About a year ago, I started a two-part post about leadership, and of course I never finished it. Link to first leadership post. So here’s part deux:
When you imagine a great leader, you might think of military leaders like Pharaohs of olden day Egypt, with thousands marching behind him, willing to sacrifice their miniscule lives for his holiness. I kind of imagine the epic battle scenes from Lord of the Rings, Aragorn leading an entire army, the hero, leading by his greatness.
But here is the Tao Te Ching on leadership:
When his task is accomplished and his work done, The people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally.’
This runs counter to conventional beliefs about leadership. Which would claim that it’s about power. That it’s about dominance. That it’s about making your presence felt.
According to the Tao, maybe being a great leader isn’t about having strict control over your underlings. Maybe the mark of a great leader isn’t about the leader at all, but the people the leader serves. That’s why great leaders are hard to come by, because like anything else, it’s deciding other people are more important than you.
Here’s a story about a great leader to emphasize the point.
A couple summers ago I worked in a lab at Harvard studying under a well-known scientist who had hundreds of publications. Of course, when I first started, I didn’t know anything. I had much to learn, but my boss believed in learning by practice, so he threw me into the fire, and I was clueless. I had to take care of some cells, but I didn’t know anything about cell culture. It was almost 5 PM on a Friday, and I couldn’t find anybody in the lab, when out of nowhere Ryan, one of the technicians, asked me if I needed help.
Surely, Ryan was headed out of the lab, and he had something better to be doing than waiting around watching me learn the routine skill of feeding cells. But Ryan stayed, and sat with me for an hour. He talked me through it as if he were having fun, and his positive attitude took the pressure off of me. My first day in the lab ended without me getting fired, so that was a win.
In this situation I have to question, who was the leader?
My boss, who was the designated leader, chosen by society as the leader of the lab?
Or was it Ryan, who was actually around the lab and making sure the newest naïve member of the lab didn’t go home from his first day dreading his second day?
Or did my boss set the tone for Ryan with his own hard-working attitude?
As always, life is confusing.
from ken
Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
In Bill Simmons-style, a running diary of Ken’s pre-wedding adventures, up through the ceremony.
9/13 Tuesday
4:15 PM: Ken leaves work until next Tuesday, forgets about HEK293 cells and mTfR2-venus chimeras for 160 hours.
5:00 PM: Ken thinks about everything he still has to do before the wedding, panics.
5:02 PM: Ken realizes it’s like four things, sits on the couch and reads a book.
7:43 PM: Ken and mom reunite. We drove in circles for about an hour trying to find Sellwood. Partly because Sellwood is hard to find, but I swear, if we could have taken the Springwater bike trail we could have easily gotten to Sellwood.
9/14 Wednesday
11 AM: My mom’s mom arrives in town, she came all the way from Japan! She is your traditional cute little old Japanese woman, the way cookie cutter grandmothers should be.
12:30 PM: After lunch, my mom, grandmother, and I are driving around downtown, and out of no where I saw one of my best friend’s from college Anna Griffin! I knew she was in town, but we hadn’t seen each other yet, and we had an awesome impromptu run in.
5 PM: Katie and her mom are moving Katie into our apartment. Ken walks into the apt. This conversation happens:
Katie: Hey, we’re reorganizing!
Ken: Oh, hey the couch didn’t used to be there. Huh, the plates didn’t used to be there. What? Yeah, of course I love the new location for the toilet paper.
Katie’s mom: Ken here’s some advice Katie’s dad would have given you. Just say, “yes dear.”
Marriage begins.
6 PM: Celebration of Ken’s first day of wedding vacation at Hop Haven.
My favorite part was that my friend Barry came. Barry and I ran Hood to Coast, and we are also on the finance team at our church, so we’ve bonded over the past year or so. Barry’s also a grandfather, but I keep telling him he’s way younger than he thinks.
About a year ago I decided that I was too mature to judge maturity based on numerical age. Mostly this was out of defensiveness for this statistic:
Age at marriage for those who divorce in America:<20 – 12%
20-24 – 39%
25-29 – 22%
30-34 – 12%
35-39 – 7%
I’m 22. I swear I’m a mature 22.
9/15 Thursday
3 AM: Ken wakes up. Officially starting to get nervous and having anxiety.
3:30 AM – 9 AM: Ken goes in and out through sleeping and waking.
10:15 AM: Ken, Katie, and our moms all go out for breakfast. I’m glad they all get along. We eat greasy American breakfast, I don’t think my mom likes it, but she’s polite.
Rest of the day, a nervous blur. Somewhere there was coffee and beer involved.
