Referenced in this episode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework

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I'm continually catching myself hesitating over next steps because I am uncomfortable. An old, familiar voice in my head, who is deeply attached to the status quo, wants me to believe that any discomfort means I'm making a Bad Decision. But I find ways to move forward. We're surrounded by messages to expand our capacity for discomfort. Take bigger leaps. Do the reps. Build the resilience. Just Suck It Up and Do It. I find these kinds of perspectives valuable—yet, I still feel like there's something missing.

I spend a lot of time experiencing a broad buffet of discomforts: conversations with myself when mile 2 on a 20 mile long run feels straight up cruddy, when a supposedly "easy" set of squats turns into an all-out, excruciating grind, when I have to firmly enforce a boundary for a disregulated toddler, or asking the obvious but difficult question in a tense conversation. I don’t like this. It doesn't make sense. Why is this discomfort so confusing and weird?

A few months ago, I broke down in tears on a run. I had just spoken about my A1c levels with my doctor and was thinking about my long-term health. I was far too sleep-deprived to want to be running. But I was out there running anyways. I caught myself feeling miserable and started wondering where my stubborn persistence was coming from. My tears streamed out as I realized: I was running because I desperately wanted to make sure I live a long and healthy life to be there for my family. I thought of my daughter getting older and the energetic, badass Dad I want to be, standing (running?) by her side. I thought of the adventures around the world I want to experience with my partner-in-crime and love of my life. I thought of my own body and everything it has given to me, and how much I wanted to take care of it. My misery was my love.

Discomfort comes in flavors, sensations, rhythms, colors, textures, memories, words, stories, and emotions. Sometimes it means "You really love your family". Sometimes it means "hang on gimme a sec I'm still warming up!". Sometimes it means "Mason, you really gotta get some more sleep". And sometimes it means "Let's call it done, you put in some real hard work. Great job. You really took care of yourself today."

How often do you experience fatigue or discomfort and subconsciously turn that into the thought "I am weak. I am bad at this. I am not enough."? How often does discomfort seem to force you into decision between two equally unappealing options: endure or give up. How often do you completely ignore your discomfort to your own detriment? There is another way. What if you stayed in the nuances of the conversation instead of bouncing out of it?

Discomfort: "blargh! 👋🏼"
You: "argh, this again, we literally just started!"
Discomfort: "no no, wait hear me out. we just haven't done this before."
You: "....say more."
Discomfort: "...okay honestly i wasn't expecting to get this far into the conversation. but now that you mention it, it kind of reminds me of this other time you did something similar."
You: "and how did that go?"
Discomfort: "it was cool! not easy by any stretch. but cool. it got better as you kept at it."
You: "cool cool cool. let me know if we get into complete panic territory okay? thanks for watching out for me."
Discomfort: "you got it 🫶🏼"

Your discomfort can be your friend. Your adventure buddy on the path to your most fulfilled life. Your Samwise to your Frodo. There is a rich relationship awaiting when you open your curiosity and your heart to your own discomfort. It's more than just "start, stop, continue." In your discomfort, you will find insights about your passions, your fears, your strengths, your weaknesses, your capacity for love, and more. Your discomfort is you. Love your discomfort, and it can love you back.

As a dancer and choreographer in my college dance group (MIT DanceTroupe, or “DT” as we called it), the end of every semester meant the culmination of all of our work in a final stretch of dress rehearsals and 5 raucous sold-out shows that we crammed all into one week. It was everything I loved about my dance group condensed into one surreal, exhausting, delirious week fueled by sleep-deprivation, loud music, final exam procrastination, and copious amounts of caffeine and sugar.

We lovingly called it Prod Week.

There was something about the collective intensity of packing a bunch of sweaty stressed-out overachievers into Kresge Little Theater well into the wee hours of the night (it felt like many of us basically lived there that week) that rather forcefully transformed me during Prod Week—the quiet, mild-mannered Engineering Student who to dances on the side got to become the sassy, confident Hip-Hop Dancer who studies engineering on the side.

The stage, the music, the lights, the change of scene, the energy I felt from my fellow DanceTroupers, even the smells (oh the smells) all added to the permission I felt to show up differently. More than permitted, I felt compelled. It was still sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, but it was overwhelmingly joyful and exuberant to step into the spotlight with my friends and shine. Not dancing like nobody is watching, but dancing like everyone is watching, and loving it.

And then it would end.

I always hated the morning after our last show—the adrenaline crash and subsequent withdrawal after a week of living in a magical alternate reality of excessive eye shadow, random hugs, loud music, and audience participation. The show was over, and we all had to blearily emerge from the theater to our Institute Gray™ dorm rooms and piles of deferred problem sets. More than anything, I hated trading my feather boa for a (mostly figurative) pocket protector and losing the version of me that came alive during Prod Week. I would have to wait an entire semester to be sassy and confident and playful again.

This past weekend I finished the last of a series of 5 intense in-person coaching training courses offered by the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI). Each course was three full days with a group of other like-minded coaches where we learned and practiced coaching skills with each other in a playful, vulnerable, deeply emotionally rich environment that we all created together. I loved it. I felt incredibly alive and energized. I felt seen and validated. I felt courageous in my skills as a coach and my worth as a human. I loved the version of me that came to life in those classes.

And then by 5PM on Sunday, it ended. And I cried. I grieved the end of a magical weekend and the end of a series of magical weekends. I grieved the “Coach Mason” who felt so alive.

