(continuation of a previous post)
If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time.
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Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Either the token or the code would connect you to a vast telecommunications network driven by immense computers housed in bunker-like buildings scattered around the world.
Labor Day 1992. I squeezed into a pay phone behind the oldest bar in California, The Iron Door, pride of Groveland, California – the “gateway to Yosemite.” I never could remember my access code, but I did have a token – also known as a quarter – which I slipped into the pay phone, then dialed my voicemail, a state of the art service that cost me an extra five bucks a month. Back then everybody used voicemail, it was an asynchronous lifeline to the rest of the world.
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An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much progress on a concise answer. Usually I’ll list the various projects that currently fill my day – working on the P&G Signal conference, trying my best to be a good board member at a number of media, tech, and data companies, managing various investments, and running a new health event I co-founded last year called DOC.
“Wait,” my friends invariably ask. “Why are you involved in a health project?!”
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For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.”
Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine.
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Late last year I wrote about my transition from being work-driven to being life-driven. It hit a chord – many of you are on similar journeys, particularly those of us who are looking toward, and past, middle age. Buried a couple of thousand words into that post, in the section about what I was up to after selling The Recount, was this line: “I’m helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity.” My partners and I have spent the past six months developing that gathering, and I’m very proud to announce it’s got a name, a date, and most importantly, a program with a purpose.
My co-founders Dr. Jordan Shlain and Kevin Ryan and I have christened the community we’re forming DOC. Our inaugural gathering is October 24th – 26th at The Estate Yountville in Napa, California. DOC is invitation only and close to full, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can request an invite here.
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The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.
But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?
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I don’t often write about personal things here, but the two most-read posts of this past year were Mastering The Rudiments, about my journey with learning the drums, and Unretirement, a personal reflection on my career.
I wrote both of those back in May – a shoulder month between seasons. In May, the year hasn’t hardened into disappointment or routine, there’s still time to change course. Now that the year has passed, I’ve found myself wanting to Think Out Loud a bit, in particular about a goal I set for myself this year. In “Unretirement” I explained that after seven companies, I had decided to get off the startup train for good: “As any founder can tell you, being in charge of millions of dollars of invested capital and scores of trusting employees is exhausting.” What I didn’t mention was that I promised myself I’d not commit to anything full time – no new startup, to be sure, but also, no project of any kind that would dominate my time and warp reality in its wake. My goal was to simply…be.
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Today I’m going to write about the college course booklet, an artifact of another time. I hope along the way we might learn something about digital technology, information design, and why we keep getting in our own way when it comes to applying the lessons of the past to the possibilities of the future. But to do that, we have to start with a story.
Forty years ago this summer I was a rising Freshman at UC Berkeley. Like most 17- or 18- year olds in the pre-digital era, I wasn’t particularly focused on my academic career, and I wasn’t much of a planner either. As befit the era, my parents, while Berkeley alums, were not the type to hover – it wasn’t their job to ensure I read through the registration materials the university had sent in the mail – that was my job. Those materials included a several-hundred-page university catalog laying out majors, required courses, and descriptions of nearly every class offered by each of the departments. But that was all background – what really mattered, I learned from word of mouth, was the course schedule, which was published as a roughly 100-page booklet a few weeks before classes started.
Consisting of thousands class summaries organized by department, the booklet was the product of centuries of evolving information design. Its thin newsprint pages were easily navigated and steadfastly accurate. This unassuming information artifact was the only way that tens of thousands of students, faculty, and administrators could – quite literally – get on the same page. It did its job – even if the page itself consisted mainly of smudgy nine-point type.
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There’s probably a name for it, but I can’t conjure the word: When you’ve been doing something a long, long time, then realize you’ve pretty much been doing it all wrong. That’s the case with me and the drums – an instrument I picked up a dozen years ago but only recently have come to understand as infinitely intricate.
I can’t explain why I started playing, I got the bug when my good friend Jordan insisted I sit down and attempt to bang out a rhythm one very late night. He was re-familiarizing himself with his guitar and wanted a co-conspirator, he happened to have a kit collecting dust in his garage. I was in my mid forties and pretty lost in my career, and I had just moved to a new town. We had a blast making noise that first night – I recall the police coming after multiple complaints, and I woke up afterwards with my face stuck to the snare. After that I built a band room in an out building on my property, found some more guys to play with, and we formed what could pass for a band.
