After reading Burkeman’s excellent 4000 Hours, I borrowed this cheeky little BBC radio series “The Power of Negative Thinking” on Overdrive/Libby.
Strangely, the last half hour is a non-sequitur program about “Imposter Syndrome”.
To be honest, I’ve never really struggled with Imposter Syndrome. I’ve always had a good knack about my own skills and strengths and never felt the need to hide my vulnerabilities.
Such openness might have cost me some opportunities, but it also saved me from a lot of stress. If someone hired me, I always felt, “I’ve been honest about what I can provide, so if it goes wrong, they shoulder much of the blame for picking me.”
But Imposter Syndrome seems to be a real issue for a lot of folks, and I suspect this is a great piece for someone who suffers from it.
The first hour about negative thinking is fun, so in all, it’s worth the hour and a half if you can find it at your library.
The flip side of leaving Houston ten years ago is arriving in Las Vegas ten years ago.
Gotta celebrate that with the King, though Ann-Margaret completely owns this scene, shot in the old UNLV gymnasium, now the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.
A few years ago, I was roped into assisting with the state’s transition to a new Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP), updating our ancient web-software backbone to link all our HR and financial information.
Anyone who has helped implement an ERP can attest, it’s a complicated effort — enough that this initiative has been put on hold for a year.
I’m an architect, not an accountant. But as a project manager, I’m now accountant-adjacent. A big part of my job is preparing and moving documents around. As the division’s representative, my goal was to make sure that they didn’t set up the system in a way that make our lives as Project Manager 2’s harder after implementation.
It was an enlightening experience. I’ve always been the Architect-Consultant who is hired to fix a problem. Things shifted a little when I joined the state and became the Owner.
This was the first time that I was just a User.
It’s hard! These consultants swoop in with minimal knowledge of how I do my job. They shove my needs into a their workflow for their brand new, opaque system. They don’t know what I do, and I barely know what they do. In this case, I was doubly ignorant — of both software and accountant-speak. Amidst the confusion, I was keenly aware of the high stakes because we were gonna be stuck with this program for the rest of my career.
I’d like to think I was a reasonably humble architect, but being a User is humbling at a whole other level! I was powerless, just praying that the experts listened to my pleas and followed through on their promises. I appreciate that a new software platform presents opportunities for positive change, but it felt like they were following their own standard playbook without addressing our specific concerns. It didn’t help that as a project manager, I was extra-sensitive to how they were mismanaging the process. It was so frustrating that I lost my temper a few times, once in a large meeting!
Aside from that shameful embarrassment, this effort gave me a chance to build great relationships with our accountants (nothing builds comradery as an uncaring outside force).
And in a moment of inspiration I threw together this diagram showing how the new system will allow to analyze our project finances along multiple dimensions.
I’m inordinately fond of this diagram, maybe because it melds my current work with my old life. I doubt a non-architect would have realized that an axonometric drawing could sell the potential of the new ERP!
Alt Text: Axonometric diagram of the ERP tracking project funds on multiple dimensions. The different funding sources are shown as different layers on the vertical axis, with cost categories on the X axis and project phasing on Y axis of each spreadsheet. I suspect my early experience as a hand draftsman is why I love axon’s.
We spent our last night in Houston a decade ago on 2/13/2013.
The apartment was packed up and we’d head out for Las Vegas on Valentines Day.
In honor of our years H-town, here is a ridiculous song that captures the brashness of that energetic city in all its problematic glory.
We miss it.
After a long delay from a busted tire on the car trailer the next day, we’d enjoy our most memorable Valentines Dinner eating packaged salad on the parking lot at Buc-ee’s in San Antonio (as in sitting on the concrete tarmac and eating our meal, cause they didn’t have picnic tables at the truck stop).
The girl was an awful sleeper as a baby. This lullaby emerged over hours of trying to walk her to sleep.
小宝宝去睡觉 (little precious, go to sleep)
It never worked.
Not for her. Not for him.
It just riles them up. So I sing it at every opportunity.
Last year, I transcribed it into Flat.io so you can now hear it as a round, because I doubt I’ll ever convince anyone in the family to sing along with me.
I left Ziegler Cooper ten years ago. They’re a fine architecture firm, but in the wrong part of continent.
My parents were in San Jose, her parents are in Las Vegas, and fate had told us it was time to go back west. The heater in our apartment blew out, filling the place with acrid smoke. Instead of fixing the busted equipment, the landlord released us from the lease (turns out he was selling the property and it’s now a parking lot).
My two years at ZCA revolved around this 300 unit, 8 story luxury apartment behemoth on the outer ring of this suburban metropolis. I was the job captain for this project, but we were understaffed so I drafted about 80% this set, from the start of Design Development until halfway through Construction Administration. (We did this in AutoCAD, so Gables Tanglewoods must be among the last generation of projects at this scale that wasn’t documented via BIM.)
It was great experience for a guy who had only worked on small residential and tenant improvement projects. I learned a ton from the older architects, like proper waterproofing principles and how to squeeze every square inch out the building code from Rafael.
I also picked up how a more corporate firm works. You have to stand up for yourself in the corporate environment, unless you don’t mind being run over. Sometimes it’s not a horrific trade (I got a ton of experience in a short amount of time) but I realized I can’t sustain such a pace for my career.
One day, we’ll visit Houston again. Along with pilgrimages to the Menil and the Orange Show, I’m going to saunter into the lobby as prospective tenant so I can finally get a tour of this place that I didn’t get to finish.
