Growing up in a Christian home, I didn’t learn about Chinese religions. The one thing I remember is my mom telling me that the Taoists are really crazy.
When I started dabbling in Eastern philosophy a few years ago, I thought she was talking about the slippery mysticism of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi.
My mom was a history major so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was forced to painfully slog through a philosophy class in college. But I also suspect she saw many religious ceremonies growing up in Taiwan.
The philosophy might be mindblowing, but wait till you check out its practices. This book described a series of practices that run between wild and completely bonkers.
Admittedly, a Bible story (take something as basic as Christmas) is totally ridiculous for someone who was not raised in the hegemony of Christian myth. So to be fair, all religions are pretty far out.
But we entered the modern age to get beyond everyone’s superstition. I’m not sold on the intricate cosmology of Christianity, and there’s no reason to adopt the talismans and esoteric exercises on Taoism.
This book did its job. It gave me enough of an overview to realize that I don’t need to investigate this religion further. Admittedly Taoists are a heterodox bunch so I’m certain there is a more sedate sect that might suit my preferences.
But time is limited, so I’ll just sample the philosophy, proverbs, and wisdom in all these traditions, and leave the religion to their participants, just as I let my parents worship in peace.
TLDR: Here is a quick overview of Taoism on youtube…while you’re at it, he also put together a great takedown of Hollywood depictions of Asian “honor”.
Last year, I listened to the library’s copy of the Upanishads during a 3-hour 10K hike in the hills behind our house.
It may have been appropriate to experience this work as an audiobook because these were originally oral texts, but it was a slog. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads are fourteen separate documents and it was difficult to keep attention without the structure of a story.
Given their canonical status, it’s my fault for not properly appreciating this experience. Then again, maybe the translator shares some of the blame (I found the introduction to the book incredibly dry).
Or possibly, these teachings should be sampled one line at a time, slowly pondered in a deliberate fashion.
The audiobook format is great for lighter works that wash past the consciousness, often at 1.5x speed. Self-help books flitter into the consciousness to create an illusion of learning that will be forgotten in a month.
The Upanishads are definitely not fluffy self-help fodder. These texts were orally transmitted from father to son. Something that required this much effort must have embodied deep value to survive the attrition of millennia.
It was too much to digest in an endless stream, even at 1.0x speed.
In all, I don’t regret the listen. But this was the barest of introductions. If I want to get anything substantive out of the Upanishads, I’ll have to sit down and read it slowly.
But if the past year of inaction is any indication, I doubt will ever happen.
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(notes on) The New West
The Houston Public Library introduced me to three great books, The New West, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, and a third monograph that focused on reflections in the plate glass on New York City streets (but I haven’t been able to rediscover). All three books were from the 1970s and 1980s.
The New West has kept its freshness ten years after I first discovered it, almost fifty years after publication. Even though the Rocky Mountains are a foreign place for me (the most interaction I’ve had with Denver is stretching my legs at its train station while riding the California Zephyr), the suburban scape is quite familiar.
The tract homes are much like the simple homes I renovated in the Bay Area. I spent four years remodeling an old tract home in downtown Vegas. I now live next to freshly cleared new subdivisions in the desert. The book’s business strips mirror my grandparent’s avenues in the San Gabriel Valley. I can also see a central business (casino) district from our house, through the dusty haze of flatland. That same highway rolled through the foothills of Austin when I started dating my wife. It also runs through the desert towards Los Angeles.
It is all so familiar, and yet half a century foreign. Different from what I know, but every element rhymes.
The only misstep in this book is the introduction to the chapter “Tract and Mobile Homes”.
Few of the new houses will stand in fifty years; linoleum buckles on countertops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.
I pulled up a copy of Google maps to verify this sour prediction. There have been some changes. Big trees stand tall where the land was scraped bare and fences now divide the properties. But the homes all remain, sometimes barely touched.
