I’m back after a two week honeymoon in Hawaii feeling refreshed but a bit out of practice writing. Between the lead up to the wedding, the wedding and now the honeymoon, I’ve done zero journaling and no other writing to speak of. Here’s to getting back into it.
Those of you who were subscribers last summer for my engagement post may be expecting something similar around the wedding/honeymoon. But two weeks is a short time to draw conclusions about such an amazing day! And since the bulk of our trip was spent splayed out horizontally by the pool, I haven’t made much progress towards articulating how I feel about it all.
I’ll leave it at this: It was overwhelmingly spectacular, both the wedding and the initial feeling of being married to Anne. She put it best when she said “now we’re really family.”
Also – Loco Moco is delicious:
One thing I have had time to reflect on is how detached from work I felt while in Hawaii. I did not check email or Slack once. Not even out of curiosity. I’ve never been tethered to my phone in that way, but in the past I absolutely would have checked in every few days to see what I had missed. To double check that the stuff I left with people wasn’t being screwed up.
So what changed this time around? Maybe it was the fact that this trip was my honeymoon (!), and the thought of being that guy just didn’t sit well with me. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d just started in a new role at my company and had more or less transitioned out of my old one. Maybe.
More than either of those, however, was the tone that was set by my team. There was never a question of how my work would get done in the two weeks I was out. That was an afterthought, and instead, in conversation after conversation, I was told to have an amazing time off and to not think one bit about the office.
A cynic might say that this is an exception, it being my honeymoon and all. But I’ve had enough time on this new team to see similar behavior modeled for trips of all kinds. Out of office means out of office. Vacations are celebrated. Work will gladly be covered.
And in the two weeks I spent away from work, I thought a lot about the benefits of an environment like this. I’m sitting here on a Sunday, back from two weeks off, feeling very little anxiety for what will face me when I open my inbox. I know – from prior experience – that my team will not expect me to be firing on all cylinders tomorrow morning. They’ve been jetlagged, they’ve felt post-vacation-blues, and they’ll commiserate with me. I know – from conversations leading up to everything – that my team is genuinely interested in the wedding and honeymoon. Not just for pleasantries. They know Anne’s name.
What that does is set the tone. We are people first, employees second. It engenders a culture of openness that allows people to be themselves at work, and say things like I haven’t been able to focus in any meetings today or my kid threw up on me so I’m gonna take the afternoon off. And while it may not seem important in the moment, how you react to news of vacation as a leader cascades to dozens of other areas. An excited where are you going?! sends a completely different signal than a make sure to transition over your work, and the former is much more likely to inspire the type of behavior that makes a team great, like proactively training new hires, supporting each other through personal troubles and wanting to go above and beyond.
Best of all – it’s so incredibly easy! Vacations are fun and beneficial. Kids and spouses and parents and siblings are really important. Hobbies can contribute in meaningful ways to happiness and on-the-job satisfaction! And so long as a leader acknowledges as much, the rest of the team will feel comfortable doing the same.
I’m obsessed with this cascading power of modeled behavior. So many big goals become exponentially easier when the responsibility is shouldered by all of us, instead of a select few. Imagine if it were just the CDC, and not your judgmental friends and family, who told you to quit smoking. Or better yet, whose own smoke-free behavior inspired you to do the same. Imagine the vaccine rates if every level of American leadership, from Biden down to the teacher at the front of the classroom, got the COVID vaccine. Very little work on the part of the individual can move mountains, if done in concert with a multitude of other people.
I’ll leave this with one more work example. I had a returning intern reach out a few weeks back to ask me about the return to office policy of our company. She and I spoke once or twice through a webcam during the summer she interned. She had her manager, a summer buddy and other interns to reach out to with her question, but she chose me, despite hardly knowing me. Why?
Here’s my theory: I sent her a simple email, in the fall of her senior year, offering myself up for any questions she might have as she returned to the company. It took me two minutes at most, and yet in those two minutes I signaled to her that I was invested in making her return experience a good one. Maybe my peers assumed it was obvious she could reach out, but imagine the impact if everyone she’d connected with that summer took two minutes to remind her of the obvious!
Blissfully Ignorant
One final thing, on Afghanistan. What’s going on there is sad, and the way we’re reacting over here is largely sad as well. We always default to the blame game. Negative finger pointing aside, this piece by Ezra Klein is a good one and gets at what America could be if we wielded our power in other ways:
If we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.
One thing I’m struggling with is how happily I went about my life these past twenty years without thinking too much about Afghanistan. Maybe having the occasional “this is a mess” conversation with someone, but not much else. I think a lot of the country is probably in a similar boat. One messed up perk of living in the United States is how easily you can ignore the conflicts we’re a part of. World War II had over a million U.S. casualties – you were bound to know someone directly impacted. Afghanistan has had a little over 20,000. That’s a big difference when it comes to feeling the consequences of our country’s actions abroad.
Where that leaves me is the feeling that I don’t really deserve an opinion on the withdrawal and conflict in general. How could I possibly jump in at this point and make a judgement about whether we were doing any good there or if we’re leaving at the right time?
My only thought is this: What an amazing message it would be to the world if, after all of this, we welcomed with open arms any Afghani citizen who wanted to come to the U.S.
Logistics be damned.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
Incredible book that will break your heart and make you angry.
One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America – Gene Weingarten
An investigative journalist spends six years understanding what happened on December 28th,1986.
What I’m Listening To:
The Biggest Mistakes People Make In Relationships – School of Greatness Podcast
“[If] you’re with someone who hasn’t kind of worked out their stuff, they’re going to be fighting not just with you but lots of other people from the past.”
What I’m Watching:
The Donut King (Trailer, Amazon Prime)
Perfect example of what could be done with Afghani refugees today.