Category Archives: Creativity

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Big League Debuts

I get choked up when a baseball player makes his first official appearance in an MLB game. When I say choked up, I mean I viscerally feel what is taking place on the field. I was in Dodger Stadium when Dustin May first pitched. I recently watched Gavin Stone and Bobby Miller do the same on television with no less emotion running through me.

Those first starts are the culmination of endless sacrifice, physical preparation, and mental resets. There are so few positions available in professional sports it is almost ludicrous to bet one’s future on it. When I see young ballplayers walking onto an MLB field for the first time, usually with their families in the stands on very short notice, I feel a sense of awe and trepidation. A lifetime of dreams can continue for years after that debut, or possibly end right there on an underwhelming performance and a flight back to a playing field a tenth in size.

The power of hope and the threat of failure are all at once alive in a single and unrepeatable moment. I struggle to find the words to convey the meaning of that spotlight and the unknown future it presents as a test, but seeing that ballplayer suited up for the first time and given a spot on the roster by a manager is always in my eyes volcanic.

Then there are the veterans who perform even better late in their careers than they did when they first came up. Clayton Kershaw won his 200th game this season, becoming only the third Dodger to achieve that milestone, reaching an achievement shared with just 96 players in MLB history. I’d like to tell you Kershaw’s debut clearly foreshadowed the legendary career ahead of him, but five weeks after his first MLB game, he was sent back to the minors for fine-tuning. That’s when he recommitted to getting back in The Show and proving he belonged on a big league roster. Nothing could stop him from realizing his potential. He has worked hard every day of his career.

Why does talent reaching the launching point of potential bring me to stunned silence?

The why is as simple as I can say it: I revere talent.

You might have guessed, this isn’t just about baseball. All talent climbing to the apex of a focal point is forever for me an uncanny unveiling. A launch in the majors is not the real start of a career, that happened back in grade school, then again in high school, then again in the draft, and any number of games won or lost along the way in each leg of a player’s journey. Walking onto a big league stadium field for the first time in uniform and on the official roster is a moment of recognition, an entry in a time capsule that isolates a key reward point. It is real to the individual and a metaphor to all who are watching it in real time.

When talent sees the spotlight, when one person’s dream becomes reality, we all can look inside ourselves and see the shape of our dreams.

Talent is such an overused, even abused term. Talent is precious. It’s part nature and part nurture. When it reveals itself, the world breathes differently. At least I do.

There are all kinds of talent: sports talent, artistic talent, design talent, scientific talent, leadership talent, mentoring talent, teaching talent, parenting talent — you name something difficult to do, and if you see someone doing it better than a lot of others, it likely involves talent.

Some start with more natural ability than others but when we see talent at work it is seldom a lightning strike or an accident. Behind the realization of talent is a regimen of development that calls upon all the same forms of dedication and commitment evidenced in the training of athletes. I don’t believe it’s different for doctors, dancers, or poets, perhaps just less visible to the unsuspecting.

I often hear business people talk about the war for talent. That phrase troubles me. Filling jobs is not a war for talent. Creating an opportunity that attracts talent to unlock its potential is not a war at all. If your company is doing work of significance and someone with talent becomes aware of that opportunity, the fit will become natural. That is precisely the scenario where one plus one equals three, five, or ten.

Plug real talent into an ordinary opportunity and little exciting is likely to happen. Attempt the impossible with ordinary applicants and equally little is likely to happen. Marry real talent to real opportunity and the sky is the limit. That to me is the power of talent. That is why I revere talent.

I have been blessed over the past four decades to work beside a number of individuals who quietly changed the world through their talent. Some were gifted beyond imagination. Some just worked harder than all those who thought they wanted to compete with them. Most of their names you will never know, but they were game-changers in my life and the many seemingly impossible hurdles we crossed together. They weren’t just good. They were as good at what they do as Clayton Kershaw is at what he does.

When you are in the company of talent, almost nothing seems impossible.

Bobby Miller won his first three games and then encountered reality and lost a huge one. Gavin Stone at the moment is back in the minors. Their talent remains unquestionable, but how it will reveal itself fully won’t be known for a long time, Neither will debut again, but those debut dates will be memorialized on the scoreboard every time they appear in their active careers.

You had a debut and so did I, maybe not tied to a specific date, but close enough to remember the circumstances. We will watch others do the same. The inspiration of seeing talent emerge is unlimited in scope. When you see the next young ballplayer walk onto the field in that brilliant moment of emergence, remember the applause you offer is your own moment of celebration.

