Come Visit Us!

 

Our Guest Room

Come visit my wife and I this year!

That's what I want to say today. I haven't blogged in months for a variety of reasons. The world can seem big and heavy and hard at times. Have you seen the news from Minneapolis? The stock market hits record highs, and yet our grocery bill stresses our budget. I'm reading a book on how to beat cynicism with hope, and one of the things it suggests is work on building relationships with people. 

Last summer, I got stressed one day and I stopped reading all of my text messages. Yes, I'm more or less not engaging with people that I care about and that care about me. It's weird. And unfortunately even as of this writing I have nearly 100 unread text messages. That used to be the most reliable way to get in touch with me, but lately, unless you are on a very short list (some days just my wife), it might not work. 

My wife and I have slowly been working on making our house into our custom home. We have two green houses in the back yard, we put in a patio, we put the book shelves into the guest room, she has started zero scaping our front yard for pollinators and to save water. One of the clear things that emerges as we have put work into our house is how infrequently we have guests stay over and spend the night. All of our local friends just drive home of course, but both of us have friends and family across the country, and it would be our pleasure to host some guests and save people some money. 

I know I'm not alone. I've had friends for years that don't respond to many text messages, and when I hit that point last summer that I stopped even opening them all, I got it, there is a lot going on in the world, and it takes some energy to open the message and read it. It feels like there is an obligation, that I might let the person down, so if I just avoid it, I don't have to deal with that. Of course, that's not true, I need connection in my life. I need to go rock climbing after work with my friends, even if that stresses the budget too.

Last fall my wife and I did an East Coast road trip, from Maine to Georgia and every state in between, and we saw a total of 22 different friends or family members on the trip. It was excellent on the days that we spent in other's guest rooms! Colorado is a great place to visit, and we're only 20 minutes from Boulder. So let us know if you come out, we can save you some money and spend a few evenings chatting. Despite my lack of action building relationships over the past year, I do want to continue being friends with my friends.

When you learn something new, change your mind.

A few days ago I finished listening to the book Range by David Epstein, and it was good. Essentially it described to me something that I already knew, but in a way that I hadn't understood or articulated. People that do a range of different sports or jobs before getting to their current sport or job often have more success than people that specialize very early in their sport or job. 

One way this manifests is that people with a range of experience can give an analogy about a situation to describe it in a different way, and that might provide some insight to a group that they didn't have before to the current situation. He spends one chapter of the book talking about people that forecast different events, and the people that are able to forecast the best often have the largest range of experience, and relentlessly change their minds about thing as new information is presented. So I took some time to reflect on myself, do I have a good range of experience? Am I open to changing my mind on things? What have I changed my mind on in the past?

It both made me feel good about having changed my mind on a number of things, and also made me feel a little bad that I didn't seek out more diverse opinions on topics to intentionally change my mind more often. To give a big example, but also one that moved rather slow for me, 20 years ago I didn't think that universal healthcare made sense, it would be too expensive, end of story. However, over the last two decades, I've learned how much money insurance companies make, and how much money pharmaceutical companies make, and how much debt it takes to become a doctor, and how in many cases, like PEPFAR a dollar a day can actually save a person's life for decades. Would you save a person's life for $1.00 per day? I think that's a no brainer, yes, every single time. Raise my taxes to make that possible. I can pay an extra $10/day to save 10 lives a day. The United States is a wealthy country, how is it countries with half or a third of our average income per person can have universal healthcare, but we can't?

To give another example, I still can't believe I'm in manufacturing. In a few months it will have been five years, and admittedly my design skills are a little rusty. I always perceived manufacturing as dirty, dangerous, poorly illuminated, but the reality today is very different than the factories of 50 years ago. Plus there is a certain satisfaction to building something, you get to see the thing that you were working on come to fruition. In the design world you can spend years working on something, and then it can actually get canceled before it becomes reality, and that happened to me several times. Of course the risk in manufacturing is you build a whole new factory and never get to take the factory to production.

Another example is the three stage rocket. I need to write this one out more, but nearly three years ago I watched two coworkers debate a two stage versus a three stage rocket, and despite the fact that nearly every rocket company works around two stages, I've actually come down on the side of a three stage rocket. Why? Well, we know a first stage rocket can be reusable and land vertically, so now it's just a matter of making it more reusable and easier to reuse. We also know that orbital vehicles like the space shuttle can be reusable. However, due to the rocket equation, a two stage rocket just never really can get that much to orbit. So a solution that no one has implemented is make a three stage rocket, with stage one landing back on land within a few miles from the launch pad for easy refurbishment between flights. Stage two landing 1000 miles away on a barge, or better yet some piece of land, and then stage three being orbital, and either disposable, or reusable. Trying to make a second stage orbital and fully reusable means that the payload capacity will be small compared to the mass of the second stage, something like 5% of the dry mass of the second stage. It's like saying that you need a 5,000 pound SUV to deliver 250 pounds total to the destination... which is only two people and no luggage if the people are small. And the problem is reentry is always going to be harsh on vehicles, so that second stage in a three stage vehicle that is suborbital, you really want to minimize the reentry stress on that stage. 

The point of these examples are it's okay to change your mind, in fact, it's good when you are presented with new information. Often the ideal answer isn't clear and it can take a lot of research to find the best answer that incorporates all of the available data. It can definitely be hard to search out an opposing opinion at times, but it's often worth is to find a better solution.

The Christian Church in the United States is in Trouble

In the last 20 years, I have regularly attended six different churches. That's not a large count, but it is a fair number. The church is changing. Some of those churches have been healthy and stable, but a couple of them have been hanging on by threads. I'm not talking about actual Christianity, because as a believer, I believe that God has got it all taken care of. I'm talking about the human organization side of the Christian Church, the various congregations and denominations all over the country. They are struggling.

My wife and I are Christian, but when we go through the list of the friends we spend the most time with, only a few, maybe 15% of them, are Christian enough to regularly attend church. The ideology of the church has turned off many millennials, who see public figures that are not accepting of the poor or sinners. The church doesn't really appear to be a loving and caring place when viewed through their most vocal public figures. When public church figures are actively campaigning for a person that seems to have no values, and certainly not strong Christian values, people get turned off to any thought of moral aspiration coming from that group. As the saying goes, it takes years to build trust, and seconds to lose it. Of course, when you get into a church congregation, they are typically very caring, but it takes time and effort to get into that group. Many churches have somewhat stale congregations, where the same people have gone for 10+ years, and they all know each other, and aren't necessarily looking to add new people, so they don't feel especially welcoming. 

To give a specific example, I once went to a church that had a declining membership, and the people were worried about the church finances. Just down the street was a Hispanic church start up that was meeting in an old hardware store, and I suggested, why not share the church with them, let them use it Sunday afternoons? That's was actually scoffed at as something the congregation would never go for. Yet, that's one way that the Christian Church in this country has a chance at survival is to show that we're more united than we are divided. 