By Monday evening, with a full day separating me from the immediacy of my sadness, I found a new awareness. What if what was alive during class carried on? What if the show never ended? What if all the world really were a stage? Do they still make those Pink Grapefruit gummies? What if all of those versions of me that I long to embrace never left at all? It’s actually easy for me to believe that there wouldn’t be very much point in spending all of the time and money in these coaching classes if I didn’t take the spark they ignited and bring it out into the world.

I hold that the world needs more spaces for emotionally vulnerable connection, more courage to offer our gifts to others, more random acts of sassiness, more un-self-conscious hugging, and a lot more feather boas.

Prod Week and my coaching classes always had to end. But now I realize that they were always a beginning to something too. If I love the version of me that felt so alive in those moments, how do I bring that version forward and out into the rest of my life? I’m realizing that I have a choice where I didn’t see one before: after I take my bow on the stage at Kresge Little Theater, do I step up and keep on dancing in the Big Theater of Life?

I’m gonna keep dancing.

Working in tech, I've had several experiences of burnout. I was depressed, disillusioned, exhausted, and... angry. I'm not normally an angry person, but those moments really pushed something in me that just made me mad. Anger is a powerful emotion—it’s usually trying to tell us something important about ourselves. Perhaps pointing to a value or belief that’s being violated, or to something that needs attention.

While in the depths of my burnout, I remember telling close friends that I was tired of fighting "The Machine". Tired of being asked to use my brain, while being forced to ignore my heart. Tired of having to choose between what felt right to me and what I saw being rewarded around me. Tired of pouring energy into others' cups while feeling like nothing was coming back into mine.

The strange, ironic thing is that the "Machine" is actually made of people too. What is it that turns a bunch of presumably well-meaning humans into something that feels so... inhumane? When we see organizations create unsafe environments, implement draconian processes, ignore people’s contributions and growth, or layoff brilliant and capable employees, is it really just a phenomenon of scale, with large enough organizations? Is it the nature of business and capitalism? Is it something about working with technology? Is it something in the air in Silicon Valley?

I don't know the answer, and I am drawn to keep wondering and exploring. More than wondering about the Machine though, I am drawn to helping others like me who feel trapped with their Big Hearts inside of a Big Machine. What would it be like to escape the Machine? What’s possible from there, and what parts of you would you be able to embrace? What paths would you need to take to make your escape? Or Is it possible to escape the Machine while staying in the same job or environment? What would have to change in you or your surroundings?

If any of this resonates, I would love to talk with you. You are far from alone. And even though it can make you vulnerable sometimes, your Big Heart makes you amazing. Together, we'll find your escape from the Machine.

Like many of you, I’ve been spending a lot more time cooking at home during the pandemic. Our kitchen is one of the most important spaces in our house—it’s where we feed ourselves and each other, and it’s also a profoundly personal instantiation of our values, personalities, and upbringings. For me, the kitchen is a place where habits and tradition (“this is how we always did it as kids”) mingle with aspiration and experimentation (“I wonder if I can make my own ice cream…”). Where necessity—we all have to eat, somehow—mingles with indulgence and luxury. Visit someone else’s kitchen, and I am sure you will learn something interesting about them, and maybe yourself in the process. The photo for this post is from an Airbnb in Copenhagen we stayed at in 2018. What seems familiar, and what seems surprising? What do you notice?

My friend Rachel is one of the most food-loving people I have ever met. The first time we hung out outside of work, we met up for a picnic, and she brought a homemade quiche and some seasonal berries from the farmer’s market that morning. She told me how she knew which stands at the market had the best fruit and how she likes to talk with the vendors to pick the tastiest treats. She recently moved to New York and went through the process of furnishing a new apartment from scratch, including the kitchen. Sensing an exciting and somewhat rare chance to dig a little deeper into the experience, we decided to record a podcast about it!

We hope you enjoy this conversation we recorded together about Rachel’s experiences and reflections on putting a new kitchen together, and how our kitchens connect us to our cultures, to ourselves, and to each other.

If you like this kind of podcast-ish content, please let me know (you can just reply to these emails)! What else would you want to hear? What would you like to talk about or learn more about?

Of course, as our current circumstances seem to have strayed a fair bit afield of normal, I’ve been onboarding to my new role and team completely remotely. Changing jobs is already kind of a strange experience, and doing it remotely has been particularly eye-opening. I thought it’d be worth starting to share some thoughts and tips on remote work that I’ve gathered from both the past few weeks and from the past several months. Perhaps you’ll also see some future topics on this theme.

When I was working from an actual corporate office (in the Before Times™), I sometimes tried to imagine a typical day in our open office space recorded as a birds-eye time-lapse: the buzzing, vibrating fidgeting of engineers at their keyboards, the Brownian motion of procrastinating souls grazing for some coffee or company (or both), the sudden exodus to the cafeteria at lunch time. I was most intrigued by the idea of visualizing the “heartbeat” of the work day—every 30 minutes, the clockwork pulse of people coming and going from 1:1s, team meetings, tech talks, etc.

Imagine that you’ve just joined a new team and you’re all working in the same office. You’re sitting at your desk, and all of a sudden several of the people around you grab their laptops and start standing up. Hopefully one of your new teammates notices your inquisitive stare and explains that they’re about to go to an ad-hoc brainstorm with some members of a partnering team, and that you should probably come along too.

