What is your superpower?

What’s your superpower, and what routine do you do to invoke it?

I am convinced that everyone has a superpower, a special set of talents and experiences that they are especially well placed to get exceptional outcomes. You might not know yet what that superpower is, but once you discover it there’s an opportunity to build on top of it.

In the past I’ve picked up some of my own little habits that accumulated over time that look like superpowers, in their own way.

Postcards

I like writing postcards to people who send me postcards in return. This is a fun way to have slow-motion correspondence as well as to keep a stream of pictures to put up on the fridge.

I learned this habit from my grandfather, who would send hastily scrawled cards to his grandchildren when he was on geological expeditions. Grandpa Kay’s cards usually had rock outcroppings on them. Now my kids send cards to their grandmothers.

When I was travelling a lot in the 1990’s, there was a genre of “airport postcards”, sold only in airport gift shops and featuring aerial photos of those airports. In the pre-Internet of airplanes there was a lot of time to write in the air.

Paper rolodexes

I keep a few paper Rolodexes to go with my electronic directories. Even the best of the contact management tools can’t beat the tactile discovery of hand-written notes about your friends, acquaintances, and colleagues - little cards to jog your memory.

Online contact management tools have not gotten better over time. The “CRM” systems that proclaim that they do contact management got turned into sales funnel and forecasting systems, and they do a lousy job of actually helping you do anything except sell things to people. All of the “personal CRM” stuff I’ve seen to date is pitched squarely at 20-somethings who are dating in Silicon Valley. LinkedIn ate your carefully constructed list of professional colleagues, and sold it back to you.

Paper rolodexes are awkward, bulky, hard to find and easy to get out of date. They will never be as shiny as LinkedIn. That said they are great and I highly recommend the next time you find yourself in a thrift store to see if you can score one.

Organizing lunch

I organize a lunch group that’s been meeting for a dozen years. This group has stuck it out through a year of pandemic so far, and still has a regular Zoom call - though I can’t always make it, there’s a steady pace of friends keeping in touch until they can meet again in person.

At first the lunch group was very small, and we could meet anywhere. The great idea was to do a tour of all of the Korean restaurants in Ann Arbor, which easily had multiple months of a new bowl of bi bim bap every week. As the group grew I started a mailing list (see a pattern here?). When the Great Recession hit, everyone suddenly had time for lunch, and one week we had 35 people show up. Fortunately the restaurant (Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor) was very accomodating.

The economy got better, and the restaurant closed, and the lunch group got a lot smaller - mostly people who were either working independently or who are retired. The pandemic stopped our in-person meetings but we carry on with Zoom. I can’t always make lunch because of my current jobby-job but I try, and I look forward to seeing folks again.

Writing for publication

At one time, I regularly met a daily 500 word noon deadline. I’m not sure yet how I’d do that again, but I’d love to try.

There was a time that I could reasonably sit down in a cafe, order a fine cup of coffee, and produce publishable work at about the cost of a penny of coffee per word. Fancy coffee and the warm ambiance of a cafe both helped this effort. I haven’t yet determined how to replace the cafe in my own house.

There’s a lot to be said for the German word “sitzfleisch”, the ability to sit still for a long time and focus on one task. Writing takes focus and stamina and that’s very hard to find in a world of continuous interruption and continuous partial attention.

Bug finding and fixing

Filing and fixing bugs - that’s more for another story, since it’s a technological superpower. There were a whole lot of bugs and requests for help that happened during the course of my last big project. Understanding how to gain the interest and trust of an open source project to recruit people to test and patch and test again is a fine art that can be learned.

My favorite kinds of bugs have to do with the things you discover when taking old code and making it run on a new system, or taking new code and making it run somewhere the inventors haven’t thought of going yet. The sort of bugs you find are often tiny configuration issues, where the code works easily as soon as you teach it just a little bit about a new machine.

More rare are the mysterious bugs, where the behavior looks flaky rather than predictable, and the underlying cause is far, far away from the observed behavior. My favorite was the go pagesize bug on arm64. The observation was that Docker was mysteriously crashing in CI/CD environments. The code revealed eventually that Go was picking a fixed page size, and while that constant was correct in RHEL and CentOS, it was wrong on Ubuntu. The fix involved writing the necessary tests to make the crashes repeatable and not mysterious.