ANDERSON W. WILLIAMS

The art of church

1/30/2020

My religious beliefs and practices are my own and are no longer rooted in the church. So, when I went to church recently by my own desire for the first time in years, I was a little surprised by the number of things the church and the experience actually reminded me that I believe in:

I believe in architecture and the way the hardness of a stone floor can remind me of my physicality and groundedness - with cold feet and mild pain - and by contrast the way a soaring ceiling can pull my eyes and my thoughts upward and beyond my body and my self. I believe in vaulted gothic pillars and high, pointed arches that make me feel physically small with their scale and with their sense of history that reminds me that my time as part of the creative, human story is minuscule. I believe in dramatic lighting and its ability to add texture and fullness to the form surrounding me.

I believe in music and the ability of a booming pipe organ or a delicate piano to inexplicably make my heart race or move me to tears. I believe in acoustics that can take the reverberations of a singing choir and sync them to the energy within me, melting my form as the sopranos take flight, my spirit in tow.

I believe in stained glass and the artisan’s ability to filter natural light in such a way that I actually stop and pay attention to it, its source, relative intensity - the ways glass and light can make the artisan’s vision dance warmly on my retina in potent contrast with cool, bland, stone walls. I believe in the rose window and its circular reminder of the infinite. I believe in its fractal patterns that remind me that we are all parts of a whole - and in that whole, there is order.

I believe in the creative, spoken word and its ability to analyze familiar parts of stories, fractals of human history, and twist and turn them in new ways to generate new reflections and understanding - to pique the intellect or move the spirit. I believe in symbols and metaphors that help us rethink and reframe small stories of daily life and large stories about the meaning of it.

I believe in sitting still and being reflective.

I believe in art.

image: https://hiveminer.com/Tags/episcopal%2Csewanee

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Don't confuse problem/solution fit with product/market fit

1/16/2020

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As good as it may feel and as validating as it may seem for your early product, confirmation that the market has a problem and that your product seems like a good solution should not be confused with finding product/market fit.

Particularly in a B2B context and especially at the enterprise level, new product sales and adoption encounter a world of organizational dynamics, dysfunctions, disparate priorities, funding streams, and basic inertia that often are what actually creates the need for your product but also undercuts demand.

My first startup created a mobile communication tool for both the education and the healthcare sectors at different times. In both, there was a clear and acknowledged communication problem - in education among schools and students, and in healthcare among administration and physicians. In each sector, we found a solid early interest in our solution.

Both sectors, however, are also highly regulated and compliance driven. Both sectors are risk averse and bureaucratic. Both sectors have complex decision-making structures and resource allocation processes. And, both sectors are notorious for culture problems among administration, front-line staff, and the people they actually serve. This is why both sectors have severe communication problems (need), and also why both sectors have not been able to commit to solving (demand) their communication problems.

Needing a communication solution and demanding one are two different things. Our startup got a lot of head nodding and early interest and affirmation, but was never able to scale our sales to match.

In hindsight, we had achieved problem/solution fit (need oriented), but a couple of years later we were still searching for product/market fit (demand oriented).

Image: https://forum.brickset.com/discussion/21293/requesting-information-regarding-2-top-vs-top-fit-together-1x1-round-bricks%EF%BB%BF

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I am Daddy.

1/3/2020

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In 2019, I became Daddy.

Now, this may seem odd given that I have a 5 (almost 6) and 7 year old. After all, I have been a Dad for all of those years.

But, becoming Daddy is about something altogether different.

I have talked over these 7+ years with many friends-turned-Dads who sheepishly divulge their struggles in parenting, the desire for the freedom they once had, time alone, the changes in their relationship with their spouse, and the overall life-turned-upside-down that happens when you bring a child into the world with you. Granted, after a beer or two, most of those conversations end in raucous laughter and funny (usually crass) stories about the mistakes we have made or some embarrassing thing that had happened with our kids that hilariously shamed us as parents.

In these conversations, we were still Dads-in-limbo - caught somewhere between the inertia of a previous life and the possibilities of a new one.

Because of these conversations and the general lack of access to candor about being a Dad - empathy as much as guidance - I committed years ago to writing about my experiences, particularly the ugly parts that people think only happen to them - but rarely only happen to them.

