Becoming Genghis - An Ode to Officemates

I ain't afraid of no lawyers. 

The officemate relationship is the arranged marriage of the workplace. As a junior associate at a big New York law firm, you will probably share an office with someone preordained for you by HR.  Because they sit literally an arms-length away from you and because you will both sit there for most of your waking hours, you will see this person more than any other person in your life. Like all arranged marriages, sometimes it goes smashingly and you have a best friend for life; other times, it makes your life that much worse every single day. 

My first officemate was pretty good, as they go. We worked together on my first deal, so he taught me how to do my time-sheets, utilize legal assistants, navigate first-year M&A tasks, and, most importantly, after an entire Sunday of frantic deal-closing work, how to order food from Seamless. In good times, when work was slow, he'd look over and say, "HAN. Entertain me. What you got?" We visited zombocom and watched viral internet videos. We called up other associates to banter. In bad times, we covered for each other. When I had worked a few nights in a row and just HAD to take a nap before my body shut down, I'd give him a heads up, "Hey, if anyone comes looking for me, I'm in a meeting." Then I'd curl up under my desk, set my blackberry to vibrate, drape my suit jacket over my head, and try to catch a few winks.

So in this way we rolled with the ups and downs, sometimes literally. In 2011 when an earthquake hit NYC, my officemate and I appeared to moonbounce around our 46th floor office. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. Afterwards, we stared at each other mouths agape and asked at the same time, "What the hell was that???"

Because of the close proximity, you'd know things about your officemate that no one else did. You would know what they eat for lunch and dinner, how often they go to the bathroom, how often their girlfriend calls and whether she was usually in a good or bad mood, how they talk to difficult clients on the phone, and how they deal with work and life generally. Once a friend was walking by his officemate's desk and happened to see her googling "unexpected pregnancy." She took a leave of absence shortly thereafter.

My officemate certainly had dirt on me. Just prior to starting the job, my 5-year long relationship ended, a demise which included a broken engagement. After the breakup, I moved into a dark, noisy, tunnel of an apartment, started an all-consuming job, and decided that I wanted to be a musician after all but it was probably too late. It was one of the darkest, loneliest times in my life. If you've ever moved by yourself and then, surrounded by your worldly possessions in beat-up cardboard boxes, had to rebuild an IKEA bed frame before you can sleep, you know that every misaligned pre-drilled hole feels like a cruel joke by the universe. In those days, I would sometimes cry quietly at my desk. When it became noticeable, my officemate would ask gingerly, "Yo.... You okay over there?" and I'd answer, "Yeah," and clear my throat. "I'm fine," I'd say, leaning closer to my computer to see whether that was indeed an errant comma or a figment of my tear-blurred eyes. 

The code of officemate-dom was that you stayed out of each other's lives, but could gossip about it if it was remotely entertaining. I had a subsequent officemate who was dating a very pretty legal assistant, and I made a mental note of whether she was still stopping by for no good reason, just in case anyone asked. Another thing about this officemate was that he usually talked in a normal voice but once he got a phone call would switch to bellowing, whether on speakerphone or not. The moment he answered his calls, my secretary (who didn't even sit right outside our office) would instant message me, "OMG. How are you not deaf??"

Idiosyncrasies aside, conflicts between officemates were usually kept under control, because you really did have to get along. But there were some tense times. Once, I had just printed out a document of maybe 200-300 pages - one common junior associate task was to do a final review of a massive document in a short period of time before it was sent out, say to another team of lawyers or submitted to the SEC. As a corporate lawyer, you live or die by your organizational skills, and since I am also somewhat OCD, I started banging the stack of papers on all sides against my desk to neaten it into a pile. Bang bang bang! on one side of the stack. Bang bang bang! on another. I did all four sides and then went through it again just to make sure it was all aligned. Finally my officemate, who was trying to concentrate, looked over and howled, "Enough with the violence! Geez. Enough, Genghis! Genghis Han!!" 

And a nickname was born.

A nickname is, ultimately, a souvenir from a period of your life, is it not? Whether it's a pet name from your parents that sticks even after you have kids of your own, or a college name that indicates some grand victory or magnificent stupidity in your past, names represent an era in our lives and recall the people who gave them to us. 

I've kept the Genghis moniker because it represents many things: a ruthless efficiency, a will to triumph over the seemingly impossible, and an office culture where one of the best things about the job was the people around you. We have since all moved on to different endeavors, but every time someone calls me Genghis, I think back fondly to my officemates and those years that helped make me who I am today. 

Betsy DeVos, and why I quit piano for ten years

Wha...

I threw in the towel at 17. I remember worrying when I was 13 that my piano career was behind - I didn't have a major recording contract, full calendar of performances with major orchestras, or a Grammy. I thought to myself grimly that I had better ramp it up before I became obsolete! Age 16 was that deadline, and, guess what? By 16 I still didn't have any of those things. Furthermore, I wasn't cleaning up at every competition I entered, especially at the international level. To my teenage self, that meant that I wasn't good enough and never would be. Time was up. And so I told my piano teacher that I was not auditioning for conservatory and would be going to college. 

