Crossing Cultures, Cultivating Connections

A lot of my most lasting lessons from college weren't from the classroom but from my participation in an on-campus Christian group.  For example, I'm thankful for numerous cross-cultural ministry trainings we received from our strong leaders, which helped those of us who spent summers or semesters abroad but were also relevance for navigating the very diverse student body at Penn. 

The nuances we learned through talks, discussions, and role-plays are not lost on me 25+ years later.  Connecting with someone around religion, spirituality, and truth is a delicate action even before considering how to do so with someone whose cultural upbringing and life perspective differs from yours.  It was formative for me to have modeled for me constructive ways of doing this, especially when there are so many unconstructive ways.

Crazy Consulting Stories

My wife thinks I work too much, and she's probably right.  Although the answer depends on who you're comparing me to.

I have a lot of friends and family members for whom their job is just a means to a certain lifestyle.  So they clock in and clock out, and they're good at what they do and give it 100 percent.  But it's pretty well contained to 9 to 5, and you won't find them itching to put in time on evenings, weekends, and vacations.  Compared to them, I work many more hours.

I also have a lot of friends and family members for whom their job is an all-encompassing passion and craft.  They're still committed to their family members and have hobbies, but their heart and therefore as much time as possible is devoted to their career.  Compared to them, I work way fewer hours.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have," by Tatiana Schlossberg.



In fact, Americans eat so much corn—in the form of meat (the food our food eats), syrup, oils, and alcohol—that according to scientists, on a molecular level, Americans are basically “corn chips with legs.” But there’s also a lot of it we don’t eat, or at least not directly: just under forty percent is animal feed, and another thirty percent is used for ethanol. Of all that corn, we only eat about 1.5 percent of it in the form of actual corn (or popcorn or cereal.)

As it turns out, the emissions from transportation relative to the overall emissions associated with food production are very small. All transportation (including how farm equipment or other supplies got to the farm, for instance) is about 11 percent of the total, and final delivery (from producer to retail location) is about 4 percent. Generally speaking, the production of food accounts for much more of the emissions as well as the overall environmental impact. For beef, which, as we know, requires tremendous amounts of energy and resources to produce, only 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from transportation (1 percent is food miles). For fruits and vegetables, transportation’s share is higher—about 18 percent—but still less than production. What does that tell us? It means that buying local doesn’t make that much of a difference to food’s overall impact. One study found that you could reduce your emissions by a maximum of 5 percent if you bought local. If, instead, you shifted one day’s consumption of red meat and dairy per week to another protein source or fruits and vegetables, you could achieve the same level of greenhouse gas reduction.

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Here's an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life," by Amber Scorah.

As futile as this work might sound, we had given up any thought of building a life in the world we had been born into, because this world was ending. Soon we would live in paradise, on Earth, and God would bring destruction on those who were not of our faith. It was our duty to save them, or if not save, at least warn them. We were very invested in the trade-off we had made. We gave up any hope of a career, or education, financial security, and certain relationships, all for the sake of saving these people, and goddammit—no pun intended—we were very concerned about their impending destruction. You wanted to save just one of these uppity, self-satisfied people for your trouble. I can use the “we” and speak with such certitude of a collective of over eight million people because we all believed without a shadow of a doubt that this paradise would soon be ours.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from an article I recently read, "How to Survive an Apocalypse and Keep Dreaming," in The Nation.




As Indians, I think we’ve been told that we’re supposed to be dead and gone so many times that we’ve internalized it. Some of us don’t want to be anymore. In a society built atop our graves, survival has become an act of resistance.



As Native people, we have endured some of the darkest chapters in history and emerged knowing who we are, where we come from, and what we stand for. We’ve inherited a vision so audacious, it terrified our oppressors. It’s a worldview that celebrates beauty, defiance, and a playful wagging of the finger at the people who tried to kill us. After the pandemic but as the climate crisis unfolds, maybe more people will understand what it means to survive and still dream, like us.

Tips on Why and How to Network

Well, this little mini-series on career advice has been fun.  I got good grades in school, but most of what I’ve drawn from in my career is not that book learning but these professional nuances that (if you’re lucky like me) you pick up along the way.  So, having covered job interviews and managing your boss, let’s now talk about networking.

Some of you may think you’re in lines of work that don’t really require networking, and/or consider it to be kind of a slimy and artificial way to backslap your way through a career.  And to be sure, some occupations and industries lend themselves to more science than art, in terms of credentialing and hard results carrying more weight than the shine of your reputation or the size of your social network. 

Tips on Managing Up

I’ve been blessed to have great bosses in my career, folks I deeply respected, enjoyed learning from, and had a good rapport with.  So, continuing my professional advice series, here are some thoughts on “managing up,” which is to say how do you handle your working relationship with your boss. 

Tips for Your Next Job Interview

In my 25-year career I’ve held two jobs, so I haven’t had much experience being interviewed.  But I’ve probably conducted several hundred interviews.  Which means I should probably be further along in being a better interviewer.  But alas, I still sometimes ask questions that are too canned or alternatively that are too complex.  I do think, though, that along the way I’ve picked up a few pointers on what makes for a good interview.  So, hopefully this is helpful to anyone out there who’s looking for a job.

Recommended Reads, 37th in a Quarterly Series

Stuff I'd recommend from the past three months:

First: Sandra Day O'Connor (Thomas). A well-written biography of a titan and trailblazer.

Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law (Bharara).  I often wonder what my career would look like if I'd gone to law school.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It (Gorsuch).  A measured take on the role of the Supreme Court in our great system of checks and balances.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution (Zia).  A remarkable narrative of kids whose lives were turned upside down by tumult in Communist China.

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (Dreyer).  Reading this was like a tune-up for my writing.

Alexander Hamilton (Chernow).  What an incredible life, and how masterful is this account of it.

 

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The remainder of passages I wanted to share from Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton."  (Part 1 can be found here.)

Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and masterful executive. He and James Madison were the prime movers behind the summoning of the Constitutional Convention and the chief authors of that classic gloss on the national charter, The Federalist, which Hamilton supervised. As the first treasury secretary and principal architect of the new government, Hamilton took constitutional principles and infused them with expansive life, turning abstractions into institutional realities. He had a pragmatic mind that minted comprehensive programs. In contriving the smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state—including a budget system, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast guard—and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled. If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America’s future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

Hamilton’s crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weehawken, Hamilton’s life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding. The saga of his metamorphosis from an anguished clerk on St. Croix to the reigning presence in George Washington’s cabinet offers both a gripping personal story and a panoramic view of the formative years of the republic. Except for Washington, nobody stood closer to the center of American politics from 1776 to 1800 or cropped up at more turning points. More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and scandalized the newborn nation, serving as the flash point for pent-up conflicts of class, geography, race, religion, and ideology. His contemporaries often seemed defined by how they reacted to the political gauntlets that he threw down repeatedly with such defiant panache.

Present of My Body

When I run outside early in the morning, my mind tends to wander.  Part of this is that I have a lot on my mind: I’m game-planning a big conversation at work, or daydreaming about a trip I want to take, or running the numbers for whether I can swing another condo.  Most of this is that running hurts, so getting lost in my head helps the miles go by faster.  (It’s why I never run on the treadmill without watching TV.)

The other day, though, I decided to be present during my run.  No daydreaming, no number crunching, no escaping to a special place in my head.  Just me, present in my body.  You might consider this an exercise in mindfulness.