A physical office holds people, objects, and plenty of noise, but it also functions as a high-bandwidth hub for ambient situational awareness. I’ve seen managers and admins go to great lengths to make sure people working on closely related things are sitting close together, making it easier to both actively and passively transmit information: two colleagues debugging a problem a few desks away might draw in a third pair of eyes, or meeting attendees getting up to walk over to a conference room might cue someone else who probably should have been invited anyways. At an even more primitive level, the simple presence of colleagues clicking and typing away at their desks serves as a signal that “yes, people are working.”

When teams are working remotely, without a shared physical space, where then, is the digital equivalent of the Room Where It Happens? If you wanted to observe one single communication channel as a representation of the activity and happenings of a working group, which would it be? Slack? Email? Video? Is there such a place?

At my previous company, two (out of six) members of my team had been working fully remotely for several years before the whole company went remote. As a result, we all aimed to make sure team-level communication happened in our team channel in Slack by default, instead of in-person. I think a large part of this working well was due to the leadership by example from our remote teammates, who helped set the tone and culture of our team’s Slack usage; for example, they were never shy about starting threads for “small” technical questions and regularly took the time to compose clear messages that made context and assumptions explicit.

When I first joined the team, we had a team-specific Slack channel that was also public to the whole company, so anyone could join. This made it easy for people to discuss topics that spanned team boundaries, to “subscribe” to areas of interest by observing chat, and generally create a culture of transparency-by-default. This seemed like the norm for our Slack channels at the time, likely because the company was still fairly small. This decision also led to our team’s channel growing to have over 100 members, with a small active core group of users and a long tail of less frequent participants.

Eventually, I noticed that we weren’t using our Slack channel as often as I felt we should; we were resorting to DMs (direct messages), or worse, letting questions go unasked and unanswered instead. I started a discussion with my team and we realized that our team channel’s large public audience was changing our perception of the “bar” for chat. We didn’t want to spam that many people with engineering minutiae (“hey can you look at my diff?”), personal logistics (“will be OOO this afternoon”), and off-topic banter (<insert endless stream of animated memes>). Sending a message to our channel felt less like turning around in your chair to ask a question and more like stepping up to a podium to give a speech.

We eventually made the decision to create a separate private channel only for our team and keep the public-facing channel as our virtual “front-door” for interfacing with other teams and other broader communications. None of us were happy about losing some of the transparency that came with our previous single-channel setup, but we did find that the new private channel was far livelier and easier to use for day-to-day intra-team communication. For us, our internal team Slack channel became our virtual office, where most of “it” happened. Our channel was far livelier than email (also largely true of the rest of the company), and frequently livelier than our physical office space—we might all be quietly sitting at our desks while urgently debugging a customer issue over Slack. I firmly believe that a team’s primary working “space” should be easily and equally accessible by all of its members, which for us was our team Slack channel.

Overall, I’m glad we took a thoughtful look at how we were communicating and made the changes we did. On your team, where is your “room where it happens”? If you had a small question for your team, where would you go? How would you describe it?

• What kind of communication channel are you using?

• What kind of features (audio, video, presence, etc) does it have?

• How does one access it? Is it private or public-by-default?

What’s happening in your room?

• How large is the audience? How many are active participants?

• Who is participating and how do they engage?

• What kinds of topics tend to come up most frequently?

• What is the overall tone? Casual? Serious? Encouraging? Critical?

• What is the pace or rhythm of the conversation? Steady chatter throughout the day? A ghost town?

Paying attention to your team’s primary communication channels can help surface problems and opportunities for improvements. For us, the audience size and public nature of our original team channel—which had served the team well early on—were making it difficult to discuss day-to-day, hour-to-hour team topics. Deliberately creating a new private channel gave us a lot more room for team-level things to happen. What might you improve for your team? Maybe you feel like you and your colleagues would benefit from faster ways of resolving open issues and questions, or maybe there’s so much chatter that it’s hard to tell what’s relevant? Maybe it’s difficult to ask questions because there’s a pattern of harsh criticism, or maybe it’s difficult to bring up real issues because of a focus on being cheerful and positive? If there’s something you’d like to improve about how your team is meeting, perhaps it might be worth changing how you arrange the venue, the menu, the seating?

I love how he succinctly describes the struggle and frustration of making things that we know just aren’t good enough—the gap—and goes on to make the connection to a seemingly innocuous idea: taste. “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making, is kind of a disappointment to you.” By the time most of us decide to put in the effort to make something in a creative field—be it music, art, writing, or even code—it’s practically inevitable that we’ve already become attuned to sniff out the good from the bad, the insightful from the insipid, and the spontaneous from the sloppy. We’re constantly exposed to other people’s creative output, it’s only natural that we develop our taste, our sense for what we like and dislike, in the process. But, does that mean we’re doomed to a lifetime of constant disappointment?

I like food a lot, but I dislike being called a foodie almost as strongly. I’ll often catch myself describing a recent memorable meal to a friend, like how the roasted potatoes with one of the entrées at Zuni Cafe were some of the potatoiest [sic] potatoes I’d ever tasted, and my captive companion will remark, “Oh! So you must be a really big foodie then?” I hesitate, laugh sheepishly, mumble something about trying to appreciate food, and usually clumsily settle on a reluctant “so… yeah, I guess you could say I’m a foodie.”