The idea that my performance *at that moment* in a competitive arena was an accurate measure of my abilities dictated how I thought about myself in all areas of my life. In high school, when my brother got a better score on the national qualifier AHSME math exam, even though he was two grades below, I thought resignedly, well, guess I'm terrible at math! 

Luckily, college helped changed that mindset, partially because it was a fresh start - I no longer had to be a good pianist because no one knew I was a pianist. I could study anything, so I picked biochemistry because it was a broad major and I'd always loved learning about the world and how it works. But it turned out in the premed-eat-premed major I'd chosen that I was, in fact, way behind. In my first semester, perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw what a difference preparation could make. For example, I failed my first physics exam. It tested material typically covered in a high school AP class, which most of the class had taken but I had not (it was not offered at my school). The average test score was around a 94%. My score was in the 30's. The professor put up a histogram of the scores on the projector for the hundreds of us to see, circled the three worst scores at the low tail end of the curve, and stated ominously, "If this is you ... come see me."

I went to her office, stunned. Wasn't I good at science?? The professor, a wry woman who was clearly brilliant but also clearly annoyed at having to teach this class, asked me how I prepared for the exam. I said that I read all the chapters covering the material and went to all the classes. "And how many practice problems in the problems book did you do?" she asked. I stared blankly at her. Practice problems? She saw my hesitation and asked, "Do you ... even have the practice problem book?" No. I had done no practice problems. She rolled her eyes. In one of many moments where people change my life but have no idea that they're doing so, she said, "Get the book. Do the problems. That's how you learn science." 

Thoroughly humiliated, I bought the book and did just about every single problem in it. Despite my first exam, I ended up with an A in the class. More importantly, I was empowered. I was NOT bad at physics. I was just not good at it yet, and I could change that with some elbow (brain? brain elbow?) grease.

For the first time in my life, I had the confidence to keep going at a tough challenge. When the all-male study group told me I didn't get the right answer because I was a girl and girls are bad at science (they were serious, by the way, and this was in the early 2000's), I got mad because I knew they were wrong. Some of them had taken the course before (I knew one girl who sat in the lectures for all of next year's classes to get a head start) and others had been doing research in the field (at local universities, etc.). And so I studied more, and I beamed inside when I beat their exam scores. Once I got a 99% on a tough test and a friend happened to see my score. For the next four years, anytime I relapsed into "poor me I can't do this" mode, he'd say, "Whatever, 99." I entered college a failed music prodigy, according to me. But I left college knowing that I could improve at just about anything. 

A few decades later, I'm watching Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing and it is a disaster. I don't think I would have been hired as a babysitter with her answers, let alone hired to oversee American education. That aside, an interesting moment for me was when Senator Al Franken asked her about her views on proficiency versus growth. DeVos's answer was as incoherent, uninformative and unprepared as her others, but the question was a critical one - should educational success be measured by individual students' growth or by whether they meet a set of standards? A light bulb went off. I was living proof that a growth mentality enhances learning more than a proficiency one. I went from being someone who judged her abilities by some impossible standard, who met challenges with the fear of failure, to someone who believes she can do just about anything with enough courage and effort, and who seeks out challenges. Senator Franken reminded me how important mindset is to the ability to learn. 

For this reason, it's a good thing I quit piano while I did. I needed time to realize my own potential, to have the confidence to tackle harder challenges. And building a performance career is the most challenging thing I've ever undertaken. It grows my mind, body and spirit every single day. I now play piano better than I ever thought I could, and I know I will continue to improve the longer I work at it. We all have real limitations, but over the years I've realized that my attitude doesn't have to be one of them. 

Practice like Steph

Athletic excellence has always fascinated me. One of the most lasting sports memories I have is of Shawn Johnson winning gold medal on the beam in the 2008 Olympics. Doing ridiculous acrobatics on that little plank without falling off is impressive enough, but what stuck with me is that she felt terrible that day - headache, stomachache. I don't know about you, but when I have a stomachache, about all I'm up for is putting on a snuggie and listening to white noise.  

And yet she had to bring it, and she did. 

When I see such focus, consistency, and results, I think of our job as performers. The audience is there to be transported, to hear what we have to say, to experience something extraordinary. They don't care if we had a bad day, if we're having a headache, or if our left pinky nail is falling off. (This is part of the reason why I get annoyed when singers announce that they are under the weather ...). The challenge of bringing it, no matter what else is going on, is why performers have to train the way they do. 

Performance training in music, as in sports, has many components (all of which can and do fill entire blogs and books). There is foremost the mental game, which in music draws upon sports psychology. Noa Kageyama's blog is one of the best out there on this topic. 

Another very important component is preparation, that is, practice. And on this point, I recently saw something that reminded me of the relation between consistency in practice and on-stage: 

STEPHEN CURRY PRACTICING THREE-POINT SHOTS.