9/16 Friday
2:30 PM: Keyser and Ken are getting lunch downtown, with plenty of time to get to the rehearsal at 3:00 PM.
3:00 PM: Ken is lost. Close to Tigard, a suburb of Portland. Keyser and I have this conversation:
Keyser: Aren’t you stressed out about this?
Ken: Hmm, I’m not sure if I need to be, I should check with Katie.
3:30 PM: Ken finally arrives at the rehearsal. The minister is also late, so it blows over. I’m telling you, it’s even hard to find Sellwood with God on your side.
5:00 PM: Everyone arrives at Ken’s mom’s rental house for a Japanese rehearsal dinner. Lots of photo’s are taken.
8:00 PM: Ken and friends arrive at 24 hour fitness, pay $20 to work out. Ken plays in his token one basketball game of the year. He took a few shots, and one went in. It was awesome.
My friends Keyser and Heath have the following conversation about five times the rest of the night:
Heath: We could’ve pick and rolled all night.
Keyser: Yeeah, we were all about the pick and roll!
I’m still not exactly sure what a pick or roll is. Oh and this one:
Keyser: Hey, who do you think is taller, you or me.
Heath: Dude we’ve compared like three times already. You’re taller.
2:30 AM: Ken and Needham friends, who’ve known each other of upwards of ten years now, have a slumber party on Ken’s floor. This might be the last night Ken ever gets to sleep on a floor. For some reason, this is a luxury.
9/17 Saturday
12:20 PM: Ken has his first nervous breakdown. Probably the first of many. Ken doesn’t like posed photographs. Sidenote – I’m pretty sure I have some sort of social anxiety disorder.
3:00 PM: Ceremony starts with only a little bit of rain.
3:01 PM: Ken sees Katie and the bridesmaids doing a group prayer, so Ken tries to top them by doing a groomsmen huddle snap bomb. It’s complicated, but you take a snap in your hand, throw it in the air, and snap when you catch it at the bottom. It’s complicated.
3:30 PM: Ken walks down the aisle with best man, Mooks, tries to hold his hand, doesn’t work.
3:35 PM: Mooks tells Elm Bank story, epic. I almost cried.
3:45PM: Ceremony ends, Ken is a little bit relieved.
I wish I was as funny as Bill Simmons.
from ken
Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
I work in a research lab at Oregon Health & Science University. There, I study the cellular mechanisms underlying iron homeostasis, but OHSU is best known as the home of Gleevec.
Brain Druker, an oncologist-researcher at OHSU, discovered Gleevec. It’s a drug that completely cures a type of leukemia (white blood cell cancer) with few side effects. This is a stark contrast to other cancers, that are attacked by surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy that kill healthy cells and have deadly side effects.
Cancer is scary. It can be activated by external factors like smoking, but it is a disease caused by your own body. Tumors are caused by your own cells that grow uncontrollably. Cancer differs from say, diseases of poverty, or diseases of gender, because it is caused by the cellular mechanisms that are common to every human being.
As a result, cancer does not bias itself, and it has a tendency to pick the most devastating targets. Katie’s friend from home was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Said friend is only thirty, has a wife, two kids, and another on the way.
For years, scientists that study the cellular mechanisms responsible for cancer had been convinced that you could target cancer in ways other than blindly killing cells, by just targeting the mechanisms that cause cancer growth. Insert Gleevec, which targets a specific mechanism of leukemia cells, and only kills cancerous white blood cells.
Gleevec is a miracle of a cancer drug, and it will probably win Druker a Nobel Prize one day, but it’s greatest strength is as a proof-of-principle experiment. I recently came across the idea of proof-of-principle, and I’ve been intrigued by it.
Here’s a sidenote to explain proof-of-principle:
Before Pixar started its series of computer animated movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, it first launched a mini-movie to test out the principle of animating human facial expressions. It was a success, and Pixar went ahead and produced larger projects like Toy Story. The mini-movie wasn’t the ultimate goal, but it was necessary to open the door for a whole genre/type of movies.
The type of leukemia that Gleevec cures is a relatively rare cancer, but it has single-handedly proven that it’s possible to hone in and eliminate cancerous cells without harming healthy cells. It is, simply, the proof to all scientists, doctors, and thirty year old brain tumor patients, that cancer can be cured.
As a scientist, I’m interested in Gleevec as a proof-of-principle experiment in cancer research.
But my real interest in science is bigger.