Foodies love food. I love food. And if that’s all the association evoked, then I would happily embrace it. But when I think of a “foodie”, I also think of hypercritical Yelp reviews, the stressful fixation on only finding the best X, Y, Z, and generally being “that person” among a group of friends who always has an extremely difficult time enjoying the food at most places. (Me: “No! Wait! There’s another place 0.7 miles from here that’s rated a half star higher!” Group: collective groan). Sometimes I wonder if some foodies actually enjoy eating anymore, especially without the badge of a #1 spot on a blog’s list, 3 Michelin stars, or 5 / 5 on Yelp.

I dislike being called a foodie because I think we associate the word with more than just enjoying and tasting food. We associate being a foodie with judging food: deciding the good from the bad, writing a review, giving a score, and generally somehow always miraculously finding a way to be dissatisfied with any meal, from Popeye’s to pop-up. Sufficiently refined taste can always find a flaw. There’s a fine line between appreciating something and judging whether or not that something is “good enough”, and in fact they often feed into each other. Learning something new about tasting food, like how to pay attention to textural contrast, can easily become yet another way to be disappointed. When Ira Glass talks about taste and the gap it creates, he’s focusing on how taste easily turns into judgement, which turns into disappointment and frustration.

Thanks to sheltering-in-place, I’ve been making a lot of espresso at home. The experience so far, in addition to keeping me more than adequately caffeinated, has helped me appreciate (and miss) coffee shops and baristas even more: making good espresso is hard. The sheer number of variables affecting a shot of espresso is overwhelming: choice of beans (including their origin and roast level), choice of equipment (e.g. espresso machine, grinder), dose (how much coffee to use), grind fineness, puck preparation (e.g. distribution, tamping), brew temperature, brew pressure, brew ratio (how much water to pull as output), extraction time and more. To add to the fun: small adjustments, like pulling a 36 gram shot instead of 34 grams, can often lead to wild differences in how the final shot tastes. Next time you sip a delicious latte from your local coffee shop, consider tipping generously—it wasn’t easy!

I’ve made a few very nice shots, and many more nearly undrinkable ones along the way. Each time, it’s all too easy to immediately taste, or rather judge, whether or not the shot is “good enough” and feel a little disappointed when inevitably it isn’t. Sadly, disappointment doesn’t magically make espresso taste better (if only). But then, how do I improve? I still need to taste each shot, but instead of beating myself up, I try to focus on observing—gathering data. What do I notice? What words would I use to describe it? What can I learn for next time? One of my favorite coffee blogs, Barista Hustle, has an Espresso Compass that maps different taste descriptors like “sour”, “bitter”, and “dry” and suggests parameters to tweak based on where you land. As with many graphs, the goal is to move up and to the right.

Judgement is one-dimensional: bad to good. By stepping past it, I can turn my sense of taste from an overly simple source of frustration into a powerful GPS for navigating a complex process. Thanks to this compass, I can not only see a literal “gap” in taste, but I can start to understand what it means. Each shot of espresso is another step, another jolt of caffeine, and each taste gives another glance toward how to improve the next one, up and to the right, toward narrowing the gap.

As a child, I was once talking to my father about cooking when he casually but completely seriously said that “the essence of cooking is knowing how salty salt is.” I think I laughed at the time, but, like with many of the things my parents have taught me, the wisdom of what he said would take many years for me to internalize. When we hear noisy traffic while we’re speaking, we intuitively know how much to raise our voices to be heard. When something is in our way on the sidewalk, we know how far to step to the side. So when I taste something that’s just a little bland, do I know how much salt to add? Or will I be too caught up in disliking the food to bother noticing the reason, let alone adjust it?

We’re all constantly judging. Food, drink, music, videos, writing, each other, ourselves, practically anything that occupies our attention comes automatically with a sense for whether or not we like it: 4.5 stars, Would not recommend, Like, B-, Best Ever. But when the black-and-white lens of judgement is how we see the world, we’re limited in how much we can enjoy the things we like, and often frustrated by the things we don’t. Taste and judgement are intertwined, but not inseparable. The next time you experience something or make something that strikes you as particularly “good” or “bad”, take a moment and see how much you can unfold that knee-jerk grayscale judgement into all of its curious colors and shades. What do you notice?

"Dispersive Prism" by Spigget is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

I remember carefully mixing some dough, setting it on the counter, and waiting. It should have started rising right? Doubling in volume sounds like a pretty dramatic transformation—and it is—so presumably I should have been seeing some initial progress. Something wasn’t quite right though: nothing was happening. Not what I expected. Come on, yeast, wake up and help me out here! Don’t worry, this particular memory ends with some decent bread, but why did the dough rise so unpredictably? What went wrong with my mental model?

Without thinking too hard about it, I had imagined a bunch of yeast getting introduced to some dough and starting to happily munch away on the sugars from the flour, producing precious carbon dioxide (rise) and flavor in the process. If you had asked me for a graph of the volume increase over time, this is what I would have intuitively drawn:

I would have guessed a linear behavior, or in other words: that the rate of change is constant. Lots of things in life behave linearly, or at least close enough for practical purposes: wages and salary, objects in motion, traveling from point A to point B (with some interesting exceptions), so it’s natural that I would have assumed the same for a humble batch of dough.

In the case of yeast, I was missing a crucial element to my mental model: the yeast are multiplying. With the vast majority of bread recipes, you start with a fairly tiny amount of yeast. Over time, that intrepid microorganism landing party spreads through the raw flour and water, constantly dividing and reproducing. If the population of yeast stayed constant over time, steadily eating away, we would see much more linear behavior. Instead, the yeast are constantly doubling—1, 2, 4, 8 billion cells and so on—and the population grows exponentially, so the rising dough behaves a lot more like this:

You might be familiar with exponential growth for things like compound interest, but did you expect to see it in bread? This far better explains why yeasted dough seems so inert toward the beginning, and why it rises so vigorously later on. Shifting our assumptions from linear to nonlinear (in this case, exponential) can make baking bread much more predictable.