So, here I am 7.5 years in to being a Dad finally (maybe still a touch sheepishly) divulging: I am Daddy. I have become Daddy. When I think of myself and reflect on my life and purpose and where I want to grow and learn and improve, what I want my future to be and why, I think Daddy.

This is a big shift. And sorry, girls, I am just being honest - it took awhile.

Back in 2014 with a 2 year old and an infant, I saw this early process unfolding, but I wasn’t there yet, and was clearly struggling to navigate it. In fact, the process I was struggling with was in becoming a Dad. The notion of becoming Daddy hadn’t even surfaced yet.

Back then, I started and never posted a blog - left only as incomplete thoughts - called “A Dad Becoming”. Here’s a bit of what was becoming in 2014:

When my girls were born, I loved them, but I didn’t instantly feel like their Dad.

As I changed their diapers and fed them, I became invested in them.
With investment, their lives claimed space in my identity.
Through shared identity, we both began to grow.
In growth, I started to become a Dad.

As they grow, they want to do for themselves.
They seek independence.
Become mobile.
Explore.
Question.
Challenge.
They demonstrate their unique personalities.

Through their demonstration, I get to know them.
Knowing them, our relationship becomes an exchange.
As we exchange, I still say I love you, but now they express it back.
In expression, love itself deepens, but so does the responsibility.
The responsibility: the weight of being a Dad.

As the weight increases, so does the need to model personal and relational health.
In modeling, a discipline of patience and unconditional love.
The discipline, failure.

So, for now, this is where I am: a Dad becoming.

Five years later, I do feel like I know my kids (and I’m crazy about them even when they drive me crazy); I am not just their caretaker.

Five years later, our relationship is an exchange, a genuine, learning, growing relationship. It has a past, a present, and a future.

Five years later, my patience - well… I’m still becoming.

Five years later, the weight of being a Dad is still there, but it is counterbalanced by the unparalleled joy of being Daddy.

Five years later, here I am again trying to put my parenting experience into words, but instead of struggling to understand the process, I am whole with the reality. While I am and will always be a “Dad becoming”, I have also become Daddy.

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What am I supposed to do with that advice?

12/31/2019

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How to understand the advice we get as entrepreneurs (and what to do with it) is perhaps the most important topic that 2019 has left me wrestling with. There’s so much more to be written and explored, but I wanted to get something down to help organize my thoughts before 2020 is fully upon us.

Here’s the confusing reality:

Wise advisors can give wise advice, but wise advisors can also give un-wise advice.
Un-wise advisors can give un-wise advice, but un-wise advisors can also give wise advice.

So, what are we as entrepreneurs supposed to do with this?

For starters, we need to sort advice and advisors into impermanent buckets so that we can focus and be most efficient with our learning at a given time, for a given stage of our company, or around a particular challenge or opportunity. The quality of advice and advisor can change based on context, so these categories should be at least somewhat fluid. To be clear, however, some people will likely stay in their buckets permanently.

Here are a few ways to think about sorting advice and advisors:

The Holy Grail
This advice is hard to come by. There just aren’t that many people in the world who have the wisdom (which fundamentally includes their own self awareness) required to give good advice. Additionally, there just aren’t that many people who can listen to and understand our problems dispassionately and with the ability to help us identify the structural patterns and problems at the root of our issues or opportunities. If you find this person, hold on to them. When you get advice from them, dissect it, explore it, come back to it, let it marinate - and, ultimately, make sure it’s not The Mirage.

The Mirage
This advice is easier to come by than I ever realized. And to be clear, in my experience, it’s rarely - if ever - malicious. In fact, it often comes from wise people with a genuine intention to help us. For this reason, The Mirage has all of the appearances of The Holy Grail. Determining the difference has everything to do with our own understanding of our business, our needs, our questions, concerns and so forth and our ability to think critically about advice in that context. The trick of The Mirage is one of convoluting the value of the messenger with the value of the message.

The Golden Nugget
This advice is the fundamental reason we must always listen for understanding and keep an open mind. It’s the reason we must remain hungry as a learner, no matter who we are talking with. Just as we can’t accept advice simply because of the person who offers it (The Mirage trap), we should not dismiss advice out of hand for the same reason. It is potentially the person who knows little about our business or our product who can offer an insight that breaks us out of being stuck or sheds light on our next move. They might not even realize that they are giving us advice. We just have to listen for and grab that Golden Nugget when it shows itself.

