frameworks

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I love how good frameworks clarify confusing ideas. Although applying frameworks too rigidly can be harmful, I have found that a flexible and moderate approach to frameworks has added nuance and depth to the way I perceive the world.

Here are a few of my favorite frameworks.

Frameworks for Empathy

5 Love Languages
The 5 Love Languages framework was my first introduction to the power of frameworks in clarifying confusing relationship dynamics. It turns out that different people need different things to feel loved, and different people have different ways of expressing their love – so if we want to give and receive love, we need to be aware of the different “languages” that our loved ones may be using when they give and receive.

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Framework Source: 5 Love Languages
Graphic Source: Odyssey

9 Enneagram Personality Types
Like the 5 Love Languages, the Enneagram personality types give us a concrete way to think about how people are different. The Enneagram is especially helpful for understanding how other people may be fundamentally driven by different things.

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Framework Source: The Enneagram Institute
Graphic Source: Integrative Enneagram

Four Career Foci
This is a framework that one of my managers once discussed with me, and I haven’t been able to find online. The core premise is this: different individuals may be primarily motivated by company (winning and being successful), people (helping people around you grow and develop), society (making the world a better place), or growth (learning or getting promoted). It’s helpful to know what motivates the people you are working with.

Four Tendencies
This is the newest framework I’ve latched onto. It’s a way of thinking of how people are motivated, with a specific focus on how people respond to outer expectations and how people respond to inner expectations.

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Source: Gretchen Rubin

Frameworks for effectiveness

Important vs. Urgent
The classic prioritization matrix.

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Framework Source: Typically attributed to Eisenhower
Graphic Source: The Book of the Future

Likelihood of Success vs. Impact
A twist on prioritization that looks more closely at expected value (rather than immediacy).

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Framework & Graphic Source: First Round Review

Honesty vs. Kindness
When we are honest to others, we are sometimes brutal. When we are kind to others, we are sometimes not actually helping the other party. It’s okay for honesty to hurt, and it’s okay for kindness to be received – but there are ways to deliver honesty from a place that comes from love and care rather than meanness, and there are ways to be kind yet direct.

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Framework & Graphic Source: Radical Candor

Difficult Conversations
Difficult conversations are often actually made of three separate conversations: What Happened? How do I feel? And what does this say about me? I’ve found that I’m usually least aware of this last conversation, of how what’s happening makes me feel about who I am. When I can’t figure out why something is bothering me, the identity question is often at the root.

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Framework Source: Difficult Conversations
Graphic Source: Deepak Babu

Thank you to Catherine, whose art post inspired me to look into the four tendencies framework, which in turn drove me to write this post.

value, money, and time

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While exploring my relationship with music this year, I’ve thought often about the alignment/misalignment of the value you create, the money you make by creating value for others, and the time you spend creating value.

In my teenage years, I was convinced that the optimal relationship among these three ideas was to specialize in creating one type of value for the world, to only choose a type of value that people would pay money for, and to spend all of your time devoted to creating that one type of value. My mother, a passionate venture capitalist, had taken such a route for her own life. She would often tell my brother and me how much she loved her work, and she encouraged us to pursue what we love and make that our life’s work.

With time and different life experiences, I’ve realized that this framework doesn’t fit the place where I currently am in life. For one, I have learned that I want to create multiple types of value – I want to do work that makes a difference, and I want to support and enjoy time with the people I love, and I like having hobbies outside of my primary work. For another, I’ve learned that value and money are not always simultaneous, and that it’s possible to create significant value without making huge profits.

In the music industry, the contrast is stark. I’ve been moved to tears time and again by powerful songs and pieces, indicating just how powerful the value of music can be, yet I candidly don’t pay for most of my music, because most of it is available for free online. (I do contribute to specific artists, but the number is few, and the bar is high.)

Nine months into this exploration, I know for sure that there is something in the space of music, stories, and people that is the value I want to create. I also know that my technical academic background and work experience is in high demand and low supply, and that using those skills is a much straighter path to supporting myself financially, at least until I grow my creative skills further. So it looks like the value I create, the money I make, and the time I spend will continue to be misaligned for awhile.