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Photo: The Author at Dodger Stadium, Miller’s Home Debut

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The Pros and Cons of Generative AI

Generative AI refers to the technology that can generate new content such as text, images, music, or videos. Like any technology, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of the pros and cons of generative AI:

Pros:

  1. Creativity: Generative AI can generate new and creative content that can be used in various fields, including music, art, and advertising. It can come up with novel ideas that humans might not have thought of.
  2. Efficiency: Generative AI can create content much faster than humans can. For example, it can generate thousands of images or pieces of text in just a few minutes.
  3. Personalization: Generative AI can create content that is personalized to the user’s preferences. For example, it can generate music or art that is tailored to the user’s tastes.
  4. Automation: Generative AI can automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. This can save time and resources, especially in industries such as marketing or content creation.

Cons:

  1. Quality: The quality of content generated by generative AI can vary widely, depending on the quality of the data used to train the model. The content may be low-quality or even nonsensical.
  2. Bias: Generative AI can perpetuate biases that exist in the data used to train it. For example, a generative AI trained on a biased dataset may generate content that is discriminatory or offensive.
  3. Ethical concerns: Generative AI can be used to create deepfake videos or other content that can be used to spread misinformation or deceive people.
  4. Intellectual property: Generative AI can create content that may infringe on intellectual property rights, such as copyright or trademark.
  5. Lack of human touch: While generative AI can create content quickly and efficiently, it lacks the human touch that makes content truly unique and memorable.

In summary, generative AI has many potential benefits, but it also comes with significant risks and challenges. As with any technology, it is important to weigh the pros and cons carefully and use it responsibly.

Note: This special guest post was created in its entirety other than the title by ChatGPT.

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Photo: Pexels

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Be In The Room

Over the past weeks, several major companies have announced various return-to-office policies. That means a requirement to be in an office some number of days each week. Thus far I have resisted sending a similar memo because I think for the most part this is best left to the judgment of department leaders who understand their goals, More than that, I am counting on the good judgment of individuals to make sense of advancing their career horizons.

Let me offer this one bit of advice: If you have the opportunity to be in the room and are not taking it, you might be doing yourself an enormous disservice. The time you spend at home may make your current life easier. I have significant doubt it will make your future more successful.

In my experience, there is no substitute for being in the room. It is where true bonds are created. It is where you can see in person how difficult challenges are met. It is where your gifts can be shared and recognized not just by your peers and boss, but by your boss’s boss, and anyone up the chain who might poke in their head and see you in action.

That’s not office politics. That’s reality.

Willingly giving up a chance to be in the room is a choice you make at your own risk, to the extent you have the choice. If you still have that choice, consider what you might be giving up in exchange for those nasty commute hours and a refrigerator full of your own preferred food.

Several decades ago, I was a recent college graduate desperate for an opportunity. I offer the word desperate quite deliberately. Despite a bachelor’s degree in the humanities from a known college, a string of paid jobs and internships, and a resume filled with extracurricular projects, I was just another unknown job applicant in a huge pool of recent college grads. The economy was in rough shape. It seemed no one who mattered even wanted to talk with me, let alone hire me.

All I wanted was to be in the room.

Like so many others, I ceaselessly kept at it and eventually got interviews. After many of those I got hired into a lousy job, then another lousy job, then several other lousy jobs, then finally a good job that I believe started my real career. At no time during that arc or any subsequent arc did the notion of willingly working remotely ever cross my mind, although one of those jobs happened to be such four out of five days each week because they had no desk for me. Any time I was able to be at work I considered it a catapulting privilege to be among accomplished, ambitious colleagues.

I never forgot what it was like being in a small apartment waiting for the phone to ring for an invitation to be in the room. I also can’t imagine doing what I do today without those many decades of watching other people perform their jobs across the spectrum from expertly to incompetently.

Every chance to be in the room for me has been a chance to learn. At the same time, it has been a chance to collaborate, creatively engage, and be a part of innovation.

Have I taken solo work home to review evenings and over the weekend regularly? You bet.

Do I believe there are times when telecommuting makes sense? Absolutely.

Do I see the internet as an unrivaled tool to share ideas globally among people who might never have the chance to gather under the same roof? Without question.

Would any of it convince me that forgoing an opportunity to be in the room for comfort, convenience, or an alleged increase in productivity was a reasonable trade? Not on your life.

Working alone may increase efficiency. I don’t see it increasing creativity.

Covid-19 response was an anomaly. Did it teach many of us a new set of behaviors, that we could accomplish things remotely if it was a necessity? It certainly did. Is the continuing right to work remotely an entitlement that is the result of that learning? Well, not exactly.