The Grain of Salt
Again, I’m not trying to be ugly here but just strategic in how we think about advice. This isn’t about individual people. Sometimes advice just isn’t relevant. Sometimes other people’s experiences, views of the world, or approaches to problem-solving just don’t match our own personally or in terms of our business. It’s OK. Just know that. Be nice. And, file this advice away somewhere. Still, I’d say to archive it, don’t delete it. Who knows, we might find in time that it ends up a Golden Nugget.

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3 Key Mindsets of Human-Centered Product Design

12/10/2019

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I generally try not to write about a topic that’s already been exhausted by countless other blogs, videos, talks, etc. but sometimes I get bold enough to think that I might add just one more re-frame that might, just maybe, help to simplify a topic that has been over-wrought, over-written, and most importantly over-thought.

What I’ve found with product design - as with most things - is that it doesn’t matter how many tools you have at your disposal, how many blogs you’ve read, frameworks you follow, or videos you’ve watched. If you don’t have the foundational mindsets to apply them well, then what you build will check all the boxes and deliver little of the value.

So, I’d like to strip the topic of human-centered design down to three basic mindsets - and then Google can tell you everything else you need to know about how to actually do it.

Mindset #1: Be Human.
You are a human being designing products for other human beings. (I warned you I would make it basic.) While this is a painfully obvious statement, it’s also often ignored in product design and is a chronic reason for product failure resulting from lack of adoption.

I spent many years in education and in healthcare - both in technology and not. The number of products and services in those two industries that are designed to facilitate those two industries - not the people working in them or the outcomes they are supposed to achieve - is one great driver of their continuing bureaucracy and inefficiency. In education, we build tools and strategies for tracking student risk indicators but do little to design tools and processes to increase student engagement, mental health, or otherwise. In healthcare, we spent countless billions of dollars to manage and make sense of patient healthcare data but invest relatively little in helping people access healthy choices and manage their own health and wellness.

So, what are we trying to accomplish and for whom?

To remain human in our product design, we must:

Identify, understand, and solve real problems for real people.
Design with empathy and focus on user experience.
Remember that humans are emotional, not always practical or rational. Because our product can enable someone to solve a problem doesn’t mean that person will use it to solve that problem.

Mindset #2: Be Humble.
You don’t know everything and, if you work hard enough, you will probably find out that you don’t know very much at all. This is a good thing, not a weakness.

In fact, after a dozen years in education and youth work and having co-founded a company building a software product based on that experience, I became a much better product designer when we pivoted the company to healthcare and I actually didn’t know anything at all. All of my experience and previous knowledge in education wrongly gave me the impression I had all the answers and made me less curious about what people thought their problems were - and less honest about what they would actually be willing to do to solve them. In healthcare, I knew it was learn-or-die for our product and our company, so I approached product design with more humility.

To remain humble in our product design, we must:

Accept that we are wrong about a lot, but figure out where we are right and build on that.
Prototype and seek feedback as quickly as possible to test our hypotheses.
Listen to the user for understanding, not confirmation.

Mindset #3: Be Hungry.
If you aren’t deeply, personally motivated by the creative, iterative process of product design, you will not be able to sustain human-centered design over time.

Getting feedback from our users is difficult, often humbling, and at times humiliating. It’s a learning process and learning requires a deep desire to face and learn from mistakes - and not cover them up. Getting feedback on an early product is particularly challenging as we often try to explain away its known deficiencies more than listen to the feedback on what’s there. Our insecurity takes over. As I mentioned above, humans (meaning us) are emotional, but we have to be bigger than our own egos if we are actually going to solve real problems for our customers. In other words, our hunger must be stronger than our ego.

To remain hungry in our product design, we must:

Work to understand people’s needs and how they understand them - and how that changes over time and across settings.
Deliver value now, incomplete as we know it may be.
Execute and iterate obsessively.
Communicate with the user even when it is difficult.

