Paul Whitaker's blog

A decade ago, I joined the Army with the expectation that I would do something with computers, get some money for college, get to travel, satisfy my want to serve, and make it so others didn't have to.

The gist of what I did in the Army as a Signals Intelligence Analyst was use brains (mine and others') and computers to piece together puzzles, make educated guesses about what would happen in the future, and pass the knowledge on succinctly and clearly to commanders who could act on it. It was mostly one-way communication so I have little knowledge of the impact of the work I did, but I feel a great pride knowing that I was in a position to pay attention, study, document, and collaborate with others. Maybe the work I did helped save lives, or maybe I happened to have not had the right nuggets to make that happen. Either way, I was working for that goal, and I am proud to have done it.

One of the most agonizing decisions I've made is to leave the Army. I felt useful, I think I was pretty good at my job and the Army games, and it was satisfying work. My passion for computers and writing software drove me to pursue a college degree with the hope that somehow I would get back into doing work that made me feel this prideful again. I looked at a programming job for a defense contractor in Texas, and had actually committed but backed out because the circumstances weren't quite right.

Some influential people in my life tried to convince me that I can make valuable contributions regardless of my vocation (by way of volunteering and civic involvement), but I refused to accept that I shouldn't be able to marry the two. I need meaningful work.

In a calculated but emotional leap of faith, I left a decent job with no clear prospects. I interviewed for and found another job, and did the same thing shortly thereafter. It just wasn't working. It didn't fit. I didn't know exactly why, but I knew I had to make some changes.

I decided to "drop out" and go into business for myself, though I didn't pour all of my energy into growing a business. That's not what I wanted either. I had learned a few things in the process.

I took about 3 months off of full-time work, working part time on a project for IHSAA, playing a lot of World of Warcraft, finishing school, and doing BYB. I amassed substantial credit card debt due to school bills, BYB, my mortgage and utility bills, and not changing my lifestyle to match my diminished income.

After a while, my credit cards could no longer sustain my lifestyle. I thought about the Army again. It'd get me back in shape. I'd go to Warrant Officer Candidate School and become a technical leader like CW3 Murphy. It would be my shift from a doer to an enabler, and this represented my desires well. Even so, I was concerned that I was chasing a dream that might no longer be there for me in the Army. Since I've added a few years, maybe I wouldn't be able to play the Army game well, or maybe I would become more cynical of the real impact I was making on the world. I was lucky to have my friend Sheryl to discuss this with, and she helped me realize there might be other ways for me to get what I want.

Around that time, I got an unsolicited email from Microsoft. It was for a consulting position in a small section of the U.S. Federal Services division based in Philadelphia. I interviewed well over the phone and it sounded like something I would be up for pursuing. The recruiter mentioned other opportunities in the DC area, but said they were more competitive so she thought with my qualifications I might fit better into the Philadelphia job. I decided that I wanted to pursue the DC opportunities, and things fell into place for me. The Philly section needed someone with different experiences, but they were impressed by me and passed me off to the DC folks.

Although I had considered moving to the DC area in the past, I hadn't been looking there. I probably wouldn't have taken, or even noticed, a job working for any other company.

I got hired in what was a leap of faith by someone high up in the management chain. I had made a great impression in Philadelphia with regards to my technical knowledge and want to be doing useful work, and this energy carried forward and got me the job that I have today. I was the first of an experimental hiring strategy where I didn't qualify 100% for the positions for which they were hiring. The company and my local leadership committed to sending me to training to fill in the gaps.

Now I work for Microsoft. I'm a consultant with a focus on software development with SharePoint. I'm assigned to the civilian side of the U.S. federal government, and do work related to law enforcement. In my current project, which seems like it might be finishing soon, I've done some work in SharePoint and InfoPath that will free up investigators' time so they can focus on the important work that they do.

I just returned from a 2-week trip to Seattle. In the first week, I attended TechReady, a week-long internal training conference.

The second week, I learned about an application that Microsoft created for collaboration and analysis in the law enforcement field. I'm excited that it looks like I'll be participating with this mission in some capacity. The instructor of the class told a deeply emotional, personal story about the impact that the application had on one person's life. It was a genuine, tangible example of software helping make the world better.

