Advice from People That Aren't My Friends

07 Aug 2018

I believe complete strangers have more power over us than we realize. My wife is a teacher, and years later I still get irritated thinking about what an anonymous user said in an online newspaper commentary about teachers. Strangers can also sum up others in a frank and direct way. They have less time than an elevator pitch, and they react to a situation, even if it’s as simple as seeing your face for only a few seconds.

Granted, there is a fair amount of noise: misinformation, neuroticism, and misplaced cruelty that come from strangers. Every once in a while though, we hear nuggets of usefulness. This post is an attempt to honor the good advice I’ve received from people that are not my friends. Some of them used to be friends, some of them were acquaintances, and some of them were complete strangers.

Pablo, 1992, “When someone leans in like this, they might stab you”

Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not very well educated in gang warfare, but I’ve lived and gone to school in places where gangs have an influence over the culture, down to how you walk. I learned to walk with my head down, hoodie up, keeping as much to myself as possible, without any sort of challenge towards others walking along the street.

Pablo was a guy at my school whose brother was in a gang, but was trying to keep him out of it. Pablo and I had gym and history together, and once after school he came close to me and put a hand on my shoulder. He said, “if someone puts his hand on you like this like he’s leaning in for a hug? He might be about to stab you, like this.” And out of nowhere, came his opposite hand, right into my stomach.

Good advice. It’s like the next layer of “keep friends close and enemies closer.” Sometimes your enemies are trying to keep you close. More than once I’ve found myself in a hostile work environment when someone is suddenly being a pal, letting bygones be bygones, only to realize a knife was coming my way. So I generally get extra paranoid when a poisonous or hostile person is unexpectedly buddy-buddy. Thanks, Pablo.

Al, 1998, “You can’t just say something’s ‘awesome’”

I read The Stranger during Spring Break one year, while we were driving deeper into Texas to visit my sister. I had heard about it of course, and had always meant to read it. So, I soaked up that one and followed it up with Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist. I read both books on the drive, and I thought they were each awesome. When I got back to school, I was in another car with a friend and a sort-of friend, Al. He was a smart man and one of those where, upon graduation, you’re convinced he’s still going to do something academic. He was also an English major, and when I pointed out how I thought The Stranger was awesome, there was an uncomfortable beat. Then he gave me this advice. His point was that I sounded ignorant. That stung but he was giving me a valuable perspective. In some circles, critical analysis is the secret handshake, and bland text is a liability.

Now, I’m still going to call things awesome, because I like to enjoy awesomeness. However, the lesson I learned from this advice is twofold: (1) know your audience, and (2) some people criticize things to sound smart. I’m not kidding on that last one. There are some circumstances in which folks need to constantly establish their authority. In those situations, naked enthusiasm is a sign of weakness. (I think that’s a terrible truth.) Largely I try to avoid getting mired in places thick with this, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly avoidable. So, it’s good to adjust as needed.

Ex-girlfriend, 1999, on running.

After seeing me out for a run, I got some advice from a woman I was dating. She’d been taking a triathlon class, and she pointed out how much vertical energy I was spending, rather than using that energy to propel myself forward. I needed to lower my shoulders and lean into the run more. In essence, I was doing more jumping than running.

I think this advice has farther implications than running technique, though. More than once I’ve found myself looking at or even taking opportunities that were somewhat pointless exercises: expending energy without actually propelling my skills or my professional life forward. For example, I spent about 4 months on an analytics project at a former company, and I had spent most of my time either acquiring permission to systems, or waiting for someone else that had permissions to develop on those systems with me. Somewhere between 60 and 80% of that time was spent hitting this wall and trying to find alternative approaches to avoid the wall. I had enough blockages and impediments that it dawned on me: I was spending important career cycles for something that ultimately I was not receiving support to do. I decided to write up my architecture plans and put them on the backlog. I called out that the team I was helping should pursue it since it had to do with guaranteeing data integrity, and then I moved onto another project. I hated to declare something incomplete, but I was getting feedback and questions about what value I was adding in general, so it was clear things were heading in the wrong direction professionally. Closing up work on that project was a great move on my part. I shifted to things where I could get home at night feeling I’d accomplished something, and soon, my coworkers and superiors noticed, too. Had I spent more energy jumping up and down, I’d have found myself in a rut.

Ramón, 1993, “Your breath smells, dude”

Yeah, that one was embarrassing and hurtful. Somehow we were both leaning close towards a candy machine as we were feeding it coins. But you know what, I took his advice and went nuts buying tictacs. Now I like to have a constant supply of gum and Altoids. Nobody likes bad breath, pal, so do something about it.

Various forums and product reviews, 2005-present

This is the noisiest of the noisy. There are trolls, there are bots, and there are jerks. We could have a separate blog/post on how to weed out noise properly, but I’m leaving that out of scope for this entry. I’ve read countless forums and product reviews, weeded out the noise, and made some decent decisions before treating my lawn, fixing something in the car, or even buying a product. Praise to the heartless strangers that just spew what they know, even if it’s layered in hatred!

