Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I still remember buying “Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day,” an old-school adult learning book that was never going to keep its promise.

I bought it during college, right after deciding that I was going to take a semester off to live in Spain.

I’d bought the book over a weekend, and the following Wednesday, I found myself on a bus to some volunteer work.

At this point, I’d put in two days’ worth of work—20 minutes, per the book’s lesson plan—and made my way through Chapter 1, which consisted of a dialogue about a lost suitcase (“Hola Señor. Yo he perdido mi maleta.”)

Sitting on the bus, with no smartphone to distract me, I started paying attention to two guys sitting nearby who were having an animated discussion in Spanish.

I started paying closer attention, eavesdropping more aggressively, and trying to get the gist of their conversation.

Of course, I could understand almost nothing. And I was so frustrated.

Think about how silly that is: a week prior to that bus ride, I wasn’t a student of Spanish, and I had no story about my now or future Spanish-speaking abilities.

But armed with my Spanish in 10 Minute a Day book, and—more important—the new story I was telling myself, I’d deluded myself into thinking I was supposed to understand something of this conversation.

The new stories we tell ourselves are powerful. They can motivate us to action, and push us to new heights.

But they also create uncomfortable tension.

I’m eating healthier now. Why haven’t I lost any weight?

I want to learn to swim better. Why am I still breathless after one length of the pool?

I’m resting to give this injury time to heal. Why isn’t it any better.

I’ve promised myself I’ll speak up more. Why didn’t I do it in that last meeting? 

I’m going to invest more in new friendships. Why don’t I have any plans on Saturday night?

I’m starting to learn something new. Why aren’t I better at this today?

 All learning takes time.

The time after we’ve decided to do a new thing, but before we make (much) progress.

The time after we can clearly see the gap between where are and where we’d like to be.

The time living with the tension between what we want to be better tomorrow, and where we are today.

Remember, when we fall short, it is almost never due to lack of skill.

It is because we cannot live with the discomfort of the gap between where we hope to be tomorrow and where we are today.

(Note: it’s easy to see this tension on an individual level. It plays out tenfold at an organizational level. It’s one of the many reasons change is hard.)

Being Happier Costs Nothing

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It’s easy too.

Notice I didn’t say being “happy” is easy, because it might not be.

But “happier” is always within our grasp.

We go through the world, and we experience things.

Those things are good, bad, terrible, surprising, wonderful, shocking, infuriating, or a great relief.

To all these things we can have a range of reactions.

Regardless of the thing that’s happened, we can then make our experience, and the experience of those around us, a bit better or a bit worse by how we react.

Within that spectrum, “happier” is always possible.

It helps, of course, to notice the things that systematically drag us up or down.

My reactivity and judgment drag me down.

Curiosity stabilizes me and sometimes makes me smile.

Gratitude always helps.

So those are the things I’m paying attention to right now.

 

 

Infectious Happiness

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Our new puppy is finally settling down. This means we get to relax a bit after the Defcon 5 of the last four months.

Having a dog makes no sense, really. They are expensive, inconvenient, they make it harder to travel and generally limit your freedom…

And yet I love them. What makes a dog worth it is two things:

  1. (for dog lovers only) Having a warm, fuzzy, living teddy bear in your house is pretty great
  2. (for the rest of us) Dogs go through life with infectious happiness.

When I pay attention to my dogs, I see their unbridled joy at the smallest things—a leaf, a smell, a toy, a squirrel, dinner.

It rubs off on me.

It reminds me that I can be more present, that I can take more joy in the small things, that there’s no reason to be stingy in giving away love and affection.

One thing I’m committing to in 2025 is to show up in a way that lifts others up.

What about you?

What is a company newsletter worth reading?

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That’s a question we first asked ourselves five years ago at 60 Decibels, and we’re pretty happy with the answer.

Up until that point, I had never come across a company newsletter I wanted to read.

So we decided to do something different. Each month, we share things that delight and surprise our team, focusing on cool findings from data, great visualizations, things that have to do with sound and listening, and, for reasons I can’t explain, surprising animal facts. We call it The Volume.

It’s joyful to create, and a point of pride for us when folks write to us to say, “this is the only company newsletter I read.”

You can check out the last 20 issues here, and here’s a taste of what you’ll find:

> Clean up on aisle…New Jersey
File under: how NOT to compost. 300+ pounds of pasta were recently found dumped next to a stream in Old Bridge, New Jersey. The pun pastabilities are endless here, but the winner from Reddit is undoubtedly “send these perpetrators straight to the pennetentiary!” Honorable mention for “someone is gonna have to pay a pretty penne to clean this up” as well as “throwing away pasta? What a fusilli mistake.” *Chef’s kiss*

> Plastic-eating bacteria
Ever wonder why your picky toddler won’t eat her spinach? Human taste buds change as we get older, including tolerance for bitterness and spice. The same happens with billion-year-old bacteria, whose new flavor of the week is plastic. Scientists recently discovered new strands of bacteria that have evolved to digest and decompose plastic. The bacteria’s change in appetite is caused by overexposure to plastic (cred: humans). The good news is a team of researchers saw the red solo cup as half full, and have begun blending the bacteria with materials to create a plastic that eats itself. Bon appétit, Bacillus subtilis.