I was a terrible drummer. I took a few lessons and watched some YouTube videos, but I resolutely refused to practice. I think I knew how much I didn’t know, how much I had to learn. I mean, Lars Ulrich was a parent at my kids’ school, and there was no way I was ever going to play at his level. Anyways, I didn’t want to “get serious” – I just wanted to play. Turns out the world vanishes when you lock in with other players and everyone is chasing the flow. When that flow graces the room, damn, there’s just nothing like it. I knew there was a universe of “real drumming” that I was ignoring, but hey, I could study a beat and figure out how to mimic it, and I could (mostly) keep time. And every so often I’d surprise myself with a new riff that seemed to come out of nowhere. We were just having fun, jamming and playing covers and even penning a few originals. None of us had dreams of “playing out” or getting good enough to make a career in music.
The band room was a joyful counterbalance to the madness and exhilaration of running businesses and raising young children. It beat playing golf or going to Vegas or getting drunk in random bars. We’d all text each other on the fly – “band room!?” – and since we all lived nearby, we’d end up playing for a few hours several times a week. It was always after: After dinner, after we put the kids to bed, after the evening work emails or calls. We got good enough to draw a crowd from time to time, but I think folks came more for the vibe. The music was just an excuse for the hang, and the band room was a pretty special place to hang. We had white boards, extra instruments just in case someone showed up who actually knew how to play, and plenty of booze and weed. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hang?
Seven years in, reality intervened, some bad things happened to good people, and the band splintered. Jordan and I kept playing when we could, and a few regulars would come by from time to time, but the vibe was never really the same. I was playing far less than I’d have liked. And I wasn’t learning anything new. When the band room was in full swing, we’d push each other to learn something new, or real players would come by from time to time, and they’d push us even harder. That wasn’t happening any more.
A few years later, with two of my three kids already out of the house, the rest of my family and I moved to New York. Cleaning out the band room was one of the hardest parts of leaving California. Our bassist agreed to relocate the equipment to his garage, but I only get back there a few times a year. I did buy a new kit for my apartment in New York, but it sat there like a stack of unread New Yorkers, balefully reminding me that I wasn’t really playing anymore.
Then the pandemic came, and my wife Michelle and I moved our base to our multi-generational family homestead on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Last year, after my daughter’s high school graduation, we realized we didn’t have to stay in New York. We moved full time to the island, and, for the first time in five years, I had both the time and the space to start playing again. I built another band room in my basement, but for the first six months I only played when other players came by – and given we were new to the area, that wasn’t very often.
Early this year, however, I was hit with a major life transition. We sold the Recount in January, and for the first time in more than thirty years, I wasn’t either running a company or worrying about starting another. I promised myself and my family that, after three decades, I’d stop chasing the entrepreneurial dragon. But I needed something to chase, so I decided to get serious about the drums – to actually explore how much I didn’t know. I resolved to practice daily. I’m a lifelong maker of lists, so every day I write “practice” on my list of things to do. And every day I cross that line through. (It’s silly, but it works.) I even set up a practice kit in my office upstairs – saving the “real” kit downstairs for when friends come over to jam. I read somewhere it takes three weeks to develop a new habit, and as of today, it’s now been more than three months of realizing how little I actually know about playing the drums.
Back when I was first learning, I remember a YouTube instructor imploring his viewers to practice what are called rudiments. This are basic sticking patterns that underpin pretty much the entire vocabulary of drumming. I once asked a friend who was a “real” drummer about them, and he told me if I really wanted to get any good, I should focus on nothing but rudiments for at least a year. That struck me as insane – it was just so much fun to bang out basic beats while playing with others. Rudiments are not only boring to practice, many of them are also maddeningly hard to master. But that’s where I started in February – with thirty minutes of rudiments each day. When I get stuck, I turn back to YouTube, where you can find thousands of videos on, say, the double stroke roll or the inverted paradiddle.
I’m not even close to where I want to be, I know I’ve got months or even years of work ahead of me before I can get to the speed and musicality I know is possible once you master rudiments. Turns out I was holding the sticks wrong, I was failing to use my fingers properly, I sucked at triplets, I wasn’t playing to a metronome, I was utterly ignorant of how to play the bass pedal – nearly every day my list of things to practice grows longer. I’m wading into the sea of ignorance I had been avoiding for a dozen years. And it feels fucking awesome. I’ve noticed lately that I don’t have to push myself to sit at the kit and practice any more. I want to master the rudiments. I want to get to the next level.
I guess the lesson is this: For every field, every career, and every practice, there are rudiments – core skills that underpin everything else. I’ve found that if you’re stuck, it pays to return to them. They have more to teach us than we know.
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