Thank you to Nick for introducing me to Dana Fonteneau’s work and perspective, which inspired me to write this post.

the art of listening deeply

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listening broadly and listening deeply both inspire new ideas. listening broadly exposes you to variety that you can incorporate into your own work; listening deeply gives you insight into how to capture a specific idea in your work. i’ve found that the art of listening deeply surfaces across many fields:

in drawing and design

craft matters, but drawing classes aren’t just about hand motions. if anything, my drawing and design classes have been focused on helping me deeply see – how are light and shadow meeting on this building edge? how is this color made? being able to look for and build intuition for these questions is what makes my charcoal more accurately match the world, my paint more vibrant and true.

to draw well, see deeply.

in product management and leadership

speaking well matters, but good communication isn’t just about choosing the right words and saying them confidently. if anything, my experiences as a product manager have been focused on helping me deeply listen – why is my coworker feeling troubled about our approach? what is this user really thinking when they use the product? being able to listen for and ask after these questions is what makes highly effective and empathic leaders.

to communicate well, listen deeply.

in music and conducting

how you move your arms matters, but good conducting isn’t just about precise motions. if anything, my conducting class has been focused on helping me deeply listen – how are the violins in conversation with each other? how is the viola adding depth and color, or the bass driving the harmonic transition? how does the timbre of the string articulation affect the emotion? being able to listen for and account for these questions is what makes a conductor connect with her musicians.

to conduct well, listen deeply.

sulking, and the course of love

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“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

What I love about this book: it talks about the right problems. In a world filled with happily-ever-after fairytales and stereotyped black-and-white good-or-bad relationships, de Botton chooses to grapple with what it means for two real and imperfect people to be in a real and imperfect relationship. He describes the individuals’ feelings and the relationship problems in a way that resonates with relationship experiences as they might actually happen, rather than in some idealized form.

What I don’t love about this book: it sometimes shows wrong or oversimplified behaviors. I worry that people will treat this book as a guide for how to respond in their own relationships, and there were at least three problematic behaviors that bothered me.

  1. Effective communication is oversimplified. While it’s great for a person to apologize if he thinks he has done something wrong, the author seems to imply that an apology is sufficient to heal a relationship after a fight, when it doesn’t actually solve what actually caused the fight. I wish there had been a follow-up scene to the apology, in which the two people discussed what happened and why, demonstrated strong listening skills, brainstormed potential solutions, and then tried to make real changes in their behavior for each other.
  2. Honesty is not valued as highly as I think it should be. Even by the end of the book, one character chooses to “not hurt his partner’s feelings” and hide his affair from his partner forever, rather than tell the truth about his affair. I find this appalling. I’ll write another post about honesty in relationships sometime, but one of the reasons I think honesty is so important in relationships is that by being honest, you give your partner the agency to act based on the information you have, and by lying you are robbing them of that agency. That seems wrong.
  3. Polygamy and jealousy are oversimplified. The author seems, through one of the characters, to claim one authoritative view on jealousy and affairs: that affairs are only bad in that they hurt your partner, but that this is sufficiently damning to put affairs off limits. This is certainly a valid way to view sex outside of marriage, but it’s only one perspective, and in a healthy relationship, I think the two parties should talk about their views rather than assume how the other person would feel. Two people could certainly commit to a monogamous relationship, or they could mutually commit to allowing certain kinds of sex outside of marriage. Two people could agree that they would feel jealous and unhappy about it happening, or they could agree that they will aim to be happy that their partner is living their fullest and happiest life, even if it involves sex with someone else (see compersion: opposite of jealousy). In my view, the discussion and shared commitment is critical, and I’m disappointed that the book didn’t give it appropriate weight.

 

moral vs. descriptive

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Warning: unrigorous philosophical thinking ahead.

Specificity matters when you’re making a philosophical argument. Vague ideas may sound true at face value, but turn out to be false or trivial when their concepts are more clearly defined. In particular, I find that some folks don’t consider the possible distinction between a moral imposition on human action and a descriptive state of the world.

Consider the following two definitions of egoism:

  • ethical egoism (moral): a person ought to always act in their own self-interest
  • psychological egoism (descriptive): a person does always act in their own self-interest

Ethical egoism implies an obligation on how a person should act; psychological egoism is an observation of how people operate.

Believing one does not necessitate believing the other. It is possible to believe that people should act in their own self-interest, but that in reality many people choose instead to behave altruistically (for others’ best interests rather than their own). It is also possible to believe that people’s actions are ultimately always in their own self-interest (which would include seemingly-altruistic actions), but that it would be pointless to say that people should be motivated by such an obligation (since they already do so, by description).