I wonder if any of the current residents know that their abode is been featured in a photographic monograph? What would they think if they stumble across a print in a fancy gallery? Do they realize the artist fully expected them their homes would quickly disappear?
However, our ability to predict the future is often half right. I followed up the house search by looking up his busy commercial strips. Almost all of them have changed. Sometimes there are wafts of the past with similar uses in new buildings, but American commerce is one of creative destruction.
Those examples in this book were not spared. Only the church has remained.
And so I see our future in Las Vegas. The streets will remain. These squat stucco boxes will survive. I doubt our trees will grow as tall, but I’m curious what our shopping centers will become in the second half of this new century.
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A Question
What do you see in your crystal ball? What will stick around in fifty years?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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A Link
The Growth Equation posted about the importance of physical constraints, especially for knowledge workers who deal in data all day. This is why I love this industry. Outside of academia, architects have to deal with physical reality, even if we aren’t forced to get our hands dirty.
Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft as a curious Owner PM. See you soon!
Once or twice a year, I dig through my fifteen boxes of books in the garage. Aside from the occasional late night web purchase, these are my most materialistic exercises.
It’s ridiculous that I keep these books.
The enlightened unattached person should discard all these material goods. Nine years in a box is proof that they are unnecessary.
However, I love revisiting all these little gifts (burdens?) from my younger self. Books always carry a physical memory of the moment when they were acquired or when they were read.
Books also carry hope for future knowledge. Mainly a vain hope; I’ve lugged some of these across the continent over two decades, from Berkeley to Houston to Vegas.
One day, when we find our own house, I envision a big bookshelf with all these books in glorious display. Maybe that’s a vain hope too.
But for now, I occasionally rescue a select few from the garage. At least those lucky volumes are a step closer to being read.
Every few months, I rummage through my boxes of books looking for a specific volume. I usually come out with several books to reread, which is what happened last year (even though I didn’t find the book I was searching for).
This photo book takes a journey through North America, photographing the food and waitresses (all women) along his extended road trip, taken over three separate legs.
The early 2000s was a tenuous time, having just dealt with the upheaval of 9/11 and the Iraq war. But our lives had not been infected by the smartphone and its ubiquitous internet in the pocket.
As such, Stephan foretold the incoming future. He just barely beat the trend of uploading sexy photographs of one’s meal and sharing it with the digital world.
Not that he was searching for sexy. It’s a damn shame to travel 13,000 miles in a big loop around this large continent and just eat diner food. But that’s what he signed up to do.
Sixteen years after publication, reading the book felt like entering a time capsule. Twice. Both for my initial page turn and slowly reviewing each photograph over the period of a week, reliving communal scenes from my early adulthood.
As a fan of shoddy diners, the settings are intimately familiar. However, it is strange to think that I am now older than many of the ladies whose portraits are frozen in time. I wonder what they are doing these days. I wonder if they ever ponder what happened to that strange photographer who took a portrait of the meal and of them, almost two decades ago.
After a while, it felt a bit voyeuristic (especially since the German edition is titled “Cuties and Calories”). Even so, I’ll posit this is a good book. It was definitely a great deal as a deeply discounted remainder item at Half Price Books, even worth moving across the continent for its own road trip from Houston to Las Vegas.
The book is an interesting concept, a well-executed portrait of our nation. Well worth a read.
The dates are now, the technology is anachronistic, its dystopic urban landscape never materialized, but these short stories still feel real and urgent.
College was a foreign world before smartphones or wifi, so Gibson’s landscape seemed merely a couple of left turns from being real. Our inner cities had not yet become the playground of the wealthy and the tech in his stories was more advanced than what we had on our desktops.
Two decades have passed and his dystopia still seems frighteningly close to happening. We have much cooler toys in our pockets, but are we that far away from societal collapse? Even more terrifying is the threat of chaos, we’d now be backsliding into a dark age of decreased technological capacity.