I work for a company that shares my civic conscience. The role that I fill is one of an enabler. Through my own work, my leadership, and my willingness to push forward with new challenges, I create the circumstances that allow others to do important work in a more effective way. My work has a verified impact, requires me to be a strong leader and technician, and provides jaw-dropping potential for learning and growing my abilities so that I can continue to expand my impact. This is why I am where I am, and why I do what I do.

While I was trying to make something work in a particular way that I figured it should, I was doing some other things, and some of them were actually pretty great. Here's a list of some of the awesome, fun, cool, or otherwise more upbeat things I've created or done this year:

1. Moved to a new city
2. Sold a house
3. Watched Lord of the Rings with a live orchestra
4. Bought a bunch of socks
5. Ate great food
6. Made my apartment cooler with a new couch and rug
7. Traveled
8. Shared myself completely with someone
9. Passed four Microsoft certification exams
10. Sat on the edge of Puget Sound, watching boats go by
11. Soaked in a beautiful sunset
12. Fell in love
13. Created software to help make the world a better place
14. Confidently started a new job
15. Appreciated good music
16. Continued not drinking caffeine
17. Learned to appreciate vegetarianism
18. Got plenty of sleep
19. Stopped the bleeding on my credit cards
20. Got great customer feedback about the work I've done
21. Made a bunch of new friends
22. Reconnected with old friends
23. Completed Beyond Your Best's "Vision in Action" training
24. Looked fear in the face, and laughed at it
25. Learned that rejection is OK
26. Experienced something for the first time
27. Contributed to an open source software project
28. Appreciated a friend
29. Wore sunscreen
30. Joined a softball team
31. Kicked butt on said softball team
32. Shared something intensely personal with a bunch of people
33. Showed a friend around town
34. Discovered raw oysters
35. Got involved in politics for the first time
36. Documented my life in pictures, twitter, friendfeed and my blog
37. Deleted a bunch of old emails and chat logs
38. Walked overnight as part of a walk-a-thon
39. Raised over $200 for a food shelter
40. Delivered groceries for 8 needy families
41. Magically turned a matchbox into a tambourine
42. Became less prejudiced
43. Realized how powerful I can be
44. Painted some rooms in a high school
45. Volunteered to be an officer in a non-profit organization
46. Inspired someone to be open with me
47. Learned how to dress a bit spiffier
48. Found a regular hairdresser
49. Avoided doing something I probably shouldn't have been doing
50. Learned to appreciate the good in my life

I see her message in my inbox, and my stomach grumbles the way it does when I’m late for something important. Fucking finally… something, at least. I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing or if I should've hit "send" at all. I wonder which 10% of my message she’s responded to, and which of the pieces that were most important to me she’s chosen to blow off completely. I wonder what lies within: unsolicited feedback of how I should behave? what I shouldn’t do? a veiled insult about my choices? I try to predict which form of smug or dismissive tone it’ll contain. I wonder if I should delete it without reading it, though I know I could never do that. I return to questioning why I sent her a message in the first place. Am I being needy? Am I letting her see that I spend way too long drafting something simple? Does she know the agony that goes into the intricate crafting of my deleted words? Does she know what I don’t want her to remember, that my tenuous hold on living without her suffers with every successful exchange? Are her crass and cold responses her way of telling me to get lost? Why would I need someone in my life who treats me and makes me feel like I’m not worthy of a cordial, complete or timely response? Well, it's something, at least...

Now that TechReady (an internal Microsoft training week) is over, I'm spending the weekend in Seattle, effectively by myself. I decided to attend a class here next week so I'm sticking around until then. The class will be extremely valuable to my career, will enable me to provide an important service to one of my clients, and fits exactly with my vision for the world (one in which technology eliminates crime and terrorism).

I had intended to spend the weekend helping at a BYB function with my friend Sheryl in Indianapolis. There were a couple of draws to helping there. BYB was an intense experience, and Sheryl shared in my experience. As a volunteer I was looking forward to sharing something new with her and mooching off of the experiences of the group attending the event. I was hoping this would give Sheryl and me a new experience to draw from, and potentially change the way we've been behaving towards each other lately.