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How to Avoid Feature Frenzy But Stay Aggressive With Your Product Roadmap

12/2/2019

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Feature Frenzy and its close cousin Shiny Object Syndrome (S.O.S) are startup killers. They confuse product direction, muddle the sales pipeline, and frustrate developers and eventually our users - and then, as a result, all of us.

And yet, we want aspirational and aggressive product roadmaps so that we can excite the market with our product vision, demonstrate responsiveness to early customer feedback, and possibly share our vision and direction to seek investment to grow the company. Sharing a big vision, being creative, and coming up with exciting and dynamic solutions are why we became entrepreneurs after all!

So, the challenge is real.

Recently, I pulled together a workshop on how to avoid Feature Frenzy but maintain an aspirational product roadmap, and here are 10 tips to consider:

Keep your aspirations focused on your business first, not your software.
Software should enable your business. New features (i.e. more software) should have clear and direct business value. See if you can test the business value first without building more software. It’s amazing what you can figure out with some conversations, some data, and maybe a spreadsheet. If that won’t cut it, just make sure you are building the smallest amount of software possible to test the business value.

Be clear about the purpose of your roadmap.
There are lots of roads and lots of maps that serve lots of purposes. So, you just need to be clear at all times which one you are talking about and who it is for. The roadmap for your tech team and the roadmap for your investors or your customers are not the same in detail or message - even though they should align in direction.

Never forget: Products are for customers, so your roadmap should take them somewhere.
Entrepreneurs like new things and get excited by the next thing. But, the milestones on a product roadmap should be focused on delivering some tangible value or specific outcome to your user.

Beware solutions looking for problems.
Entrepreneurs are problem solvers, so we come up with solutions. New features can be dazzling for us and for our customers, but a pile of new features that seem like a solution to us doesn’t necessarily solve a customer problem as they understand it.

A startup product roadmap should focus on finding answers to critical market hypotheses.
Our early product development priorities and sequencing should lead to validating or invalidating the hypotheses that are core to early adoption. If it includes anything else, it’s probably noise for you, your team, and the client and will obfuscate the testing of the value proposition. It’s easy to come up with features customers love, but a lot harder to build a product they will actually use.

Beware solutions to problems that are nice-to-solve but don’t need to be solved.
Ideas and feedback from the market on what’s nice-to-solve often comes clearer and faster than the underlying what-needs-to-be-solved. We have to dig deeper into our customer problems than they are able to and come up with solutions they don’t have the time, inclination, or experience to create for themselves.

Be aware that users who say email is their problem will often design email as their solution.
I have lived this one many times trying to improve communication in schools and in hospitals. Don’t ask customers for solutions. You have to dig into their problems, listen for understanding, and solve from there.

Beware the shiny object.
When you see it, check your reflection in it before you grab it. Figure out why you think you need it.

Just say no.
We have to communicate that we are listening and care about our customer feedback even when we don’t take it. But feedback like: “If your product just did X, we’d be ready to buy” or “If you just added this button, we’d start onboarding all of our users” is almost never true. If we chase those things, we will almost certainly kill our product.

Be honest about what you can deliver and when - and then deliver it.
Overselling puts our product roadmap in chronic debt and is a sure path to disappointed customers, frustrated product managers, and uncreative developers. Selling something small but valuable and delivering it is a win. Selling something huge and then only delivering that same small-but-valuable element becomes a loss.

As a bonus, I highly recommend watching this video: 20 Years of Product Management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

Image: https://wavelength.asana.com/work-plans-high-level-objectives-roadmap-week/

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Run to your arms

11/6/2019

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A note to my kids who I hope someday will read it when the time is right:

You’re already off playing on the playground - which is exactly what you should be doing. It’s a beautiful, warm, Fall afternoon. I’m just sitting on the sidelines, out of your way, now back in my car, on my laptop, writing this.

But, today, I needed to pick you up early. I needed to see you. I needed to run to your arms, even though it looked like you ran to mine. You didn’t see me “running” from all the way across town just for that moment. This afternoon, I needed you. I needed your light. And, you were there for me.

I needed you today in particular because I spent part of my afternoon at a funeral of a dear family friend who died too young - ALS. A friend who I’d known my whole life as a child, her a parent, whose children I played with in the backyard when we were little.

As I sat in the funeral service, I felt that stomach churn of tears battled, of memories longed for but lost, of pain shared with those I know and don’t. The pain of children and grandchildren left behind, moving forward. A spouse alone.

