It is impossible to play Dixit with a child. They don’t understand the balancing act of giving away just enough information so that only some people will correctly guess your clue.
But beautiful cards must be played.
So we invented a variant called Cute War. As the name implies, this is a variant of the old card game War.
Pull out a Dixit deck and twelve poker chips (six for each player). Split the deck in half for each player.
Every round, flip a card over. Instead of comparing numbers, discuss who flipped the cuter card. The winner takes both cards.
If there is a stalemate, a player may offer a chip to buy both cards. The other player may ante their own chip. They may raise each other. If neither player offers a chip or they stalemate at a tie, then flip over the next card and judge accordingly (winner take all, of course).
After someone has won a match, the losing player may offer a chip to buy one of the cards from the winning player. The winning player may accept the chip and give up the card. Otherwise, they must counteroffer with an equal quantity of chips. The losing player may take the counteroffer or up the bid, back and forth until someone acquiesces.
We never go through the deck more than once so there isn’t ever truly a “winner”. This is more of an activity than a game – the chips add a gamey patina but are really just a way to crystallize someone’s valuations.
One day, we’ll get around to playing “real” Dixit. Until then, we have fun with this opportunity to plumb the aesthetic preferences of my daughter.
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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.
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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
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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.
This is a lovely film, especially the sequences that mimic a stop animation with paper cutouts. Maybe a little heavy-handed in its fear of adulthood, but it means well.
Growing up isn’t the problem it’s forgetting.
As an inveterate planner in my current job, I must admit that I was impressed with the big board that Mom made for tracking her daughter’s summer of achievement. However, her mistake was not in planning out the current summer, but in scheming for the next summer.
Maybe the problem is planning.
Planning and forgetting are synonymous with avoiding the present. It’s important to have an idea for the next couple of days, but peering beyond the haze is a futile task. Even worse than wasting time, you’re overlooking the richness right in front of you.
Give yourself room.
Mom’s other mistake was not planning slack in her schedule. Along with indulging the farce that one can divine what’s around the corner, having no fluff time is a recipe for overlooking the important.
Don’t plan too far, give yourself time to smell the roses, and maybe growing up won’t be so bad after all.
Happy Thanksgiving, all the best in your travels and gatherings.
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Unnecessary Steps
For our last couple of projects, we added envelope consultants to the team.
One of them recommended conducting a whole building air test at the end of the project even though it is essentially impossible to do anything actionable with the results.
Since I had extra money in my budget, I went ahead and approved the extra work so we could judge if it would be valuable for future projects. After getting the results, I think the test turned out to be a good value – both for long-term data collection and during construction.
When the team knows there will be a final exam, the game is played a little sharper. Even though this test had no teeth (there were no contractual consequences to failure), the team was well aware of its looming eventuality.
Of course, it is far more important to have contractors who take pride in their work and their attention to detail, backed up by a proactive envelope consultant who made regular site visits. But then again, it didn’t hurt to know that would be a big double-check at the end of the job.
Sometimes technically unnecessary tasks are ultimately productive.
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A Link
The concept of “additional productive steps” to work in the office, is one of the fundamental principles of Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email. Diving into the inbox might be fast, but may not be the best workflow for knowledge work. Even though it’s an extra step, one may be well served by taking the time to shuffle actionable emails out of the inbox to a separate task management system before actually executing the billable work.
This concept has also made me reevaluate one of the crowning achievements from the past couple of years – assisting the implementation of digital signatures. Even though contracts are now processed much quicker than before, it has resulted in a lot of extra paperwork for the Owner PMs. By making it easier for us to execute administrative work, we’ve now been granted the task, distracting us from our primary duty of managing projects (not pushing contracts).
Of course, we’re never going back to hard copies and snail-mail. So the next step is to get these improved processes reassigned to our admin staff who used to manage these documents so we can return to focusing on issues that require architect and engineer licenses.
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A Question
Does your team have quick processes that might be improved by adding extra steps?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
… and a photo.
Vivian Leroy Crisler (1885-1953), an acoustics researcher at the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., looking over a loudspeaker horn used in sound penetration tests, Harris & Ewing, photographer, ca 1923 and 1929]
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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
Last year, I discovered the perfect cereal mix – puffed wheat, raisins, and nuts (such as walnuts or pecans). This works great with yogurt or whole milk. The nuts provide complex notes while the raisins give a bit of tang, and the ensemble is backed up by the fatty heft of whole milk. This has become a breakfast staple (along with my bread, of course).