Right now baby boomers are keeping a lot of congregations alive. When they pass away, a lot of churches are going to close. To some extent I do think retirees for decades have filled a lot of roles at churches because they often have more time for volunteering than the younger working population has. Another challenge is that there is a shortage of pastors. Here is an occupation where often it takes several years of additional schooling, and then the pay is often very low, it's a degree without a positive return on investment. I've also seen a few churches where they essentially push the pastor out because they didn't like something that he or she did. Not that the actions were a fireable offense, simply that church leaders didn't like the pastor's words or actions. Church politics can be tough. Every time a pastor is pushed out of a church, people get upset, and some leave, because it's an unloving act by the congregation.

I don't know what the future holds for the Christian Church in the United States. I hope it's good, and membership is strong, but I don't know, it's hard to see that in the next decade or two.

Design, Manufacturing, and Testing are the basic categories for all types of engineering.

It's taken me years, but I now feel that most engineering roles can be broken down into design, manufacturing, or testing. This is probably more applicable to hardware than software, but it's not limited to hardware. To summarize:

• Design - People at the start of the product lifecycle process, who design the thing to meet requirements.
• Manufacturing - People who build the product.
• Test - People who make sure that the product meets the requirements.

To some extent this is a narrow view, because when it comes to things like requirements, there is a market and a business case that drives the whole engineering process. If there was no business case, it's just a hobby and not a business. Why am I writing about this?

2011 through 2018 I was at a company with very developed processes, and rather static hierarchy, which all worked very well for that company. The company was well over 100 years old, so they had a long time to sort out a system that worked well for them. Then I joined the world of startups and young companies, because it's thrilling and an adventure. However, young companies don't have their processes and hierarchy all worked out. 2011 through 2018 I started in analysis (a sub-set of testing) and then moved over to design. When I started in the startup world I started in design, and then moved over to manufacturing. Through several different organizations I now see how the three basics of design, manufacturing, and testing are really the foundation of bringing a product to market. 

A really small company can have the design engineers build the product and test the product, however that doesn't scale very well beyond the first one, not even to 10 total units. So in the world of race cars, Mars landers, and other highly highly specialized, super low volume products it works, but by the time the volumes creep up to something like the Concord airplane or B2 Bomber (about 20 units total), there needs to be division of labor to keep up with any sort of production schedule and make sure that each role is adequately resourced. Some sort of program schedule takes shape and goes something like this:

Design, Manufacture, Test

Obviously that's an overly simplistic representation of a product development process. In today's world, a lot of testing can happen before the final product is manufactured through virtual analysis tools. And of course, the goal is for the prototypes and production to be the same... but of course that rarely happens and leads to a whole other topic of change control. Also left out of this discussion is requirements for the product. The better the requirements are defined in the beginning, the easier this whole process will be down the road. Defining requirements is hard, and frankly, there comes a point where it makes sense to just start designing and building the product prototypes in order to learn all of the formerly unknown requirements.

I once had the experience where the assembly design (and bill of materials) was released/confirmed on a Wednesday and the very next day the expectation was that we would build it... needless to say supply chain had not bought all of the parts to make that possible. I've also been asked in the past why it's hard to build something without a released bill of materials from design engineers, with the simple answer being, if you want manufacturing to buy all of the parts and use all of them in the product, then yes we need a bill of materials to go off of. I've had another example where some test engineers were adamant that the wrong assembly was built, and yet all three physically built prototypes, and the original virtual design, and the work instructions were all in agreement about the particular issue.

In all three examples, people were upset. They felt like they had been failed by their peers, but it was really a misunderstanding of what their peers needed as inputs in order to do their jobs well. Yet going back to 2011, when I was in analysis (testing), I remember saying that a 25 mm steel plate would work in a location, the design guy said nothing, but the manufacturing engineer said that was unreasonable and we needed to figure out how to use a smaller plate, so we did, because we now had a better requirement (no 25 mm thick plates on this assembly), and this all happened two years before prototypes were built. I remember that interaction as something of the gold standard for getting design, test, and manufacturing in the same room, two years before the assembly was first built, and four years before production, so that when we went to production that particular assembly was very smooth.

The general flow of engineering information.

And again, this image is a simplistic understanding of engineering. However, for the purpose of this article, this is really about organizational structure, schedules, inputs and outputs. It's not possible to do everything at once. Many things can be parallel pathed but you can't drive a car without wheels. You can't drill a hole without a tolerance. You can't weld two plates together if you don't know the materials. Hopefully this small overview gives non-engineers a little more context into the different areas of engineering, as well as perhaps new engineers information about different roles that I didn't understand until I had years of experience engineering. My advice to new college graduate engineers, get your hands dirty doing a little of all three. It doesn't really matter what you do the first two years of your career, just learn how things are designed, manufactured and tested. You can figure out which part you like best when you understand the engineering industry better.

Wedding Day Info

Hello Friends and Family! We are writing this to give out some more details for our wedding in a few weeks. For starters, the venue had a limited number of seats so to our friends that we weren't able to accommodate, please come visit sometime!

The general schedule is:

• Ceremony at 4:00 PM which will take place outside, unless the weather is bad, then it will be inside.
• Happy hour with drinks and appetizers immediately following, while we take a lot of pictures. You can wander around outside and inside, there is a lot of cool stuff at the farm.
• Dinner around 6 PM will be inside the large barn.
• After dinner we will cut the cake.
• After the cake cutting we will have a dance!
• At 9 PM dancing will conclude due to a Boulder County sound ordinance that the venue must adhere to and it's time to go home!

When you arrive, park behind the red barn, you will go past a house and two smaller barns on a narrow dirt road after you turn off the main dirt road. We don't recommend Uber or Lyft because the venue is about 10 miles from Boulder and Longmont, so there might not be many drivers still working at 9 PM willing to drive out in the country.

Please make sure to check the weather in Boulder County and dress accordingly. We have heaters for the reception, however, we hope to have the ceremony outdoors and it's known to snow in April.

For food, we will have a variety of appetizers after the ceremony that will probably have something to appeal to almost everyone. For dinner we will have a buffet with multiple vegan options, most dishes are dairy free, most are gluten free, there is a pescatarian dish, and then yes we have a meat and diary dish which will probably be the favorite. There will also be dessert, and a gluten free dessert option upon request.

For drinks, I recommend the wine, it is vegan and comes from Dave at Chill Switch Wines. We will also have beer, Rowdy Mermaid kombucha, a little bit of champagne, yerba mate, a small keurig for coffee, and of course water. 

We do have a wedding registry, contact us for the link if desired. We don't really need more things, so you are also invited to donate in our name to Give Directly, or the Adams County Food Bank.

Please feel free to reach out with any additional questions. Thank you all for coming in a few weeks, we know that many of you are traveling a large distance and it's greatly appreciated! We look forward to spending a fun evening with you to celebrate this love that we have found!

