Matt posted a hair-raising lesson on LinkedIn about electric cars, distraction and gratitude. He wanted to share it here, also.

This is a gratitude post. No fancy photos and no clever links. Just a shout-out to the universe for allowing me to be around and complain.
I have friends with cancer. I have relatives with dementia, heart disease, mood disorders, I have people in my life with serious injuries to recover from, life disasters, and more. So I don’t have much to complain about that rises to the level of those “legit” complaints.

Today I got a kind of a wake-up call at lunch. I was hit by a car.

While walking. I was coming back from lunch, crossing the street with the light, in the crosswalk. And for some reason my phone was in my pocket— an unusual thing when I’m taking a break or walk during the day. So I had all my wits about me and was presumably paying attention. I was in my suit (I wear suits at client sites, which are typically hospital systems, clinic systems or other large healthcare organizations), and was walking leisurely, not too fast. It was a warm day and who wants to sweat in a nice suit, right?

A gentleman was in an electric car. First alert—people, electric cars make no noise. So you have no warning in your blind spot as a pedestrian or bike rider. A cute little BMW i3 I think. Kind of like one of those tiny smart cars. Same shape, flat short hood. He was on his phone texting or otherwise looking at the screen. His light was red. Mine- green with the white “walk” sign just starting to count down. He swung around and zipped right into the crosswalk to make his right turn… into me. He never saw me until I was on his hood. I was two steps off the curb. I never thought to look again over my left shoulder. I had the light. There were about four or five others ten feet in front of me in the crosswalk, and if he had come 10 seconds earlier he would have hit that bunch of people, including an elderly woman and someone with a dog on a leash. The dog would have been roadkill for sure. I don’t want to think about the slow-moving elderly woman.

Why do I write this? To say “I’m grateful to be alive and grateful to have all of you in my life.” And also to say that my complaints don’t add up to a hill of beans compared to the others with real issues including the big C, and all the rest. Working lately in healthcare has given me great new perspective about how precious good health is. We take it for granted. We think we are immune from the statistics.

As a society, we live careless lives, are overweight, out of shape, putting toxins in our bodies. We think we are unaccountable for the way we treat our bodies. We think we are invincible, or we are just lazy about it. We walk around with our noses in cell phones indoors and out. We don’t notice our surroundings, much less appreciate them. Things like a gorgeous sunset. We’re too busy flipping posts in Facebook and Instagram and SnapChat and Pinterest and email. Liking a post. Making a post. Reading drivel. Is this drivel? Perhaps.

If you want a reality check go work at a healthcare company or volunteer at a hospital or clinic system. That’s where the people with legit complaints are. And they can’t just “solve” them.

Funny thing about this accident. 40-some odd years ago I ended up on the hood of a very nice woman in Palo Alto. I was riding my bike and had headphones on (not unlike many bike riders-especially commuters- today). She did not see me and as she exited a driveway without looking both ways, I ended up on the hood. I thought for sure she would pause and look both ways. Bad bet. She was distracted and was looking elsewhere. In a hurry. Luckily I was a bit more agile than I am today, and a lot more durable, and kind of bounced off and slid to the other side of the car, like a stunt man in a cop movie. She was more terrorized than I was. I was probably too young and stupid to understand what had almost happened.

Fast forward to today. Not as young, not as durable (probably only a bit less stupid) I looked to my left just in time to see this little car with the driver just looking up with a terrorized expression and no time to slam on the brakes in time. I was able to jump up and get just enough elevation to put my butt on the hood and break the force of the impact with my arm on the upper part of the hood.

The good news is that these cars are made of thin aluminum and it crushes like tinfoil on impact. So I left two nice big dents on the hood, kind of bounced off and ended up staggering away. I think my wallet took the blow instead of my hip or rear end. Thank you VISA and MasterCard. “Priceless” padding. :) I was in one of those adrenaline induced states where I was more worried about falling on the pavement and ripping my suit. My coffee was gone. No way to save that. I looked at the coffee spot on the concrete and had this terrible vision of what if that was blood. The mind does weird things.