As I left the funeral and got into my car, I was flooded with that anxious fatigue of knowing what it means to lose a parent. I had that haunting shadow of dis-ease about me - that shadow of a parent and grandparent’s love eternal, but of a relationship frozen in time, fading, or never even to be known. Eternal, yet absent.

You will never know Bugsy. You will never know Maw and Paw. But, they love you. You will know them, their love, through the piece of me that is them.

And, yet, today it is your love that is the solace, the healing force. The touch point. The grounding. The focus. Just for a moment. For that hug and smile.

I could have never imagined that it would be I running to the arms of my children that would so clarify my understanding of what it means to be your Dad.

Because of all of this: I just needed you today. Just for a moment. I needed that hug - and I needed you to go on out and play. To be a kid.

And, just now, I heard one of your cries surfacing amid the throngs of kids voices at play. It’s your hurt cry.

You run to my arms again.

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Reunion

9/23/2019

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From time to time, I will come across a piece of art I made many years ago somewhere out in the world - at someone’s house, a school, or someplace surprising. I don’t make much art anymore, so it’s always a nice experience. I’ve always said that it’s like seeing an old friend. Each piece comes from a particular time, a particular place, and a particular me.

A couple of weeks back as I was on the two-week countdown to my 20th college reunion, I got a text from my sister that included a painting I had made for my senior honors exhibition at Wake Forest University. I hadn’t seen the piece in 19 years. She had come across it hanging in a local soup kitchen down the street from where I grew up - which is the same house where I live today with my Mom and Wife and Kids.

My sister and niece are having their joint 50th and 16th birthday party in the community room at the parish with donations to benefit the soup kitchen in lieu of gifts. The woman who worked there knew the painting had been done by “a kid from the neighborhood” but didn’t know anything more. She was thrilled to make the personal connection via my sister to me and back to the painting, and I was thrilled it still meant something to someone.

Reunion.

Now, a soup kitchen may seem an odd place to find a piece of art, but the painting was of a homeless man, face obscured, laid out on a park bench in the park across the street from my house - the space that separates my house from that soup kitchen. It was from a series of faceless portraits of people who lived on the streets and often slept in the park. Some of them I knew. Many of them my parents knew. Most of them came and went before their faces, much less their names, were familiar. This man was in the latter category.

In my senior show, I was wrestling with the reality of these faceless, nameless people, and a sense of loss of my own identity and disconnection from my upbringing - especially after four years away, cloistered on a pristine university campus, the opposite of the grittiness that had so defined my neighborhood growing up. In some pieces, I wanted to draw attention to the body, the physical humanity laid out, so often with a face hidden from light or for comfort or perhaps a childlike sense of privacy. Regardless, most of those bodies were faceless. They lacked identity.

I alternated the body portraits in the show with portraits of only faces, specific, with telling eyes and smirks and wrinkles and stories. For these, I didn’t show a body. I only showed the humanity that lives in the eyes and countenance of each of us. These were people. They had identities.

Back to the present: Within a few days of getting that text from my sister, a few days closer to my college reunion, the doorbell rang at my house. As I approached, I scanned the woman in the window trying to see if I recognized her. We still get a lot of doorbell rings for a lot of strange and sundry reasons. As I approached to grab the key, I still wasn’t sure. But then, I locked onto her eyes - eyes I had studied more deeply than she will ever know - eyes that gave meaning to her portrait in my senior show. Eyes that still hung on the wall in my house.

It was Luann. Over 20 years sober with a healthy body that suggested nothing of the toothless, colorless, emaciated addict I had known when I created her portrait. She came in and talked with my Mom and me for a good while, and I introduced my girls as they sat and listened intently.

Life is still tough for Luann. She works hard to help others who have found themselves where she has been. The streets. The drugs. She talked about the day she had given up and found herself on the Shelby Street Bridge ready to jump before a police officer talked her down. My Father had stood on that same bridge with those same inclinations. She talked about my Dad and when she found out about his suicide. She visited and wrote us a note that day. I can’t imagine how such a thing impacts someone who has lived what Luann has lived. To bring it all even closer, she shared that Dad had committed suicide on her birthday, which was the day before his own birthday. She thinks often about him and Mom and their impact on why and how she is still here.