Other times in the kitchen, I’ve been caught off guard by food browning suddenly and quickly while in the oven. When roasting a chicken, it might sit pale and unchanged for most of the cook time, then quickly threaten to turn to charcoal just as my attention lapses.

Why so sneaky, chicken? The answer is water, and more specifically: the energy it takes to turn it to steam. It takes 1 calorie (by definition) to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C, while it takes another 540 calories to then evaporate that same gram of water. Only after enough of the water evaporates does further browning really take off. This is the same phenomenon that causes the dreaded “stall” when cooking large cuts like brisket for barbecue.

Often, in a particularly difficult dance class, I feel like I can relate to that brisket. Not just because of how overheated I can feel, but also because I frequently feel like I’m stalling. All warmed up, starting to break a sweat, trying to commit the choreography to muscle memory, but nothing feels right. Maybe I even feel like I’m falling behind. Some of the best dancers I know have this uncanny ability to make everything look effortless. How am I supposed to do that when none of my limbs are cooperating and each movement feels awkward and forced? Yet, I try to push through. Three steps and a hand gesture coalesce into phrase. I internalize the jagged rhythm of a drum fill. A memory surfaces that carries the right emotional raw matter to inspire my character. I push through the stall.

10 minutes later, I feel stuck again. We made it through the verse but it turns out that the chorus is a completely different beast. Back at the bottom of a cliff. Somehow, a lot happens in the 60 to 90 minutes of a typical class that I take, and by the end I can almost always say that I’ve made some good progress. The path to get there, however, is almost never a straight line, nor is it a single hurdle to overcome. It is a path of many struggles:

I find that when I can anticipate this pattern, it makes it easier to push through those difficult moments, because I know it’s a natural part of the process that I’ve been through before. I know that learning isn’t a linear process, and feeling stuck now doesn’t mean I’ll feel stuck for the entire class.

Zooming out from the dance studio, we see the same interesting pattern in how species evolve. When we learn about evolution, we naturally imagine slow and steady change over time, and yes this does happen, but it’s not the whole story. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory where evolutionary change happens in rare but rapid events, such as catastrophic environment changes, separated by periods of relative stability. We’re more accustomed to thinking about the former, but what about the latter? Where in your life do you see rare but rapid change? Moving between cities or jobs? Starting a family? Moving in with someone? So much of how we grow happens sporadically rather than steadily.

Linearity is an extremely useful concept. If it takes me 20 minutes to walk a mile, I can be pretty certain that it will take me 40 minutes to walk two miles. If my hair grows an inch every two months, I can reasonably predict how long it would take to grow out a majestic mohawk. But linearity, or rather the assumption of linearity, can also set up some misleading expectations. Biological processes, like yeast in dough, are often exponential in nature. Sometimes there are hidden “walls” like the evaporation energy of water, or external factors like difficult choreography or environmental changes. Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense at all, no matter how hard we try:

In any case, choosing the right mental model, linear or otherwise, can help set you up for fewer surprises, better choices, and hopefully some more success along the way—at least with bread and dance class.

Where else have you noticed something behaving in a surprisingly nonlinear way, and what ended up being the reason? I’d love to hear from you in comments or replies!

Artist unknown, image source: BWNC

Where do I start? That’s all I can think about as I’m trying to sit and write and make sense of everything happening. What can I do? Anxiety, confusion, and then quickly followed by a pang of guilt. Why do I get to sit here, safe and comfortable, and write about racism, injustice, and inequity while it has been a dangerous lived reality every day for generations for Black Americans? Why aren’t I doing more? Is this writing actually a misguided example of performative allyship to cleanse my own conscience, gather kudos from others, and prove that I’m a “good person”? At some level, I’m sure it is.

Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)

I’ve been struggling with how to understand and untangle those selfish impulses, so that I can feel more confident that my actions are truly helpful and compassionate. I’ve seen too many examples of questionably intentioned social media posts, videos of half-hearted speeches, and outright ignorance to believe that simple good intentions are enough to guarantee positive change. But I do believe that vacillating and equivocating right now are a guaranteed way to be unhelpful. I want to help! I want to do the right thing! I’m scared!

Wait—scared? Is that what this is?

Examining assumptions

I think it is. I’m scared of messing up. I’m scared of offending someone. I’m scared of doing the “wrong thing”, and likewise scared of not doing enough. And yet as scared as I am, when I dig a little deeper, I realize that I’m also not scared of physical violence, of dying. I’m not scared for my career or any long-term repercussions on my job prospects. I’m not scared for my family. For most of my life, I wasn’t scared of the police. I’m not scared that people will instantly assume I’m a criminal because of the color of my skin. Because of my privilege, I get to worry about how I’m going to write about racism and how I’m going to fight it instead of worrying about how it targets me.¹

At an even more basic level, I have the immense privilege to largely choose whether or not I even engage with racism. Arguably, I might even stand to benefit—in some narrow, selfish way—from choosing to be ignorant, because for me, society is by and large fair and reasonable. Is it though? Or does it only work that way for some people? This core assumption: that the world is generally fair and reasonable, isn’t one that I typically reexamine. It’s also the same core assumption that makes ideas like defunding the police seem extreme at first.