My choice about this weekend got me thinking about the choices I have had to make between my past or present, and my future.

Sometimes I have to decide between experiences that build continuity with people I know, and new experiences. More often than not, I choose new experiences.

Many would describe moving forward confidently into an unknown situation as courageous. In my case, however, maybe this is the status quo. It doesn't scare me to change. What is a stretch for me, and what might require my courage, is doing things that strengthen, improve, and sometimes repair, my existing relationships and situations. I recognized this in my own BYB experience. I had decided to focus on connection, and after working on it some, realized that I'm not terrible at upping my connection numbers; it's depth of connection that I have struggled to maintain.

I have had plenty of experiences. I've traveled, trained, worked, walked, run and partied in various parts of the world. I've shared these experiences with many different people, and I think there's power in that. I've created connection with people, and shared myself with them. Many of them have become my friends. I've affected most of their lives in some small but powerful way, and I appreciate that I have the power to do that. They've all helped shape who I am and who I will be.

I know that my disjointed life, one in which I'm bouncing around and refusing to accept comfort, makes it more difficult to share many experiences with the same people. I make the choice to live this way, and will continue to do so. This ability to push into unknown territory to pursue lofty goals and visions is my biggest strength. But it conflicts with my want to create deep connections, and precludes me from remembering and learning from my past experiences.

To put it dryly, in Army terms, love and continuity are a force multiplier; they enable people to be more effective.

I've always expected that among my deep, loving relationships, I'll find someone who will share my commitment and longing for continuity. We'd offer continuous insight into each other's lives based on our shared history of stories and frequent shared experiences.

My mother has been my most important source of this continuity, and I appreciate that she provides this for me. Sharing with her is like a mirror for me that I can use to check the sanity of my decisions and recognize unintended consequences for my actions. Our conversations also give me often-needed perspective. There are, of course, facets of my life that I won't share with my mother and she's not always available. So there are gaps in the transparency of my life (as is probably the case for everyone), and my experiences get shared across disjoint groups and lead to the situation where I feel nobody really knows me, and I forget a lot of what I've been through.

It's a self-promotion problem more than anything, I suspect. I'm the one who knows me best, so the continuity comes from my ability to share with others.

It takes a long time and a lot of love to build mutual understanding of who we are and how we live our lives, so I've expected for a while now that I would have one "most important" relationship in my life, someone who I love and who loves me, and who wants to commit to sharing the majority of each other's experiences, stories and ideas. And I've always suspected this type of intimacy would be associated with romance. For whatever reasons, it's been hard for me to separate the two; maybe they're intertwined as part of a biological or divine plan for the advancement of humanity.

My friend Shelly forwarded me this email recently, and I "replied all" with a note that I give no credibility to these types of messages. My contention is that email messages like this, though they may have some basis on facts, are sensationalist and intended to skew popular opinion in a way that is subversive and manipulative. Also, I feel that it's irresponsible to forward these types of messages; they reflect poorly on the sender regardless of intention and whether or not the list of recipients includes people that have an ability to analyze their contents. The message lists no sources and its language is clearly extremely biased. I didn't feel that this opinion was up for debate, but apparently it can be considered a valuable part of the election process. Feel free to discuss in comments below.

My level of tolerance of others' behavior is generally aligned with liberal social norms, which means that I'm pretty much OK with most things that are legal and (occasionally "or") generally acceptable as a personal choice. There are, of course, some behaviors that I don't support.

The largest facet of human beavior that doesn't jive with my sensibilities is intolerance itself. That presents a little bit of an odd challenge. The challenge comes down to defining my role when presented with someone's behavior that I don't like or is in conflict with behaviors with which I want to be associated.

For a while, I've allowed this to depend on my status with that person:

• Among friends, I think it's within my mandate to make my opposition clear, to set or present a counter-example, and generally try to influence the behavior away.
• Among acquaintenances and strangers, I simply try to maintain my own integrity of thought and distance myself when possible.

