

Miranda is awaiting Carrie at a bar for a Girl Date date, but Carrie stands her up; Carrie has forgotten Miranda to have dinner with Mr. Big. Sitting among drunk NYU kids, Miranda decides to indulge her sorrows and orders another glass of wine. The camera pans to the bartender:

Steve!

My viewing partner and I sat up straight and nearly shouted, “STEVE!” I couldn’t believe the reaction we both had to seeing this character for the first time in more than a decade. It was immediate and emotional. Dormant staying power like this indicates great writing, and even better casting. Starting with just a wry smile, actor David Eigenberg’s charisma and charm steal the scene instantly. And he continues to steal every scene he’s in.

My reaction was heightened by Miranda’s threnody-level lamentations, but I’m right where the writers want me to be when we meet this character. This makes me want to rewatch more great shows, especially because so many of today’s good prestige shows are actually bad (yes I said it!).

Just like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sex in the City is a fascinating time capsule, presenting a sharp vision of popular culture in the early 2000s. To rewatch Curb is to experience how much daily life has changed, because of the show’s reliance on technology and manners for plot devices. Though it’s also a show largely about manners, what you notice rewatching Sex and the City isn’t what has changed, but what has stayed the same. The characters alternate between horrible dates and “Is He The One?” affairs. Dating is often exciting, but usually a slog. Sometimes the men are horrible to the main characters, and sometimes they’re horrible to the men. Sure, an answering machine or pager occasionally shows up, but the episodes aren’t about that. Many of them feel like they could have been written today, excepting for the conspicuous absence of dating apps.

To rewatch Sex and the City is an experience in pathos, which feels less like a time capsule, more timeless.

Trains of thought.

As a kid, I used to lie in bed at night, thinking. I’d imagine things, tell myself stories, or replay the day’s events. Eventually it would be late enough that even my kid brain worried I’d be tired the next day, and I would tell myself to stop thinking and try to sleep.

The thing that usually tipped me off that I’d been “daydreaming” too late into the night was suddenly becoming aware of my current thought, and realizing I had no idea how I’d gotten there. When this happened, I’d play a game of retracing my mental steps before falling asleep. It would go like this:

“… velociraptor, that is definitely the best dinosaur. Wait why am I thinking of dinosaurs? I was thinking of basketball practice tomorrow.”

“… dinosaurs, which came from velociraptor, which came from Toronto Raptors … Vince Carter … I wish I could dunk … basketball practice tomorrow.”

Today I was reminded of how I used to play this mental retrace game. I was listening to my meditation app, and the guest teacher Joseph Goldstein retold a Buddhist proverb that compares the untrained mind to a waterfall, always tumbling down. The metaphor that’s more common in Western speech, he continued, is the train. We lose our ‘train of thought’ all the time, which can happen only when we’re identified with (lost in) thought, rather than observing thought. When our minds wander, Goldstein says, it’s like “hopping on a train, and never knowing the next stop,” or even like “falling asleep on a train and then awakening, not knowing where you are or how you got there.”

Awakening is the practice of breaking the spell, realizing you were lost in thought, and no longer being identified with thought. It was fun to remember back to being a kid, and realize that many nights lying alone, I’d been doing something like meditation practice, without knowing it.

Mother’s Day

Early Sunday morning I was in La Salle Flowers, a little family-owned shop, and one of the few storefronts in my neighborhood that still hints at how the city used to look and feel.

I inched toward the counter, fourth in a line of other last-minute sons and husbands. Behind me a toddler’s dad tried to give an ad hoc lesson that not all flowers are for picking. The shop is so tight, that even when he picked the little girl up, there were flowers within her reach no matter where he stood.

The guy working the counter, probably in his early twenties, stood out somehow. His La Salle Flowers shirt was oversized even on his burly frame. He seemed more invested than a typical summer-job college kid, but also not quite at home, like he belonged there but hadn’t fully embraced it. When helping customers, he seemed to gaze half at them, and half out the window behind them. As he rang me up, I was wondering whether he loved his job and couldn’t admit it, or hated his job but really needed it.

Then the older woman assembling bouquets at the back saw the stems I’d picked out, and kindly but firmly suggested that she might rearrange things, and maybe swap a few colors (she didn’t say why but the reason was obviously to improve on my efforts). I was happy for the help, and the guy stepped aside so she could gather up what he’d been working on.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said.

And suddenly his demeanor made sense. Maybe he’d worked there as a kid, and was just helping out on one of their biggest days of the year. Or maybe he’s full-time, but working for your mom is complicated. Either way, his words had all the history and weight of anyone who’s ever said them: thanks mom. And it was nice to see them working together on Mother’s Day.

Sometimes you get caught in the rain.

My friend Joe invited me on a bike ride yesterday, and we had a great time catching up and chatting for an hour or two. (He’s in great cycling shape, so I was gasping more than chatting toward the end). We rode south, stopped to say hi to his partner Sunni, and then I turned back north to head home.

It was starting to drizzle started at I left Joe’s, but the rain just got stronger. 10 minutes into the ride, it was pouring. Halfway home, it was at monsoon levels. I thought it couldn’t get worse. Then it started coming so hard that the drops were stinging my arms, like there was maybe some hail mixed in. By this time I was hungry and cold, passing 18th & Halsted, so thought about stopping for tacos in Pilsen and waiting it out. But that was a trap–I was already soaked to the bone, and knew I’d get so cold sitting inside that I’d never get back on the bike.

