The Life-Changing Magic of Meetings

(This is satire, inspired by a line in this article of The Generalist , poking fun at those business books that stretch one decent idea across hundreds of pages.)

Meetings. The word elicits terror in some, disgust in others. For me, it evokes a string of joyous associations —

Meetings…with people

Meetings…with conversation

Meetings…with ideas

Meetings…with my own mortality

There was a time when I had no meetings in my life. It's true. I did that thing that people talk about doing but never actually do: I lived alone at the top of a mountain, in a lean-to, with no possessions other than the clothes on my back.?

Well…the clothes on my back, plus all the clothes I could fit into my Briggs & Riley Extra Large Trunk Spinner suitcase, along with a few other must-haves, including: a $4K Macbook, high-speed satellite Wi-Fi, a portable generator, a refrigerator with built-in ice maker, and a standing daily order with Uber Eats.?

You'd be amazed how much Uber Eats drivers complain about trying to find you at the address "second peak on the left, past the sequoia with the vulture's nest near the top." They expect a big tip!

The generator and the frig would've just sat in storage until my camp needed them again at Burning Man. So that was a win-win.

I slept on dirt. I walked barefoot. I thought thoughts. I contemplated contempts. I had zero meetings for nearly a year.?

I had planned to do it for a full year, but nine months in, I realized I'd spent enough time to claim a year in my LinkedIn profile. Heck, the experience crossed over two calendar years, so it would look like I'd been Chief Executive Thinker for two years!

It was such an enriching two LinkedIn years!?

And yet, something was missing. I spent much of my time on that mountain top trying to figure out what it was.

Companionship? No.?

Culture? No.?

Good coffee? No.?

Commuting? Shopping? Love? No, no, no.?

It was: Meetings.

Before I offer tips and tricks for making meetings magical, let me share some of the things I enjoy most about meetings. I'm sure you'll be able to relate.

Vigorous Head Nodding

The neck is one of our most important body parts. Try living without a neck; you can't. So it's important that we keep our necks in shape.

One of the things I noticed on that mountain top is that my neck got out of shape. I hardly used it, except to look up at the vulture's nest. The rest of the time, it was difficult simply to keep my chin from falling down to my chest. Before my time up there, my neck had been fit AF — from meetings. Where else do we get to experience the vigorous head nodding that keeps our necks in shape??

In every group meeting, we all know who the highest-ranking person is. And that person understands that their role in the meeting is to lead the head-nodding. They're kind of like the Peloton instructor for the meeting, setting and keeping the pace in order to ensure that we all get a proper workout.

"Let's double-click on that." Vigorous head nodding.

"Love that idea, Asad!" Vigorous head nodding.

"As Mark said at the All-Hands, 'This is the Year of Efficiency.'" Vigorous head nodding.

Of course, the pinnacle of vigorous head nodding is the extremely rare Head Nod Wave. I've only had the privilege of experiencing it a handful of times in my career. So if you haven't had that privilege yet, let me describe in detail one of those mind-blowing moments…

It was during an admittedly tough meeting about the performance of some of the company's investments in content. The ROI of those investments was disappointing. My team did the analysis that led to the disappointing insights, so from my perspective it felt like one of those Kill The Messenger type of situations.?

The highest-ranking person in the room said, "These results certainly are disappointing." Vigorous head nodding. Then he said, "Brian, is it possible the analysis was flawed?"?

To which I replied, "Our forecast predicted negative ROI, but we went ahead with the investment, which ended up achieving a negative ROI that was just 2% off our forecast. So I don't think the analysis was flawed. I think the investment was a bad idea to begin with."

The second-highest-ranking person in the room, who was sitting next to the highest-ranking person, and who had been the strongest advocate for the failed investment, said, "There were some green shoots in the forecast that convinced us to do the deal. Perhaps the forecast had some flawed assumptions."

Most of the assumptions that we built into the forecast came from his team. And by "green shoots," he meant, "the forecast concluded that the investment would deliver negative ROI, but not someone's-going-to-get-fired negative."?

So I said, "Perhaps." Meaning, "Sure, it's possible that your team screwed up." Meaning, "Of course your team screwed up!" But nobody else in the meeting knew that the inputs came from his team. So what they heard was, "Yes, I, Brian, admit that perhaps my team screwed up the forecast."

The highest-ranking person said, "Okay. Brian, you need to go back to your team and rework your forecasting model."

The second-highest-ranking person began vigorous head nodding. As he stopped nodding, the next person nodded vigorously. And the next one, and the next one, each person starting and then stopping as the person next to them started, like fans at a sporting event doing The Wave around a stadium, all the way around the conference room to me.?

I nodded, too, in realization that I'd just made myself the fall guy for a bad investment that I had vigorously advocated against making in the first place.?