At some point, I have to consider the impact of my association with the behavior on myself. Am I strong enough to resist adopting the behavior with which I disagree as my own behavior? Is my commitment to my friends (and to humanity) more important than taking the easy way out (avoidance)? Finally, what doors am I closing for myself by being guilty by association?

It's a leadership challenge. Recognizing it as such, maybe I can apply my thoughts about leading by getting out of the way to it. Perhaps I can accept that my insistence and belligerence about somebody's behavior (even among friends) has the same effect as making demands of a subordinate. They might go along, but they won't "own" the decision and internalize it. Maybe my role is again to set an example, educate them on my point of view, and give my love and support despite the conflict.

Alternately, standing up for somebody sometimes involves going against the grain and being the person who points out what they refuse to accept for themselves, that they're wrong. For me, this is always the case with intolerance.

I want to share this video slide show that I made shortly after I was in Bosnia in 2000 (it all its auto-play, auto-repeat glory). I have some very strong memories from my trip there, and I'll follow up with another post sharing a lot more of my experience. This is the closest I've come to the horrors of war (I was a mere spectator to the aftermath), and it haunts me, yet I'm inspired by the regrowth. This city was under siege for nearly 4 years, and some of the terrorist-generals in charge are still being harbored, like this assbag, Ratko Mladić (though Wikipedia cites rumors of his possible death in 2006, which would be a shame, for justice's sake).

The video shows the contrast between the tragedy of the city and its inhabitants, and the way that our group was able to make the best out of the situation (40 of us stuck on top of a hill) and let our hair down a bit.

I like to be self-critical, to analyze the crap out of my lot in life and how I choose to spend my efforts. I'm fortunate enough to have an amazing friend, Sheryl, who likes to do the same, so we feed off of each other. What's even more powerful is that I can slap some thoughts on this here page, and somebody else might benefit from it.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin

I remember this quote whenever I sit down to blog. How is this worth reading? What benefit could others get from this?

What I've decided is that those questions aren't mine to answer. This, my personal blog, is an outlet for me to create a conversation with the world that may or may not be well-received (or received at all).

I have faith that some people are receptive to hearing others' points of view, or being cued into where others spend their energy. In that light, here's where I've put some of my thoughts lately.

1. Fading attraction and its relationship to commitment
   
   I think it's possible to stay attracted to someone forever, but in the event that physical attraction isn't there anymore, people can make the choice to stay committed to the person they love for purely emotional reasons. I guess I would expect that to be the case in a potential partner, but the idea of being in an attraction-less committed relationship (or having someone feel obligated to me in that way) makes me a little sad.
   


2. Volunteering my time means more, but is less economical
   
   It's more rewarding for me to give of my time than to give my money and ask others for money. It seems more genuine and outwardly focused of me. I do, however, recognize that groups need money as well, in order to keep up their good works. So I'll also donate when I can... and, economically speaking, if I have the choice between earning money and giving, and doing work I'm not well-suited for, I'm theoretically doing a group more good by giving. In related news, I've been volunteering quite a bit. In fact, last week was the first of four consecutive weekends where I'm donating one of the two days to helping others.
   


3. Regurgitated technobabble
   
   There are a lot of powerful technology leaders on my twitter and in my RSS feed reader. Most of them do an amazing job of disseminating new, or at least interesting, information. For my part, I tend to focus on things that I do (like code that I write) when I post on my MSDN blog. But as a connected person, I understand I may be more in tune with happenings in the tech world than others who read my articles. So I've decided to focus at least some of my attention on highlighting awesomeness around the community, even if it becomes blasé to me.
   


4. Motivation to restart my running regimen
   
   I'm being a bit of a wuss when it comes to my running routine. I have had some time where I could've run a few times this week, and I just think back to what a struggle it was when I tried to get started last time, and find some way to rationalize it away. I did learn last time, however, that my lungs depend on muscles and need rest, so when I had days where I felt short on breath, that was why. This time around, I might be able to avoid getting hurt by cross-training with my bike. With the longer days, I'm running out of excuses.
   