CPR Training, late 90s, “Don’t worry if you hear something breaking because on the first couple of pumps you’re breaking up cartilage.”

This is old-fashioned attention to detail. Both as a student and as a sometime teacher or mentor, I’ve found that details can completely derail someone. Even though it’s verbose, I like to give as much detail as possible. There’s a nuance to it, of course, in that I don’t just jump into detail. I try to prepare a person beforehand, and tell them: I’m giving you a brain dump and you can throw away whatever you don’t need. This is because I will not be there when that odd situation comes up, and those details can put a hard stop on important things, like pumping lifeblood. When I was working with an overnight, offshore team in a previous job, we got back to the office one morning to discover that they had encountered an error, and then sat at their desks for 8 hours because they didn’t know what to do. That was a waste of everyone’s time and money. So, in this case, we were sure to give them not only guidelines, but specific instructions, too. When odd things came up, they knew how to pivot and keep moving.

Jaime, 2006, “It’s an adjustment”

Honestly I still consider Jaime a friend, but we’ve only had one indepth conversation in the last 10 years or so, and perhaps that means I can list him here. We worked together during the time my wife and I became parents. As a soon-to-be father, I would hear two extremes: (1) “your life is ovah!” and (2) “your life will forever change for the better”. I’d been spending time in the mornings writing, essentially pursuing a dream, and the mentality from either version 1 or 2 was telling me that the time for dreaming was ending. Jaime though, nodded and thought for a second before he said, “it’s an adjustment.” He was the only person that did not paint fatherhood in some sort of extreme. (This includes the literature. Deciding to pick up a crying baby was either the only thing you should do, or the absolute last thing you should do, depending on which book you were reading.) The mentality that Jaime injected into that situation was critical, and it was through that mentality that my wife and I made life changes without completely gutting the lives we’d already built. Instead of leaving the house early to go write, we instead experimented with writing at home early in the morning, or on the weekends, until we moved and I began writing on the train ride in. But I did not abandon the writing (at least, not for several years, and not due to having children).

Casting a major life change as an adjustment brought stability to the overall vision without completely upsetting it.

A Slovenian in a hostel, 1998, “You should go to the hospital.”

While traveling, I slipped down the side of an outcropping and jammed my leg, twisting it in a crevice. I walked on it for 3 days thinking maybe it was just a sprain? I mean, even if it couldn’t bear weight and was badly swollen, it wasn’t that bad, was it? (Indeed, I had a hairline fracture.) Fact is, sometimes a person just needs to hear a concrete next step, rather than an assessment. If he had said, “your leg is broken,” then I would’ve waved it off since he wasn’t a doctor. Ignoring, too, how the bruising was strangely spreading to my toes. But instead he gave me a step to take. This still felt like a big deal, but it was easier to walk to a nearby hospital than to speculate what the next 8 weeks would look like. This made it feel small enough where it was worth the effort.

We don’t treat broken legs in software (well, at least not the software I help develop); however, we do solve large-sized problems. The best way to procrastinate is to look at how great the effort size is, or how fundamentally different life would be afterwards. But getting there is usually incremental. Breaking the work down into concrete steps – where you can see improvement without actually committing to steps beyond that one – is a great way to get something moving. And it’s true: you could take that first step and then realize more time won’t be worth it, in which case, you’re relieved.

Guy that gave me a ride, 2000, “Sorry. I’m usually not racist.”

This isn’t advice, but it is a statement that’s hard to erase. For about two weeks, this guy gave me a ride to work from Southie. He was a nice enough guy (I mean, he offered to give me a ride every day while his wife was out of town), but he had just said a racist slur I’d never heard before. We were on the highway and a car had dangerously swerved into and out of a non-existent exit (maybe it used to be a bus stop?). The guy had to slam the brakes and, although he didn’t raise his voice, he let fly a few slurs, shaking his head. I am not repeating what he said because that would just give it more power than it deserves.

First I had to absorb what the slurs meant. There are several racist comments that are powered by stereotypes, and sometimes I just don’t know all the stereotypes. But second, I was surprised. Massachusetts, home to the Massachusetts 57th infantry, surely was bereft of racism, right? (Indeed, I clearly needed to be taught a lesson in this area.) The third part of it, which is dead-clown-funny, is that some folks think that racism is temporal. He taught me a lesson: people are bigoted even if they don’t think they are. After my experiences growing up, after traveling to Northern Ireland in the ’90s and seeing The Troubles, I’m convinced that just about everyone has prejudice. What’s important is having the humility to recognize it’s always lurking. That humility allows folks to keep it in check, at the least, and perhaps change some part of their world views.

Unsolicited advice

I’ve heard plenty of bad advice, too, and over time hopefully I’ll get better at figuring out the signal-to-noise ratio. I’ve also heard plenty of hurt, ranging from how I look, to my race, to my belief system, to what people think is my background. I’d like to say I can easily discount it and ignore it as crazy/wrong/misdirected, but occasionally there is value if I take a few minutes to evaluate what I’m hearing.