Civic Engagement

When I joined the local school board here in Philadelphia, I was serving on six volunteer boards: 5 small non-profits and the local water rate board. I stepped down from all of those seats and still spent way more time per week on school board than everything else combined. 

When I resigned from school board about three years later, I gave myself a few months off from civic roles, a highly necessary respite given how hard I had run myself ragged from school board. 

A good year and a half and change later, I'm happy with the portfolio of civic opportunities I am honored to have:

* Board member of Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, a quasi-public entity that serves as city government's economic development arm

* Trustee at Missio Seminary, a theological seminary that three years ago moved from Hatfield to the heart of Philadelphia

* Advisory board member of the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, whose programs include city planning, historic preservation, architecture, and fine arts

* Board member of Public Health Management Corporation, which directly and through its affiliates provides a wide range of health services throughout the region

* Board member of Philadelphia Freedom Valley YMCA, the network of 16 Y's in our region (13 of which I have personally visited and worked out at!)

These are all by and large much bigger in size and footprint than my previous non-profit boards, and stretch me into somewhat new civic issues and professional networks, which has been delightful to experience. It all makes for a logistically busier schedule but a happier me. And hopefully if my contributions are meaningful, it also makes for a stronger region.

But for Dear Pennsylvan-i-a

 

 

Last week I was honored to be invited to multiple events related to the inauguration of Elizabeth Magill as the 9th president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. I have a lot of Penn pride, and owe this institution so much. Two degrees. Countless memories. All my kids have been or are being educated by a neighborhood K-8 school supported by Penn. My neighborhood's economy is anchored by the economic footprint of this institution. Penn is a client of my firm's. And, perhaps most momentously, I met my wife at Penn.

Though I live but a few blocks from campus, I'm not actually on campus that that much. So it was nice to spend basically the whole day one day last week, shuttling between events, catching up with old friends, getting the latest and greatest updates on all the amazing things Penn folks are up to, and of course getting inspired by the ambitious vision of our incoming president.

The day was a bit of a blur, not in the least because as always I had to juggle a full itinerary with work and home responsibilities. Thankfully, there were pockets of time in between events to check in on office emails and kid updates. But I managed to claim those pockets of time to also soak in this hallowed institution. I took some pics of picturesque scenes. I reminisced about a younger version of me from decades ago.

And, most of all, I observed the campus in action, particularly the students. The week was full of meaning with the historic inauguration and all this transition holds. But individual scenes were the opposite of that: just normal, mundane interactions of students walking to and from, holding conversations, being in the moment. It is a special place, this campus of students from diverse backgrounds talking excitedly about classes and clubs, research projects and social outings.

Penn is an amazing place filled with amazing people. It was good to take a day to just soak all that in. How fortunate I am to have this access. How fortunate I am that I was once one of those students too. I have been forever impacted by the experience, an experience that I am lucky enough continues to this day.

Lessons Learned

Without delving into too many details (I acknowledge I'm an over-sharer but even I have limits), I want to consolidate a few takeaways from being in therapy this year. None of these insights are earth-shattering or revealing, but I must confess they are hard enough for me to accept and live out that I am taking today's blog post to claim them in the hopes that that will help them to stick better. If you need to hear these truths too then I'm glad to have shared. 

1. For those of us who are naturally hard on ourselves, it may be helpful to imagine that you are observing yourself from afar. What kind word would you offer to someone in your situation? Whatever it is, say it to yourself and allow yourself to receive it.

2. I am allowed to just be, without any agenda or accomplishment.

3. However much influence you may have on someone's life, you can't will the right path for them. In fact, more often than we are willing to admit, we can't even know for sure what that path should be.

4. Having the hard conversation is easier than the dysfunction we create for ourselves and others in the process of avoiding the hard conversation.

5. Decide in advance what's important enough that you are willing to pay a steep cost to live it out. Because along the way costs will be exacted, some small and some quite large, and it helps that you've already determined you're ready to bear them.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Atlas Shrugged," by Ayn Rand.

"Dagny," she asked once, "don't you ever want to have a good time?" Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, "What do you think I'm having?"

"Muscles, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy, the contractor, had said to her, "muscles—that's all it takes to build anything in the world."

