After spending the last few days recovering from hernia surgery by laying around watching shows, I’m reminded how doing nothing for too long can make you feel like shit. 🤕

📖 Dead Man’s Walk

By Larry McMurtry

🎧 📖 You Are Special

By Fred Rogers

😂

7yo went into the bathroom with his cookies, after asking for books to be slid under the door. As he went in the bathroom, he let out a curdling scream. When he came out, we asked, “Was there a fly?”

“Hashtag a million fruit flies. And there was a fly.”

📖 📱 Right Ho, Jeeves

By P.G. Wodehouse

My Do Not Disturb sign fell off my resort door, so I just had to get up to have the minibar restocked. #roughlife #releasenotesconf

😂

“Dad, I had a level 10, super-weird dream. I can’t even explain it. It was too weird. Well, I can explain part of it–with a dog. It was a mix of some movies. From Coco there were a couple of the dogs. And from National Treasure, it was the people. It was so weird.”

—7yo

📖 🎧 Blink

By Malcolm Gladwell

😂

Me: “Can anyone clean up Clue for us?”

14yo, while looking down at the phone: “I can.”

Me: “Great, thanks!”

14yo: “Wait, what!?”

Wife: “You’re cleaning up the Clue game.”

14yo: “Do I have to?”

Wife: “Yes! It will be a lesson in listening.”

Life is like walking against a moving walkway. We need to regularly stop and take stock of where we are at, and whether we are still focusing on what is actually most important.

In my job as a software engineering manager, there are a number of possible activities in which I can engage on a daily basis. It is easy to allow myself to coast and be reactive; just dealing with the crises that arise on any given day. The natural pull of entropy is constantly tugging at us to disrupt and distract us from our priorities.

One thought that I have had lately is to more regularly consider the question, “What work am I uniquely qualified to do for our team?” Particularly as the manager, it can be tempting to dive in to help with minutiae that may or may not benefit from my time and attention. Often, the most helpful approach for our team in the long-term is to delegate as much as possible so that others on the team gain more experience and comfort dealing with different issues. Ideally, as the manager, I have a unique perspective across all of the issues the team is facing, and my time will best be spent at a macro level, while trusting my team to execute on the micro level.

Recently, I wrote about prioritizing experiences over artifacts. In general, I still think that is true. However, as a manager, my most important work is communicating with others. I do need to have experiences that continue to shape and define me, and I need to spend considerable amounts of time thinking, but by and large, I need to communicate my thoughts and vision to others. This means that I need to prioritize artifacts more often in my professional life. My focus needs to be on facilitating experiences for my team, and creating artifacts.

The other crucial part of my role is to be available to help the people on my team when they need it. I will be most effective when I am able to make them more effective, and ensure that they are not blocked in their efforts. This involves a high level of reactivity, but when planned and anticipated, it can feel more proactive. I would rather be the one running around trying to figure out some obscure piece of information from just the right person, and allow the engineers on my team to focus on delivering great software. A balance is needed here. I do not want to completely insulate them from other people in the company—I need to foster connections. But so much of the preparatory work of connections is a slog of investigative and archaeological drudgery, and I would rather save my team from that.

Outside of those two main activities, nearly everything I do is a distraction and is taking me away from my primary role. This is something that I want to remember better, and I know I will need to pause and reflect again many times to ensure that I am focused on the right things.

📖 📱 Warheart

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Severed Souls

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 The Third Kingdom

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 The Omen Machine

By Terry Goodkind

A month of intense reading led to rediscovered relationships with a number of old friends.

At the beginning of August, I decided to pick up a series that I started when I was a teenager: The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. I have often enjoyed fantasy as a genre, and wanted to read something purely enjoyable instead of informative and educational. More than with most books, the characters of this series draw me in, and I wanted to read more to spend more time with friends that I have not seen for years.

