Will you take me as I am, California?

I recently went back home to California and it's taken me a while to chew on my visit, because it hit me hard, like it always does, because it's home and it's so much more than home. Like all returns, the trip back reminded me of who I am and not just where I came from, but how far I've gone since leaving home, yet how badly I need home because it's me. It's in my blood. It flows through me and when I'm there I feel alive. California's home and it's so much more. It's the pain of knowing what could have been had I stayed, of seeing a Paradise Lost. 

When I left California, I did the most Californian thing I could possibly have done. Because California is about the spirit of going further, the spirit of adventure, seeking life and the exuberant joys and deep pains it brings you. Leaving California and being on the run, I've lived in 2 continents and traveled many tens of thousands of miles through all the states west of the Mississippi. And I've experienced places of beauty, like the Northern Cascades, and places that made me feel at home, like Lawrence, Kansas, but no place has marked me, formed me, hurt me, yet made me feel the exquisite ecstasy quite like California. And I take it with me everywhere I go. 

People have come to California since it became California and it's been a melting pot and the United States's most diverse state since the times of the Gold Rush. California's name came from a mythical island populated by Amazons from a 16th century chivalric novel Las Sergas de Esplandián. Caliph is a word that came to Spain, like many Spanish words, from the Arabic, and means the caliph's domain, a place of infidel rebellion. 

In 1849, prosperous farmers crossed the continent putting themselves at risk of cholera and starvation--Indian raids, contrary to popular belief, were rarer than lightning strikes--just to make it to the Promised Land and the place of infidel rebellion. 

Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" should be California's anthem, but no artist captures the spirit of California quite like Joni Mitchell in her song "California" from the 1971 album Blue. Blue is one of human creativity's greatest achievements and has always been an album that has hit me devastatingly hard. Anybody who has felt the deep pangs of love--the joy, the tremendous sorrow, the pain that aches in your heart years later, will be hit by Blue like a freight train. Joni bares it all, giving us everything, the honest view of a 28-year-old who has loved and lost. The album's 6th song is "California" and it always makes me a bit homesick. I remember listening to its opening lines during a cold winter living in Barcelona--the cold was made horrible by the thin walls of the ancient building I lived in--as Joni describes sitting on a park in Paris and thinking about how "old and cold and settled in its ways" Europe is and it struck a deep chord with me in my homesickness, making my heart ache for California, which is just the opposite of those old, cold, settled ways. 

What is poignant is how Joni, from a small town in Saskatchewan sings about California as if it's her home.  In my last year living in California, I was with a Irish girl and what struck me when I first played her Joni's "California" was that she said California was the only home she could have known except for Ireland, a place for which she had deep nationalistic feelings. And that sentiment, which Joni expresses so well in the song and with the line "Will you take me as I am, California?" is something that resonates. California, for better or worse, will take people as they are. And it's an exuberant love that comes with calling California home for those many millions who have made the pilgrimage to call it their home. California will take people as they are. It will take those pilgrims as they are, even if it was the state that most systematically exterminated the Indians to make room for these people coming from around the globe.

Despite the mass extermination of  more than 130,000 Indians, California has been a land of acceptance, of taking people as they are. We can talk about the gold rush and the internet, but California's main business has been as a refuge for the freaks, the weirdos and anybody who wasn’t accepted wherever they came from and found a home, a paradise, in California. When you arrive in California, it's like you made it. A paradise beyond description, where even extreme hyperbole does not do it justice. The redwoods, bigger than your imagination, the deserts at the edge of extreme, the decadence of the old palaces and miners' bars in what was the Emporium of the Pacific, San Francisco, and LA, not a city but 100s of square miles of just about everything, from the most popular and extravagant celebrities to the most down and out desperados, and just about anything in between. 

A Golgotha of sin, California’s air of transience makes resonate the idea that anything’s possible. Any wild long journey across a continent will do that to you. It infects you with optimism.  It's the American Dream on steroids, and when it gets weird and strange and colorful, it’s like the American Dream on highly potent acid.

The California Dream

California is still reinventing itself, taking the 21st century gold miners who come to the state to build apps and make the devices that control our thoughts and start the companies that are reinventing our world. 

What's special about California is that it will take you as you are. What's also true is the notion that when you're in California, you can say to anybody, "I came here from somewhere else, just like everybody else." And it's true. Everybody is from somewhere else. Even the legacy Californians who may have 4 or 5 generations of Californian in them, they're so rare, and their families still came from somewhere else.  