I suppose in an employment market where talent has unlimited options, the benefit of working remotely might be a trading card that management can offer to attract team members. Yet if management is only offering this benefit because it has no choice if positions are to be filled, how positive do you think management feels about that? Hiring managers want choices just like you want choices. When anything becomes a mandate, it often does so with a nagging amount of reservation.

One of the things I noticed when Covid first grounded us was how quickly and well our leadership team adapted to remote meetings. In many respects, I think it is the reason our company succeeded and curiously accelerated during Covid. Many colleagues at other companies weren’t as lucky. Some tragically saw their companies in demise, not only as a result of unprecedented business conditions but of the challenges in responding to those conditions with untested practices.

The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced that we succeeded because of the years we previously spent together in the room. Those many years of collaboration established a solid foundation for crisis management we could apply remotely. We were able to talk in shorthand because we had established that shorthand. We were able to use humor because we knew each other’s sensibilities and sensitivities. I couldn’t even imagine the idea of trying to onboard a VP into a remote setting, where I knew others were trying and failing at this.

Our team knew this management paradigm was intended to be temporary and that we would be back in person as soon as practicable. Personally, I couldn’t wait and was back in the office as soon as I could. We also didn’t overreact. We knew that five days a week in person for everyone no longer made sense because it had never made sense. It was obvious that forty or so required office hours was too broad a brush. We knew workplace equilibrium would work itself out, while we counted on individuals to make sense of their careers in tandem with company needs.

Moderation always seems like a better approach to consensus than absolutes. Individual decisions always seem preferable to sweeping mandates when inspiring people’s best work.

I had a sense that every individual would come to understand the value of being in the room. To be in the room is to absorb the skills you will call upon to address the next set of challenges you will face. To be in the room is a gift, perhaps not every day, but on the days that matter and will stay with you for a lifetime.

You may be arguing with me in your head. You may be telling yourself this is a new day, a different generation, a wiser and more inspired collective that embraces work-life balance and knows to mistrust corporations that don’t have their best interests at heart. You might be convinced that because technology advances have made remote work viable, we’d be silly not to ride the horse in the direction it seems to be going. You might be right, but I am always reminded of those very dangerous words that creep up every time I think they are going away forever: “This time is different.”

I have written before about leverage in getting your way. It can be an effective tactic as a matter of last resort, but it is seldom a path to trust, long-term relationships, and compounding progress. If the only reason you are allowed to work remotely is that you think your employer has no other choices, I wonder whether you really want to work for that company. If there is a mutual understanding about workplace arrangements that benefits you and your employer in agreeing to a schedule that helps you with childcare, quiet time to think on your own, and still leaves room for in-person collaboration, that’s one thing. If either side is making a demand of the other, that seems like a shaky platform to advance together.

Some types of professions like software engineering seem particularly well suited to remote working as has been evinced by decades of sharing libraries and contributing to enterprise projects, where most of the engineer’s time is spent on individually created program code that is later assembled with other modules. Even then, when I see software engineers in a room with marketing and finance professionals, I often see exponential progress in shorter windows of time.

Don’t undervalue intangibles. Learning to read a room can help you secure unexpected allies to support a controversial strategy. The most unassuming bits of advice acquired from unfamiliar colleagues in the breakroom can be life-changing. Lifelong friendships emerge and develop from unplanned acts of empathy and compassion. You can say all of that plus mentorship and coaching are available electronically and you’ll be right. The in-person impacts you might be underestimating are tone, degree, and happenstance.

When we are together, we learn from each other. We have peripheral vision that lets us see not just what Zoom or Teams puts on the video screen, but what catches our attention in the corner of our eye. We take in winning and losing arguments and approaches. We have the unique opportunity to establish and build company culture.

My advice: Don’t wait for the company directive, don’t even wait to be asked politely. If you have the opportunity, be in the room.

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Photo: Pexels

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David Milch Pens a Curtain Call

It’s called Life’s Work. It’s anything but a simple title, as only to be expected from its incomparable author, David Milch. It’s not so much a play on words as it is an enunciation of intent, a spiritual aspiration. Yeah, let’s start there and see where it takes us. The rabbi is in.

There is a profound sadness that winds its way through these pages. Alzheimer’s is laying claim to David’s current challenge, and it permeates his thought process in this troubling memoir. He is assisted in committing the recallable memories to paper by his family, and even where confusion follows his path like a sine curve, it’s not just Alzheimer’s that elicits sorrow. It’s the entire path of intermittent regrets. If words are to make us feel, his words again succeed.

I hadn’t seen David in a very long time when I attended his book launch. I asked him if he remembered me. “Of course,” he said, “do either of us owe the other money?” I was 99% sure it was a joke, but just in case I assured him we did not.