With love and appreciation, 

Isaiah + Cherelle

The Unemotional Pivot?

I've been working on a project for the last eight months. We committed to the process in June 2022, and now in February 2023 we are saying this doesn't work, we're essentially canceling this project and pivoting to something that we know we can make work.

What changed? Well we originally picked the old process based on assumptions we had about lead times, and technical ability to do certain things. And we did have progress. We broke ground in areas that I don't think anyone else has explicitly done. We read published literature and didn't find anyone doing exactly what we were doing. We also had (have?) a path to success using that process we committed to, however we all came to realize that the amount of time and money needed to make that successful was more than we had available. Doing a new cool thing for the sake of doing a new cool thing doesn't make businesses successful. It's about making and shipping a product to a paying customer, or some variation of that as it relates to delivering a service. So we decided to make a change.

For all practical purposes this was essentially a secret development. Only a handful of people actually understood what we were doing. So in the spectrum of failures, it wasn't even remotely public, even across the organization. However, as I've thought about it the last couple weeks, I feel this sense of emotional defeat and personal failure. I advocated for this process, and it failed. As much as I try to make it an unemotional pivot, we tried a technical path and it didn't work, so we're going to go to a more well established path, there is still that sense of failure. 

As I reflect on the failure, there are three technical pieces of information that had we known any one of them at the beginning we probably would not have gone down this path. One was an obvious one, but also one that there was some limited published papers suggesting that it was an issue that could be solved. Unfortunately we ended up solving that problem in an expensive way by adding a whole other process. The second and third issues were unfortunately specific to the application of the process that we chose. I'm trying to avoid any hint of specifics on this because it's part of the secret sauce in my industry. Those second and third issues, had we known from the outset, would hopefully have stopped us in our tracks.

It's not all negative, I've learned a ton in the process. There are some technical things that I now know, with many applications, that were very difficult lessons to learn. I now know from experience some things which could potentially save my company even millions of dollars on future projects. Still, in this moment, it feels like a waste. As I like to say, we created "desk art" which is to say very expensive pieces of hardware that will never be used because they were ultimately a failure.

Can you have a big pivot and not have emotions attached to it? I'm not sure. The more time and effort that gets invested into something the more sunk cost hope there is that it will succeed. By the same token, it's okay to feel bad about going down a dead end. Now you know it's a dead end. One day you might even laugh about it.

While the result of going down this path for eight months hurts emotionally as it feels like failure, I'm really proud of the team that worked on this and pushed the technology forward! We learned an incredible amount. We did things that are truly cutting edge technology. And like most business projects we developed a number of new business relationships that you never know how they might be mutually beneficial in the future. It's a small world, and it's fun to be a part of it.

Organizational Culture: Part 1 - What is Culture?

Every organization has a culture. Culture is the behavior of people in the organization. It’s the worst tolerated and accepted behavior. It's also how a group rewards and celebrates successes. It’s how a group documents things, it’s how they run their meetings, it’s how they communicate and how transparent their finances and decision making is. In the same way that Japan and the United States have different cultures, so to do Apple and Tesla have different cultures, even though their main offices for years were 20 miles apart and they definitely shared workers.

For a long time I thought culture, the soft skills, was something that was harder to measure, but as I get older, you can put concrete numbers to it, I’ll give some examples. A company with a median tenure of 9 months. A company with a median tenure of 12 years. A company that fires 4% of it’s employees. A company that lays off 30% of it’s people in 2020 versus a company that had company wide pay cuts with higher earners having higher pay cuts. It’s a company where the normal meeting is an hour, and typically goes over time, versus a company where the average meeting is scheduled for 30 minutes and it often ends early. It’s a place where only released drawings are used in manufacturing, versus a place that routinely uses unreleased drawings. It’s a place where 100% of people in operations can pick up any part and find the part history using it’s serial number, versus a place where you’re not sure what the part number is let alone the serial number and part history. It may be a place people yell every day, or almost never. It’s a place where someone can question the CEO, versus a place where people are afraid to speak up to middle management let alone the CEO. It’s a place where managers try to build their fiefdoms versus a place where managers strive to give their people the best resources and the best coaching. 

Those are topics you can ask about in an interview to get an idea of what the culture is. You might not get good answers to all of those questions, but some of those questions will have numerical answers you can use to quantify the behavior of the company. There is no perfect place and no perfect culture. And many of the things that make a culture good, or at least fun for some people, are often things with difficult downstream consequences. For example, design engineers can often bristle that they need to release all part drawings and assemblies before the parts and assemblies are made. Having spent more than two years in manufacturing at this point, that’s laughable because without something in black and white (which a printed drawing is) what are we supposed to build? Once, I was in a meeting getting some feedback from a different functional group and my group was being told we built the thing wrong. So we compared the picture of what we built to the work instructions, and they matched. Then we compared it to the CAD model, and it matched again. Then we compared it to the original test article we had built, and it matched too. All of the documentation was in order. Moral of the story is, don’t hold meetings after 5 PM when people are tired, but 5 PM meetings are a cultural thing too.

A friend recently left a slow moving four person startup because the team hit some roadblocks and he realized that his voice wasn’t fully being heard. To paraphrase him, a company is always going to have a little bit of it’s founder in the culture and either you get on board or get off at the next stop. As I get further into the world of startups, I get to hear about more companies all the time first hand from people living those startups. It’s fascinating because there are so many really really cool technologies out there that have the ability to disrupt the world. Yet there are also a whole bunch of people out there making the same people relationship mistakes over and over. To give an example, don’t threaten an engineering team because half of them will just leave in the next few weeks. But then again, if that is your culture, one of threats, and a constant turnover of people, maybe that works for your organization. One of the big companies in my industry published a turnover rate of 21% last year, and given what I know, it’s probably been around that level for years. This company is known as the benchmark, and it’s clearly a market leader, and yet 21% of their people are leaving every year. I haven’t worked there, so I can’t really say, but the stories do seem to be a place that burns people out. Yet another example, an industry incumbent that several of my acquaintances recently left was described to me as having a “terrible culture”. When I asked if it was so bad that it would not be around in 20 years, despite having legendary status and a long customer backlog, the answer was that it might not be, it was hard to say. Surprising to say the least.

So, I’m going to write about organizational culture. Mostly companies, but also non-profits, sports teams (yes there will probably be some Ted Lasso examples), even social groups, all have their behavior norms and what is acceptable without being pushed out of the group. Let’s talk about those things. Let’s dive in and talk for example about how when a first time manager micromanages, how is that person’s manager supposed to know, and quickly, that the new manager is micromanaging? I’ll have to come back to that because I don’t know. 