So I just had to grit it out. Turn off my brain and keep peddling. Dream of a hot shower. Sometimes you get caught in the rain, and that’s all you can do.

Balance and Unbalance.

At Steve Jobs’s funeral, Jony Ive told a story about Jobs’s bottomless perfectionism:

As I’m sure many of you know, Steve didn’t confine his sense of excellence to making products. When we traveled together, we would check in and I’d go up to my room. And I’d leave my bags very neatly by the door. And I wouldn’t unpack. And I would go and sit on the bed. I would go and sit on the bed next to the phone. And I would wait for the inevitable phone call: “Hey Jony, this hotel sucks. Let’s go.”

Luckily for us, Jobs channeled his personal unbalance into a company that tilted the world’s expectations of personal technology products. Jobs famously said that the world is a better place with Apple in it, which is true. But, as Ives noted later in his remarks, the effort took a toll on Jobs and those around him. It’s not always an easy way to live.

All of us would do better work if we were a little more naturally Jobsian. But most of us would also be less happy. One skill I’ve tried to cultivate at work is to constantly raise my own expectations, and to ask over and over again, “Why can’t this be better?”

Luckily for me, this takes effort, it doesn’t come naturally. I don’t have to live with a pathological design sensibility when I’m not at work, and neither do my friends and family. But there are other ways in which I’m unbalanced; over the years, I’ve tried to recognize them, and figure out how to use them to my advantage–instead of fighting it, to throw my weight against something in the world that needs to be shifted.

For introverts like me.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I want to share another tip from the Tim Ferriss Show. This tactic will be helpful to introverts like me. And it will help you be a better, more authentic person!

All introverts know the feeling of wanting to exit a conversation at a party. It’s not that you don’t like someone, or that you’re uninterested. You just need a break. Yesterday, podcast guest Kevin Rose shared the best, and kindest, tactic I’ve ever heard for bowing out. Rather than awkwardly dancing around it, hit your desire head on. Here’s what you say:

“There are a few other people here I need to catch up with, but before I do, I really want to hear more about [that last interesting thing you said.]”

This accomplishes three things:

  1. Signal. Gracefully let the person know you’d like to exit the conversation.
  2. Complement. Boost the person by showing you’re listening, and that the things they care about interest you.
  3. Bonus time. Unlike all other tactics for exiting a conversation, you’re not trying to end the conversation now, and you’re not making an excuse. You’re telling the truth. And you’re displaying genuine interest. The end of the exchange is re-framed. Now, you both view the next few minutes as worthy investment of even more time together, because you’re both enjoying the conversation.

Of course this all works better when you really do care and really are interested. This is something I’ve had to work on, and maybe that will be another post. For now, the best trick for really caring about what any person is talking about is, ask better, deeper, more direct, more interesting, and weirder questions.

Live 10th Anniversary Random Show with Kevin Rose — Exploring What’s Next, Testing Ozempic, Modern Dating, New Breakthrough Treatments for Anxiety, Bitcoin ETFs, Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul, and Engineering More Awe in Your Life (#733)
The podcast where I heard this tactic. And here is the book where he heard it.

How to avoid regret*.

(*At least, how to avoid regretting your own prior commitments.)

Two tactics:

  • “Hell Yes, or No.”
  • “Pretend it’s tonight.”

I believe Derek Sivers coined these two related ideas. But I heard them secondhand on the Tim Ferriss Show and from Seth Godin, respectively. They are both rules that you can impose on yourself, to avoid committing to things that you’ll later regret signing up for.

“Hell Yes, or No” means, if you’re about to say yes to something, it should be obvious yes, a slam dunk, a no-doubter. If you’re wavering, trying to talk yourself into it, feeling pressured, saying yes out of guilt … any or all of these, feeling even a hint of doubt … then it’s a no.

Preach, Randy.

The second tactic, “Would I do this thing tonight?” reduces the number of future things you commit to, by raising the salience of your own daily energy level, which most people tend to overestimate for their future selves. When you’re invited to do something next week / next month / next year, it’s easy to say yes. Future You tends to never be tired, overwhelmed, in the mood for a night at home. Current You thinks only about the virtues of the proposed commitment. Current You sees the proposal as an opportunity, and forgets or ignores the cost.

But Future You will have stuff going on. Future You will not be as poised, calm, and energized as you imagine him to be. So impose the rule and ask yourself, would I change my plans, drop everything, make the drive … whatever, in order to do this thing tonight. It’s a special case of “Hell Yes, or No,” that works better specifically for time commitments, social plans, events, etc. Because even though you’re obviously busy this week, it’s hard to remember that you’re likely to be equally busy, that week. This trick will reminds you. It forces you to make salient what it actually feels like to plan your day around an event, to move things around amidst real-world logistics, not the Platonic Ideal of a Calendar week. If the thing were happening tonight, and you’d happily drop whatever else was going on and move commitments to attend, say yes. If going tonight sounds like a slog, chances are it will feel that way in a few weeks, when it’s time to get up and go. So just politely decline.