After gathering myself and determining I was a) still alive and b) in one piece and c) okay enough to be mad but shocked enough to be happy to be in one piece, I was asked for my insurance information…. apparently mister wonderful was going to try to make a claim. There were about three people left around us, asking if we should call 911 and at that point someone made the point that they saw him run the red, looking at his phone and that he hit me in the x-walk. I declined to give my info and allowed as how I was walking back INTO a healthcare clinic and that he should be happy that I was not more banged-up and asking for treatment. I just wanted to get back to normalcy. Probably still in shock.

He took off, I came back to the office and sat down to assess how lucky my life is, to be able to complain about distracted drivers. And to be walking around to talk about it. And to warn my friends and family about electric cars at intersections… you can’t hear or see them coming when they zip around corners.

On a bike I guess I would have been more vigilant, but as a pedestrian I had this kind of invincible feeling of being protected walking with the light and the “Walk” sign inside the crosswalk. That’s not so. Be vigilant. And thank you Sensei Mirko and Senpais David and Jessica and friends for the recent agility work in jumping and spinning this week that probably got my body primed to jump up and turn around to break the impact. Not Kevin Durant elevation but just enough to get up over the bumper and onto the hood with my rear end and upper body. Note to self— practice jumping more. And look both ways twice at busy intersections.

My daughter is learning how to drive this year. I am her teacher. This is a great example of what distracted driving can do. I am not 100% guilt free in that department. I’m taking the pledge to stay off of phones 100% while driving except for bluetooth and headsets in one ear. Just too much at stake and just so many times to dodge the bullet. And maybe the Universe was sending me a reminder message today.

And to my friends with legit concerns… prayers to you that you come out of your battles and win the war. We’re only here the better part of 100 years give or take. It’s not fair what’s happening to you.

And now I’m leaving the office and driving out to watch the sunset. :)
No Instagram post. Just taking it in and enjoying it. I’ve posted my share of pretty sunsets. This one is just to look at. I encourage you to do the same, to honor our friends and family that have bigger problems than the rest of us. We can all enjoy the same sunset in sync from wherever we are. No Instagram/snapchat needed. We are the lucky ones. ‪#‎gratitude

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

What happens when you create a fast growing business that has unicorn potential, but it doesn’t fit with your personal dream?

Do you pursue both?

That’s what Ben Nash did and almost destroyed PCS Wireless in the process.

Nash had always dreamed of being a real-estate mogul, while PCS Wireless bought, fixed and sold old cell phones.

Glamorous real estate or mundane phone reselling — which would you chase?

“I was running around the business world trying to find myself. I got distracted with ego and shiny things. I lost money in real estate, but losing money isn’t the problem. That’s a minor issue. I’ve always personally made money. The issue was my energy and focus was going to my other businesses and not to PCS.”

Nash didn’t get himself back on track, his team did.

About two years ago, the PCS executive team sat Nash down and gave him the “are we going to do this or not?” talk. (It’s “very important to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you,” is how Nash describes his team.)

There are myriad distractions in life; everybody has them.

What’s important isn’t the distraction, but how you deal with it.

And how comfortable your team would be if it was necessary to sit you down for “the talk.”

Image credit: HikingArtist

I had just finished unloading my cart at Home Depot the other day when a woman pulled up with her two young sons; when I offered her my cart she shook her head and kept walking.

There was a time when she might have offered to take the cart, but those times seem a part of the past.

Instead, she kept walking, talked to her sons and answered her cell phone.

Is the world really shrinking or is it just a narrowing of interactions and less interest in what’s around us in real-time?

The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

As usual, I am out of step.

I take back the carts, function beautifully sans cell/smartphone, pay attention to the humans in my orbit and love real-world interactions.

Digging in the dirt, conversation and reading (mostly cozy mystery fiction) are my favorite “time wasters;” no Facebook, Twitter or Candy Crush (my sister’s addiction).

I prefer to be connected to a few in the real world than connected to dozens (hundreds?) in the cyber world.

In short, I want to continue to pay attention and be present for whatever time I have left on this planet, whether decades or days.

Flickr image credit: Zeno_

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Last week I wrote about the power found in vulnerability, today I have a different question for you.

What do you do when you screw up?

Do you

1. grin, bear and ignore;
2. rationalize;
3. deny; or
4. apologize.

The creed of authenticity demands you choose ‘d’, but in practice many founders are more likely to choose ‘a, ‘b’ or ‘c’.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings chose ‘d’ and did it with candor, solid information, no punches pulled or rationalizations and in a very public way.