Action, reaction

That reaction and surprise is rooted in the belief that the police system in America generally serves its purpose. But when we examine that belief a little more closely with a skeptical eye, I ask you to see what is already painfully obvious to too many Black Americans: the police system as we know it in America is systemically broken. Why were the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as tragic as they were, so devastatingly unsurprising? Why are we spending so much on policing and so little on social programs, education, and our communities? Why should policing budgets continue to rise, relatively and absolutely, year after year while crime rates drop? You may find yourself wondering about the potential downsides of reducing police funding, like increased crime, but consider these two thoughts: that the funds might reduce crime more effectively through other means, and that your interactions with, and therefore perceptions of, the police will heavily depend on the color of your skin.

The protests across the country now are also cause for strong reactions. I’ve seen many debates on whether or not the protests (and associated violence) are justified. Or should we condemn them? I suppose that in a moral vacuum, looting a store or burning someone else’s property are Bad Things to do. But we don’t exist in a moral vacuum, and these actions are reactions to what came before. The natural impulse to judge the protests as Good or Bad impedes our ability to genuinely understand. And I believe it is entirely more compassionate and more constructive to move beyond moral judgement of the protests themselves and to arrive at acknowledging and fixing what is causing them. Neither blindly condemning nor blindly accepting—we’re far better off striving to open our eyes and hearts to the suffering of so many Black people that has led us to this moment.

What now?

I wrote this as a way of connecting with other well-intentioned but struggling allies, in the hopes that we might find some strength together to take the next steps beyond confusion and guilt. I still feel overwhelmed by how I can help, but I’ve managed to gather a few ways that I am trying and I can recommend.

First, you can educate yourself. Black Americans carry enough burden while living their own lives, and it’s unfair to expect them to also bear the responsibility of teaching others about how to fight racism thoughtfully. Find ways to educate yourself. Look for books, videos, social media. As you do this, be mindful of your implicit assumptions about the world. They’re easiest to detect when they trigger a strong knee-jerk reaction to something, like defunding the police. I am starting to read How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo as both have been highly recommended. Thank you to my friend, Tal, for sharing this thoughtful list of resources.

Second, you can act. There are too many ways to list completely here, but to name a few: you can donate, protest, and reach out to politicians and business owners. You can help a Black friend who might benefit from someone checking in. You can find and support local Black-owned businesses. You can stand up for diversity, equity, and inclusion at your workplace. You can mentor and support Black people in your role or industry. We don’t have to look very hard for calls to action. We just have to step up and take them, and keep taking them.

There’s a lot that’s broken in our society right now. But if you’ve read this far, odds are that you’re one of the many people who want to help. Maybe, like me, you’re unsure, overwhelmed, and uncomfortable. But I find when I examine my own self-centered discomfort, I realize how important it is for me to push it aside and do something. It doesn’t have to be complicated or perfect: the first step is to learn, the second step is to act, and the third step is to repeat. Black lives matter, and all of us can work to make sure they do.

¹Yes, I, and other Asian Americans, experience racism too, but at this moment I’m choosing to focus on the injustices faced by Black Americans.

Originally published at https://masontang.com on June 8, 2020.

I’ve always looked forward to the holiday season. Yes, I love big meals, endless desserts, gifts (giving them especially), ice skating, and the crisp smell of winter air, but there’s something deeper that I love about the holidays. Specifically, there’s something to how the holiday season shifts my perspective on time. Normally, life sweeps my attention down countless disparate paths: a chaotic montage of past achievements and mistakes, future hopes and anxieties, and occasionally—if I can manage it—the present. But every year, sometime after Thanksgiving, Mariah Carey’s voice first drifts down a department store aisle to tell us exactly what is on her Christmas wish list (hint: there’s only one thing), and reminds me to reflect with gratitude on the past year, to be present with the friends and family around me, and to look forward with intention and hope to the new year. The holidays are a time for me to listen to the bigger, slower rhythms in life, measured in months and years, and yet also a time to cherish the minutiae that so easily slip by otherwise: friendly smiles, an unexpected sprinkle of nutmeg, and warm blankets while the wind howls outside. It is this unique temporal tapestry of past, present, and future that I love most about the holidays.

“Let’s put away our phones and capture this moment in the fuzzy, imperfect VCRs of our memories,” words that Jillian Meyers shared with a crowd of us sweaty, physically tired, and mentally energized dancers toward the end of her dance workshop. The quote is an approximation; I don’t remember her exact words, nor do I remember the choreography anymore. I don’t even remember when I took the workshop. But I remember how I felt: recorded far more vividly than any specific detail, yet dynamic and malleable, shifting and transmuting with new layers of meaning on every recall. Like learning and performing a dance: each subsequent rendering taking on its own life and meaning by filling the context around it. Sometimes small and hidden—sneaky hand dancing while waiting at a stop light—other times ebullient and reckless, buoyed by the electric energy of a crowd. We don’t just watch, or even relive, our memories—we perform them.

In trying to remember what happened this past year, my inclination was to open my calendar. As I scrolled back to January, my first disorienting realization was that a huge chunk of my calendar was missing; this September, I left my job at Google and joined Airtable. My dense, sprawling Google corporate calendar is now a jumbled haze of freeze-frames and flashbacks. As my first job out of college, Google had been a home and a family to me for 8 years. As difficult as it was to leave, some of my closest friends helped me realize that I never intended on staying at Google forever (maybe just a long time), and that I had so much to experience from stepping out into the unknown. Below is the email I sent to my colleagues at Google on my last week:

My dear friends,

This Friday, September 6th, will be my last day at Google.

