I was enthralled by this thread from @yonatanzunger – I’m loathe to tl;dr it so please have a read.
Then I saw a movie I’m still processing.
Then I read this. And this. And, fortunately, this.
It’s time for platforms to stop treating its users as unwitting petri dish specimens.
Today, as always on the first day of spring, my step-dad Richard celebrated his birthday.
We tend to have a cyclical relationship to birthdays: when we’re young, we cannot wait for them as they signify celebration (and getting stuff). As we age (and are also trying to get rid of stuff), we shy away from them. But at some point, the celebration mode kicks back into gear.
This is definitely true for Richard, who today is now 92 years old.
Richard reflecting in Tucson, AZ.
This year we didn’t even wait for Richard’s special day to celebrate him. When he suffered a stroke in January, he received the honor due to a war veteran who piloted 35 dangerous missions over enemy territory. One mission was so treacherous that his plane was one of 3 that made it back out of an initial group of 30.
I’ve always marveled at how he did it. Personally I grew up in a safe suburb, went to college in an ivory tower Disneyland, and have lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world. So it’s difficult to imagine what life would be like if I suddenly found myself in a plane fending off bullets, dropping bombs and accountable for the precious lives of a crew depending on me.
Richard’s survival extended far beyond the war. He went on to outlive his parents, siblings, many of his friends, and even a child. Add to that prostate cancer, an aneurysm, a stroke and several hard falls impacting his head. We’ve concluded he’s pretty much invincible.
But always deserving honor. Happy birthday Richard. As he and I discussed today, there’s a reason he is still with us. And we are still with him.
On my past few visits to see Richard, I’ve asked him to reflect on his experiences. Enjoy 🙂
What it’s like to go on a mission dropping bombs:
Fighting for justice sometimes means fighting on the “inside”:
How his chief paradigm of people’s core motivations (either money, recognition or power) impacted his sales approach:
In the current startup environment, “vanity metrics” refer to tracking things that “make you feel good, but don’t offer clear guidance.” But the human propensity towards vanity – things or pursuits that are “worthless, trivial, or pointless” – is pretty much timeless. The definitive take came from Solomon, who took quite a bit of time to discuss the Vanity of vanities (for us English-speakers, “a Hebrew superlative expressing the supreme degree of futility and emptiness”). In a modern webby context, think page views vs. conversions.
Examples abound of people thinking that what they do really matters, when it really doesn’t. I know of startup accelerators who spend more time on PR and marketing than with their own teams (presumably the reason they exist). I know of so many startup people who attend every startup mixer and event but I’m hard-pressed to describe what value they are actually creating. Even in causes as noble as human rights, I learned this week that there are some organizations generating all kinds of marketing campaigns and attending all kinds of events which lead to pretty much zero changes in actual lives.
No surprise this simply echoes what has also been around since Solomon’s time (relatively), when the prophets lamented the false religion of going through the motions which appear righteous but lead to no real justice or positive change in the world. Isaiah and Jesus paraphrased this as “honoring with lips but with a heart far away.”
The last thing I want to do is activity that appears valuable but simply isn’t. Whether in business or any other area of our lives, may we have the humility and awareness to avoid a life of vanity and instead be grounded in what is truly real, important and effective.