“I messed up,” Mr. Hastings wrote in an unusually forthright September 2011 blog post. (…) In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success. (…) I wasn’t naïve enough to think most customers care if the C.E.O. apologizes, but I thought it was honest and appropriate.”

He made three other good points that are worth remembering

• “Don’t get distracted by the shiny object,” he said. And if a crisis comes, “execute on the fundamentals.”
• “…we don’t manage for the stock price.”
• “Executing better on the core mission is the way to win.”

Most importantly, he doesn’t see himself or Netflix as infallible and admits that another wrong turn could kill them.

There are a lot of founders who should take heed of his attitude and his words.

Image credit: HikingArtist

People’s preoccupation with their screens has been blamed for many things and if you’ve been around someone who kept sneaking peeks while talking you know how annoying that is.

But did you know it messes up not only your brain, but also your capacity for connection, friendship, empathy, as well as your actual physical health?

Texting even messes up your infant’s future!

New parents may need to worry less about genetic testing and more about how their own actions — like texting while breast-feeding or otherwise paying more attention to their phone than their child — leave life-limiting fingerprints on their and their children’s gene expression.

It’s not just a case of being distracted.

Your vagus nerve connects your brain to your heart and how you handle your social connections affects the vagal tone, which, like muscle tone, can improve with exercise and that, in turn, increases the capacity for connection, friendship and empathy.

In short, the more attuned to others you become, the healthier you become, and vice versa. This mutual influence also explains how a lack of positive social contact diminishes people. Your heart’s capacity for friendship also obeys the biological law of “use it or lose it.” If you don’t regularly exercise your ability to connect face to face, you’ll eventually find yourself lacking some of the basic biological capacity to do so.

Do I think this research will actually make a difference in people’s actions?

No!

Even if the information becomes widespread I don’t think people would give up the instant gratification of being mentioned or conquer their FOMO and focus instead on quality face time.

It doesn’t seem a big deal right now, but look into the future at a world that doesn’t just lack connection and empathy, but is filled with people who aren’t even capable of it.

I’m glad I won’t be around.

One last item; a short essay that says better than I have in the past exactly why I don’t carry a cell phone. Enjoy!

Flickr image credit: Digitpedia Com

No, not the buzz of social media, but the buzz in open office environments.
These days companies spend both time and money creating and managing the buzz of social networks—more every year—with varying degrees of success.

But only the most perceptive are recognizing the need to manage the noise level, especially of conversations, whether on cell phones or between colleagues, in open office environments.

“The noisemakers aren’t so bothered by the lack of privacy, but most people are not happy, and designers are finally starting to pay attention to the problem.” –John Goins

Studies have proved over and over that human brains can’t multitask and that doing so reduces competency on all tasks; of even more concern is reduced productivity.

Researchers at Finland’s Institute of Occupational Health have studied precisely how far those conversations carry and analyzed their effect on the unwilling listener: a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work.

Most people actually tune out conversation-blocking background noise like music for focus-intensive work such as writing, but conversations are a different matter.

Noise is not conducive to creativity.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

Autodesk got the message and installed what is known as a pink-noise system in its Massachusetts offices.

Pink-noise provides a soft whooshing over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.

To test its validity they turned it off after three months and the complaints poured in.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

Whether your company recognizes the problem or not, there are many things that you can do in your area to avoid noise-related productivity loss.

The first is to make sure that you are not part of the problem, because you will change no one else’s actions with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach.

Next, talk to your team; find the problems and work together to alleviate them as opposed to assigning blame to a few gabby colleagues.

Flickr image credit: debaird™

Let’s start with a short personal quiz.

A. Do you consider yourself creative?
B. Do you

• love your iPad;
• wouldn’t be caught dead without your smartphone;
• can’t conceive of spending time without a music source;
• still follow TV shows, whether on TV or online;
• all of the above, often simultaneously?

What if B interferes or even cancels A?

What if the springboard for creativity and creative problem solving is boredom; a mind free of distractions that can wander untethered?

…a phenomenon that’s been identified by Edward de Bono, the legendary creative thinker. He calls it the “creative pause.” (…)The creative pause allows the space for your mind to drift, to imagine and to shift, opening it up to new ways of seeing.

