Reflections from an aspiring elder

• Be grateful for your life. Not only because I am lucky to be alive after my bike crash in 2016, but because I am now blessed with a life partner and two beautiful children. I have benefited from a lot of privilege through my life, and really appreciate that I now choose how I spend my days, doing work that I love and spending time with my family. I try not to take any of it for granted, and practicing gratitude is a way to remind myself that none of this is guaranteed.
• Pay it forward. I try to acknowledge and recognize how we humans are interdependent, and look for ways to help others. This includes recognizing that others are doing the best they can, and giving money or time to causes I support. I volunteer as a mentor with a couple organizations, and with my local library, and aim to spend 10% of my hours each year doing pro bono coaching for people who haven't shared my privilege (if you know anybody who might want such coaching, I joined with several other coaches to offer coaching scholarships this summer - apply by July 5th). I wrote the book with a similar goal of sharing what I've learned with a broader audience, rather than restricting those insights to those who can afford my coaching.
• Connect with courage and vulnerability. As those of you who follow my blog know, this has been my intention for the past few years as I have realized that life is best when shared. It turns out that connection is a long-standing theme for me - Facebook memories recently popped up this blog post from 2008 where I wrote "the most important thing in this world is the connection we make with each other". Most humans want more connection, so take the risk to share what you're really thinking with another person so you can find your fellow travelers.
• Take care of yourself. It's easy to believe that whatever crisis we are facing is so important that we should sacrifice ourselves to handle it. But there will be another crisis, and another. The sacrifice isn't sustainable. Your mind and body are the instruments through which you make a difference in the world, and have to last you for several decades, so treat them with respect. I wrecked my mental and physical health when I burned out chasing a promotion at Google - that experience led to many positive changes as I learned to value myself more, and yet I still occasionally fall back into those old patterns of sacrifice.
• Invest in your health. I have been intending for years to do more strength training via bodyweight exercises and the weights I have at home, but I never actually did the exercises. So a couple months ago, I joined a gym for the first time in my life. It is a 10 minute walk from my house, it offers group weight training classes, and the paid membership includes two classes a week and if I don't use them, I lose them. So I actually go, and it makes a difference. Beyond that, committing to my health in this way flipped a switch in my brain that I value my body. I've started eating better. I've been going on more runs and even went on a four hour bike ride this week. It's been really satisfying to enjoy what my body can do even as I enter my 50s. And back to my first point, I'm grateful that I can still do these things as many people don't have bodies that permit them to do these activities.
• Slow way down and acknowledge what's here. Last week was the second gathering of the trauma-informed coaching program I am taking this year. While they are sharing a lot of techniques and frameworks, the main advice is to slow down, and be present. Most people rush through life, trying to get to the next thing and the next, without ever acknowledging what they are feeling. When we give ourselves time to breathe and room to feel, it can release tension we are holding inside and often creates insights as to why we react the way we do.
• Focus on the most important things first. There are too many things we "should" do, and you will never get to them all. Trying to be more efficient doesn't work. Instead, get clear on what is most important to you, and say no to the rest. Accept you can't do it all, and choose to do a few things well instead.

• Buy the book if you haven't already on Amazon or Bookshop.org.

• Recommend the book to your friends or others who could benefit from it.

• Post a short review on Amazon or Goodreads. Potential readers evaluate books by number of reviews and by quality of reviews, so even a rating can help.

• Post about the book or this newsletter on LinkedIn.

• How are you building the story you want to tell? What are the accomplishments you want to share or the skills you want to demonstrate when you are seeking your next job opportunity? Think about how you can generate those stories in your job and your life to create your personal brand.
• The hidden trap of being a top performer. I loved this Nikhyl Singhal video where he observes that no company can actually ever reward their top employees enough because they will always contribute disproportionately more than what they get compensated. Recognizing one's own value and managing one's own boundaries then become valuable skills because the company will never help you with this since it's in their interest to extract that disproportionate value from you.
• What are you willing to experience to advance your goals? So much of what limits people in their careers is a fear of what will happen if they make a mistake. But if they can step away from their ego-based fears, a mistake becomes just a learning experience that would let them be more effective and impactful next time. Are you willing to live with mistakes to progress towards your goals?
• Are you successful or flourishing? I see so many people in Silicon Valley who are conventionally successful but miserable and burning out because they don't know how they can keep sustaining the pace of work that brought them that success. But people that embrace their own flourishing without considering what will bring conventional success may struggle from a financial perspective. I want more people to find the overlap where they are energized and excited by how they spend their time while also earning enough to support themselves.

• I thought the observation that Silicon Valley harnesses anxiety disorders for productivity was a cynical joke. Then I read this HBR article by Laura Empson, that observed "elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers”", in part because when "insecure overachievers become leaders of their organizations, they unconsciously replicate the systems of social control and overwork that helped to create them." Yikes!
• Since reading Ijeoma Oluo's book Be A Revolution, I have been following the Disability Visibility Project to learn more about this area of justice. One article that was particularly helpful for me was In Service of: Thoughts on Claiming Disability Justice, by Margaret Price, in which she shares how she learned to stop centering her own challenges. I particularly liked the messages she received from a patient mentor:

  "Your voice doesn’t need to be the center of this.

  You may not perceive everything that’s happening here.

  Not everything here is about you.

  Not everything here is for you."

• Another recent article was heartbreaking, containing a plea to San Francisco to enforce masking in hospitals so that those most vulnerable can go see their doctor without risking a deadly infection. Most of us have moved on from Covid, but according to that letter, it still killed 25,000 people in the US between January and March of this year. If anything else was killing that many people, it would be front page news every day, but we have collectively as a society decided those deaths are an acceptable cost to pay to go about our daily business.
• To end on a more positive note, a client recently shared Richard Hamming's talk You and Your Research, where he shares his observations of the difference between his colleagues at Bell Labs that did great work vs. those that just worked hard. He claims that doing great work is not a matter of luck, but involves working on important problems, having the courage to keep trying even when it's hard, reframing situations to find what is possible (but still important), and not giving oneself excuses. I am reflecting on his challenge "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?"