Reunion.

Luann said a lot. She talks rapidly. Passionately. Even feverishly, losing herself and forgetting that my young children were in the room listening curiously and with concern.

So, when she left, we had to debrief. I called everyone back into the living room. We needed to talk about what it means to be addicted to drugs, what it had meant for Luann. We needed to talk about how amazing Luann is and what she has overcome - giving some context to her feverish monologue. We had to explain what Luann meant when she said “Satan lives in East Nashville” and why that is true for her, but that they don’t need to be afraid.

Once I was convinced we had at least given the girls space to ask their questions, I took them into the kitchen and pointed up on the wall to a dry point portrait - scratched into metal with a sharp tool, inked, and printed on paper - of Luann 20+ years and probably 50 pounds ago. Her emaciated face, crevassed and deeply wounded in a way that suggested eternity but no specific age. But, her eyes - once you found them sunk deep in her hollowed out sockets - were still there shimmering. These were the same eyes I met in a new visage, in a new body, in a new life at the front door 23 years later.

Reunion.

Last weekend, when I finally got to campus for my college reunion, I went by the art studios and the first face that I recognized was my former painting instructor. We’ve been in touch here and there over the years, at least enough to feel connected. But, after a pause and a couple of slow moments of recognition of my aging countenance followed by a big hug, I couldn’t wait to tell her of this sequence of events that had curiously led up to my visit. How it was that painting that I hadn’t seen in so long, that portrait that I see every day of that person I hadn’t seen in so long, that art I had wrestled with 20 years before, that work that had helped me explore my story, create my first art show, helped me find my voice through art, start my creative journey - that those experiences that happened in a few undergraduate art studios 20 years ago still mattered deeply to me, and to at least some people I don’t even know about.

Reunion.

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Parenting: The Morning Shit Show

9/16/2019

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WARNING: Explicit, frustrated, tired parent language

No matter how many times I wrestle with getting socks and shoes on my kids in the morning or getting teeth brushed and faces washed or getting a coat on or a seatbelt buckled or a bag packed, the simple-process-turned-painful-multi-chapter-dramatic-comedy-that-isn’t-funny never ceases to make me crazy. The lightening transition from peaceful morning snuggle to infuriating shit show is simply too fast for my simple emotional self to navigate.

So, then I swing wildly from this-is-ridiculous-and-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you to why-is-this-pissing-me-off-so-much-and-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me!?

At some point, however, my kids and I do actually have to leave for school and, whether any of us likes it or not, the school does require the basic bits of clothing to be in place and for my kid to be there and on time, or I’m the one who gets in trouble. I have no choice. It has to get done. I have to make it get done. And, I’m probably a little pissed about that too!

Martial law. Get it done. Out the door. Crazy into the car. Kids to school.

And then, the shit show miraculously stops in its tracks once the threat of seeing friends and teachers is present. Fuck that too, by the way!

“Have a wonderful day, girls. I love you. Always and forever. No matter what.”

Those words are for them. They don’t help me on these mornings. I feel like an asshole and a failure and generally feel like shit - all before I’ve even had coffee or gotten to work.

Now, I’m in my car in silence reflecting on why it had to be like this, how it got so crazy, why does this keep happening and what is wrong with me and what is wrong with my kid and when do we set up the counseling sessions and how fucked up will she be as a teenager because I’m such an asshole, but at least she’ll be a teenager that knows there are certain rules that have to be followed and that life isn’t always what you want it to be but then again I want her to know what rules she should break, but, by god, they better not be mine! Why do I have another headache today?

And, just like that, off to work.

Somehow, over the next 8 or 9 hours, I recover. I don’t know it’s happening. I’m not sure how it’s happening or even why.

But, by the end of the day, all I want to do is see my kids. Yes, seeing them opens the possibility of another shit show. And, if that happens, I run the risk of putting them to bed the same way I felt when I dropped them at school.

“Let’s have a better day tomorrow.”

I pour a glass of bourbon. Stare at the TV for an hour. Go to bed. And, somehow, over the next 8 or 9 hours, I recover. I don’t know it’s happening. I’m not sure how it’s happening or even why.

