Tag: life

CHAPTER NINE: LIMINAL

The purgatory of being in-between naive beginner excitement and rational experienced master is basically where I live for most skills, just right there in the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner hype cycle. It feels like there’s a ton of support for “getting started”, and a ton of support for highly niche specialization, but just not a lot that helps you get through the purgatory of “intermediate”. This goes for learning a new language, or how to code, or baking, or entrepreneurship, or writing, or managing, or whatever. There’s so much out there to support the zero-to-one initialization, and then there’s deep subject matter expertise, but the “messy middle” is really hard, seemingly endlessly wandering through a liminal space.

I don’t really feel like I’m hitting “enlightment” in anything, just maybe finding how much farther down the “disillusionment” goes, but I’m also not anywhere near “inflated expectations” for any of my skills so that seems to put me pretty solidly in the “intermediate” range. I love picking up new things – I mentioned before that I challenged myself to learn how to bake macarons, and that I wanted to learn how to code so I joined a machine learning lab – and it’s so frustrating to get the basics down then just have zero resources to get through “intermediate” to “fluent” or “advanced”. There’s the 10,000 hours rule, which says that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, but that seems to emphasize the point that there’s always tons of resources to help you with the first 10-100 hours, but after that it’s just supposed to be grinding until you reach near-mastery and can get into the ultra-deep niche groups, I guess.

So how do you get through “intermediate” to be considered a “master”? Although it’s the 10,000 hour rule, realistically that’s more like 5 years of fairly dedicated training, so about the average American science PhD program. The first year is structured classes like high school or college, with more in depth materials, but after the first year or two it’s all unstructured research, largely self-guided with some input from your PhD advisors and thesis committee members. In the end, when you defend and get the “PhD” letters after your name, society generally recognizes you as a “master” in that subject, which is itself a hilariously sub-sub-sub-field specific niche, a tiny drop in the vast vast ocean of human knowledge.

In the things where I’m “intermediate”, I don’t feel like I make a lot of progress after those first 1-2 years of structured learning. Maybe because the rest all needs to be self-guided? I wish there was more structure out there for intermediate anything, to at least learn more about what I need to learn. 

I probably just need to learn to embrace the journey that is being “intermediate” and find ways to enjoy the process more.

CHAPTER SEVEN: CONFESSION

Well, clearly I stalled out during the conference. In my defense, I did actually stay pretty busy and made the most of the in-person face-to-face meetings, so I’ll give myself some space for grace. Admittedly, I actually sat down a couple of times to churn out some words, but the combination of the blank screen and the shame of having missed days had me deleting whatever I wrote and laying in bed instead. I’ll have a lot of chapters and words to make up if I’m going to hit the 50k goal by the end of the month, but there’s still time! There’s still a chance! 

In part, I probably just need to make this easier. I’m already noticing I’m holding myself up to a certain quality standard, when the whole point is to break that habit and just get myself into a quantity mindset where editing can happen later, and the main goal is to just get words onto the screen, even if they’re deleted later. It’s that “editing as I go” process that holds myself back in my grant writing and manuscript preparations, where I have some ideal story in my head that I never end up getting out onto the screen because I’m mentally in the revising stage before I even have anything to revise. If that doesn’t make sense, you’re probably better at grinding out that first draft than I am!

Funny enough, I’ve also had a lull in my leisure reading, so I wonder if there’s also some correlation between consuming content and generating it? It might also just be a spurious correlation, where I read for leisure when I have “spare” time, and I also write more when I have spare time; the basis is having spare time for both, but they end up looking correlated from dependence through that shared variable.

I’m also just openly admitting that I’m not writing as much as I hoped. Earlier today, I confessed to not making any progress on a manuscript for which I’d promised to have some updates by now, and while it wasn’t surprising or really blocking anybody’s work from getting done, it felt good to just admit that I’d dropped the ball. It doesn’t feel good to not have made progress, but it felt somewhat relieving to just admit that I’m struggling.

So hopefully this can be the day that I get myself back into the swing of things, and make a renewed effort to build up the writing habit!

CHAPTER SIX: CONFERENCE

I missed a day. Zero words written yesterday. But I’m back in the saddle now, coming at you live (-ish) from Toronto for the Human Proteome Organization’s annual conference.

The conference has been, of course, my top of mind, and I thought I’d give a whack at the trite, over-done “conference advice” content. So here’s my take on that, trying to both add something new but also reiterate the common yet important bits.