If you've never watched this man play on the court, let me tell you it is like dance and sports and a rabbit evading a fox all at once. The man is poetry in motion. He makes three-pointers while way behind the line, while three men are grabbing at him, while on the run, while the shotclock is on its last millisecond ... you name the non-ideal situation, he can nevertheless nail the shot. 

And this is how he practices - taking shots every day from every part of the three-point line. And he has developed an eerie consistency. 

Now music is not about hitting all the right notes - far from it. A performance that only does that is boring as hell. And no one pays or leaves the house to be bored to hell. 

BUT. What Steph shows me is that if we practice with consistency and deliberateness and intent, we build up the physical skills to adapt in the performance situation. That means practicing pieces in tiny chunks (like a four-bar phrase, or even a two-note slur) rather than running the whole piece repeatedly. That means, when something is not quite right in the practice room, figuring out why rather than playing it over and over until we like it better. Ultimately, this deliberate, conscious, deconstructed practicing can allow us to let go on stage and show more freedom, more artistry, more expression. And isn't that the whole point? 

How to stop losing your Airturn

Like a growing number of musicians, I've finally made the switch to digital scores. Storing PDFs of my music on my iPad eliminates a bevy of worries - backaches from carrying around a giant stack of music, forgetting which score I need for the day, not having a pencil to put in markings, losing my scores with my markings, etc. Clearly I am a forgetful person who loses things. 

The process I have now works super well - buy the score, copy it, scan it to PDF (or just download public domain music from IMSLP), and upload to forScore (probably the most popular music reader for iPad). All I need to remember to bring with me is my iPad! I can categorize all of my music in the app, annotate with a finger, and download new scores from the web at any time. I'll take paperbacks over the Kindle any day, but this music setup has greatly simplified my life.

One of the best advantages of using an iPad is hands-free page turns. I finally got an AirTurn Duo, a bluetooth-enabled device which allows you to turn pages with your foot. This took some getting used to, as I'm already occupied with the three pedals underfoot ... Trying to coordinate the two extra pedals with my left foot without screwing up the other foot definitely had a learning curve - like a friend said, it's like learning to play the organ (and I sure have had some epic organ fails). You may flail about and feel clumsy at first, but the only way out is to practice until footwork becomes second-nature. So I did. And now I can turn my own pages at my own pace! No more asking friends to turn for performances or strategizing what notes to leave out so I can do it on my own.  

The only problem ---

I keep leaving my AirTurn under the piano. Remembering to check down there is kinda like driving a car for decades and then suddenly having to check under it every time to retrieve a critical piece of equipment. Just wasn't happening.  

After many embarrassing trips back to rehearsal spaces and lost and found centers, I decided I needed a fool-proof solution. Get a better memory you say? Nah. Enter the SMALL DOG COLLAR. $5 off Amazon. 

Loop the noose around the airturn and clip the other end to something you WILL NOT forget.

Hasn't failed yet. 

2017 - best year ever?

Happy 2017! How do you get ready for the new year? 

This is my favorite part of the holidays, when the buzz of parties and people and constant noshing has receded and the relentless drill of work has not quite restarted. At the end of every year, I try to sit down in a quiet place to journal about the year past and set goals for the one coming. After just a few days of contemplation, I feel more clear-headed and purposeful and brimming with new ideas, making me wonder why I don’t do this more often. 

In some ways, it’s easier to just keep going mindlessly. The periods of my life during which I was the least introspective were those spent in very demanding, client-service jobs (law and consulting) where I was at the bottom of the hierarchy. Years flew by, and all I had to do was keep showing up to the office. Compared to having a hard think about my life values, goals, and action steps, showing up was pretty easy. Plus, I was getting ahead, right? But where was the finish line? Where was I going?

In my experience, the American work culture does not believe in downtime. No one in any workplace ever suggested that I clear my schedule, unplug from technology, and just wander around aimlessly. But research suggests that our brains actually need downtime to optimize creativity, productivity, and attentiveness. Our bodies and minds remind us too, when they burn out. I remember taking 5 days of vacation in 2011 (after working holidays and weekends), and went to a piano performance camp. Music can be restorative, but good golly, wasn’t that just another attempt to cram more into my schedule? That year was a blur.  

Since quitting the corporate game and embarking on the journey of creating an artistic career on my own terms, I’m finally starting to get the value of introspection. This year, I'm resolving to schedule in regular periods of downtime so that they are protected as much as work or other obligations. These periods of “unplugging” can be scheduled into every day or at regular times during the year; Tim Ferriss blogs about doing both and how it has resulted in big ideas and bigger income.

One period during the day that I’ve grown to value is my long commute on the New York subway. Previously, I always lived within spitting distance of my work or school. Makes sense if that place is your life. This year, I finally moved out to a beautiful neighborhood where people seem to care about quality of life. At first, I dreaded the 45-60 minutes it took me to get where I could practice, work, or teach, but now I use the time to read, listen to podcasts, and indulge in free-form thinking. As a result, fewer days are blurs - they are guided by purposeful thoughts and meaningful actions. I'm hoping that these scheduled periods of downtime will make 2017 a very memorable one. 

Wishing you all a happy, productive, and fulfilling 2017!