Total Leadership Exercise – Page 46

Values that are important to me:
1. Honesty
Being honest with yourself is most important. Be able to self reflect and admit when things are good or bad helps gain the trust of others. Secondly, be an honest person. Understand what others expect of you and don’t let them down. Lastly, I feel it’s important to allow others a forum to be honest with you. Otherwise, you may get a subset of the information you need.

2. Integrity
Integrity, to me, means the ability to stick to doing what’s right no matter what other choices may present themselves. It’s walking your friend through the bad part of town because you said you would, even though all of your other friends are having a good time on the other side of town.

3. Follow through
Always do what you said you were going to do. This ties in directly with be honest and integrity, but it has to be said separately. All too often, we’re left wondering what people have been doing “all of this time” when we’ve expected they do something that they said they would. Follow through with your word.

4. Challenge
Challenge is important to be because without it, life becomes boring. I seek challenges in my life – both social, physical, emotional and mental. There’s a fine line where you can seek challenge so much as to create it, which is something to look out for.

5. Aesthetics
To me, aesthetics is anything that is pleasing to one or more of your senses. This is important as it helps with comfort and the phycological health of interacting with other things in your life. If a phone is aesthetically pleasing, you’ll feel less frustrated, and more likely to deal with the things that actually matter in your life.

6. Community
Participation in a community is extremely important. Communities give you an identity. Receiving and giving help within a community is great for your mental health. Also, communities make greater things happen than individuals.

7. Courage
This is a two parter, too. 1.) Stand up for your beliefs. Too often do I work with people who say one thing and do another out of fear of falling out of line or playing politics. If you stand up for your beliefs, others will set the correct expectations about you. 2.) Don’t be a pussy. This means when you want to talk to a girl, do it. What you want a raise, go ask for it. When you see the company leaking millions out of a sieve, go fix it. Courage is the single word summation of the oft-used phrase “Do what you think is right, apologize later”

8. Knowledge
Without holistic knowledge, decisions are based on experience alone. With knowledge, one can supplement experience and make more informed decisions, solve tougher problems and set better directions for everyone in their lives.

9. Creativity
“Think outside the box” or “there is no box” as a friend says it is thinking that helps people state or breakdown a problem differently. Even though I work with and meet a lot of very creative people, most have a hard time actually doing this. I feel that knowledge and creativity go hand in hand, but that creativity by itself is just as important. Creativity can affect change, which is what allows people to have jobs, eat new types of food, travel to new places, wear different clothes, drive different cars and everything else they do in their lives. Creativity is about to become very important when we start to focus on nutrient depletion of the world’s soil, water table loss and global warming.

Total Leadership Exercise – Page 41

I’m reading the book Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. There are a bunch of exercises in it, and rather than write my responses down on a Livescribe
pad, totalleadership.org or on Google Docs, I decided to work through the exercises here.

I’m still twenty years from the typical retirement year, but have already met a lot of the goals I set for myself fifteen years ago. Back then, I was just a software engineer in an “Individual Contributor” role at a big company. My aspirations back then where, on a fundamental level, to do something to leave the world better than when I entered it as well as to influence others to do the same. I had no idea how to get to that point back then, so I went to business school. The process of business school gave me a boost of confidence that’s only grown since then. It also allowed me to quickly discover whether the ideas I was having were worth investing more time and money into.

Eventually, I came to discover the idea that would become the strategy I used to help me realize my fundamental goals, while also raising a great family, taking care of my interests and to never break promises to family, friends or work. I wake up early, before the rest of my family, so that I can exercise or indulge in other personal interests: reading, movies, biking, etc. When my kids and wife wakes up, I help get the ready for the day by making them breakfast and packing their lunches. Then it’s off to work. My work day is never dull. I refuse to sit in meetings where I won’t have an impact and allow my assistant to sit in and make decisions for me when I’m overbooked. Despite this, my peers love to include me in open conversations even when they aren’t related to the work at hand. The employees at the company also know that my door is always open.

What was it that I figured out? Well, what I can say is that is has to do with the fact that I used to think that going back to an agrarian society like after the fall of Rome would be the only way to fix the world. I realized that this way of thinking wasn’t valid given the amount of information and experience we have at hand. I put together a team of ecologists and business people to think about how we could use the spread of information to also improve farming conditions world wide. This was just as much a policy solution as it was a technical and infrastructure.