First, bring comfy shoes. Big conferences like HUPO and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) and JP Morgan Healthcare (well, the BIO partnering part at least) are so spread out that having uncomfortable shoes is going to ruin your whole week. Comfy shoes can still be cute, but break them in before the conference at least. This was the very first advice I got when I went to my first ASMS and it’s still true. I think about it every time I pack for a conference.

Second, survival kit! I like to have some minimal first aid (bandaids, pain killer) in my work bag all the time, but for conferences I also stock my hotel room with water, granola bars, and some treats either from a grocery store or a convenience shop. Conference venue food is almost always overpriced and under-nutrition’ed, so having (somewhat) healthier options in my room keeps my costs down and helps make sure I’ll get through the week with a somewhat functional body and mind.

Third, mental health. To people who know me, it might be surprising to hear that I’m actually pretty introverted. To the people who _really_ know me, it’s not a surprise at all. I think there’s a two-by-two matrix: introverted vs extroverted, socially skilled or not. So some people are the stereotypical extroverted and socially skilled; some are introverted and not so socially skilled. But there’s also people who are extroverted and not so socially skilled. I’m thinking of people who don’t pick up on when the conversation has moved on or talk way too close in your personal space, stuff like that. And I’m maybe socially skilled but get quickly drained without quiet chances to recharge. So if you know you’re introverted (either the socially skilled or not so skilled) then make sure you’re intentionally scheduling some recharge-time for yourself so that you can show up for social events with the right energy.

Other things for mental health might be packing some exercise clothes to get in a run and making sure you schedule intentional times to get that run or gym session in. You might schedule a sight-seeing break. You might schedule some calls home to talk to friends or family during a quiet moment. Maybe you even take a nap. Which leads to my last thought –

Finally, make sure you’re getting the full value out of the conference. The main value of a conference is the in-person meetings and connections.The networking sessions and the happy hours, the poster sessions and the coffee line chats. Maybe this is controversial, but in the age of preprints and webinars, I’m not so sure the value of a conference is going to oral sessions. Not to mention how packed and overwhelming conference schedules like HUPO and ASMS are, where every hour is filled with content. If you spend all day running from one session to another, it’s unlikely you’ll have the energy to show up fully for the networking parts of the conference that count the most. So if your mental health is going to be better with a quick nap or reading a few chapters of a book, then by all means skip that afternoon oral session so you can recharge for the poster session. Conferences like HUPO and ASMS are marathons, not sprints.

Putting in “face-time” is of course the main point, but you also want to build on those initial connections. Having physical business cards or at least an up-to-date LinkedIn profile will help you instantly exchange contact information with the people you meet. If you’re like me and have trouble remembering names and faces, you can write a quick email or LinkedIn message to the people you meet as soon as you can, and note in your message how you met them and what the next steps might be – “Hey, Bob, it was great meeting you at the ABC happy hour, I really enjoyed talking with you about sample prep. I’d love to get the link to the paper you mentioned, please send that over when you get a chance after the conference!” Something like that.

Some of that last paragraph starts to veer into another topic, “PR”/branding/”reputation” for scientists or other professionals, but that might be another topic for a different day.

There’s a few things I specifically have been doing that help me. Some are kind of silly. For example, I like to get to the conference at least one full day before the conference itself actually starts, and use this time in the physical conference setting to get myself in the mental mindset for the conference. I usually finish up some slides or scout some quiet 1-1 meeting spaces, and I get my “conference persona” on – I do my nails, put on a face mask, and lay out my clothes for the week. Once I’m all organized, I feel “ready” to take on the week, and usually I end up getting a chance to grab coffee or beers with someone else who arrived early, and I can kind of get in a “warm up” socialization event before the rush of the conference really starts. This is also my chance to schedule some grocery delivery or hit a store to stock up on my essentials: water, electrolyte mix, protein bars, and some kind of gummy candy. A girl needs a treat to look forward to when she gets back to her hotel room after a long day of socializing, okay?!

CHAPTER FOUR: COMMUNITY

I’ve been pulling together a social circle of chief technology officers (CTOs) in the Seattle area, with the intent of building a similarly-minded community of people to share triumphs, failures, and general camaraderie. It’s not a huge lift, beyond setting a calendar event and adding contacts as I meet them, and hoping that people make the time to come out on the prescribed date at the designated location; however, even this effort is perceived as a community-building accomplishment. To be honest, it’s pretty selfish on my part, because whether I’m giving advice to help someone avoid my own past failures, or I’m receiving advice from someone else’s triumphs, anything that helps the overall startup community in Seattle succeed is a “rising tide lifting all boats” and ultimately helps me look better. 