Before Gleevec, everyone was satisfied with the marginal gains of traditional chemotherapy or surgery. After Gleevec, the paradigm has completely shifted, and there is an entirely new option for cancer therapy. It’s still a little bit hazy in trying to get on that road, but Gleevec has proved to the doubters that the road exists and that cancer can be cured.
Cancer researchers everywhere are hot on the trail for the next Gleevec, and I see them as the scientists trying to get on the Gleevec road. But I also see other scientists who are looking for the roads that lead to the Gleevec road.
And I think that’s what I’m interested in.
Are there shortcuts?
Are all roads leading there uphill?
Can you wander around with no maps and end up there?
As a scientist, I want to know what leads people to insights like Gleevec. What environments, what K through PhD educational programs, what sorts of communities foster these scientists?
Is it dumb luck?
Is it once in an eon creative geniuses given a touch and vision that cannot be taught?
I’m a scientist, so I think everything can be figured out. So I guess I am one to believe that it can’t be dumb luck, or an unteachable magic touch. So I want to know. I want to know the system that creates these great scientists and then set them loose.
from ken
Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
My stride is lengthening and becoming looser. I'm feeling better, thinking clearer, and remembering things I had long forgotten.
- Bernard Heinrich
Last week I ran in Hood to Coast, a twelve man 200 mile relay from Mt. Hood in Central OR, to the Pacific coast. The team splits up into two vans of six runners. Each runner within the van runs about a 5 mile leg, and then hands it off to the other van. You do this hand-off three times, and an individual runner comes out to 15-20 miles.
It’s a pretty intense running event, taking somewhere around 25 hours to complete, and each leg is basically a race, so people have likened it to a marathon-type effort. It’s a day with lots of hard running, confusion over handoffs, and not enough of sleep or showering.
Beyond the running, though, it’s just a super fun day, and really an extravagant adventure. The best way I can explain it: As I was coming up to my driveway to be dropped off, it felt like I had returned from an intense month long backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, except I had come and gone in a mere 35 hours. My friend John put it best: “It’s basically an hour of running, and eight hours of hanging out.” Sounds great.
One of my friends from church had invited me to be a part of his team, so I got to meet a lot of new running friends, and by the end of the day there was definitely a unique camaraderie among us. We went through a lot in those 35 hours. We heartbreakingly missed shower stops, chowed down on pizza and beer in the middle of a race, drank countless cups of free McDonalds coffee, and of course, supported each other through three grueling races.
The company was great, but much like the marathon last year, I was woefully unprepared. I’ve been dabbling on the bike and the elliptical, but the only running I did prior was three 55 minute runs the week before. I was sore and dead tired from each of those three runs, but I figured I’d survive.
My three legs were a mid-day 7 miler on a bike path, a midnight downhill 5 miler through the woods by bike light, and an 8 mile trek through the rural roads of coastal Oregon. They all went great, especially the last one. I ran exactly how I wanted, I tapped into all of my previous running experience, and put in an effort I can honestly say I was proud of.
Having taken such a long hiatus from running, I’ve been on about five runs since October, it was surreal to put in a real running effort again. It took me back to those feelings when I was running a great workout, tracking down my teammates, slowly pushing the effort and pushing further and further into pain, not knowing for sure how far you can push before breaking down, and yet not breaking down.
And I think in a weird way, such a surreal running experience, to share it with friends I might never see again, there is something meaningful to it. It adds to the transitoriness. I can’t explain it, but it feels comforting.
The last few months I’ve felt like my writing has been subpar. It hasn’t lead me to any breakthrough ideas, nor has it felt like I’ve put together a really polished and impressive piece of writing. As I was concerned about this, it made me realize, maybe my life is stale.
I just finished Michael Crichton’s memoir, Travels. Crichton attended med school at Harvard, and finished school to get his MD, but he felt like the field of medicine was toxic, and opted for a career in writing instead. Sidenote - he birthed Jurassic Park and ER, so that was a good call.
Travels is about his adventures in life, both inner and outer, as he tells stories ranging from climbing Mt Kilimanjaro to attending meditation retreats. Crichton believes that during times of struggle, it is absolutely necessary to leave your ordinary day-to-day life to reframe your perspective on life, and to provide you with the ability to problem solve differently.
As I was going through this life stalemate, I inadvertently had a Travels experience, Hood to Coast. It really got me out of my normal routine, interacting with people I don't normally see, and doing things I don't normally do. I can't articulate how it changed my perspective, but so far it has urged me to quit my volunteer position at the children’s hospital and get back into shape by going back to bike commuting. Hopefully it will cascade into more changes, and increased capacity to sacrifice for others.
from ken
Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