A collective realization filled the room; we had spontaneously achieved a Head Nod Wave. So we did it again. And again. And again. It was so thrilling and invigorating that it was hard to stop. We finally ended it when someone who had booked the room for the next hour banged on the door, signaling that it was time for us to end the meeting.

Trying to Connect to VC

I hadn't realized how much I enjoy rituals until I didn't have any on that mountain top.?

One of my favorite rituals is the one we go through with coworkers at the beginning of every meeting — trying to connect to the video conference link.

I've spent most of my career working at tech companies. And there's no better bonding experience with warm, loving human beings than trying to connect to a video conference link in a conference room that has been ravaged over the past 24 hours by 1:1s, daily standups, roadmap milestone readouts, biz dev execs camping out for a few hours after their 15-hour flight from Singapore, and a hoard of engineers eating the day's cafeteria offerings while bug-bashing over lunch and then leaving all of their messy to-go containers in a heap spilling out of the garbage can in the corner, requiring the first attendee of your meeting to swing the room's door back and forth to fan out some of the smell.

We've all been there. The cords and connections to the VC system are jumbled, and once we make the connection, we're on the wrong meeting ID, or we've got the wrong password, or the people calling in remotely can't hear us, or we can't hear them over the sirens in their neighborhood.

Inevitably, one of us says sarcastically (TBH it's often me), "Good thing we work at a tech company." Which has led to many a conspiratorial chuckle and new LinkedIn connection.

Losing Track of Time

I don't know if you've experienced this, but I often lose track of time during meetings. I'm so present with coworkers as we discuss the meeting's topics that I forget what time it is, what day it is, what season it is, what year it is.?

As you can probably imagine, I often lost track of time on that mountain top, where, honestly, not a single thing mattered. I desperately wanted those vultures to Give Me A Sign. Something. Anything. They just did their weird vulture watching-from-above thing. But while watching them from below, I completely lost track of time. I recognized that feeling from attending meetings.

I once walked out of a meeting about the results of a News Feed downrank test on unoriginal content that was so riveting and time-distorting that when I returned to my desk, I asked my friendly podmate, "Are you planning to take the kids somewhere for Thanksgiving?" because his Patagonia oatmeal heather fleece vest made me think: November. But it was mid-June!

Meetings are where I experience Flow.

If you've read lots of business books, like I have (technically I listen to the audiobook versions, but consider me a member of Team Listening to Audiobooks Is Reading*), you know that Flow is when you're so in-the-moment that your every thought and action feels divinely inspired. You're not worrying about whether that package you need will arrive today, if you have enough gas to get home, or if you should've worn your sports jersey backwards today like you did the last time your team won in the playoffs.?

You're fully, deeply immersed in the moment of the meeting. You're fully, deeply present with your coworkers. You're capital-L Listening…to words, actions, thoughts, and feelings.

The TL;DR for Flow was well-articulated by Garth in Wayne's World: "Live in the now."

However, experiencing Flow and learning to conjure the Flow State is truly magical and therefore worthy of going TL;RA (too long; read anyway), especially when you need to meet a page quota with your publisher.

We'll do that in this book. This is just the tip of the iceberg called The Life-Changing Magic of Meetings.

Over the next 34 chapters, with a lot of help from ChatGPT, I'll talk about all the other ways that meetings add magic to life and help us 10x, 100x or even 1,000,000x our productivity and impact.

The Life-Changing Magic of Meetings is not available in stores. Or anywhere else. Thank the old gods and the new!

* The author of this piece of satire is on Team Audiobooks Are Cool, But Listening to Them Isn't Reading.?

If you enjoyed this bit of satire, you might like my novel Project Boing;) .

It’s a satire about working in the tech industry, and it’s available in paperback and ebook; the audiobook version is forthcoming.

"Project Boing;) is a wry, fantastically absurd, and cogent satire that unfolds in the golden days of the internet. Line by line, Robinson's prose is hilarious, astute, and an absolute delight. Just as the reader discovers a favorite line, it's quickly eclipsed by several more."

?– The Booklife Prize (from Publisher's Weekly)

Project Boing;) — Terrific Satire (5 stars)

"Several recent novels have satirized office life in the 21st century, but I know of none that more effectively capture the feeling (at once exhilarating, nauseous, and comic) of working in tech or a tech-adjacent sector. On the surface, the novel is an insider's description of what went wrong at a very Yahoo-like company at the beginning of the 2010s. But it is also a sensitive account of the oddball types who work in tech; an inquiry into the role of data & analytics at big companies; and a timely meditation on the transition that "big tech" companies are undergoing as they become "normal" firms. Above all, it is very, very funny. Highly recommended."

?– Amazon Verified Purchaser whom the author did not previously know