🏠 Take Me Home, Country Roads
Ep 20: Tactful candor, an awfully difficult puzzle, and the joy of twin toothbrushes.
Well, hello freezing temperatures, where’ve you been? I love this picture from a recent road run: just 2 miles from my house and I encounter pure country solitude. Wintering-over fields, a beautiful farmhouse and barn, and brilliant blue skies. We just returned from a trip to drop Xander off in Boston, where we enjoyed a fantastic pasta meal at Giacomo’s in the North End, shopping at the Prudential and along Newbury Street, and a grandiose room upgrade at the Sheraton. Not bad! I’m off to Atlanta tonight for business, so it’s a lot of travel for me. I’m sure I’ll be humming Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver soon enough.
A Tip for the Modern Worker
Be tactfully candid. Business is about relationships. In relationships, candor is key. If you have something to say, don't beat around the bush and hope that your message will land. This is especially important when you have something difficult to communicate. It's never a license to be rude or caustic, though. Balance your openness and honesty with tact and sensitivity.
This tip is one of 365 in my Handbook for the Modern Worker. This one doesn’t need much explaining, but I will point out that many times when I share my opinion or emotions, I’m usually not the only one feeling that way. Speaking up is powerful, so figure out the best approach and be clear and candid.
#365DayDraw
I drew this and wrote the accompanying annotation as part of my #365DayDraw project 7 years ago today.
Let's get 3 more pucks past Harvard's sieve tonight! #LGR @CUBigRedHockey
It feels like ages since I’ve been to a Cornell hockey game in person. Thanks a lot for that, pandemic. We used to split season tickets with friends and it was always a raucously good time at Lynah Rink. Check out this helpful guide if you need a primer on how to fit in at the rink. Let’s Go Red!
Commentary
My parents gave us an awfully difficult puzzle (ADP, if you will) for Christmas. I mean, one look at the box filled with geometric shapes and random colors and you’d be like, “Nah, that’s waaaaay too hard.” They gave us another puzzle filled with Broadway Playbill covers, a far more attractive option. We started with that one during the break, nailed it in a few sessions, and looked at the ADP. Might as well try, right?
As we unboxed this gem, we noticed that the pieces each had one of six letters repeatedly stamped on the back: A through F. Our task seemed to get a little easier with this revelation: the puzzle had six quadrants. My daughter hit the ground running, sorting pieces into six piles, and subsequently into shapes and edges. I put each pile into a Ziplock bag. There, nice and organized (I’m VERY Type A, you see).
Then, over the course of literally six sessions, we put this beast together. For each letter, we fell into a predictable pattern. The flower centers were easy: find pieces with like colors and piece them together. They led to the petal shapes, all unique with their outer, inner, and intermediary colors. Smaller collections of shapes pieced together into larger collections, and then as the options dwindled in a sector, a frenzied “placing of the pieces” race occurred.
This process reminded me of one thing that’s served me well in business. Seemingly insurmountable tasks, at the outset, are just complicated. You have to break complicated tasks down until the discrete tasks are no longer complicated. If you need to involve specialists (using the puzzle analogy: edge finders, pattern matchers, and piece finders), do so. When you put together a process and system for dealing with the seemingly insurmountable, you’ll deliberately chip away at the problem until, quite literally, the puzzle is complete.
Stepping back when our project (ahem, puzzle) was done, we felt quite a burst of satisfaction. All that effort — and most of it was downright satisfying — resulted in something beautiful, and we enjoyed the journey just as much as the destination.
Miscellanea
🏃 It’s downright cold again, but I know I need to start getting more running miles under my feet soon. I looked up our half marathon commitments we enthusiastically made in the latter months of 2022: April 2 kicks things off with the Skunk Cabbage Half Marathon. Two weeks later, the Syracuse Half Marathon. Then a brief respite ‘til Gorges Ithaca Half Marathon on June 17. And all the while, the FLRC Challenge will be in full swing. Time to get after it, yes?
🎭 Xander is back to college this week, but last weekend we immensely enjoyed seeing him play in the pit band for Running to Places’ production of SpongeBob the Musical at Ithaca’s historic State Theatre. We sat in the front row mezzanine on Sunday with a sold-out crowd. The venue caps out at 1,600 seats: what an excellent opportunity for the community and for these young artists!
🪥 Who would have thought that toothbrushes could bring a couple such joy? After literally decades of sharing an electric toothbrush, we bought his-and-hers models of Philips Sonicare 4100. Not that sharing was a tremendous burden, but the feeling of being able to brush concurrently and not have to switch brush heads every evening? Priceless.