Now, consider the following definitions for determinism:

  • determinism (descriptive): all events are ultimately determined by causes external to the will
  • ethical determinism (moral): a person ought to act as though all events are ultimately determined by causes external to the will

In this case, it also seems like believing one should not necessitate believing the other. In particular, believing that we have no free will does not necessitate that we ought to act as though we do not have free will.

To a determinist, this distinction might seem unimportant—if we don’t have free will, why does it even matter what we “ought” to do? Well, whether or not we believe we have free will, we still experience free will, and I claim (hand-waving-ly) that we essentially have to keep operating as if our will is free. And arguably, if believing we don’t have free will doesn’t necessarily impose on our moral decisions, it also doesn’t necessarily impose on how we write legislation.

(You might argue that there should be some principle by which we ought to always act in accordance with our beliefs, but I don’t think that’s a given. Life is a second order chaos system in which new beliefs/predictions can change the outcome.)

partner, rival, mirror, goal

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MangoldProject makes great jazz piano tutorials on Youtube. Several of his suggestions for finding motivation resonate with me:

  • Practice is a habit – Try committing 5 minutes a day every day for 3-4 weeks. It is more important to solidify this core habit (and eventually increase practice time) than to practice long hours intermittently.
  • Go to live shows and perform in them – Watching great musicians infuses you with fresh motivation to become better / more like them. Having to perform your work, especially solo, also significantly drives the desire to improve – using your fear of humiliation constructively – and often brings gentle validation of your progress, too.

My favorite of his suggestions is that one should find a partner, mirror, rival, and goal.

  • A partner is someone you practice with. This could be someone with whom you physically practice in the same place and at the same time (like a gym buddy), or someone going through a similar experience with whom you can regularly review practice progress (like discussing your practice session with another musician each day).
  • A rival is someone whom you see as your equal, against whom you can compare yourself. When the relationship is healthy, the rival activates your competitive instincts toward growth.
  • A mirror (or critic) is someone who gives you feedback about how well you are doing. A good mirror is someone whose opinions you value and trust, and who isn’t afraid to be candid with you about both the positive and negative aspects of your work. Teachers can be good mirrors. You can also become your own critic if you can reduce your personal bias; a good way to do this is to record yourself and watch/listen.
  • A goal is someone whom you aspire to become like. (While we personally know our partner, rival, and mirror, we often don’t personally know our goal.)

When I initially began working on creative projects, I felt the intense desire to operate alone. Solitude still has an important place in my creative process, but I’m much more aware now of how community affects my sense of motivation.

asian diversity over the years

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After a few years of living in New York City and becoming involved with the barbershop community, I’ve become more accustomed to being the only Asian person in rooms of 30 or even 300 people. I thought it would be interesting to look at how Asian my communities have been over the years:

Locale % Asian
San Jose & Milpitas 1, 2 48%
Palo Alto 3 27%
Stanford 4 21%
San Francisco & Dropbox 5, 6 33%
New York City – Manhattan 7 9%
All US 8 5%
Berlin 9 3%
Paris 10 1%

the space of hard choices

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transcript

We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what’s going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are “on a par.” When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn’t better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That’s why the choice is hard.

Hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that’s why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.

pride in your choices

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transcript

It’s harder to be kind than clever.
Cleverness is a gift. kindness is a choice.
Gifts are easy. Choices can be hard.

Will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

Thank you to Tanay for inspiring this post.

EDIT (2023-03-20): It’s interesting to revisit this post knowing what I know now about how Bezos has chosen to use his power and personal fortune. I still resonate deeply with the questions he has posed, but have to keep in mind that perhaps Bezos himself has not lived up to his own original intentions.

two thoughts on action

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action and self-narrative

we are defined by our action – the things we do, the artifacts we produce thereby.

we are defined by our self-narrative – the story we tell about ourselves, the way we describe who we are.

the story we tell about ourselves affects the actions we choose to take, and the actions that we notice ourselves taking in turn influence the story we tell about ourselves.

action and motivation

we are motivated, therefore we act – we have inner desires, and we take action so that the world more closely matches our mind’s desire.

we act, therefore we are motivated – through action, we discover beauty, or opportunity, or meaning; and so we build the motivation to take further action.

sometimes, all we need to do is go.