This series is partly inspired by the Big ERN’s Safe Withdraw Rate series, which is an open ended series where he dives into a bunch of details, and attacks the same problem, how to withdraw money in retirement so that you don’t run out, from a wide variety of angles. Most recently how using a line of credit, like a reverse mortgage or home equity line of credit, could be used to pay for part of a retirement. In short, every person’s retirement is different, so there is no truly one size fits all answer. Similarly, as I write about culture, it’s will be based on my experiences, and how I hopefully lift up those I spend my days with so that we accomplish great things. Yet, in large part this will subjective, as quantifying things like individual productivity and the turnover and firing rate are not things usually published by companies, so I'm not sure how much I can speak to them. To be clear, I’m not actually trying to change that, I’m just trying to articulate and quantify things that could be described as the culture of an organization, so that as people are looking for their ideal culture, they can ask the right questions. 

Again, there is no perfect culture. A culture that is super high performing likely has a fair amount of turnover. A culture that doesn’t document things well, probably is a lot of fun sometimes just doing experiments, but that failure might come to bite them. This is my attempt, between culture’s I’ve lived, those my friends have lived, and those I’ve read about, to quantify organizational culture.

How I like to run my Meetings

Meetings have two purposes, disseminate information (knowledge leveling so that we get everyone on the same page) and make a decision (with all of the stakeholders present). Before people say meetings are pointless, if a meeting doesn't fulfill one or both of those purposes, you don't need to have it. Often things can happen one on one to keep the organization running, but sometimes you need a larger group of people. 

In my current role most of the meetings I run are typically to share information, but we do make some decisions in the meetings. Last year for eight months I led a daily standup meeting for 5-10 minutes each day to talk about the shop priorities. I thought it went well, we made a lot of progress completing the high priority items. Now my meetings are milestone based for individual products, kind of like a pre-flight checklist for a pilot. In all of these cases, 98% of my meetings are with engineers and technicians so I can't speak to how business, sales, and marketing people do meetings.

Before the meeting even begins when I am planning it, I aim for 30 minutes or less. The first meeting I ever led in industry was in 2011 to present FEA results and it took only 8 minutes, including questions. I have always seen that first meeting as the benchmark. Don't plan for an hour or 90 minutes unless you really have a lot to cover. And if it's over two hours, you definitely need to plan breaks every 60-90 minutes. 

For starters, since every meeting now involves logging into a computer and setting up a video call, I like to log in ahead of time so that we're ready to go on time. Since people often filter into the meeting early I like to then have a few minutes of small talk, such as what people did on the weekend or any life events that people are having, like a coworker is buying a house and it's always fun to ask how it's going. I do this to build trust. When we talk about our personal lives, as simple as saying "I skied at Winter Park on Saturday." We show our coworkers that we are humans. Probably 5-10% of the time small talk at the start of a meeting has prompted someone to say something like, "Hey I didn't know you live in Longmont too, we should get dinner sometime." Every day you're either building relationships, or letting them wither, and spending 1-2 minutes once or twice a day purposefully on small talk helps build relationships. For example, typically I ask person A a question, and then persons B, C and D now knows more about person A, and potentially have something in common, like loving or hating a new movie.

Possible small talk questions and items to use at the start of a meeting:

• What did you do this weekend?
• Did you see that new (insert franchise here) movie?
• Did you see that (sporting event)?
• Do you have any vacations planned in the next few months?
• You can always poke fun at yourself, like saying how much your back hurts after shoveling snow.
• You can ask about people's commutes when there is bad weather.
• If people have plants, gardens, pets, or kids those are typically something to ask about. 
• You can talk about how tired you are of Covid, because we all are.
• You can ask about music, from new albums to recent or upcoming concerts.

I usually start the actual technical content 1-2 minutes late, and the reason is people, for a wide variety of reasons, show up late. Maybe the notification popped up on their computer right at the start of the meeting and it takes 1-2 minutes to log in. Maybe they were coming from another meeting. If you plan to give the most important information in the first minute of the meeting, starting exactly to the second on time is a recipe to have to repeat yourself. And if people aren't very comfortable with you (because for example you're three layers above them in the hierarchy), they won't ask you what they missed, they will ask someone else what happened in the first two minutes. That's another reason, instead of sitting there in silence a minute past the start of the meeting, having small talk is a good way to ease people into the conversation and get at least one person ready to talk. The one disclaimer to this is when the number of people in the meeting gets above 20, most people that aren't the presenter don't want a room of 20+ people to know all about their personal life. 

During the meeting the goal is to be clear. That doesn't always happen. And often what is clear to one group of people (like manufacturing) is not clear to another (like testing). It's okay to repeat things in a meeting. In fact, I kind of like it. If the information is very important, you better say it twice. Of course saying everything twice will sound patronizing, and I'm not a fan of trying to rehash ten minutes of a meeting if someone showed up late. You can always bring that person up to speed later one on one instead of wasting everyone else's time.

In decision making meetings I try to get everyone to add at least one question or comment in the meeting. Often that means redirecting a question targeted at me for someone who hasn't said anything. For example, "Interesting question John, Sara, what do you think about that?" In engineering there can definitely be people afraid to speak up, in particular women get talked over, and shy engineers often won't speak unless spoken to. So one goal as a meeting leader is to be inclusive and get everyone's perspective.

When the meeting is over it's good to ask if there are any major questions, and the pause will often feel awkward, especially with a large number of people calling into a meeting and needing to unmute themselves to ask a question. Just wait to make sure it's awkward, it only takes about six seconds. I've only waited three seconds before and hung up as someone was asking a question... and then I had to call back in to answer it.

Try to end early. Everyone has individual work to do, and giving them even one minute back will help. Some of them most likely have another meeting scheduled back to back. 

Finally, for meetings where a decision was made, it's good to send out notes to the attendees after the meeting confirming the decision. The same can go for meetings where information was shared, but often in those cases that information can actually be sent out ahead of time, so that people can bring questions to the information sharing meeting. A great example is a design review, the presentation and assembly number can be shared ahead of time so that people can prepare and ask better questions. 

That's about it. I hope it helps in your meetings, and if you've ever felt like my meetings were a little different this might have explained why.

What I learned in 2021

My blogging hasn't been prolific the last year, or really couple years. There is a variety of reasons. Dubuque, Iowa was uniquely set up for a person without Internet to blog, plus I was single and in my middle 20s. Independence, Kansas was not, and while Longmont, Colorado definitely is, a pandemic isn't. Well, I've had gigabit speed Internet since about my third day of working from home. I bummed low speed from a neighbor for a couple days but quickly realized that didn't cut it for video chats and loading large CAD models. However I only worked full time remote for three weeks in March and the first week of April 2020, and I've been in person nearly five days a week ever since. That's all a long way of saying, I've been focused on other things and not blogging, even though the learning to do I've done is pretty great.