"And it's not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me."

But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.

The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country's troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.

"Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle—the principle of the public good." 

"Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that the good' was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it—well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act."

"What kind of work are you looking for?" 

"People don't look for kinds of work any more, ma'am," he answered impassively. "They just look for work."

"And what's going to happen if you leave a train stalled on the line?" 

"That's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. They can't blame me. I couldn't help it." 

"You're to help it now." 

"Nobody told me to." 

"I'm telling you to!" 

"How do I know whether you're supposed to tell me or not? We're not supposed to furnish any Taggart crews. You people were to run with your own crews. That's what we were told." 

"But this is an emergency!" 

"Nobody told me anything about an emergency." 

She had to take a few seconds to control herself. 

Service Industry

It is 2022. I now have a side-hustle (rental business), a hobby (golf), and many family responsibilities. But I am also co-president of a small but mighty and growing consulting business. And that is, literally, my full-time occupation.

Consultants get ribbed all the time, and often for good reason. All the jokes, funny movies, and eye rolls don’t materialize from nowhere, but from negative stereotypes that are all too often true. 

It is both a matter of personal values and professional ambition that I desire to be a different kind of consultant and hold my colleagues to the same standard. When my kids, at various points in their lives, have asked me the invariable question, “dad, what the heck do you do,” I don’t hesitate with my stock answer: I help people. 

It is a very rewarding profession if you frame it like this. I respect all my clients, and in many cases there is a deep professional admiration and personal love. So I want them to succeed. And it brings me joy to know I can contribute to that or at least watch it up close. Which often, although not always, leads to me being successful, so that’s a good symbiosis. 

But it is not an easy job. This level of commitment means no small amount of grinding and hustling, long hours and hard conversations. I hope I am not becoming or ever was a workaholic. I feel I have a pretty good sense of boundaries and derive life from many other things outside of work. But helping others often means being spent, going the extra mile. I do it gladly, but I don’t do it without cost. 

One can overdo this of course. But it’s important for me that when I get hired you get my “A” game. And that you know I’m thinking about you beyond the specific thing I’ve been hired for, rooting for your success and doing what I can to contribute to it. Like a good long run, you ache after. But it’s a good pain, a pain that also feels good because you pushed yourself in service of something worth pushing on.

Striking Out into Life

 

I've made this point before but it bears repeating: failure is a natural and necessary part of life, and the sooner we learn that the better off we are. My work colleague likes to ask this question when we're interviewing a candidate: "Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned from it." I love it, because it allows us to see if someone has actually been willing to fail, failed, and emerged from the other side better for it.

Alas, most people know this is a common question and have some canned answer that doesn't actually feel authentic. But recently we had someone share a pretty spectacular work failure, and besides the obvious lesson of "don't do that again" their takeaway was that the next morning the sun still rose and life went on.

I think back to my own, relatively healthy childhood, which included a love for baseball, the quintessential metaphor for most of life being about failure. As for me, I was bad and then good, and during my good spell I actually made an all-star team. Of course, I also struck out to end the game and our season on that all-star team, and I wept bitterly on my way back to the dugout and all the way home. And then, just like the person we recently interviewed, the next morning the sun rose and life went on.

It can be paralyzing to be so afraid of failure that we are unwilling to put ourselves out there. When we think the world will collapse upon itself if we fail, we play it safe or we don't play at all. But everything in life - career success, love, social progress - requires that we try, and more often than not that we fail, sometimes repeatedly and sometimes spectacularly. 

I can laugh about striking out to end our season, but obviously other failures are more embarrassing or costly. Yet fail we must if we desire to grow, to make a difference, to truly live life. To continue the sports metaphor, more and more people are content to sit on the sideline and snipe at everyone on the field making mistakes. It feels good and safe to do so, especially when we are joined by a growing chorus of similarly minded folks. 

As for me, I want to be on the field, and I hope you do too. And if, like me, you fail a lot, and take your lumps for it, that too is part of the process. Let's embrace it, together, as part of the journey to anything and everything that truly matters in this world.