It’s been almost exactly 8 years, and still I vividly remember my first day. I had to take an uncomfortably early shuttle from SF to make it to orientation in time. I remember warily finding the shuttle stop and worrying if I was waiting at the correct unmarked street corner. Fun fact: on my first day of kindergarten, I missed the bus. Luckily, history wouldn’t repeat itself that morning. Slowly and silently others began forming a polite queue, and eventually an imposing white bus rounded the corner. “GBUS TO MTV”, it visually exclaimed. I started my journey. And as tired and bleary-eyed as I was, what I remember most was feeling overwhelmed with excitement — I was going to work for Google!

From getting picked up that day from Noogler orientation by a full contingent of 4 of my new colleagues, warmly welcoming me to GWS team, to the internship the previous summer working on the Android Calendar app, to taking a deep breath before stepping on stage to present at TGIF, to becoming a manager and striving to support and lead my team through ups and downs, to taking a leap into the unknown and joining Medical Brain, to performing at some spectacular events with Googapella, to countless brainstorming sessions, summits, partner visits, and meaningful conversations, I’ve learned and experienced more than a starry-eyed new grad on a cold SF morning could have ever possibly hoped.

I thought it would be harder to try to summarize what I’ve learned through my journey, but one lesson has been both clear and constant throughout: the awesome and singular combination of an unstoppable optimism to do good and the immovable support of the people around me. I recall countless moments, stepping into a new project, responding to a crisis, or launching a new system, where I was afraid and nearly convinced that I couldn’t do it. And every time, someone was there to tell me, “You can do this; we’re in this together.” And every time, we did it. That, to me, is Google at our best, and it has been my absolute privilege to have experienced it with you all.

I find myself now at another turning point in my journey. On Monday, September 9th, I’ll be starting at Airtable, working to democratize software creation for everyone. As I’ve never done it before, and I tend to be scared of things I haven’t done before, the prospect of working anywhere other than Google scares me. But I’m excited for what’s next, and I feel emboldened and supported by all the wonderful people I’ve gotten to know here, and who have made these past 8 years so very special to me. I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today without you all, and for that you have my deepest gratitude.

Please keep in touch. I wish you all the very best, and I sincerely hope that our paths will cross again. I’ll be around for the rest of the week, come say hi! And I’ve put my personal contact info below, and would love to hear from you.

- Mason

Here I am now, again filled with optimism and gratitude. I started 2019 with an intention to push myself out of my comfort zone. I left my first job and started a new one in a brand new domain (if you’re curious about Enterprise engineering at Airtable, let’s chat!). I traveled to some marvelous places: Spain, Portugal, Austin, Disneyland, Big Sur, Point Reyes, Kauai, Napa, Chicago. For the first time in my life since probably middle school, I took several weeks off to just…be. I performed in a contemporary dance project, presented to VPs, represented my team to external partners and customers, and baked a bunch of bread and cookies. At times, I was very uncomfortable. Through so many of those uncomfortable moments, I leaned on the support and guidance of my friends and family who believed in me even when I didn’t. At Google, we often spoke about 10x opportunities—my 10x opportunity this year has been the difference between what I could have achieved on my own compared to what I did achieve, and how meaningful it was, with the support of everyone around me.

To all of you, thank you. I’m profoundly grateful to have spent 2019 with you, and so excited to spend 2020 together.

My mom is the best cook. I know I’m far from the only person to feel strongly about a parent’s cooking. I’ve had many conversations with friends about parents’ cooking where we recall stories of improvised last-minute masterpieces, treasured secret recipes, and aversions to measuring anything. It warms my heart to think of all the people lucky enough to grow up with an amazing cook for a parent. Yet I remain convinced that even ranked among other mothers and fathers surrounded by culinary superlatives, my mom really is the best cook.

She makes mostly Chinese food, with as much skill and grace as you’d expect from someone who has been doing so for over 50 years. It wasn’t until after college, when I started cooking for more than just myself, that I started appreciating how impossibly difficult it is to put five different hot dishes on the dinner table in under an hour—something my mom does with the apparent effort of someone checking their Instagram feed and while talking to you about your day.

I love everything she makes, but my favorites tend to be the simple dishes: scrambled eggs with tomato, braised beef shank, fried rice, even just stir-fried bok choy. She doesn’t use exotic spices, sophisticated techniques, or even particularly expensive ingredients. Just skill, a flawless sense for how things are supposed to taste, and care. In those simple dishes, with only a few humble ingredients, what I taste most is the care and attention of a mother feeding her family.

Sometimes, to keep things interesting for my brother and me, she would experiment in what we all imagined “American” food was supposed to taste like. When I was in elementary school, I remember reading a book that described (with cute line drawings) how to cut out a hole in the middle of a slice of bread, place it in a hot buttered skillet, and crack an egg in the hole—egg in a basket. The hipster in me would like to point out that this was years before Stephen Fry made the dish cool in V for Vendetta. Anyways, I had to eat it. So I asked my mom to make it.

But my parents grew up in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. Wasting food to them was an obscenity. Why would you cut out the middle of the bread and throw it out? My mom decided that was nonsense, so she put it back on top of the egg. And put a slice of cheese underneath for good measure. If you do this all carefully, the bread fuses with the cheese and egg and seals everything up inside. “Our new invention needs a name,” she said. I pictured the rich, gooey yolk and melted cheese tucked away, hidden inside of its crispy browned container. “Treasure box!” I replied.