There’s a thing here called the “Seattle Freeze”. It’s supposed to be a particularly region-specific thing where people just don’t want to make new friends, so we all just hole up on our own. There’s additional specific layers to it, like saying to someone “Oh yeah we should meet up again sometime” but then totally ghosting them forevermore, and the “Seattle Freeze” is about building the long-term, regular-frequency connection to other people to build a new relationship.

I’m not sure if it’s really a region-specific thing. Having been a military brat growing up, moving hundreds if not thousands of miles away every 2-3 years, I got pretty accustomed to being a transplant and needing to reform a social circle regularly. It helped me out a lot when I went to college, and of course when I moved again internationally to South Korea (language barrier and all), and I’m not sure there was anything uniquely regionally specific to Seattle when I moved here for graduate school.

I would ascribe it more to the “transplant”-heavy nature of Seattle. Many residents aren’t natively Seattle-ites, but rather moved here for job or otherwise economic opportunity. So with many people not growing up here, with the inherent benefits of making friends through shared childhood experiences like being classmates in school, there’s not that regular, forced intersectionality, sharing the same space with similar goals on a predefined, regular schedule to see each other. That’s pretty common across all “middle-aged” relationship-building. Without the shared space (physical and mental) on a regular schedule, it’s hard to meet new people and build a relationship regardless of the geographic region. Any time there’s a bifurcation in life, it gets harder to maintain an easy relationship without committing dedicated effort. For example, pairing up with a significant other or having children pretty drastically changes the day to day routine for an individual, and that makes it harder to maintain a previously-established status quo like going out for happy hour beers after work or going to shows or concerts on the weekends. Similarly, less positive life changes cause a shift in status quo, like losing a job or having significant health issues. All of those changes can lead to altered relationships, and make it hard to “make” or “keep” friends.

So all of that said, I don’t think it’s unusual to make new friends for Seattle specifically, it’s maybe more a specific demographic that happens to move to and live in Seattle that has more of those changes in status quo without the easy historical relationships of growing up and going to school together as native Seattleites.

Instead of depending on those easy relationships, you have to build your own community. Being the perpetual “new girl” in school growing up, I built some positive and negative responses to community building. The maybe more negative side was retreating into escapism, mostly in devouring fantasy and sci-fi books; the more positive side being having some resilience to loneliness and enjoying my own company enough to put myself out there when I wanted more of a connection.

At least here, where I am, building community has not been much of a challenge. I have fortunately found that most people want to build community themselves, and will respond pretty favorably if you give them a seed to nucleate their socialization around. Sometimes this is as simple as dropping a suggested time and place to meet and then disseminating that to people; other times it’s more devoted efforts to invite specific individuals and incentivize them to attend a more elaborately planned event. Either way, in my experience, the response has been overwhelmingly positive when I put in some effort to organize something for people to gather.

That effort doesn’t even have to be something huge. It can be as simple as throwing up an event URL – sites like Luma make it super easy to plug in a time and place, and then just disseminate the link for people to register themselves – or it can be as involved as essentially planning a wedding, with all the associated catering, invites, and venue logistics to fund and secure. Either way, the intent is the same: giving people a central “seed” to nucleate around. The level of effort put into setting that seed might differ, but it’s a nucleation point either way.

In the end, I think there’s something to be said about the quote from Jim Rohn going “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” or something like that. It’s not absolute – you obviously are also influenced by people in your past, and people you’re yet to meet in the future – but there’s a lot of value in intentionally building out the type of community you want to be involved in, curating who those people are and deliberately setting time and place to connecting with them regularly. Sometimes you don’t have to do that yourself, there’s already communities built up, like run clubs or gym classes or woodworking studios, but sometimes there’s still value in starting something new, especially starting small with a niche but dedicated group that has shared values or motivation.

Building a community isn’t particularly easy, and requires a lot of rejection, whether people just are not interested in actually showing up or people flaking out at the last minute because there’s not enough incentive to be there or life just gets in the way, but maintaining some empathy and focusing on the people who do show up leads to a core relationship you can rely on and build a network of community around.