Saving Inspiration

 4) “You know I completely trust you”

First of all, the “You know I …” part can be used at the start of pretty much any sentence. It makes it so much more powerful by emphasizing that the person you’re talking to already knows the information that’s about to follow but you’re going to say it anyway. This implicitly acknowledges the importance of the information – if it’s worth repeating, it must be important.

Secondly, this statement implies complete confidence in the person you’re dealing with. It transfers the burden of responsibility from you as a boss, lover or friend to the other person. In essence, you’re telling this person that it’s his job to get it done and not yours. You’re telling him there will be consequences to the outcome of the job – either positive (gratitude) or negative (loss of trust).

A more implicit variation on this is “I’m sure you’ll make it work”.

“It doesn’t take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may be no better than several miles (Allen 1977). A field study of radically collocated software development teams,[…], showed significantly higher productivity and satisfaction than industry benchmarks and past projects within the firm (Teasley et al., 2002). Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases.” — http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008

“Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time differences negatively impact requirements gathering, negotiations and specifications. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working local context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers” — http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00766-003-0173-1

“Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy” — http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&#…

“Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than within a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so when they are separated by geographic distance; and the effect of different types of team knowledge on coordination effectiveness differs between co-located and geographically dispersed collaborators.” — http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/fil…

“One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is colocated” — http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi?doc=doi/10.1109/…

“Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning.Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity” — http://possibility.com/Misc/p339-teasley.pdf

“Despite the positive impact of emerging communication technologies on scientific research, our results provide striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations.” —http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna…

“Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still matters” — http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1463019

There exists the argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight into the damage they have done to others - and thus become more mature people. Yet it is less frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of their “summer sacrifices.” Perhaps there is also something to the argument that young men should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that sexual love is most beautiful in a monogamous relationship. Or that the best way to leave LSD alone is to try it for awhile -or even that the best way of understanding that your help in the ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to try, and fail. I do not agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t have been volunteers in the first place.

The game they play is fundamentally the same as the schoolyard version: One player is “It” until he tags someone else. But men in their 40s can’t easily chase each other around the playground, at least not without making people nervous, so this tag has a twist. There are no geographic restrictions and the game is live for the entire month of February. The last guy tagged stays “It” for the year.

That means players get tagged at work and in bed. They form alliances and fly around the country. Wives are enlisted as spies and assistants are ordered to bar players from the office.

“You’re like a deer or elk in hunting season,” says Joe Tombari, a high-school teacher in Spokane, who sometimes locks the door of his classroom during off-periods and checks under his car before he gets near it

The Sex Drive. One of the main lust factories in the brain is a peach-pit-sized lump called the hypothalamus (deep in your skull, sitting just above the brain stem). This controls hunger and thirst. It also has receptor sites for testosterone, which fuels the sex drive in both men and women. So when you’re feeling horny, the hypothalamus is working overtime. You don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to figure out why evolution gave us the sex drive: Its job is to spread our DNA as widely and often as possible.

The Romance System. This produces the cocaine rush you get from beginning love. And cocaine is more than an idle metaphor. The reptilian brain — one of the nervous system’s most ancient parts — floods you with dopamine, just as it does after you snort a line of blow. The dopamine gives you the same high, lack of sleep, delusional optimism, and obsessive thoughts. The great poet Robert Palmer was right: You can be addicted to love. Romance evolved so that you could focus your mating energies on appropriate partners — the most fertile woman, the best providing man.

The Attachment System. This is friendship on hyperdrive. While romance is thrilling, attachment is calming. It’s created by a couple of hormones: vasopressin and oxytocin (not to be confused with Rush Limbaugh’s painkiller OxyContin). Attachment evolved so that we could “tolerate our partners long enough to raise a kid together,” says Fisher.

Read more: Do I Love My Wife? Are You Really in Love Test - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/features/mri-of-love-0609#ixzz2JOaor1Z9

Nothing is stranger than sitting in dirty sweatpants and picking up the ringing phone to say “Ellen Ullman speaking” in a mature, efficient voice. It is as if I have projected myself into another universe, where I am dressed in a blazer and slacks and my hair is washed, some place completely discontinuous with the universe I inhabit in sweats. While I speak on the phone — to a client, a CEO — I am aware that I have thrown my voice correctly, that they have seen me as I wished to be seen: a clever, enterprising woman sitting at a fine desk. To hang up then is almost painful. Click. I return to myself: creature swimming alone in puddles of time.

OLD LOVE is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise. We knew something about death because we had seen loved ones die. The finish line was drawing closer. Why not have one last blossoming of the heart?

I was no longer so pretty, but I was not so neurotic either. I had survived loss and mistakes and ill-considered decisions; if this relationship failed, I’d survive that too. And unlike other men I’d been with, Sam was a grown-up, unafraid of intimacy, who joyfully explored what life had to offer. We followed our hearts and gambled, and for a few years we had a bit of heaven on earth.

Not only did he know and love product engineering, it’s all he really wanted to do. He told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it. As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us. He was basically the Product Manager for all of the products I worked on, even though there eventually were other people with that title, who usually weren’t allowed in the room :)

One of the things about designing products that can come up is Ego, or Being Right, or whatever that is called. I’m not sure how this evolved, but when I worked with Steve on product design, there was kind of an approach we took, unconsciously, which I characterize in my mind as a “cauldron”. There might be 3 or 4 or even 10 of us in the room, looking at, say, an iteration of iPhoto. Ideas would come forth, suggestions, observations, whatever. We would “throw them into the cauldron”, and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which — it just didn’t matter. Until, of course, the patent attorneys came around and asked, but that’s a whole nother story.

In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had. Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events, like turning 30. It reminds them that time horizons are shrinking, so it is a point to pull back on exploration and concentrate on the here and now. “You tend to focus on what is most emotionally important to you,” she said, “so you’re not interested in going to that cocktail party, you’re interested in spending time with your kids.”