It stuck. Not to the pan (most of the time), but to our breakfast repertoire. Twenty years later and 3000 miles away, treasure box is still one of my go-to breakfast recipes on peaceful weekend mornings when I feel like something simple, rich, and rejuvenating. I have a hard time imagining a better use or more optimal arrangement for a slice of bread, an egg, a slice of cheese, butter, salt, and pepper. It is pure comfort food that is rooted not in a historical culinary tradition, but in my mom’s love, creativity, and values.

I’m not shy about claiming that I make a good treasure box. Excellent even. I’ve probably made dozens of treasure boxes by now (if only making actual treasure were so easy). I’ve included the “recipe” for my version below. But even with the most perfectly seasoned cast-iron skillet, the free-est range eggs, and the most neurotic attention to detail I can manage—mom’s is still the best.

Treasure Box

Serves: 1

Time: 15 minutes, but only if you’re not in a hurry

Ingredients

• 1 egg, because how can it be breakfast without an egg?

• 1 slice of bread, whatever you happen to have around

• 1 slice of cheese, I prefer American but it’s America so you do you

• 1–2 pats of butter, depending on how sassy you feel that day

• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Place a pat of butter in a nonstick or cast-iron skillet over medium heat.

2. While the pan heats up, cut a large hole in your slice of bread. Keep the piece from the middle.

3. Once the pan is nice and hot, put both pieces of bread in the skillet. Immediately flip the outer piece (we’re going to make sure to toast both sides of the bread because we’re not amateurs). Give it a few minutes until the bread is nice and browned.

4. Remove the inner piece of bread to a plate and set aside. Flip the outer piece so the browned side is face up. Add a little bit more butter to the hole in the bread, and, once that melts, crack the egg into the hole. Sprinkle some salt over the egg to taste. If the yolk manages to stay relatively centered instead of drifting to one side, your luck is good that day and maybe consider buying a lottery ticket.

5. If you have a lid that fits, cover the skillet at this point and lower the heat to medium-low to allow the top of the egg to set. Use this time to frantically try to make some coffee or tea. Or just pace nervously back and forth.

6. Some small, arbitrary number of minutes later, or once the egg white has fully set but the yolk is still runny, uncover the skillet. Place the cheese on the egg. Take the reserved inner bread piece and place it toasted-side-down on the cheese.

7. Carefully (carefully!) flip this whole assembly, adding some more butter if you really want to have a good time. Let it brown on this side for a few minutes. Some of the cheese will probably escape and melt down to the pan. “Life is giving me lemons!” you cry, “now this cheese will stick to my pan!” Don’t worry, some patience will turn those lemons into delicious crispy cheese crust once the cheese browns properly.

8. Add pepper to taste, and some more salt if you’re using unsalted butter. Otherwise I find additional salt unnecessary.

9. Remove from skillet and serve immediately to someone you care about.

Originally published at https://masontang.com on December 23, 2018.

Sometimes, to try to gain some perspective, I like to imagine dialogs with versions of myself who had ended up doing more difficult or dangerous work. What if I had been a mountain climber instead of a software engineer?

Hey there! What are you up to?

Just climbing this here mountain, you see!

Trying to get to the top?

Only 2500 meters left!

Won’t that take a while?

Absolutely!

Aren’t you uncomfortable?

In so many ways!

To get to the top, couldn’t you just take a helicopter or something?

I suppose, but that’s not the point. I’m exactly where I want to be right now.

On a journey like climbing a mountain, you probably spend the vast majority of your time doing the climbing, and only a tiny fraction at your destination. What if you were a mountain climber that only felt happy standing on summits? Would that be enough to compel you to trek mile after mile, meter after meter, for that fleeting moment of satisfaction? If you were to ask a mountain climber where they would prefer to spend most of their time, do you think they would say “at the top of the mountain” or “climbing the mountain”?

We’re all climbing our own mountains. Many at a time even. And I think it’s natural to look up at all those distant, foggy summits sitting on top of challenge after challenge and feel discouraged. Tired. Maybe even hopeless. Sometimes, maybe when things change or we decide the challenge truly isn’t worth the cost, it’s important to turn around or rest. In the other cases though, I think we can get so focused on reaching the summit that it makes actually climbing the mountain miserable.

“I’m not good enough.”

“Getting there isn’t worth it.”

“I don’t think I’ll make it.”

These days, our problems are often intangible or scary enough that we forget that they are mountains. Or maybe we ended up on a mountain without even choosing or realizing it. In any case, too often we forget to be present to the journey to the top, to take things obstacle by obstacle, step by step, moment to moment.

“I’m getting better.”

“I’m enjoying the way there.”

“I’ll make it as far as I can.”

What can you do when you find yourself on a mountain?

• Be kind to yourself. What would you say to a close friend in the same situation?

• Look behind. When you’re halfway up a mountain, you’re at the top of half a mountain. Don’t forget to recognize how far you’ve really come.

• Bring a friend. Who else is on this journey with you? Either as a fellow climber, or a support team.

• Step, breathe, repeat. Unless you have a helicopter, we’re all getting to the top the same way: one step at time.

I find that reframing a frustrating experience as one step in a journey often gives me what I need to take the next step. It even helps me reinterpret that experience in a more positive light.

What are your mountains? How will you face them? What would a mountain climber do?

Originally published at https://masontang.com on December 16, 2018.