I'm going to focus on one simple lesson I relearned multiple times in 2021: communication can always be improved. At my company I recently passed over 100 formal interviews I have conducted, with a dozen or so more informal ones I've been a part of. In a recent interview I made a comment that "no one in the world has perfect communication" and was struck by how true that actually is. I like to imagine I communicate well, and I think I do, yet miscommunications happen all the time. To give an example, I have a girlfriend who is incredible, and we've been dating since August 2020, and it's going well, yet we still miscommunicate. In many ways I've found having a significant other exposes communication issues better than any corporate setting. 

As I write this I have 11 years of industry experience. I've held six distinctly different engineering positions. Additionally I have a technical master's degree that I completed before I really entered industry. After going on a lot of first and second dates, I have a long term girlfriend for our third calendar year. Additionally, I've done well running and climbing, the later involving climbing partners and trying to describe those relationships is outside the bounds of this blog post. Point being, 10 years ago when I was writing I didn't understand relationships the way I do now. Communication is so important. Sure I've always communicated, but how is it that we stumble over our miscommunication more as we get older?

I read a few months ago an anecdote about how everyone is struggling with something. I think that's really true. When someone flips out that I'm wearing a KN-85 mask, they don't know I had a pulmonary embolism in 2018 and honestly it could have killed me. Similarly, I don't know what he or she is struggling with. 

My solution? Lead with curiosity and as much empathy as possible. A big challenge in today's world is that we don't understand each other as well as we need to to accommodate all of our baggage. Using an allegory, I have a square suitcase and you have a circular one, and the trunk is a triangle, how do we make this work? It's not always as simple as walking a mile in their shoes. While that is super helpful, it doesn't always give the past, as a day in my life in 2021 would not show the 2018 pulmonary embolism. 

Again, the solution, just talk to people. Ask, "how's it going?" It's okay to say you had a bad day. At work a couple weeks ago a manager brought in a bottle of whiskey after we finished building a product and we drank 3/4 of it that night between a few of us. I know I need a lot of alone time, and I'm surrounded by a truly incredible groupie of family, friends, and current and former coworkers. So ask for help if you need it. Say there is a problem when there is a problem. Don't yell at a random dude. We're getting there one step at a time. We're doing something as a seven billion person world that we've never done before. Take a chill pill and keep trudging, we're going to get there. It will be okay. Jesus loves you. And if you want to make it better, remember, communication can always be improved. 

Enough and the Pendulum

There is a concept in the personal finance realms about enough. It's similar to the concept of a pendulum seeking to be right in the middle, yet swinging from one extreme to another. Today I'm thinking about it in the context of emotions. Specifically, how different people emotionally relate and communicate. None of us are perfectly rational creatures, and I think the more we've been given or fortunate enough to stumble into the harder it is for us to understand those without those luxuries. 

For example, for the person in the right place at the right time to be promoted to be a manager at 25 years old, it's easy to believe in your own excellence rather than recognizing that you fell into that position through the people you randomly knew and being in the right place at the right time. What does this have to do with enough? Well, enough is wildly different in different situations. From a financial perspective, the wealth of the world makes it so that honestly we almost don't have to work to maintain 90 year old standards of living. Yet we do keep working, to buy nicer cars, bigger houses, fancy phones, season ski passes, a second home, etc. Another example, at some point in the future I'd like to try full time entrepreneurship again, yet I feel inadequate. I was just thinking yesterday however, that I've had six different jobs, structural analysis engineer (FEA), structures design engineer, drivetrain systems design engineer, axle design engineer, configuration engineer, and now manufacturing engineer. That's quite the gamut of engineering experience, and honestly I don't know of any of my engineering friends who have covered so much different ground. So how much is enough? I don't know.

Getting back to emotions, I think an advanced part of emotional intelligence is communicating with people on the level they are at. What I mean is we all have different ways to communicate and articulate our emotions, even if we don't communicate them as emotions.  Here is a graph for a simple example. You could insert any number of other spectrums, like not anxious to anxious, not laughing to laughing so hard your stomach hurts. 

Going from Calm to Angry, and how do you communicate with someone who does it differently than you?

If calm is zero and angry is a 10, for people that jump from 0 to 10 they have trouble articulating and communicating with a person who ramps up and is at level 2 because in their head you're either in or your out, when for the person than ramps up it's more of a 'hey, this thing is bothering me'. To rephrase this in the pendulum analogy, if you want to be in the middle, there is always something to be angry about or upset about, take global injustices or systemic inefficiencies. If we really want to make this world better, there must be things we can work to fix. If we were perfectly calm we are ignoring those imperfections. Yet for a person who goes from no emotional response to yelling,  receiving communication with even some emotion might be hard to deal with. 

I don't know. I write these things to help me work them out in my own head even when what I write isn't fully formed and I know it's not perfect. As I've said before, I think the meaning of life is relationships so I  try to make them better. That can be super difficult sometimes as I try to figure out how to communicate with people where they are at.

My Friend the Billionaire

Technically he's still in the 180 day lock up period after his company went public where he can't sell shares yet, but as long as the price doesn't drop by more than 25%, even after taxes he'll be a billionaire. 

We are high school friends. He wasn't my best friend in high school, but he was definitely on the short list of good friends. We spent a lot of time together way back in 2001-2003. But times change, he went to MIT, and I purposely did not even apply because I didn't want to follow exactly in his foot steps. Funny enough, he was the liberal one and I was the conservative one back then. Now I'm pretty liberal in many respects as I try to interpret Matthew 22:39. I wonder in what ways he's changed. We haven't kept in close touch. I think I only saw him twice in college and I didn't go to his wedding. I bet he doesn't ride the subway as much as he did in college. 

Once when we were in Spanish class I remember us having a discussion in English and he said that his older brother an engineer was rich, because he had a hot tub. I'll call my friend J. I think J was maybe trying to decide what he wanted to do and he wanted a good paying job. He ended up majoring in software, which definitely worked out for him. There are only approximately 740 USA billionaires, and now one of those is a good high school friend of mine. It's bizarre. All this talk of inequality... it puts the discussion in a new light. 

I'm in approximately the top 10% of Americans for income based on my age. After going to Africa in 2013, and reflecting on the many other international trips I have taken, it's hit me for years how fortunate I am. Even when I have a week like this one where my 4runner needs $1400 in various repairs. I'm very fortunate, I just go and pay the bill. $1400 is more than many people survive on for a whole year. Yet my dominate savings are locked up in my 401(k) like many Americans, not in a publicly traded company. How to put this another way, J is on the brink of having enough money to do more financial philanthropy than everyone that went to high school with him combined. His tax bill, even with just long term capital gains, will probably be greater this one year than all of the income, sales, and capital gains taxes I have ever paid combined. When I think of how much I donate to Give Directly, it pales in comparison to what he could do with 0.1% of his wealth in a single year.