> It’s ‘literally’ ‘fine’
At 60 Decibels, we spend months (nay, years) fine-tuning our survey questions (in English and 130+ other languages…our newest additions are Uzbek, Nagamese, Manipuri, and Khasi) to improve comprehension and ensure high-quality responses. So, we have a lot of appreciation for how tricky words can be. Enter this amazing Mental Floss post with 40 words that are their own opposites (aka contronyms, antagonyms, enantiodromes, or “Janus words”). Our personal favorites include some ones we knew—oversight, sanction, handicap—and some serious head-scratchers—help, seed, and fast. As in, “we can’t help it, we’re addicted to seeding tomatoes before eating them. We’re holding fast to our passions.” SOS!

> Your Data’s Daily Commute
Think your morning rush hour is busy? There’s a whole other traffic system happening beneath the waves: 870,000 miles of submarine cables shuttling data across oceans like a transcontinental subway system. But unlike most commuter lines, this transport network is remarkably reliable, it requires only 100 repairs a year! These are handled by skilled sea-faring mechanics who use electrical pulses (kinda like echolocation) to locate breakages, and haul cables from the seafloor to mend faults quickly. Compare that to the 18 weather-related disasters in the U.S. in 2022 that each resulted in $1B+ in damages and thousands of repairs to on-land cables. Note to self: for best weather-proof results, just add ocean.

Have you found other newsletters that you love? Send them my way—we’re always looking for more inspiration.

And if you want The Volume once a month in your Inbox, sign up here.

The Area of our Greatest Competence

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The early stages of our careers are a discovery process.

We are working to uncover the things we do best.

As we start to figure this out, over a period of years and across multiple roles, we try to deploy that “best-ness” as often as we can.

Our focus is to be doing as many things as possible that align with our greatest strengths—to make the places where we have the greatest competence larger.

Ironically, once we’ve risen far enough, and once our job responsibilities have broadened enough, we come to a crossroads.

Having risen through the ranks thanks to our competence, and having had our job responsibilities shaped by that competence, we are now better than most people around us at most tasks that come across our desk.

At this moment, our work transforms.

We now begin the multi-year project of making the set of things that only we can do smaller.

We do this by teaching.

We do this by learning how to identify talent.

We do this by learning how to hire.

We do this at becoming skillful at delegating—not just dropping things on those around us, but handing things off and accompanying our colleagues to ensure their success.

Most of all, we do this by seeing inevitable connection between “me doing this today, because it’s urgent” and “me getting stuck doing this forever.”

It’s up to us whether and when we start this journey.

Step 1: believe, in your heart, that a big part of your job is letting go.

(More: What Work Should I (and only I) Do?)

Invisible to Me

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Earlier today, I was reading an email in my Gmail inbox, and I did a double-take. The person who wrote it always writes in Spanish, but this email was in English.

And then I noticed this at the top of the email.

On the one hand, it’s empowering: she and I can keep typing away in our native languages, with essentially no barriers to written communication.

This could be useful in so many ways beyond traditional “translation.”

Think of all the places where we have unseen language barriers. For example, business people talking to product people talking to engineering people. It’s hard to overstate the communication barriers that exist in this game of telephone, and the value of being able to say “I want something that does this” and having that turn into great user stories that could then be handed to the engineers would be…huge.

That said, I have two major worries:

  1. The most obvious is that, while I can check the Spanish to English translation, since I speak Spanish, I cannot check the English to Swahili or English to Igbo or Businessperson to Engineer translation. In most cases the black box nature of translation won’t matter, but that’s certainly giving a lot of power to the machine with minimal / oversight. If the nuance matters, that’s worrisome. And even if it doesn’t matter, that’s giving a lot of power to whoever controls the engine.
  2. The number of things that will fall prey to this sort of magic — and it is magic — will grow at breakneck speed. I assume that Gmail could already have a default reply written for 80% of the emails I receive, and that their quality will keep improving. How soon until I open Gmail and when I hit reply there’s a “suggested reply” email already written out? That sounds good at first, but the “win” we’ll get in terms of convenience would come with an even bigger “loss”: ultimately it’s a person whose mind I aim to change and whose heart I hope to engage. When my email bot is talking to their email bot, two people are, quite literally, no longer communicating.

We’re already seeing the beginnings of tweens and teens trying to get away from their phones because, 10 years later, they know so much more about the downside of being tethered to their feeds.

I wonder what will put the brakes on the millions of conveniences AI provides, and what will happen to business communications over the next two years. Could it be that spending time crafting a thoughtful email to someone working for another company will soon feel like stamps and airmail paper?

The Helsinki Bus Station

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I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It is decidedly NOT a book about time management. It is about how to escape the tyranny of time in our lives, in the limited number of weeks (4,000) we spend on this planet.

Among other things, I was taken by this passage attributed to Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, about the lines leading out of the Helsinki bus station.

There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.

Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours.

Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station.