In the broadest sense of its definition, rabbi means teacher. In the workplace, it means more than that. If you get one, your life is going to change. You might just be finding a path to Life’s Work.

When you’re a young writer, if you’re smart you seek teachers. They don’t teach you how to write. They teach you how difficult it is to write. They instill in you taste, fortitude, inhuman patience, proper doubt, and resilience.

The feedback is anything but pleasant. It’s not for the faint of heart. You learn that bad first drafts are a fact of process. They are necessary, but largely need to be deleted.

David Milch taught me these things, mostly by demonstrating them, but sometimes from the breakfast lectern. He taught me that subjecting others to unpolished work was amateur, lazy, and unfair. If you choose to tell stories, you must learn to craft them in ways that don’t waste an audience’s time or take advantage of their goodwill.

You learn discipline, like an athlete. You do it every day, again and again. The rabbi keeps you honest. Character comes first, then reveals plot, but plot is only a device to enhance the arc of character development. We think we love story, but what we really love are characters.

David taught me those characters are guests in people’s homes. Audiences will let them in on expectation, but will only keep them there if they grow. When a show dies, it’s not because you have run out of story; it’s because the characters have no more headroom to interpret and flourish.

Feedback becomes lifeblood. Then one day you’re on your own. When the teacher is no more, your filter is established to shield you from embarrassment. The work must pass your own sniff test as it would be blessed from further refinement by the teacher.

In this memoir, David writes of the mind’s decay. He didn’t ask for this denouement, but his choices are few. He accepts the path as inescapable. He turns to notions of faith that evaded him in his younger years, when his temperament was not tamable. I remember that David. That was the rabbi who first said to me: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

He wrote unforgettable, award-winning episodes of Hill Street Blues. He created the groundbreaking television series NYPD Blue and Deadwood. He left the craft of episodic television writing better than he found it. That is an understatement.

He battled substance abuse and gambling addiction, both almost crushing his existence. He raised a caring family and found his way back to their love. Surviving his demons to nurture love was a monumental achievement.

I came to David because my viewing experience of Hill Street Blues was TV that tore at the soul. I didn’t know that was possible, particularly because it broke for commercial every 12 minutes or so. David came to think of it as bourgeois. That’s a word you don’t often hear outside of college.

He wanted to go deeper, extract honesty from language despite the limitations imposed by presumed broadcast standards. Rules for David were goalposts that needed to be moved with concerted wit whenever a network executive forgot to interfere. All forms of writing are bound by some form of convention, but he wanted those boundaries to be in service to creativity, not obstacles to authentic expression.

He never stopped being a teacher. He saw the gift in his mentor, Robert Penn Warren, and paid it forward. He helped the careers of endless writers who learned from his example the poetic revelations in pure, gritty, messy, conflicted reality.

For many years I never believed I would achieve David’s standard. My aesthetic was too unformed, too quick to quip, too impatient to let a character breathe if it killed a laugh or shocking turn. I became despondent with my own attempts at composition. I worried words would fail me when I needed them most.

Yet I never gave up. The rabbi made that an untenable notion. Work was essential. Rewriting was essential. Craft was essential. I was on my own as David was. Every writer is alone. It takes a lifetime to learn that. The rabbi if abrupt saves you half your life denying this truth and readying you for being alone, determined, indefatigable.

A mentor is a subject matter master. A mentor is not meant to be kind in the present, only in the long arc of life. We learn this too late. The critique of the master is only meant to become self-critique in perpetuity. Like I said, apprenticeship is not for the faint of heart.

There is gravitas in the audacity of writing, absurdity in committing to an endeavor that consistently leaves you empty and unnaturally separates writer from the written. David understands that in a rabbinical sense. His ability to articulate the nature of output is simultaneously divine and existential. A brief, revealing excerpt early in the memoir captures the essence of that reduction:

There’s something about literature—poetry and prose, but particularly poetry—which disinfects the efforts of being. The effort itself is cleansing. It neutralizes what’s profane about the process, and just leaves the result.

If writing becomes your essence, the idea of not writing is about the same as the idea of not breathing. Neither is feasible. Both are equally necessary.

At the end of the reading, supplemented by famous friends sharing passages for reasons of pragmatism, David took the microphone. “Thank you so much for being here. I love you all. God bless you.”

I had never heard him say words like that. His arc had come with an unpredictable resolution. Story and character were again united in natural resonance.

The rabbi placed a small ribbon between chapters and closed the book. His eyes were clear and telling. Here ends the lesson.

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Photo: The Author at Diesel Bookstore