Sometimes I think people think of billionaires are "others", as not normal people. As people with the capability to put microchips (with antennas and batteries) through a tiny needle into a human and have it capable of not corroding instantly and being able to transmit signals through human tissue. The reality is, if my friend was seated two tables away at a restaurant, I might not even see him. Guaranteed that basically no one would recognize him in Colorado, and he's not famous. He drove a little red Ford Focus in high school and didn't have a car the first part of college. While being very intelligent, and having a healthy dose of emotional intelligence even back in high school, he's just a guy. In some ways it scares me, because if he is the representation of the top .0002% of Americans, we're nowhere close to having a Star Trek warp drive to take us around the galaxy or tricorder to detect cancer. On the other hand, if he can do it, well, I might not be able to replicate that success, but I can definitely do something similar. 

I invited him to come out and ski sometime here in Colorado. I'm guessing he'll do his own thing and not take me up on the offer. It's strange, I have two friends with condos in Aspen, which I always think of as the peak of my kind of luxury, but my friend could go and buy a ranch there if he wanted and fly there in his private jet. (I can basically guarantee he doesn't have a private jet yet, that just wasn't his style, and he's probably still figuring out what to do with all that money.) I know that some of his high school memories were not pleasant, and for all I know I might remind him of some of that pain. I hope he's doing well and I'm excited to see what my 36 year old billionaire friend does the next 50 years.

Why I want to be first in line for the Covid-19 Vaccine

I was talking to some educated reasonable people in the last few days, after Pfizer released the basic results of it's phase 3 Covid-19 vaccine trial and Moderna released the interim results of it's phase 3 trial. Both had efficacy of about 95% against the virus with no major side effects. For people in the know, that's a slam dunk, a hole in one, an 80 yard touchdown pass, a sub 2 hour marathon. So I want the vaccine, either one, as soon as possible, and I'll try to explain why in laymen's terms for you doubters.

First, there are two sides to a vaccine, how effective it is, and how dangerous the side effects might be. There is also the option to not get the vaccine. I made the table below to summarize the available data as simply as possible for the two options.

	Not Getting a Vaccine and Getting the Disease	Getting the Vaccine
How Effective at Preventing Covid-19	0%	95%
Chance of Dying after Two Months	2%	0%

So, obviously the discussion is more nuanced than that, if you don't get the vaccine, maybe you won't get the disease either. For starters, what are the long term possible health implications of the vaccine? Before I answer that, we need to answer at the same time what the long term possible health implications of getting the disease are. So first, we don't know for the vaccine. We really have no idea if there are any negative effects from either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines that show up more than 2 months after getting the second shot of the vaccine. Who knows, maybe people will keel over dead exactly six months after the second shot. Highly unlikely, that sentence was sarcasm, but the point is, we really do not know. To answer the second part of that, what are the long term consequences of not getting the vaccine and instead getting Covid-19, well for starters there is about a 2% chance of death, and that's an average, if you are over 60 or have any comorbidities like obesity, your risk of death is much higher. To give an anecdote, one person I know that contracted Covid-19 in July still has not fully gotten back her sense of taste like she had four months ago. There are no reports of that with the vaccine. In other words, we know that getting the disease you could die or have months long health problems, but getting the vaccine seems to have no immediate negative health effects. Again, this is a hole in one.

Second, still on the risk side, what are the short term risks to getting the vaccine or not getting the vaccine? For the Pfizer vaccine, you have a 2-4% chance of a fever or a headache... boohoo. Get over it. For Covid-19, again the average in the USA across all populations is about 2% chance of dying. Personally, I'll take the headache and a fever for the day or a few days. I would enjoy the extra day working from home... and being alive.

Finally, there is the efficacy aspect. Quick clarification, efficacy is basically how effective the vaccine is under lab controlled administration of the vaccine, in the real world, the effectiveness will be a little lower because some people will not get the second dose of the vaccine and others will get them spaced much farther apart than the prescribed 21 days or 28 days. So 95% effective is about as good as it gets. Frankly to definitively raise the official effective percentage higher than 95% there needs to be many more sick people than just the 170 that Pfizer had get Covid-19 (of those 162 were in the placebo group). Also, we don't know the circumstances of the eight people who had the vaccine and then got sick. Maybe some of them got Covid-19 between the first and second shot. Maybe some of them are healthcare workers who were working in Covid-19 wards and on accident received a high dose of the virus. 

Additionally, for those that still don't know how vaccine trials work here is a summary. First there is a pre-clinical phase where the vaccine is basically tested in animals to make sure it creates antibodies and does not kill the animal. If you watched the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith, that's the phase he's injecting the vaccine in rats. Phase 1 is a small group 10-80 people and the purpose is to make sure that it does not harm humans. A vaccine that crippled or killed humans would hopefully be obvious at this stage. Phase 2 trials are something like 100-2000 people to determine what the appropriate dose is to produce the desired antibodies while minimizing side effects. Finally phase 3 vaccine trials are 20,000-60,000 people where the statistics become real. Half are given a placebo and half are given the actual vaccine. Then, we all wait for a predetermined number of people to get sick from that particular disease, in the case of Pfizer and Covid-19 it was about 150 people that needed to get sick to determine how effective the vaccine is. 

This all comforts me because I'm not confident enough to sign up for a phase 3 vaccine trial, although I thought about it, but given the data that is currently available, count me in for either one of these. 15,000+ people have each had these two new vaccines and they seem to be working without major side effects. Long term, I'd much rather take my chances with one of these vaccines than with an actual case of Covid-19.

With all of this said, I'm bullish on these two vaccines for the above reasons and I'm also optimistic that in the future mRNA might be a key to making dozens of other vaccines for diseases that have confounded scientists for decades.  The US government has thrown billions of dollars through Operation Warp Speed at vaccine manufacturers, and let's be honest, it looks to be a huge success! 

How do we Deescalate the United States?

Syria, Columbia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Rwanda... The United States is approaching an emotional election. Haha, back in 2012 and 2004 I thought those were somewhat emotional, this feels like a whole other level, especially after I read articles like this. I am a proudly unaffiliated voter (the technical term for what most call independents). I feel that the party system takes away from being American. In other words, being a Democrat or Republican takes mental energy away from being a United States citizen, and also gives you a pressure for to how you should vote regardless of your personal opinions. I have a range of opinions and ideals, not just "conservative" or "liberal". 

I made this chart based on my estimates from the article linked above, so I have almost no idea if they are realistic, but it seems in the ball park. You can't even see the insurgents portion of the chart above, but that's the Oklahoma City bombing, Charleston church shooting, Christchurch mosque shooting, and every other domestic terrorism incident, like the ones that some unfortunate places like Afghanistan or Pakistan have frequently. Frankly, if you enter the militant phase, where you are bringing a gun to a Denver protest or looking for a fight, something like the October Denver protest shooting caught on film that shows a person dying in five seconds, you should ask why you are doing this. How did that person hurt you? What did that person take away from you? How did that person make your life worse? Did you ever bother to tell that person specifically how he or she made your life worse?