I recently simplified this combo into an elegant snack – nuts and raisins.
I stumbled into realization when we toasted some unsalted pumpkin seeds. With my family’s history of high blood pressure, I’m careful with salt, but these seeds needed something else. I had some raisins and voila, I had a new snack from the pantry!
You’d think that all the years of store-bought trail mixes would have led me to this pairing much sooner. However, this discovery was only possible because we’ve been on a detox of unhealthy foods since the pandemic started. Aside from the occasional frozen pizza, every meal we’ve had for the past year has been home-cooked. Admittedly, we’ve bought our share of snacks in plastic bags, but even these have been limited because of the cold rationality of shopping online instead of being waylaid on the path to the checkout lane.
It’s impressive that toasted nuts and raisins can result in an elegant combination of tanginess, umami, and fat. It’s all the more satisfying when this magic mix was discovered organically.
After the initial draft of this post, I’ve come up with a second simple “magic mix”. Ground black pepper, garlic, and olive oil can be applied to almost any savory meal to good effect. The label on the pepper container states that it is a product of Vietnam, which invariably makes me marvel at how far we’ve progressed since the age of exploration, kicked off by the Portuguese search for an alternate trading route to break the Italian monopoly on spices. It still amazes me that these mundane kitchen ingredients were worth so much that men would devote years of their life traveling the high seas to obtain these basic goods.
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(notes on) Enter Sandman, Drumeo and Larnell Lewis, 2021
This is an impressive display of craft. Drummer Darnell Lewis has never listened to “Enter Sandman”, so he listens to it once and then plays it. No problem.
His active listening during his first listen is a masterful example of analysis on the fly.
Watching this video brings back fond memories of starting a new project when I was in private practice. The air was filled with possibilities as we were briefed on the program. This excitement would be viscerally manifested during field verification of a building for a renovation project.
When entering a structure for the first time, the senses would kick into overdrive. The building had much to say, but we didn’t know what was critical, so everything mattered. With such stakes, my perception was on high alert. These moments of crossing a strange threshold were among my favorite as a practicing architect.
Though less tangible, the excitement of starting a new project also applies to my work as an Owner PM. Any project is a function of invisible forces – state and local regulations and constrained by industry conditions, budget, and schedule.
Beyond the hard constraints, the OPM is the leader of a new temporary team. My most important task at the start of the project is to grasp and develop the network of relationships within the user group and project team.
No project is truly new, it is always set within an intricate context. Our first job is to sit down and actively listen before we pick up sticks to make a ruckus.
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A Question
What are the moments that make you excited in the course of a project?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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A Links
My daughter recently took a liking to Linus and Lucy, so it has been playing on loop throughout the past week. Looking up the Vince Guaraldi on Wikipedia, this paragraph jumped out. I envy folks who have settled comfortably into their niche.
His desire to continually perform at small, local clubs was not due to financial necessity but because he wanted it like that. The monumental success garnered from his Peanuts work resulted in lucrative offers coming in from all over the U.S., all of which he declined. “Once the Peanuts music became famous, Vince could have gone out and done a whole lot more,” Mendelson said. “But he was very provincial; he loved San Francisco, and he liked hanging out and playing at the local clubs. He never branched out from there; he never really wanted to. He’d get offers, but he’d tell me, ‘I just want to do this; I’m having a good time, and I’m satisfied with it’.”
… and a photo.
Olive Thomas, Bain News Service, ca. 1915 and ca. 1920
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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 wrote the first draft of this post a year ago, the morning after Biden had finally taken the lead in the electoral college a week after the election was held. The race wasn’t yet called by the media companies, but it had become clear that we were gonna get a new president.
I’ve been wanting to write a post about my politics in a general fashion, so this seems as good a time as any.
I believe in constitutional democracy. Rule of the majority, constrained to protect the rights of the minority. But beyond that, I’m not a philosopher. Generally, I’m pretty pragmatic. I just want competent, efficient government.