I’m extremely satisfied with my life and am looking forward to the next twenty to forty years of contributions I have left.

Total Leadership Exercise – Page 32

Your Story: Critical Events in Your Life

The five events that shaped my life to this point.

1. Divorce-Remarriage-Divorce

My parents marriage to each other was the second marriage for both of them. They split up when I was 5. My mom hadn’t worked in 10 years, so she started out on Welfare. She got a job at a local grocery store called Tops. Eventually, she got a position doing what she had gotten a certificate to do: X-Ray Technician. We were on the road to single-parenthood and self sufficiency. My mom began going to church a lot more and by 1988 (I was seven), met and married another man. We moved twice to get into his house in the country. He had already had two kids, so I had a step brother and sister for a few years. One morning I woke up to go to school and my mom told me to pack my bags and that we were leaving that day. It was fall in 1990. I was sick.
I had not realized the results of these events until I got a lot older. Since we moved a lot (14 times before I was 15), I grew to value relationships less for myself, and seeing all of the problems my mom was having, that changed the faith I had in people. It took me a lot of hard work to be able to trust people and also to trust myself and be open and honest with other people. I’m still rather shy and awkward in new social situations, but I thrive in a group setting. I’m always looking for an audience and need people’s full attention when I talk to them.
Understanding all of this took 15 years or so and it was only in the last couple years that I realized how much these experiences held me back from my potential and that I had to overcome all of my awkwardnesses and weaknesses. I will continue to self reflect and improve until either I don’t care or I’m dead.

2. 99th percentile on NYS Regents exams and taking the SAT at the age of 12.

In 6th grade, everyone in New York State public school system has to take the same math, english and history tests. They use the results to rank students state-wide. I scored in the 99th percentile in math. I was asked to take the SAT test to gauge my potential to go to college starting in the 7th grade. I scored low (730), but that experience made me realize that with little effort, I could excel above my peers in math and science. This helped solidify my direction toward engineering.

3. Not being able to afford to attend Purdue for the second year.

Because I had decided to study engineering, I went to a good engineering school and received a scholarship mainly due to the fact that I scored perfectly on the math section of the SATs (that I took when I was supposed to). I enrolled in mostly honors classes and ended up spending more time tending to my hang overs than attending classes. I got a 2.27 average in my first year. My scholarship required a 2.5 GPA to maintain for 4 years.
Neither of my parents were in a position to co-sign a loan for me, so I couldn’t afford to go back sophomore year. After attending the University of Buffalo for a semester, I knew I had to go back to Purdue. So, I moved to Indiana and took a year off of school. This year helped me focus and to learn enough about myself and what sacrifices I was willing to make in order to reach my goals. After returning to Purdue, my grades improved every semester except for one.

4. Moving to San Francisco

Once I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I did some soul searching and turned to philosophy and logic to understand my purpose in life. Once I realized that, I knew that living and working in Buffalo was not the right way to attain this purpose. San Francisco was a natural choice for me because my brother was living in California, I had friends in SF and I knew I could gain orders of magnitude more experience in any job in the Bay Area than I would in Buffalo. I consolidated my things, bought a Subaru and drove across the country alone. Prior to that, I had never been West of the Mississippi.
This decision ended up being one of the best choices I’ve made so far in my life. My dreams are coming true and I’m just learning now that I’m only steps away realizing some of the goals I set for myself when doing all of that soul searching.

5. Meeting Vanessa

I met Vanessa almost a year after moving to SF at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. We started dating within a month and soon couldn’t get through a day without each other. She’s the love of my life and my best friend and partner. We recently got engaged and can’t wait to live our lives together. She helped me grow up and taught me how to think positively about life. She is the reason I’m able to feel more complete as she is the perfect compliment to me and my goals.

Hero

Potential heros: My mother, Thomas Jefferson, Saul Griffith
I would choose Saul as my hero today because he applies his knowledge to good and honorable things. He is an autodidact in sustainability and leads the charge to discover how to help individuals use less carbon. He’s also one of the few people involved in the Green Revolution who doesn’t bullshit with the numbers.