One interesting phenomenon that I noticed as I got back in to these books is my tendency to lose myself. I have always loved to read, and can often get lost in a book. Stopping to eat, or sleep, or work can feel like a chore. Previously, I had never understood this part of myself. But now that I have gone through my journey of discovery and recovery with OCD, I recognized exactly what it was. In addition to the character friends I spent time with, this last month has been a close time with my old friend of OCD.

Now that I know how OCD feels in my life, it is easier to recognize his presence when he shows up. One of his defining characteristics is a total domination of my mind. That manifests in the cracks of my life. In every spare minute, my mind immediately jumped to my books, and in many of my spare minutes, my eyes jumped to my Kindle, or the app on my phone.

When I finished the first book, there was a definite sense of familiarity, as if I was returning to a comfortable state in which I had lived much of my life. As the month drew on, I realized that I was not happy with the effects this state was having on the rest of my life. I wrote recently about changing my toilet time to reading instead of playing a game, but now that I was compulsively reading my books, I was just as absent from the family.

As I wrapped up the series, it provided a natural moment to pause and evaluate. There is a delicate balance to be struck here. On the one hand, I love reading, and enjoy losing myself in a story, completely inhabiting another world, and making new friends. On the other hand, I do not want to feed the OCD side of my brain, and want to make sure that I remain in control of deciding how to spend my time. The month of August was not a complete loss—I was able to engage in a number of important events and activities. The most monumental of those was the birth of a new baby girl in our family, which was a magical experience.

I feel good about where things are at right now, and hope to remember to regularly introspect and maintain balance. Living with OCD is a constant exercise in managing tension, and I expect this to continue moving forward. The more I learn about myself, the better equipped I am to make informed choices about my life.

📖 📱 Confessor

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Phantom

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Chainfire

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Naked Empire

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 The Pillars of Creation

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Faith of the Fallen

By Terry Goodkind

While there are cases in which the output of an activity matters a great deal, in much of life the infinitesimal changes that occur in you matter even more.

My therapist suggested a few weeks that I adopt a daily practice of writing Morning Pages to help clear my mind and get in touch with the emotions I am holding in my body. As I was talking about it with my wife, she suggested that I use loose-leaf lined pages, mostly because I hate lined paper. That would help transform the act of writing my morning pages to be more of an exposure, which is always helpful in my ongoing struggles with OCD. To increase the effectiveness of the exposure, I further decided that I would throw the pages away each day.

I have a hard time throwing things away, especially writing. Throughout the years, I have often taken copious notes, and rarely reviewed them. After every therapy session, I would immediately sit down in my car and write an outline of what we discussed. I finally realized one day that the urge to write these things down and keep them comes from the fear of losing or forgetting something that is important. I discussed the issue with my therapist, and she kind of laughed. She commented that she would have stopped me if I ever tried to take notes during a session. The important thing for me is not to perfectly recall everything that we discuss, but rather to internalize one or two major takeaways.

The first few days that I wrote my morning pages, I felt a little surge of panic as I threw them away. I slowly habituated to the perceived destruction of important information, and my brain settled down. As I did, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Knowing that I was not going to keep the pages freed me up to write more things. I allowed myself to express whatever was going through my mind, without worrying about whether it would be valuable later or not. As I quieted the inner editor that is constantly at work, I found myself getting in better touch with my emotions. I would often just create a prompt for myself, and write, “Right now I feel” and write whatever word came to mind.

Through this process, I realized an important lesson. The process of change that occurs as I write out my emotions and thoughts matters so much more than the output I create. This is true in so many areas of life. As we interact with each other, we are constantly changing each other. We are the result of all of those tiny changes. If we want to be different than we are now, we merely need to repeatedly expose ourselves to different situations and influences.

Whether you struggle with OCD or not, I imagine at times you feel the twinge of panic that you are losing something vital. Hopefully this lesson can help you, and me, to remember what really matters more. The kind of person we become is almost always of infinitely more importance than the artifacts we create.

In addition to being the spiritual path, it feels like the only way for me to survive.

📖 📱 Soul of the Fire

By Terry Goodkind

📖 📱 Temple of the Winds

By Terry Goodkind