April 2025

  • Gift giving

    Gifts (i.e., presents) become a lot less meaningful when you’re an adult, have a job, and can mostly buy the things you want when you like. But when you’re a child, a big part of the excitement around your Birthday or holidays like Christmas are the gifts. For a while now, most of our family (Julia excluded), has been deliberately scaling back the material gift giving around holidays. And for good reason. I mean, do you really need another sweater? I’m slightly embarrassed to say when the weather turned this year, I counted 22 sweaters in my closet. That’s silly.

    …but having said that, there is something so delightful about receiving, or even better, giving, a gift that hits just right. When you find something unique that demonstrates a deep understanding of the person’s interests or wants, it is so satisfying. And it doesn’t need to be expensive or an item necessarily. It just needs to satisfy the recipient. I’m planning to start keeping a mini tracker of gift ideas for family, friends, and colleagues because I often struggle to come up with a great idea when it’s time-sensitive around the event. Hopefully, it pays off this year and if not, well, there’s always another sweater!

  • Leave the past behind

    One consistent theme I’ve observed in the most effective leaders I’ve worked with is the ability to leave behind past events once no longer relevant. They use the past to learn, but they don’t spend significant time or energy focusing on or talking about past people, events, old processes, etc. The go-forward plan of action and belief in the future is often much more relevant and important to the team and so prioritizing their time and focus here is more effective.

    Conversely, some of the more junior or less effective leaders I’ve worked with often spend a considerable amount of time discussing prior events, team members, or old and now outdated ways of doing things. They get a bit stuck in the past and struggle to move on.

    Let’s say you have an executive who oversees a function (e.g., marketing) and their success requires a close working relationship with a leader in another function (e.g., production). The marketing leader depends on sufficient advance warning on new products coming off the line to prepare the appropriate brand content to support a launch. Well, say the production supervisor is notorious for dropping the ball on communicating with marketing and often leaves them in a panic, and then that production supervisor is terminated. Fast forward six months: an effective marketing executive will have moved on and re-established a better working relationship and process with the new production supervisor. An ineffective marketing executive will continue to discuss the problems caused by the old production supervisor, distrust the function, and struggle to establish a better working relationship with the new production supervisor.

    Typing this out, it seems straightforward. And yet, I’ve seen examples of folks getting stuck many times over the years. Better to focus ahead.

  • Defining success

    I was listening to a podcast this week where the guest responded to a question on his definition of success. Much of what mattered to him doesn’t to me so I thought it would be interesting to take a crack at my own definition. It’s a fun exercise.

    My definition of success looks like…

    • Maintaining high-quality relationships with your spouse, family, and friends;
    • Having agency and a very high degree of control (within reason) over your schedule and how time is spent;
    • Spending time pursuing physical and intellectual challenges that are rewarding to accomplish and in which the pursuit itself is gratifying regardless of the outcome;
    • Feeling your professional time and efforts matter, can make a meaningful impact, and relate to a field you’re passionate about;
    • Spending professional time working with people you enjoy working with;
    • Continuously learning;
    • Having sufficient wealth so a) money takes up a minimal amount of mental energy and plays a small role in most decisions, and b) affords you the ability to dine out as often as you’d like, and to order what you’d like without too much consideration for price; and
    • Living an authentic life where you feel you show up both socially and professionally as your true self.

    I didn’t spend too much time on this so I’m not certain it’s exhaustive, but these all came to mind quickly.

    It will be fun to look back at this in a few years and see if anything changes.