Progress is not inevitable, and my adulthood has straddled this book portending a future in both directions. Who knows where the future will land? Ultimately, the accuracy of his future-present is irrelevant. Gibson’s genius is in excavating our shared humanity within the heart of these tales.
The enduring core of these stories is anchored in Gibson’s wistful tone. A more sophisticated reader would find this maudlin tone offputting, maybe too cute by half. Then again, I wasn’t very sophisticated in college when I first read this anthology and I’ve only softened up over time.
Last year I created a method to divide my unread books by categories (fiction, non-fiction, spirituality, self-help, art).
Recently I’ve taken a different approach (most likely because we got an ebook reader, which made the entire world’s library easily accessible).
I’ve started sorting my to-read list by era:
Ancient – Older than 500 years old
Almost Modern – 1492 to 1776
Modern – 1776-1945
Contemporary – 1945 onward.
When I wrote the first draft, the reading list was:
Bhagavad Gita (1000 BCE)
Journey to the West (1592)
Walden (1854)
Oranges (1975), The Tao is Silent (1977), and a couple photography monographs
I had a sneaking suspicion that something might change, but I thought this loose structure was another good way to create a cross-section through my library.
Unfortunately, something did change. Since August, I’ve become obsessed (addicted) to an online implementation of the card game Magic the Gathering. Naturally, this has drastically reduced my reading time. I may need to quit that habit so I can go back to my old ways. Maybe an entertainment diet is in order for the new year.
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(notes on) Find Your Why
Sinek’s first book was a TED talk that was bloated to book-length. This is the book that Start With Why should have been.
The first chapter of Find Your Why is a perfect encapsulation of its more famous predecessor. The rest of the book completes Sinek’s “why-how-what golden circle” concept, fleshing out the idea within the standard structure of the self-help genre:
Introduction: Sell the Concept (Start With Why)
Body: Instructions for the reader actualize the Concept in their lives.
Conclusion: Reiterate the Concept with final encouragements.
The Find Your Why method asks you to recount the moments in your history that lit you up inside. Then you process these memories with their method to develop a why statement formatted as:
TO <blank> SO THAT <blank>.
“TO inspire people to do the things that inspire them SO THAT, together, we can change our world.”
Sinek’s own why statement
Unfortunately, the Find Your Why process requires a partner for half a day to talk about yourself and probe your memories. I generally avoid self-realization exercises (even though my experience with Golden Parachute was fairly illuminating), much less burdening those around me.
The authors claim their process isn’t possible to execute by yourself, so I’m not going to try. But if I were to take a stab doing their program, I would first try it on my own to probe the weak points of their method, before forcing an acquaintance (spouses aren’t recommended for this exercise) to participate in my navel-gazing.
If you’re curious about discovering your why, and if you have someone who owes you a big favor, it’s worth checking out. And even if you don’t, this is the better of these two “why” books.
I listened to this book at double speed, taking two and a half hours to “read” while doing chores. I don’t regret this minimal investment, however, if I were to do anything further, I would need to get a printed copy. I can’t imagine running this elaborate exercise without a visual reference. Then again, I haven’t felt any urge to find my why so over the past few months, so it is unlikely it will ever happen.
Even though I’m meh about both of Sinek’s “why” books, I very much enjoyed his other books Leaders Eat Last and Infinite Game. They are both excellent reads.
~
A Question
Is the whole “why” thing is overrated?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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A Few Links
ESPN occasionally commissions a great essay. This is a lovely portrait of a Will “Akuna” Robinson, a veteran who has hiked the three great trails in the United States.
Self help books may be a contemporary route to self knowledge, but I wonder if traditional wisdom books may be a better path. If my hunch is correct, I’d recommend Ecclesiastes, Dao De Jing, Analects, Bhagavad Gita, and Havamal. If nothing else, these have stood the test of time.
… and a photo.