Starting with my fishing buddy Anthony and his family from Italy, everybody in California is from somewhere else. And we started by going to a fishing spot we call the House. I call it the Compound. We’ve always seen it with the windows closed and it looked like a compound to me. But Anthony’s boss knew the guy who built the House, the last one on the utility grid between Pescadero and Santa Cruz. The guy who built the strange house was an Economics professor at Stanford who predicted the 2008-09 housing crisis and all of its implications and wrote a book about it in the early 70s whose name I can’t remember. And he died before he could enjoy the strange house, which is really a long, long hall with elegant rooms straight out of Sunset Magazine that are practically pure windows. And when you’re inside the windows are made of some glass that truly enhances your vision of the ocean below, making the light of the sea dance. 

The Compound

As we drove down to the Compound, somewhere between San Gregorio and Pescadero, we saw a school of hundreds and hundreds of dolphins, jumping in the air. They were intermixed with seals who also must have been chasing a bait fish of some kind. Anthony’s boss made us some delicious Bloody Mary’s and his wife made some delicious sandwiches which were made more delicious after sitting by the blustery sea air.

And then we spent the afternoon at Sam’s Chowder House drinking cocktails. With a sunset over the satellite dish by Maverick’s Beach, where Kirk Lombard, the Intertidal Harvester, sea forager of epic proportions searches for horseneck clams. I’ll even kiss the sunset...

And then it was golf in paradise. And below the magnificent Ritz-Carlton, right under the golf course, we get the remains of a strange brokedown palace reminiscent of the head of the Statue of Liberty in the classic Planet of Apes, the climatic scene at the end when we see what remains after the destruction of Earth that takes place. It’s a great revelation--this horrible strange world where the Apes rule and humans are subjects is actually Earth and we see the remains on this remote beach not too different from the beach in Half Moon Bay right under the Ritz-Carlton. This apocalyptic future right under the decadence of the Ritz. 

Punto Mónico Sur: the Brokedown Palace

And karaoke in Korea Town in Santa Clara after a smashing Korean meal. Guns n’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience,” every Johnny Cash song in the book. Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock.” And last but not least “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

The beggar man in front of my home town coffee shop who has been there just about all of my 30-some years--He probably takes the train in from his 1.3 million dollar house in Hillsborough, we’ve all said my whole life and maybe it’s true.

And before leaving, drinks at my first local, the Dutch Goose, with my junior high gym teacher.

With Mr. I

California never fails to impress. It’s just beyond dreams.

Beyond Dreams

Canonical Business Books: The Checklist Manifesto

The problem with business books is that they are like lessons on how to draw an owl. (See Seth Godin's blog post on this subject, but the diagram below should explain what I mean.) 

My beef with business books is that they tend to promise so much and oversimplify a solution while providing too many details to support a thesis that is usually based on generalities. Like, "if you do this (author's thesis here), your business will be wildly successful." The supporting examples provided are usually squished in to prove the author's thesis, but taken in a different context could prove other entirely different theses. 

Usually, a business book will make a fine point, one that could be synthesized into a 2-page document, while the rest of the book will leave me feeling like I wasted my time. After making its point, there are chapters of support (always good) but the examples given, even while they seem like "classic" examples that occur in every company, never seem to resonate well. The chapters will end with a conclusion like..."See? All you have to do is x, y, and z and your company can follow in the glory of [stereotypical big companies here]." 

The problem is...in reality, there's always a whole lot more tweaking to do. There's no easy, one-size-fits-all answer.  

Nevertheless, there are some good business books that offer some great lessons. Dr. Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto is not really a business book, as the author writes more about medicine than business, but it's a book about doing better work. And in the end that's what all business books do. 

The Checklist Manifesto identifies the greatest problem of our age: Information. We have too much of it. Complexity is the very real and detrimental side effect of this technological world we have created. While it's tempting to go hide in the mountains--I do this every weekend--we have to deal with the complexity we created and the disappointing fact that we created all this technology to make our lives easier but in essence our lives are palpably more complicated than they were even 10 years ago. Though we aren't serfs working on a plantation, we do still spend an inordinate amount of time working, despite the fact that technology is a tool, meaning that it should help us accomplish tasks faster. But don't fret about all the work we've created for ourselves. There is a solution to the work we have created for ourselves and it's a simple one: The Checklist. 

