Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I’ve been going in circles on my current assignment at work for close to a week. Somebody else was assigned to the project today, and we sat down and I started talking through what I thought needed to get done. And it all just flowed right out. It always kills me when that happens; I sit and “think” and get nothing done, but when I talk to somebody, it all comes together. Which reminds me of two stories.

One is of an IT support organization at a college someplace (I don’t remember any details). The room where all of the techs sat had a teddy bear at the front counter. The rule was that before you could talk to any of the techs, you first had to explain the problem you were having with your computer to the teddy bear. About half the time, the person would start talking through the problem, and say “Oh, I forgot to do…” and walk out. It’s a pretty clever system.

The other is of my days at TEP. My junior year at TEP, I was Rush Chair. Rush was a big deal at MIT at that time, because freshmen chose where they wanted to live in their first four days at MIT. And once they moved into a place with similar-minded people, they tended to get comfortable and never move again. So if you didn’t make an impression in those first four days, you didn’t get freshmen. No freshmen, no pledges. No pledges, fewer brothers, bigger housebills, eventual financial devastation. Anyway.

So Rush was a big deal. At TEP, we’d worked out a system where the Rush Chair was generally a junior, so that the Rush Chair Emeritus was available as a senior to help them survive the experience. One year after I graduated, I decided to go back and hang out for Rush, and participate in the Crock Opera. Except my leisurely vacation was not to be, because the Rush Chair Emeritus had decided to transfer, leaving the current Rush Chair without a sage to appeal to. So I filled that role.

And I learned something about “leadership”. My role basically consisted of hanging out at TEP. Underclassmen would run up to me and say “Perlick, what should I be doing?!” I’d say, “Well, what do you think you should be doing?” “I think I should be doing this!” “Okay, then, go do that.” “Great! Thanks!” I probably offered occasional refinements, but mostly my role was to be an external authority to validate their perceptions of what needed to be done.

And that’s what happened today when talking to my co-worker. I didn’t really need him to straighten things out. I would have done almost as well talking to the teddy bear. It was just the process of laying things out in words that helped me to clarify priorities.

This is part of why I started writing this blog - to take ideas that are running in circles in my head, and see if the very process of trying to write them up makes them clearer. Sometimes it does. Other times, it’s at least a good forum for venting.

I’d relate this observation to some larger point about managers needing to learn that their job isn’t to control, but to facilitate and empower their employees, but it’s late, and it’s obvious, anyway.

I really like good conversations. A lot. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when my friend Jofish came to town to visit. I organized a big dinner of all the TEP types to see him. Afterwards, the whole crew of us (11 or so) wandered over to Bug’s place to hang out and chat some more, and ended up spending several hours talking til it was after midnight and time to go home for us old people that had to drive 45 minutes back to Oakland. Somebody commented while we were talking that it had the feel of those great undergrad conversations that we used to have late at night where the conversations would range over pretty much any subject that came to mind. And, yeah, that was the feel. I always wondered whether those conversations were as interesting as I remember in retrospect. But, wow, I enjoy them.

It was just neat having a group of highly intelligent, accomplished people in a room, each of whom thinks about things and has opinions that they’re willing to share and defend. An example. Early in the evening, somebody picked up the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from Bug’s bookshelf and asked him what he thought of it. It’s a book I’d heard of and was interested in reading at some point, but not interested enough to actually read it. It turned out that half the room had read it, or at least started it, so it launched a discussion about his thesis, that people are happiest when they are in the state of flow, where they’re not thinking, they’re just doing. And Bug and somebody else said they put it down around there, because it seemed like a really limited definition of happiness. And then we got distracted by the question of what happiness really meant, and how do you balance short-term gratification with long-term enjoyment. It was interesting hearing all the different people contributing their thoughts, and it was clear that most people had thought about the subject and had a considered opinion. Then somebody pointed out that the book described Csikszentmihalyi’s son Chris and his attempt to become popular by acting cooler. It turns out that Chris is now a professor at the MIT Media Lab where several of the people had done work, and they laughed about how that was an accurate description of him even today. And then the conversation drifted off into recollections of the MIT experience, etc.

But I really enjoyed the conversation - we talked for about five hours all told between dinner and hanging out afterwards, and the time just flew by. I could have talked for many more if I weren’t old and stuff. I miss that type of conversation - at TEP, such conversations were the norm (which may partly be the nostalgia talking) because there were always smart interesting people around who wanted to punt on whatever they were supposed to be working on. While I was an undergrad, I probably pulled as many all-nighters just talking with folks as I did actually working on problem sets. Well, maybe not quite. But several certainly. In the real world, the density of people isn’t high enough, and there’s the constraints of being an adult and going to work and all that nonsense. It’s a pity really.

I also need to get better at instigating such conversations with groups other than my MIT friends. This evening was fun - after my ultimate frisbee league game (which I’ll probably write about after this), a few of us went to the bar and just started talking about stuff - it turned out that the three of the four of us there were science grad school dropouts (2 physics, 1 chem), which was pretty neat. So we talked about the various choices that we’d made, and how our lives had progressed and things like that. Good stuff. And I never would have guessed it, despite having played several hours of frisbee with these folks over the past few weeks.

So I need to work on my conversational skills. Because I enjoy these conversations a lot, and I would like to have more of them, and I think the only way to do that is to get better at drawing people out. Asking them what they’re interested in, what they do. The best stories are ones where the person gets really excited while telling them. Plus, people that are excited by what they do are just more fun in general. Skills to work on. Right.