5. You are a gift to me
   
   Having this outlet is very empowering. I don't really know who you might be, but you give me a great gift by reading. I feel strength from (and am humbled by) knowing that you might have some interest in what I have to say. Thank you.

So, I'm a "green" (13-12-7-4 actually). And I'm trying to change the fact that I don't have a girlfriend by analyzing how I'm showing up, seeing how I can make tweaks to the way I present myself, and learning things about myself that help me choose relationships to pursue that might work well. In a particular personal relationship of mine (with a certain social nucleus), I don't show up as the dominant one, and that's something she would want in a potential mate. I'm not looking to "fix" this fact, but I want to understand why it is, and if it's something I can (or would want to) tweak. Since I'm a decent feedback acceptor now (thanks to Beyond Your Best), I can internalize that if I'm not showing up in a powerful way, I'm just not being powerful. At least in this relationship, I don't come across as confident, assertive, and independent. I believe I've allowed these ways of being to take a back seat to me being easy-going, loving, and simply being content with whatever circumstances arise. It's not that I don't care enough about myself to make a hard line, it's just that I don't really mind anything. I think this shows up as me being weak. This has come up a few times in my life. I feel full confidence when I'm with someone, and feel like I'm contributing, making decisions, and taking the lead... and it just doesn't come across that way. A recurring theme in my discussions about relationships (over the past 15 years or so) is that "most" girls want a "take-charge kinda guy". That's all fine and dandy, but it's at a real conflict with how I think I've shown up to pretty much everybody I've met, including in my professional relationships when I lead by getting out of the way. So that brings up two questions. 1) Should I seek out relationships that I am strong enough to clearly dominate, or are there stronger girls who are OK with sharing "the responsibility" or being the dominate one? I know there are dominant girls who like to abuse guys. I don't think that's what I'm looking for :), but a shared responsibility thing would seem to be ideal. 2) Should I lower he bar (in the limbo sense)? It's a fact. I like playing the less-dominant role in some of my relationships. It allows me to balance being dominant in other areas, and gives me a bit of a reprieve, I think, from being "on point" all the time, which can be stressful. How this has manifested itself is I'm strong at work and weak in personal relationships. This is an assumption that I've made, that this is how I am. I think I can throw some energy at showing up in a stronger way, and maybe that could get me what I want. A risk for this might be that this might not be sustainable, and I'll lose the momentum and the relationship will go sour because she is not experiencing me in the way that she needs to in the long term. I also don't want to compromise who I am. There's a similar conversation going on for me that happened after I read Party of One: A Loner's Manifesto. This book was a scathing justification for the "loner way of life", and I interpreted this as I'm OK to not do work on myself to show up better for others. Since then, I've learned that I had aspirations greater than myself that depended on me being more outwardly focused in some areas. Maybe something similar could happen with my being the dominant force in relationships. I know I can't be everything to everyone, nor should I try. And I also know that I should "be myself". I just want to be the best "me" I can be, and I'm wondering if that involves me asserting myself in new ways. What do you think? Have you had similar conversations?

Groups work well when they don't feel like they're being told what to do. I've been in a few small groups here at MSSU (Microsoft Services University), and I have typically bubbled to a leadership position, either by default or by choice. Sometimes it was pretty clear that I was "playing the part" of a leader--I was the spokesperson, the scribe, or just talked a lot. These groups went pretty well, but I found myself getting in a routine that I felt was dry and in some ways sapping the group's energy by being too directive and too focused. So I made it my intention to bring "fun" to the group and made some subtle changes to my delivery. There wasn't much to it... I just decided I was going to work more to bring out others' thought processes and be more energetic. And smile once in a while . What happened in the next group was pretty neat for me. It was very clear to me that I was pulling the strings, and the group achieved its objectives. Yet somebody else got recognized for leadership in the group. Ha! On one hand, I was a little bummed because I like to be recognized for my contributions as much as the next guy, but on the other hand, it was pretty neat! The group was effective, I'm pretty sure the group had confidence in me, and I think I was able to keep things light and upbeat by not dragging the group down with a command-like hierarchy. Plus, somebody else had an experience of being a leader as well. We were a group of peers, and we were pretty powerful.