The Checklist Manifesto's premise is that up until recently humanity's greatest problem was ignorance. Now it's ineptitude. Or eptitude, making sure that we apply the knowledge that we do have consistently and correctly to whatever problem we are trying to solve. The most recent anecdote I can offer that illustrates this principle is what happened during a meeting at work a few weeks ago when somebody stated that we don't have the specs for the approved products of Big Time Customer X. A colleague quickly got on his Smartphone and bam, there were the engineering specs for approved products for Big Time Customer X. There is too much information out there and it's too easy to Google it, and yet sometimes it's so overwhelming we don't even think to look, nor do we know how to filter the bullshit, and apply the knowledge that to which we have such easy access.

The goal is not to be crushed by this information but to learn how to synthesize it, communicate it, and use it well. 

Following the lead offered by aviation, Dr. Gawande offers some evidence of the power of checklists and proffers advice, given his experience in medicine working with the World Health Organization, on how to effectively implement checklists in our complicated lives. 

The idea of using checklists stems from the early history of aviation. After the test flight of the B-17, which crashed killing several people, pilots realized that, with 4 engines and all the related controls and gauges, there was too much information for one pilot to handle. Pilots have been well aware of the idea that memory and judgement are unreliable and fallible, and it's interesting that other professions have been slow to realize this important point.

Checklists have now become an essential element of aviation. Dr. Gawande narrates his visit with Boeing's "checklist writer," who relates  the thousands of situations for which there are checklists and the very scientific process of writing checklists. There is an inherent tension between brevity and effectiveness. Too short and there's no guidance. Too long and it's not a checklist--it's a novel (tl;dr might be the response). 

Once you have everybody's input and analyzed all possible situations, you get it onto one page, with big, clear font, and you laminate it. 

Writing checklists involves the two basic principles of writing: 1) Know your audience; and 2) Anticipate reader questions. And it's really an art. Especially given how much information we have to do deal with. 

Another point Gawande makes is that that we don't just need checklists but co-pilots to read them to us. "That's not my problem" is the worst thing you can hear when working with a team and step 1 to avoid hearing this statement is to know each member of your team and to understand the purpose of your team, so you don't have to hear that awful phrase. When the team knows each other and has a shared purpose, an awful lot of problems can be avoided. It's surprising how many surgeries take place without doctors and nurses knowing each others' names, as Gawande describes operations he has observed and gives statistics on how often not introducing each other takes place in the operating theater. Shocking!

Indeed, the greater the improvement in teamwork, the greater the drop in complications. 

There's also importance in what you don't need to put on checklists. There needs to be room for judgement, especially in complex operations. 

Dr. Gawande distinguishes between simple (several steps, baking a cake), complicated (multiple moving parts, launching a rocket), and complex (dealing with the human element), and it's an important distinction. Complex processes require the greatest room for judgement.

It's amazing how a one-page document can have such a huge effect. Subsidiary benefits of checklists include standardization, which makes it easier to develop metrics and measure progress. Gawande describes how incorporating checklists at one hospital reduced their line-infection rate from 11 percent to zero. In this particular hospital they prevented 43 infections, 8 deaths and saved $2 million. Just with a one-page checklist. 

My favorite anecdote from the book involved the rock band Van Halen, who was very specific in their extremely detailed contracts with concert venues. Each step was very critical to setting up and accommodating their sound equipment. They would write deep in their contracts on like page 17 that in their dressing room they wanted a bowl of M&Ms, but without a single brown M&M. In other words, someone would have to remove each brown M&M by hand. This demand wasn't because the band was made up of egomaniacs (or maybe it was), but because not following this step showed if a venue followed the band's very specific, step-by-step process. Van Halen ended up cancelling a show in Colorado when the venue forgot to remove the brown M&Ms, because they knew that the venue was not detail-oriented enough to follow their process. 

Another excellent point is Dr. Gawande's observation that we are obsessed with having great components but pay little attention to making them fit together well. This is true of medicine, which is what he is referring to with this point. Optimizing a system isn't about optimizing parts, but making things work well together. He gives the example of trying to build the world's greatest car with car parts: the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo. And what we get is a really expensive piece of junk. The same is true of putting together teams of workers or athletes or even musicians. It's always how you put together the talent, rather than the individual talents of each member. 

In a world in which we live with too much information, it's important to make things as short and clear as possible. Use bullet points. Anticipate reader's questions. If the inquisitive reader wants to know more, give them a link. But, otherwise, repeat the mantra with me: 

• One page
• Massive font 
• Big space between points 
• Laminate it!

Dr. Gawande's thesis (Life is complex. We need checklists) is spot on and you should read his book if making checklists is truly an interest of yours, but I just saved you 200 pages of his detailed  descriptions of surgical operations, which are very interesting and insightful, but let's face it: There's too much to read out there. Which is why we need checklists!