Themes

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of my company was recognized for her leadership as one of the top 100 women in the hedge fund industry. She wrote up a speech to accept her award and distributed the transcript internally. In her address, she identified key themes that have run consistently throughout her life and career, and she concluded by urging others to do the same. It is an exercise in introspection and self-awareness that serves to guide one through life's decisions.

I have written in this blog, on and off, for a little over a year now. Reading over old posts, I can identify a couple themes that have been most prevalent in my mind for at least the past year or so.

1) Living probabilistically. For me, thinking probabilistically is a way to deal with the limits of individual agency, a mode of thinking that encourages one to confront randomness proactively by tweaking those variable that are within one's control. The focus is not on short-term variation but rather on long-term properties.

2) Intellectual humility. Having deep conviction in my own fallibility, I try to approach problems and questions from the perspective of discussion and not debate.

3) Responsibility. About a month ago, a high school friend was in town visiting, I was hanging out with her and her friends in my apartment, and conversation grew more intense and drunken. A guy threw out a comment about being answerable only to yourself and how you should pursue whatever career it is that makes you happiest. Invariably, I get a very strong and negative reaction to such comments. I believe in relational being, and I believe in a notion of responsibility that supersedes the individual.

4) The beauty and richness to be found in stories, especially those that connect in unexpected ways.

5) The power of ecology as a metaphor. For understanding cities. For understanding policy-making. For understanding people. Currently, I obsess over the idea of triple bottom line thinking and what I am now going to call Maslow's ecology of needs.

For now, I feel pretty comfortable with these themes being drivers of my personal growth for the years to come.

Yikes. There is such a thing as too much introspection. And indeed, you, my imaginary reader, are beginning to make me blush self-consciously. Too much sincerity. Too little sarcasm.