In Flight

I’ve been doing fine until right now.

We’re flying back home as we speak, and I’ve opened my laptop in an attempt to grab what’s in my head before it goes poof. We just moved our daughter into her dorm at the University of Oregon and we’ve had an incredible past few days.

We flew to Portland first and stayed the night with good friends who were kind enough to let us ship a lot of gear to their house in advance. Then we repacked the rental, drove to Eugene, and did everything we needed to do to get her up and running in her new dorm room, alongside her roommates.

I hung wall sconces. She laid out a light pink rug that tied the room together. Right out of the gates, a very different college experience than what my wife and I went through. 

Being busy with to-do’s definitely helps keep the slow, more creeping thoughts out of your head. Like how we were helping build a new space for her daily life, and that space wasn’t upstairs, down the hall from our room.

She was brilliant and managed our parent energy really well. It was fun watching her go into director mode, collaborating with her roommates and pointing us at tasks that needed our hands or attention. I played my part best I could. Jumping in when needed, sitting back and letting her lead, and my mind changing altitude the whole time. Will these command strips hold this thing? Did I help her feel as confident as she could be? She’s definitely going to lose the remote to this fan. Is she sturdy enough to do this? Don’t forget to connect her laptop to wifi. Does she believe she can do anything, the way we do?

I promised you a weekly email with one idea to help you see your work differently and I know I’m all over the place with this one. If you need to eject, the unsubscribe is in the footer. No offense taken.

If you’re still with me, here’s a Red Thread you can pull. Resilience.

Like a catchy theme song, this was in my head all week. I doubt anyone would argue against the value of being resilient in work and life, but we should be more specific. Because there are two different types of resilience and it’s worth seeing the distinction.

There’s structural resilience. Being built in a way that you’re not likely to get knocked out in one punch. Do you have a portfolio or a body of work? Are you diversified, or did you bet everything on 27 Black? Is there enough surface area with your work to increase the chances of luck finding you?

Then there’s emotional resilience. Something fails, it hurts, but you find out it wasn’t fatal. Do you climb back in the saddle? When the world doesn’t turn out the way you expected, are you anti-fragile? How do you internally process something that didn’t work? Is there a way forward when your dreams don’t come true?

These two flavors of resilience are linked because reps with the first kind fund your ability to build the second. And we can get these reps as kids. They can be artifacts of the games we play; baseball, Monopoly, Left-Right-Center. The dice come up differently than you’d hoped, but it’s not personal. The dice don’t know about you or care about you. They just present you with an outcome.

It’s feeling in real time the difference between strategy and tactics. Learning there’s not much benefit to flipping the game board in anger or slamming your batting helmet on the ground. The value will flow to the player who is set up to play another round, and given new information, is able to make a new decision.

Where we learn the benefit of being able to stay in the game, and that our ability to keep coming back, and back, and back is a superpower.

Which helps us when we really fall hard and draw blood. When broken bones happen in our work or our life, we can remind ourselves that we’ve picked ourselves up before. We can set bones, heal scrapes and bruises, and get back at it. As I write this and read it back, I’m aware this is also just growing up.

Which is why it’s a real problem if we’ve built a system for kids based on just getting the “A” or the “right answer.” Or prioritizing environments where they’re told the way to get to the next level is to spend their time complying, asking for the manual, and following instructions. Because sometimes things don’t work out the way you expected. And sometimes the next level isn’t where you thought it would be.

Looking at the faces of all these fresh college kids, I wondered what each of them was bringing to the table when it comes to this stuff. Our daughter included. I know it’s a spectrum.

There are constants though. No one does it alone. Your tolerance for being uncomfortable is a predictor of growth. Time spent building resiliency muscles is time well spent. All the wisdom they put on posters.

We’re landing now. I miss our daughter, and for the first time all week it feels really real. Tears have been trying to push their way through for a few hours. She’s in flight, away from our home, doing the work she’s meant to do right now.

We’ve tried really hard to help her be ready for what’s ahead and we couldn’t have done it without an enormous amount of help. If today you’re fortunate enough to have supporters, and choices, and decisions to make about how to move forward, that’s a gift.

That’s a reason for all of us to be hopeful.

~ Jaime
Co-host, Slackers podcast
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P.S. But what do you think? Hit reply, let me know.

And thanks as always for being on the other end, I’m glad you’re here.

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