The point is, those of us in the masses and the movements need to step up and say "that's not okay" when people show up at protests with bats and guns. When we're doing our online talking we need to keep it civil. I realized years ago that had I grown up in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s I would have been a Nazi, and personally I think I would have done really well as a Nazi. I could have been persuaded when I was a teenager that it was right. Now I've matured and learned a lot and I don't ever see myself working at a concentration camp as a career prospect. But that's a hard lesson! It's way harder to be a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King Jr. than an anonymous soldier standing beside your friends hurting the enemy. 

I don't have the answer. Well... except to say love is the answer. For anyone that's read the Bible, specifically the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, it's super clear that Jesus came to share God's love with us. How many of us actually extend love to people other than our family? There is a homeless person living in his van behind my apartment. We, United States society, have failed that able bodied young man in his 20s. So the statement that now guides most of my voting these days is a Jesus quote from the Bible Matthew 22:39, "And the second is like it, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" How can I, how can we, better love our neighbors and even our enemies, including the homeless people living on the street behind my apartment complex?

Good Days

If you ever have the opportunity to break two bones and partially tear two ligaments in your ankle, politely decline the opportunity. I really don't recommend it. I ran a 20:55 5k, on a track, two weeks ago. Almost anytime 2009 through 2017 I would have lapped myself twice.

Saturday I ran over three 14ers, Shavano, Tabeguche, and Antero... and I felt so good my climbing partner M and I started up Princeton before thunder at treeline turned us around. It was clearly the best I have felt in the mountains in three years. The feeling was beautiful. While I was working hard, at all times I had the capacity to push the pace more than I was. That's how I want to feel in the mountains.

After our retreat I drove back to the awesome city of Longmont where I live. During the day I saw a total of nine rainbows, ten if you count a double rainbow as two, most on the drive back to Denver. As I walked up the stairs to my third floor apartment, after 10,004 feet of vertical hiking on 14ers, I was exhausted and ready for bed. It was a full day with a couple of my friends. As I get older I realize how precious days like this are, even if we get snowed and rained on like we did, we had some laughs out there, and S and M are two good friends I look forward to more time with.

When I see a Rainbow

The other day, actually a few weeks ago now, I bicycled up Flagstaff Mountain on the edge of Boulder. At the top, waiting for my friend, I was sipping and gurgling water and coughing, making everyone else nervous in this pandemic I suppose. As I would take a sip of water and spit it out, a small rainbow would appear in the spray at 6:45 PM as the sun set through some light clouds. Long enough I could definitely see it, but not long enough to be a normal rainbow, let alone a double or triple rainbow.

In Genesis God says that a rainbow will be the sign that he will never again destroy the world like he did in the flood. (Yes, I realize for non Christians, talking about the flood is blasphemy because if the flood really happened, than a lot of other stuff in the Bible most likely happened too.) Personally I take it one step further when I see a rainbow, even, or maybe especially, when it's in the spit that comes from my coughing mouth in a pandemic as I go through a breakup. I see it as a sign that God loves me.

The last time I spent time with my most recent ex we saw a double rainbow. We were no longer dating at the time, it was the first time since we broke up that we physically spent any time together. For me it was a test to see if I could tolerate being around her, and fortunately I could. We still laughed. As I drove back down from the mountains after rock climbing in a snow storm (not exaggerating) without working windshield wipers in the rain (again not exaggerating) we saw a double rainbow, and I realized it would be okay. God loves me. I don't have much of a clue what that means or what he has in store for me, and after a pulmonary embolism and torn ankle ligaments to deal with the last 27 months, I'm very ready for a little pleasant resolution. But the point remains, God, the big man up there calling the shots when he wants to (and not calling the shots sometimes), is looking out for me. He's not going to spare me pain, just read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but the events in my life are ultimately all for His good plan, whatever that is.

Monday I Cried

I learned last weekend that a friend of mine for over eight years has never cried in front of his fiancé, or me. Might have to dive into that another time. I cried Monday on the drive to work listening to NPR about the protests the night before. Just a few tears. The average cry session is eight minutes and my commute during the pandemic is just over 20 minutes, but this session was only three minutes or so.

I only have a few African American friends. I actually have more friends that are born and raised Africans than African American. In other words, most of my friends are white, Hispanic, or Asian, so I have trouble relating to the experience of people of color in the USA. Yet I've heard the stories of different encounters some of them have had that simply blow my mind, because I don't have those kind of encounters. For example, I haven't been pulled over by the police while driving at all since I went through a yellow light back in 2011.

I haven't watched the 9:31 minute long video of George Floyd being suffocated... because we've seen this before, Philando Castile and Terence Crutcher were the two videos I watched in 2016 that changed me. I just cannot imagine myself ever being in those two situations and getting killed. One challenge is, I know police officers, they don't set out to get into those situations, at all. We live in a world where everything is video taped now, people are going to be held accountable for things that they would not have been even 10 years ago let alone 25. I kind of come at this from a quality control and Six Sigma perspective (hope that's not cold...) meaning as a society we keep trying to get better. However, as the overall quality improves, getting down into the nitty gritty corner cases actually poses harder deeper questions. It's like commercial airline safety, two pilots, basically all instrument flight rules, maintenance is meticulous, certification of the aircraft type is meticulous (737-Max excepted...), and so when there are incidents like the 737-Max crashes or George Floyd's death, it can be hard to overcome, because we've already tried the easy options.

Today I briefly attended the Boulder Black Lives Matter protest. It was mostly on accident, and the crowd was so big I didn't stay long because we are still in a pandemic and I don't want to get sick. I don't know what change looks like, because I already have equality with basically everyone else I want equality with, but obviously many people don't have the opportunities I have had. So I cried.

Point being, Jesus love you. He love me and everyone else too regardless of the sinful things we can change about ourselves but repeatedly fail to change or the things we can't change about ourselves.

Individually, how do we return to physical socializing?

I'm not talking states, nations, counties or cities and the laws and restrictions they are imposing to stop the spread of the coronavirus, I'm talking about each one of us as individual humans. There are weekend days where I eat out for all three meals. It's not common, but it happens. I think the most takeout meals I've had in a week recently is three times. Other previously normal things, going into an office with 40 people. Going to church with 100 people. Going to a ski resort with who knows how many people, 1000? Sometimes I go to densely packed concerts or bars. Or at least I used to.

So what do we do individually to open up and return to socializing?

This weekend, I had dinner with two friends, who are both younger and in good health. It's the first time in over a month any of us has had dinner with anyone. We explicitly said we weren't sick, or hadn't been sick, as far as we knew. It wasn't an implicit agreement that there was a risk to seeing each other, we said it out loud. So for me, I think that's how I'm personally going to open up. Part of opening up will be going back into work, like sheep to the slaughter. But the part where it's my choice, those will be hikes and climbs and dinner with friends. No, I doubt I will go to restaurants when they open. I doubt I will be the first to go sing at church. I'm afraid to be too close to people or around large groups of any size.