But, by the next morning, all I want to do is see my kids.

Here we go again.

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"I don't need you anymore, Daddy!"

7/17/2019

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This powerful and potent proclamation could make a Dad’s heart sing or make it weep. For me, for now, for today, it made it sing.

Let’s rewind the 20 minutes it took to arrive here.

I’m at the beach on an annual family vacation, and my brother-in-law broke out a pair of Boogie Boards and asked my girls if they wanted to give them a try.

A couple of short minutes later, they were floating on the boards awaiting just the right wave - my brother-in-law guiding/launching my younger daughter (5) as I prepared to do the same with the older (7).

As the first good wave amassed, I got her prepped and balanced on the board and faced her toward the shore. I took a couple of quick steps and gave a push to meet the wave and off she went…but only about 10 feet. My timing was off. She got on top of the wave for a bit and then just settled in behind it.

So, we regrouped and got ready for the next wave as I prepared to adjust my launch timing and technique. I pointed out which wave she would catch as it swelled well out beyond where we were. We readied the Boogie Board, a couple of steps…a push to launch…three feet…and the nose of the board goes straight down. Her legs went straight up. Her face went straight to the ocean floor as her nose and mouth ground into the sand. Her body flipped. Her board flew.

And, she popped up out of the water startled and scared, her frightened eyes hidden behind a curtain of wet, sandy hair. As she swept her hair from her face, she realized she was also hurting. I picked her up and she held tight to me as she worked through all of those feelings, the fear, the pain, the need for comfort, her head on my shoulder. As she settled down, I encouraged her to go back out and try again, but she wasn’t ready. While I generally push on this kind of thing (probably too hard), this time I totally understood. It was a solid crash and she needed to step away and regroup.

So, she walked out of the ocean and went and sat down with her Mom leaving behind what I guessed would be our last time riding the Boogie Board - at least for today. I felt bad.

I went back out with my other daughter and brother-in-law and shared the insight that I thought we had the girls too far up on their boards, that they needed to slide back to make sure the tip stayed up as they caught the wave. A seemingly obvious lesson learned the hard way, and at the apparent expense of my older child.

Within about 5 minutes, however, I look back to the shore and my daughter is standing there waiting, ready to come back in. I quietly swelled with pride. I strapped the board back to her wrist.

A new board position was all we needed and we became masters of the waves. After the first ride in, she stands triumphantly and exclaims: “I didn’t face plant!” This was obviously a good thing, but certainly a lower bar for success than we’d started with.

As they rode the waves, both girls were squealing in delight at the thrill and the speed and the freedom, the older one quickly replacing fear with fearlessness. Four or five rides later as she worked her way against the waves back out to where I was to prepare for another, she spontaneously turned her board and jumped on and caught a wave by herself - and road it all the way to dry land.

She climbed off her board and stood there on the sand beaming and yelled for all the beach to hear: “I don’t need you anymore, Daddy!”

I beamed as well, yelling back: “You sure don’t!”

She proceeded to ride several more waves on her own before rejoining me and picking up our previous routine - where I was allowed to help her launch, where we mastered the waves together.

What exactly had just happened over that brief 20 minutes?

She had trusted me.
I had failed.
She had fallen.
She was hurt.
I felt terrible.
She recovered.
The bar for success got lowered.
We improved.
She grew confident.
She went out on her own.
She beamed.
I beamed.
She owned it.
She came back to me.
We continued together.

So, what was all of this?

Parenting.

Parenting is hard. And, most of us are kind of making shit up as we go - on some basic principles perhaps, but still making shit up. What do I, from a land-locked state (Tennessee), really know about Boogie Boards!? And yet, I will continue to make shit up, to screw up, and my girls will continue to be resilient and I will do my best to improve and make sure no permanent damage is done. Beyond that, I’m actually counting on them as much as they are counting on me.

Parenting is relentless and happens in a never-ending sequence of waves. We can’t understand, much less master, every wave. Waves, however, are just a series of peaks and valleys. The same wave that face-plants you is the one that can propel you to the shore. The one that instills fear can give you your greatest sense of freedom. The wave that almost breaks you is the one that shows you that it takes a lot more than you thought to actually break you.

Boogie Board life lessons for you, my love, and for me, your Daddy.

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