I went from being a conservative in high school to being politically apathetic in college, to joining the Democratic Party in in the early 2000’s after the twin disasters of the Second Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. I haven’t left that party, though I fear that I’ve become a raging moderate as the rest of the world has polarized to their comfortable extremes.
I am still sympathetic to the trope that less government is better government. However I diverge with many folks who espouse such a view, because I believe government has a legitimate role in society, and I am willing to pay a little extra for more a well run government.
Beyond competence, I believe in the twin goals in our pledge of allegiance: Justice and Liberty for all.
And when our leaders fail, I hold hope in our democratic process. This system of government gives us a voice every couple years so we can enact a course correction.
This is why it has been particularly distressing to watch one party morph into an embrace of authoritarianism over the past four years. Their continued defense of January 6th has been terrifying. To a lesser extent, I have also been dismayed about vocal extremists of the left and their stifling influence of upon our (non-elected) cultural institutions.
Government is a balancing act. Too much one way or the other is a certain path to disaster.
Let’s hope we rediscover our equilibrium.
Interestingly, this past year has been a marked continuing evolution towards becoming a hardened centrist. I’ve become increasingly concerned with the excesses of the vocal left, and I’ve become amenable to the idea of lessening the the power of the Federal government in favor of the States. Things are so heated, I’m hoping that giving States more autonomy may defang the viciousness of national politics.
Frankly, I’ve also lost interest in what whackadoodle policies might be instituted thousands of miles away; if someone out there doesn’t like it, let them fight it or leave. Maybe my next upgrade in my political evolution will be avoiding the news altogether. After all, the whole point of living in a representative republic is to be free from politics outside of the elections held every even numbered year.
I used to go to Huffpo for my regular political web-hackery but their shrill alarmism wore thin after a while. I tried various news sites, but during the 2020 presidential cycle I settled upon the Bulwark.
I suspect I have more disagreements than similarities with the folks on that site, but they have earned one thing more dear than almost any site out there.
Trust.
In a world where many Never-Trumpers heeded the tribal call of their party, these folks have held firm. I might not agree with many of their policy preferences, but they are honest and they have the courage of their convictions.
The other thing that is quite appealing about their site is the conservative belief on American exceptionalism. I’m not fully bought into the thought, but I have to admit its appeal. It is alluring to think that my own country is somehow special in spite our multitude of faults.
We’ll see where it goes. I presume we will transition from friends to foes during the administration of the new guy…but at least these folks have earned my respect.
I wish we didn’t need four years of chaos to separate the wheat from the chaff within our punditry class, but I might as well take the silver linings that I can find.
Over the year after the election, I’ve found myself following the Dispatch slightly more – I enjoy the cerebral musings of Jonah Goldberg and David French over the continued alarmism of the Bulwark (even if it is justified given the festering fallout from January 6th). Either way, I’ve been slowly weaning myself off the news, it’s all too much so I might as well give my attention to things I can control (or at least respond to in a meaningful fashion).
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(Holiday Season)
We officially entered the holidays a couple of weeks ago, when we observed Nevada Day on the last Friday of October. We’ll be having an official day off every other week culminating in President’s Day in February.
These holidays are a reminder of the basic tradeoff that one chooses as a government employee. One forgoes the financial profits of climbing the corporate ladder for a saner working environment.
In today’s hustle culture, settling for a good job may be considered a mark of shame. But work is ultimately a business decision, and joining the government is a trade forgoing upside for limited volatility. It’s not just financial boom or busts; it’s also the heavy hours that are often commanded of employees in private practice.
I was able to take this deal because my parents chose to live frugally and pay for our college educations. This Christmas present has been a continual gift to me and my sister, letting us pursue the lifestyles that best fit our needs.
Outside of the cold calculus of hours-to-dollars, there is something nice about spending a career serving the public. Admittedly, the State compensates me nicely, so leaving the private sector was not as a difficult decision as it might be for other professions.
So I count my blessings. One is lucky to find a job that pays well in exchange for reasonable demands, suits one’s personality, and works towards a greater good.
And of course, dear reader, in this time of Thanksgiving – many thanks again for reading!
Take care and be safe during the festivities.
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A Question
What has brought you joy in your career?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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A Link
Another insightful post from Seth Godin about dreams. He differentiates between strategic and tactical dreams, and he discusses how they need to be analyzed differently.
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