But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.

What’s the solution?

“It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

“Stay on the fucking bus” indeed.

One of the things I see often is people, three years into a job, getting stuck. They find themselves at the point that Minkkinen talks about, when the gallery owner says their work is unoriginal—but instead of the gallery owner, the voice is their own. It’s a voice that’s saying:

“I’ve learned all that I can in this job.”

“It’s no longer new.”

“I don’t see a clear path forward.”

Those reflections may well be true in some cases. However, if a job has been good for a few years, this discomfort might indicate something else entirely:  that you’re on the cusp of deepening.

Having succeeded in the first three years, you’ve mastered a set of skills. These are the core aspects of the first job or jobs, the stuff that’s easiest to describe.

This discomfort arises on the threshold of a new set of skills, the essential “soft” skills that really matter: managing and leading others; dealing with uncertainty; taking initiative; making tough calls; writing (some of) your own job description…

The list is endless.

It is a list full of skills that are harder to describe in a resume, that don’t boil down to a simple job title or a bulleted list of responsibilities.

But these are the skills that make all the difference.

These are the skills you might never get to if you’re constantly taking the taxi back to the Helsinki bus station.

The Problem with Jargon

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The first one is simply confusion: jargon allows our work only to be understood by the subset of people who speak your language.

In the case of economics, where the jargon is calculus, that might be OK.

But in most cases, jargon excludes people unnecessarily: if they don’t readily understand your language, they won’t understand your message.

The second problem is one of distance and separation. Jargon is a way to hide from reality, because technical language feels neutral, even when it’s not.

For example, in the world of social impact, it’s common to talk about measuring “outputs” and measuring “outcomes.” Both of those “O” words sound pretty good—sophisticated even—and neither carries much emotional content.

That’s why someone can say “we don’t measure social outcomes” and it can feel objective, rational even.

Whereas if someone were to say, “We count how many people are being reached, but other than that, we don’t have any data at all,” that might engender a whole slew of additional questions.

Don’t you want to know who is being reached?

Wouldn’t it be helpful to understand what their experience is?

Isn’t it essential to hear from them directly if the product is helping them — how much and why?

The good news is, hearing directly from people about what’s happening for them is increasingly common.

For example, the third annual 60 Decibels Microfinance Index was launched last week: real, comparable data from more than 36,000 customers representing tens of millions of microfinance clients.

Data about who they are.

Data about what their experience is.

Data about what’s working for them, and what can be improved.

It’s amazing how easy all of that is to understand when we state it simply and directly.

 

Fretting

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A little more than a year ago, I started playing guitar, to keep up with my daughter who has also been learning.

I didn’t know was how painful it is to play a steel string guitar: pushing hard on the strings was excruciating until I started playing consistently.

I’ve been fully self-taught, using the occasional YouTube video for advice and the Tabs app for the music. But a few weeks ago I came across the online course I’d been looking for. It includes the technique tips I’d been missing.

One tip in particular stood out.

It turns out that you are NOT supposed to put your fingers at the midpoint between two frets: doing so makes you have to push twice as hard (remember: finger pain) and it often makes the strings buzz.  Instead, you’re supposed to place your finger as close to the metal fret divider as possible. When you do this, you need less pressure, and the note comes out clean.

D chord finger placement – notice how his fingers are touching the frets.

So often the difference between the expert and the novice isn’t just skill, it is ease. Experts glide through things, novices sweat.

If you’re at the beginning of something, and things are going slowly, look for an expert who can teach you about the fret bar. New things are hard enough without the wrong mental model.

1,000 Breaths

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This year more than most, I’ve had bouts of sleeplessness.

I’ve always been a great sleeper, so this comes as a bit of a surprise. I generally have good sleep hygiene, include a reasonably consistent bedtime, bedtime routine, and no devices or other distractions in the room. I also start my days with a morning dog walk that supplies fresh air, early sunlight, and happy dog energy. And I do my best to remain physically active.

When I have trouble sleeping, I do a version of a breath counting meditation, sometimes with a body scan. I start at 1,000, and with each in-and-out breath cycle, I count down one. 999. 998. 997… At ~10 seconds a breath, I work my way through the numbers pretty slowly.

Most of the time, I get lost somewhere in the 800s. This could be because I get distracted by my thoughts, or because I doze off.

But occasionally this year, I’ve found myself getting further down into the smaller numbers, and I’ve found this frustrating. All the normal thoughts of “why isn’t this working,” “I’m just lying here, again, in my bed,” etc. start circling, and I get agitated.

Lately, what I’ve tried sitting with is the reflection that I am already resting.

The act of lying down, with a clear mind, breathing slowly in the dark, is itself restorative.

Meditating on this thought has help me be less goal-oriented in my relaxation (!!), and helps me be less concerned and tired if, indeed, I don’t manage to get myself back to sleep.

I’m hoping that the next few days don’t bring us all new reasons to feel stressed.

But if they do — and even if they don’t — we are all better served by being the most rested, rejuvenated versions of ourselves.

I hope you find this reflection useful, in whatever way you might adapt it to your body and your life.