From HBS’ Jim Heskett’s research question on deep thinking to my own comments on the value of silence, the need for undistracted time and the resulting creativity is well documented.

To be or not to be distracted is an individual free choice and can’t be dictated by others, but it is always wise to look at the consequences of one’s chosen actions.

Distracted driving kills people.

Distracted thinking kills creativity and innovation.

Flickr image credit: MacintoshDo

In spite of Monday’s post I’m still ambivalent about social media and I’m not just thinking about Facebook, Twitter and their ilk, but also blogs and other commentary.

Part of my ambivalence is from the anonymity available. Mark Suster defends it and I understand the necessity in places where dissent is dangerous.

But what works and is necessary in dissent is destructive when embraced by local gossips.

One thing social media guarantees is that at one time or another politically correct attitudes will fall prey to actual attitudes and reality can be pretty ugly.

Bloggers have long argued that they deserve the same protections as journalists, but in most cases I disagree. While there are a few exceptions, most bloggers have neither the interest, ability nor resources to do in-depth research of a subject; what we produce is commentary and opinion pieces, so I am glad when a truly destructive blogger is sued and loses.

Of course, a primary reason for my dislike of social media is that it brings out so much human unthinking, me-focused stupidity. Seriously. If you thought distracted driving—email, texting, talking etc.—was bad try distracted doctoring!

And while Facebook and Google initiate efforts to become forces of good, not all twenty-somethings-and-up feel the need. (I have company:)

Crowdsourcing is a new wrinkle in the social world and one that I find positively uplifting. Join me next Saturday for a look at it.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

Are you one of the millions who talk on your cell phone when driving?

Or are you one of those stupid (my opinion) enough to text and drive?

Does it matter since everybody (except us dinosaurs) does it?

And who is responsible if there is an accident as a result of the distraction?

An interesting question that is currently playing out in court.

Christopher Hill, then 20, told the police he was so distracted by a cellphone call that he ran a red light at 45 miles an hour, hitting Ms. Doyle’s car as it crossed in front of him.

Doyle died and Jennifer Smith, her daughter, is suing Samsung and Sprint.

Ms. Smith argues that the industry’s success in marketing to drivers is the reason people like Mr. Hill do not change their behavior or pay attention to what she characterizes as faint warnings by the industry.

A previous suit in 2003 was thrown out of court.

Now anyone who follows the tobacco lawsuits knows how difficult it is to prove that companies knew their product had risks even when testimony and exhibits are overwhelming.

So it seems a no-brainer to assume that there is no smoking gun for plaintiffs to find.

But—the $150 billion industry has aggressively marketed to drivers for 50 years.

Bob Lucky, an executive director at Bell Labs from 1982-92, said he knew that drivers talking on cellphones were not focused fully on the road. But he did not think much about it or discuss it and supposed others did not, either, given the industry’s booming fortunes.

“If you’re an engineer, you don’t want to outlaw the great technology you’ve been working on,” said Mr. Lucky, now 73. “If you’re a marketing person, you don’t want to outlaw the thing you’ve been trying to sell. If you’re a C.E.O., you don’t want to outlaw the thing that’s been making a lot of money.”

Not everybody felt that way.

In 1990, David Strayer, a junior researcher at GTE, which later became part of Verizon, noticed more drivers who seemed to be distracted by their phones, and it scared him. He asked a supervisor if the company should research the risks.

“Why would we want to know that?” Mr. Strayer recalled being told.

Bell Labs is gone and many of those involved are retired and, like Lucky, have no real incentive to lie about what went on (if they were even inclined that way)—in other words, no actively vested interest.

Where does corporate responsibility lie in situations such as this?

It’s a lengthy article, but one well worth reading.

And you might ask yourself how many of your calls from behind the wheel are really so critical they couldn’t wait; and those that really achieve critical status. And of those that truly meet the critical test, how many would take so long that you couldn’t pull off the road?

As to texting, I can only hope that when you’re busy looking at the screen and hitting the keys that you run into an inanimate object as opposed to one with humans involved.

Either way, the next time you start getting involved in anything while driving ask yourself this: how well would you sleep for the rest of your life if you were Christopher Hill.

Image credit: Mike “Dakinewavamon” Kline on flickr