Supersonic Wing Wind Tunnel Model – A three-quarter rear view of a wooden Langley display model in January 1958 showing the radical twist and camber of a supersonic arrow-wing design. Note the cobra-like raised nose at the upper right and the cambered, drooped trailing edges of the 75-degree swept wing. These features were inverted in the first seal design by Modarelli. (NACA L-00502), January 1958
~
Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft and relationships as a curious Owner PM. See you next week!
Stay humble, be kind, and keep experimenting! Justus Pang, RA
I must have read this book way when. How else would I have known this is a sad book? I think my parents had a copy.
After watching the movie, I borrowed a copy from the library to read it afresh.
The book is fully deserving of its acclaim. It is a heart-aching fable with spare watercolor sketches.
It is a subtle and nuanced meditation of childhood and the loss of adulthood (unfortunately, the movie bowdlerized the message by shoving it in your face).
Grown-up normalcy is shown to be absurd.
But.
Only an adult would see the message.
That said, I’m not going out to find more recreational sadness even though this book was totally worth it.
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(notes on) Team of Teams
This new world moves too quickly for top-down, optimized entities.
The twin narratives of this book are the rise of the hyper-efficient organizations (exemplified by the work of Fredrick Winslow Taylor) in the 20th century and the rise of the hyper-connected network (exemplified in the structure of Al Qaida) in the 21st century.
After Saddam was crushed in Iraq, the occupying forces were constantly harassed by the flexible amorphous cells of the terrorist organization. This underground operation was running laps around the awesome might of the great American military machine. General McCrystal’s task was to reverse this trend.
He accomplished this by “shared consciousness” and “empowered execution”. He merged the information silos in multiple organizations so that all the data was shared throughout the forces. He also delegated decision-making power as low as possible, allowing the staff who were most familiar with the situation to respond in an agile manner.
These twin endeavors ultimately turned the tide of the war. While history was being made, I had thought that the “surge” was merely an issue of applying more resources. I did not realize that the eventual defeat of Al Qaida was the result of better management techniques.
At first glance, it does not seem that the lessons in this book are immediately applicable to the much more methodical work of a government OPM.
However, timing is always an issue. Sooner is generally better than later, but our processes with multiple peer reviews tend to push the schedule longer. It’s a bit of a conundrum. Budgets for state buildings are tight. This one renovation may be the only project in this building for the next twenty years. With such timescales, losing a couple of months is worth the tradeoff of ensuring the design is dead on.
But still, the needs are immediate. It would be nice to move more quickly so we can better serve our users. This book makes me wonder if I should experiment further to speed up my projects. It also makes me question if our system of multiple checks is truly effective. Are we getting proper value for the delay? Each extra step incrementally improves the project, but at what hidden cost?
In all, this book is a good read. It is a compelling story of how a top-down behemoth adapted in response to the networked resilience of its opponent. Restructuring the team was the key to the endeavor, the nature of the organization is its strategy. As such, this book is a great case-study companion to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-Fragile.
The other concept that intrigued me is the regular status update meetings that were instituted by General McChrystal. Along with transforming their main base into a large open office plan, his team started running a 2-hour meeting every day. All relevant parties could attend these meetings, and he touts it as his primary tool to achieve “shared consciousness”.
There is a prevailing trend in Tech to avoid such meetings. In that vein, I’ve been pondering how to minimize my OAC meetings. Maybe that is the wrong approach. Maybe I should be thinking about how to maximize the effectiveness of those meetings.
As OPM’s, we tend to think in a top-down fashion, after all, we are the “owners”. However, delegation (empowered execution) is the primary job of our work. Empowered execution is only effective when there is true coordination, so how does one create a shared consciousness between the multiple parties in our team?
~
A Question
How do you handle regular status meetings?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
~
A Link
As an employee of the State of Nevada, I’m contractually obligated to mention that October 31 is Nevada Day when we joined the Union. Unfortunately, we observe it on the last Friday of October, akin to celebrating Independence Day on the first Monday of July.
Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft and relationships as a curious Owner PM. See you next week!
Stay humble, be kind, and keep experimenting! Justus Pang, RA