In addition to my little social outings, I plan to space them out. In other words, while I could possibly hang out with four different little groups of one or two people over a weekend, I'm not going to do that. I may be contagious as I write this. That's the challenge, we just don't know, and you can't really get a test until you are sick and it's too late you've already spread it. So basically it's like hang out with A1, then hang out with J and K, and then wait a week before any more socializing. It's going to be that way for awhile. Church in particular scares me. Why? Everyone is over 50! They're just more likely to get really sick and die. When I see that 31% of people over 80 in Colorado who test positive die, that's a huge number!

We have to strike a balance. The world is not risk free. I don't think we can ask everyone to stay home except for going to the grocery store once a week, for six months without causing a host of other mental health problems, or even delayed care for other physical health issues that scares people away from going to the doctor. And, frankly, with 3 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide, we're not going to stamp it out this year. It will continue circulating, somewhere in the world until we reach herd immunity either through lots of sickness and death or a vaccine or most likely both. We need to be safe and keep our distance, but also let our loved ones know we love them. Finally, we need to be responsible and not put anyone at undue risk, and when we inevitably do get sick, be as clear as possible about others that might be sick too.

We are Living at the Perfect Time

When I was younger, I often wondered why I was alive now? I mean, it feels like I have a diverse set of skills, and I could have thrived at many periods earlier in history. The whole lifetime scientific progress of Ben Franklin or Leonardo Di Vinci can be understood by most graduate students these days. Of course, to a physics graduate student the majority of what Einstein did is understandable too, and we still haven't proven or disproven a fair portion of his work. However, it's always hardest to be first, or to push the limit in some way.

In the book "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" Earth is destroyed to make way for a super highway on the day that someone woke up with the answer to the question "what is the meaning of life?". Up until that point Earth was basically just an experimental computer to answer that question. A human, living experiment. In a similar way, each one of us is pushing the collective world forward, in some tiny little way. We all have a purpose, even though it doesn't feel like it all the time.

In other words, for my peers, I know we suffered at the start of our careers in the Great Recession, and now as many of us were just getting established we're having the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 to deal with. Not to mention the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that many fought in. Then assuming we survive all of this, we still have climate change, automation, and inequality to deal with. Any one of those three could lead to wars and famines if we aren't a little more generous and equitable with the wealth of the world.

The point is, I believe we are all here at this point in time because it's when we were meant to be. You weren't born in 2090 or 1890, you were born in 1990. That doesn't mean it's easy. That doesn't even mean you will survive the pandemic. But to me, it's like a fun puzzle, like a very interesting game, where you want to keep playing to see what happens. Along those lines, people are freaking out over the cover-19 coronavirus and the resulting recession we have entered, justifiably so, both are pretty serious, but I'm hoping we're going to have some roaring 20s, so please try and be patient as we get through this.

India, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan Covid-19 Pandemic

India, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan are four of the world's six most populous countries, with the USA and China being the other two. I've been to all four of those, and let me tell you, you think the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is bad in the USA? It's going to be worse in all of those countries. Brazil has a strong fighting chance, but the other three, have some big challenges. Why am I so pessimistic?

1. Large populations, it's no secret larger populations have more people who might be infected with Covid-19.
2. Dense urban centers. Sal Paulo, Islamabad, Pekanbaru, Mumbai... these are cities I've been to in those countries where people live in close quarters, and not all have electricity and clean running water, in any of those cities. It's a recipe for a virus to spread.
3. General wealth of the country. This is a stand in for all things medical, because in short, a more wealthy country is going to be able to mobilize doctors, nurses, ventilators, medications, etc. better than a poorer country. Again, Brazil has a strong chance here, and frankly India and Indonesia do too, but not like the USA has.

The big upside those four countries do have is younger populations. Covid-19 is affecting older people far worse overall than younger people. Sure, it's still killing people in their 20s and 30s, but it's far more deadly to people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. An upside for Indonesia and parts of Pakistan and Brazil are that islands and very remote areas make frequently contact with urban centers not too common. In other words, being a little remote in 2020 will turn out to be a good thing. 

In short, I fear for, and pray for, my friends and acquaintances in those countries, because their risks are so high. If countries are going to get herd immunity, it's going to be countries like those first before the wealthy countries like the USA. Oh my heart breaks thinking of the people that need to work every day or they starve!

Communicating to Different People

I have a friend, who has been asking on and off for a year or so about how to get set up for retirement. As far as I know she has not opened a Roth IRA yet, because it seems overwhelming to her. In the past month I dumped about $5,000 into various company stocks that were tanking from the pandemic recession. While I'm delighted to tell you I bought Boeing for $101.45 a share and AT&T for $26.28, how do I describe to a person, a very educated person, how to simply open a Roth IRA? It's night and day. A different friend bought puts on a company back in February, and while I've never actually bought or sold and options or puts, I understood it (and he might have made thousands on it). Yet there is this huge gulf where people don't even have investing accounts. Frankly, 48% of Americans 55 and older do not have any money in a 401(k) or IRA.

I work in a role that is highly, highly cross functional. I work with all the departments. Lately I've been stressing out (and I'm in therapy in large part because of it) because I don't know how to communicate with the different groups in ways they understand. My friend who wants to get into a self directed retirement account (she has a 401(k)), but missed out on the recent 23% gain is a great analogy for communication with a person who has very different experiences and ways of communicating.

Here's another example, give me a map, any kind of map, a flight map, a topography map, a road map, and I'll get to where we want to go. But some people need to know the exact distance between each turn. Some people need to see what each intersection looks like before they get to it. Some people can't find themselves on any map.

The point is, communication has to be tailored to the audience to be effective. Each one of us has skills. Sometimes we don't even realize our skills, but we definitely notice when that is not someone else's skill.

When we are entering a critical time at work every 6-12 months around a product release or entering a pandemic I tell people the same thing, "Be patient. Keep Communicating." Yes I came up with it myself. Because impatience often leads to not only yourself getting upset, but others getting upset. And often, communication can mitigate those issues. The problem is, when one person stops communicating well, and starts being impatient, it spreads, other people get impatient and then stop communicating well.

I don't have the answer. I mean, being patient and keeping communicating totally helps, but ultimately it's a two way street. Another way to put it is the best teacher in the world can still have a student fail because the teacher's attempts to communicate in different ways doesn't inspire the student to want to learn.

Where am I going with this? Try. Try to communicate. Try to understand the people you are communicating with. Don't just give up. I've done four 24 hour races and essentially flopped in three of them, but the one that went well, it went quite well, and I look forward to doing that again. So hang in there. Take another step. Keep going. And worst case, if you can't figure out the communication, at least you know you tried.