Let's Talk to Each Other

Whether in my nightly readings, daily conversations, or social media feed, I'm picking up a number of trends that are worrisome to me:

1. Kids are really struggling in the aftermath of total and then partial isolation.

2. Parents are really struggling to love their kids through these struggles, least of all due to having to navigate their own life challenges, work complexities, and domestic responsibilities.

3. Women have been hit particularly hard, because structural inequities and societal expectations result in an impossible setting for women to survive let alone thrive.

That third point is a killer for me, because sexism is not only evil but unproductive, and women deserve better than to be constantly assailed and unsatisfied. We have a lot of work left to do.

For many of us seemingly enlightened urbane folk, our minds go to things like protesting in the streets, working to change policy at the employer and government level, railing against clueless politicians, and hustling to get our candidates in. All well and good: we should be engaged in all of those ways and then some. 

But, and this is an "in addition to" and not an "instead of," I also propose that we who are in relationships and are trying to navigate all of this as a team of two, we should also do something that is far more immediate and tangible, albeit probably harder, which is let's talk to each other.

Apologies if the following over-generalizations offend you: they are, on purpose, OVER-generalizations, and I actually assume that the vast majority of people do not neatly fit into these caricatures. That being said, let me lay out a couple of perspectives I've picked up that warrant attention and correction:

1. Studies seem to show that when women are professionally successful, and particularly when they out-earn their male partners, they end up feeling pressured to spend MORE time on domestic chores, because their men are already feeling emotionally precarious. Guys, we have to lose the insecurity and step up. If your partner makes more than you or is otherwise more vocationally prominent, celebrate that and support her. And part of supporting her is doing your share and then some around the house.

2. The flip side to the above point is that many people (stereotypically women) put upon themselves the impossible burden of carrying all that goes into running a modern household, between kids and bills and chores and errands. It seems some people derive something meaningful from running themselves into the ground (and mumbling about how clueless and unhelpful their partner is), rather than having a grown-up conversation with that partner about a more equitable distribution of responsibilities.

Talking to your partner about what each person needs and who's going to do what is not nearly as sexy or Insta-worthy as railing on some sexist politician or making a clever sign for the next protest. But I believe that it, along with policy changes and societal pressure, is part of what it will take to navigate this new normal we're in now, and particularly for the benefit of those (mostly women) who are at their wit's end trying to juggle way more than is literally humanly possible.

In my own marriage, we've had to navigate these dynamics, and some days we do better than others, both in sharing the load and in talking it out in the first place. So I speak not from a high horse but in the same muck as everyone else. 

Folks, it's not good that some people (mostly women) are just utterly spent, least of all because it's based on social expectations and unspoken obligations that don't need to govern how we act. I liken it to running a race against the stiffest of competition, and, instead of doing everything we can to do our best, we've decide to tie our shoelaces together. Life's hard as it is, especially now. Why are we making it harder by not doing the thing right in front of us? 

Which is having a grown-up conversation with the person we've committed to building a life together with, about who's doing what and what's fair and what do I need. Some of us (mostly the men) need to stop being clueless or hiding behind past or assumed divisions of labor. And some of us (mostly the women) need to choose the path of asking for help in redistributing the load over stewing over how imbalanced that load distribution is.

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 Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis," by Ada Calhoun.

 

Then Covid-19 hit the U.S. The rest of my tour was canceled. In quarantine, I started hearing from one woman after another who saw the pandemic as almost an inevitable next chapter for this generation. We’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop since childhood. Here it was, the other shoe. Everything that was bad suddenly got much, much worse: more caregiving, less job stability, more isolation, less financial security. Readers told me that they now saw the book as a kind of prequel to the pandemic horror—an explanation not just of why midlife can be rough for us but also for why our generation was at once so logistically vulnerable to and yet also so psychologically prepared for the devastation.

Deborah Luepnitz, a Boomer psychotherapist practicing in Philadelphia, said, “What I see in my Gen X patients is total exhaustion. They feel guilty for complaining, because it’s wonderful to have had choices that our mothers didn’t have, but choices don’t make life easier. Possibilities create pressure.”

Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

More than one unhappily married woman I spoke with said a variation on: “I do it all. What is he even here for?”

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century," by Steven Pinker.

For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words.