Heartcrossings

Recently, we stopped by at Chinese restaurant at the local strip mall for early dinner. The supplies in the fridge did not inspire any creativity and the day had been too long to contemplate a grocery run. This place was very quiet and we were among the half a dozen people dining there. The food was good not great but that was the expectation given the type of establishment. But the quietness felt wonderful to have a conversation without needing to be loud. The level of loud at restaurants specially the ones that come highly rates is very frustrating for me. I was happy to have mediocre food in relative peace on a weeknight. Noise generally drives business but the the implication is that the diner is there for entertainment Restaurant owners think they know something about their diners that their diners might not fully know about themselves: They enjoy busy spaces more than they realize. Customers tend to have more fun in louder environments. High-energy dining rooms are more likely t

I never warmed up to the self-checkout lane though use it the majority of the time. There is something to be said for being familiar with names and faces of people. Some cashiers can be chattier than others, they warm up over time even if things were transactional to begin. Shopping at a big box store where these lanes are typically found is usually a soulless experience. The only human touch could be experienced at the check-out lane which many retailers decided to do away with to save monies.  Yet the success of retail relies on the human experience at the store, it may be the only way to differentiate from competitors who look and feel much the same and can price match as well. Those few minutes at the check out line can the only way brand can stand out. I always found it counter-intuitive that brands did not see than as an opportunity but as a lever to crank up operational efficiency. Thanks to rampant theft, the math of self-out no longer makes sense and many retailers are removin

I was reading this essay curious to understand how Richard Feynman distinguished knowing from understanding but was struck by his definition of what is means to have "fantastic imagination" "If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination…” As someone from with a very rudimentary science background, I was not able to fully appreciate how imagination plays a role in discovery but it got me thinking about art and literature where it is easier for me to see imagination. T

Heart-warming to read about Toni Morrison handing rejection letters to aspiring authors. There is so much grace and kindness in how she said no.  ..she occasionally ended a rejection by offering her name as a kind of passport with which hopeful authors might navigate the borders erected by other cultural gatekeepers. In 1977, she advised one young writer to find an agent and directed him toward the legendary literary agents Georges Borchardt and Peter Matson, adding, “When you write to them you may say that although I could not take your manuscript myself, I was very much in love with it, and I’m willing to put it in writing.” The role of cultural gatekeeper is to decide the bar writers must clear to be sellable in the market they address. Being sellable is not always correlated to the quality of the writing or the novelty of thought. The world can miss out on both because someone decided to gatekeep for reasons of not meeting the bar not matter how ill-advised. It is also the reason,

Loved reading about this woman who became a scuba diver at fifty just because she wanted to. In the paragraphs that form the story, it becomes evident that she had potential that was ignored, undermined or denied. There are always the better informed, more traveled and worldly relatives who can't wait to find fault. It was only at the age of 45 that Uma revived her interest in painting. “When I started to paint, I felt like I was reborn. Then, I saw a documentary on coral reefs which encouraged me to read more about them. I started painting them and holding exhibitions,” she shares. Once while speaking on the impact of pollution on coral reefs, she was mocked by one of her cousins. “He asked me if I had seen coral reefs in real life, or how the ocean even looked underwater, or what the colour of the ocean was. Although it appears to be blue and beautiful outside, it’s full of pollution inside. This sparked my curiosity to dive deep into the water,” she adds. What is so inspiring a

Nice essay on the building a patchwork family and the particularly painful decision to leave a good enough marriage when there are children involved. An overwhelming majority of folks who are in decent marriages, do their best to maintain status quo. While there maybe the secret yen for change, the gnawing doubts about if this can be the partnership for life, people realize finding good enough is a miracle too. To that end there is the concept of a "parenting marriage" and the rising wave of gray divorces. A parenting marriage simply cannot last after the parenting done. The couple is forced to reorganize in some sense - look the other way or part ways, whichever is less painful, less disruptive.  To me, ‘blended’ suggests a homogenised state of merging; or, more precisely, of erasing differences and becoming indivisible; the new family, a seamlessly repaired vessel trying to replicate the original before it was ruptured. This attempt at merging into one is where so many ste

If you have ever been part of a large program involving between ten to over hundred teams, then you have surely sat in a program retro session. The higher the level of dysfunction in the organization, the greater the zeal of leadership to organize these and spent hours and weeks to get people to provide candid feedback in on what went well, what didn't and what can be improved. At first blush this would seem like an honest and prudent thing to do - let's all be self-critical and call out our collective failures to perform and see what we could change going forward.  Reality tends to be a bit different. The highest ranking person in the session will almost always kick off the session by saying this is not about blaming people so don't make anything personal. It's only about process that can be improved. So the group consisting of those who precipitated trouble and those who dealt with its consequences are now left to review their collective feedback  as myriad manifestat