Becoming Genghis - An Ode to Officemates

I ain't afraid of no lawyers. 

The officemate relationship is the arranged marriage of the workplace. As a junior associate at a big New York law firm, you will probably share an office with someone preordained for you by HR.  Because they sit literally an arms-length away from you and because you will both sit there for most of your waking hours, you will see this person more than any other person in your life. Like all arranged marriages, sometimes it goes smashingly and you have a best friend for life; other times, it makes your life that much worse every single day. 

My first officemate was pretty good, as they go. We worked together on my first deal, so he taught me how to do my time-sheets, utilize legal assistants, navigate first-year M&A tasks, and, most importantly, after an entire Sunday of frantic deal-closing work, how to order food from Seamless. In good times, when work was slow, he'd look over and say, "HAN. Entertain me. What you got?" We visited zombocom and watched viral internet videos. We called up other associates to banter. In bad times, we covered for each other. When I had worked a few nights in a row and just HAD to take a nap before my body shut down, I'd give him a heads up, "Hey, if anyone comes looking for me, I'm in a meeting." Then I'd curl up under my desk, set my blackberry to vibrate, drape my suit jacket over my head, and try to catch a few winks.

So in this way we rolled with the ups and downs, sometimes literally. In 2011 when an earthquake hit NYC, my officemate and I appeared to moonbounce around our 46th floor office. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. Afterwards, we stared at each other mouths agape and asked at the same time, "What the hell was that???"

Because of the close proximity, you'd know things about your officemate that no one else did. You would know what they eat for lunch and dinner, how often they go to the bathroom, how often their girlfriend calls and whether she was usually in a good or bad mood, how they talk to difficult clients on the phone, and how they deal with work and life generally. Once a friend was walking by his officemate's desk and happened to see her googling "unexpected pregnancy." She took a leave of absence shortly thereafter.

My officemate certainly had dirt on me. Just prior to starting the job, my 5-year long relationship ended, a demise which included a broken engagement. After the breakup, I moved into a dark, noisy, tunnel of an apartment, started an all-consuming job, and decided that I wanted to be a musician after all but it was probably too late. It was one of the darkest, loneliest times in my life. If you've ever moved by yourself and then, surrounded by your worldly possessions in beat-up cardboard boxes, had to rebuild an IKEA bed frame before you can sleep, you know that every misaligned pre-drilled hole feels like a cruel joke by the universe. In those days, I would sometimes cry quietly at my desk. When it became noticeable, my officemate would ask gingerly, "Yo.... You okay over there?" and I'd answer, "Yeah," and clear my throat. "I'm fine," I'd say, leaning closer to my computer to see whether that was indeed an errant comma or a figment of my tear-blurred eyes. 

The code of officemate-dom was that you stayed out of each other's lives, but could gossip about it if it was remotely entertaining. I had a subsequent officemate who was dating a very pretty legal assistant, and I made a mental note of whether she was still stopping by for no good reason, just in case anyone asked. Another thing about this officemate was that he usually talked in a normal voice but once he got a phone call would switch to bellowing, whether on speakerphone or not. The moment he answered his calls, my secretary (who didn't even sit right outside our office) would instant message me, "OMG. How are you not deaf??"

Idiosyncrasies aside, conflicts between officemates were usually kept under control, because you really did have to get along. But there were some tense times. Once, I had just printed out a document of maybe 200-300 pages - one common junior associate task was to do a final review of a massive document in a short period of time before it was sent out, say to another team of lawyers or submitted to the SEC. As a corporate lawyer, you live or die by your organizational skills, and since I am also somewhat OCD, I started banging the stack of papers on all sides against my desk to neaten it into a pile. Bang bang bang! on one side of the stack. Bang bang bang! on another. I did all four sides and then went through it again just to make sure it was all aligned. Finally my officemate, who was trying to concentrate, looked over and howled, "Enough with the violence! Geez. Enough, Genghis! Genghis Han!!" 

And a nickname was born.

A nickname is, ultimately, a souvenir from a period of your life, is it not? Whether it's a pet name from your parents that sticks even after you have kids of your own, or a college name that indicates some grand victory or magnificent stupidity in your past, names represent an era in our lives and recall the people who gave them to us. 

I've kept the Genghis moniker because it represents many things: a ruthless efficiency, a will to triumph over the seemingly impossible, and an office culture where one of the best things about the job was the people around you. We have since all moved on to different endeavors, but every time someone calls me Genghis, I think back fondly to my officemates and those years that helped make me who I am today. 

Betsy DeVos, and why I quit piano for ten years

Wha...

I threw in the towel at 17. I remember worrying when I was 13 that my piano career was behind - I didn't have a major recording contract, full calendar of performances with major orchestras, or a Grammy. I thought to myself grimly that I had better ramp it up before I became obsolete! Age 16 was that deadline, and, guess what? By 16 I still didn't have any of those things. Furthermore, I wasn't cleaning up at every competition I entered, especially at the international level. To my teenage self, that meant that I wasn't good enough and never would be. Time was up. And so I told my piano teacher that I was not auditioning for conservatory and would be going to college. 

The idea that my performance *at that moment* in a competitive arena was an accurate measure of my abilities dictated how I thought about myself in all areas of my life. In high school, when my brother got a better score on the national qualifier AHSME math exam, even though he was two grades below, I thought resignedly, well, guess I'm terrible at math! 

Luckily, college helped changed that mindset, partially because it was a fresh start - I no longer had to be a good pianist because no one knew I was a pianist. I could study anything, so I picked biochemistry because it was a broad major and I'd always loved learning about the world and how it works. But it turned out in the premed-eat-premed major I'd chosen that I was, in fact, way behind. In my first semester, perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw what a difference preparation could make. For example, I failed my first physics exam. It tested material typically covered in a high school AP class, which most of the class had taken but I had not (it was not offered at my school). The average test score was around a 94%. My score was in the 30's. The professor put up a histogram of the scores on the projector for the hundreds of us to see, circled the three worst scores at the low tail end of the curve, and stated ominously, "If this is you ... come see me."

I went to her office, stunned. Wasn't I good at science?? The professor, a wry woman who was clearly brilliant but also clearly annoyed at having to teach this class, asked me how I prepared for the exam. I said that I read all the chapters covering the material and went to all the classes. "And how many practice problems in the problems book did you do?" she asked. I stared blankly at her. Practice problems? She saw my hesitation and asked, "Do you ... even have the practice problem book?" No. I had done no practice problems. She rolled her eyes. In one of many moments where people change my life but have no idea that they're doing so, she said, "Get the book. Do the problems. That's how you learn science." 

Thoroughly humiliated, I bought the book and did just about every single problem in it. Despite my first exam, I ended up with an A in the class. More importantly, I was empowered. I was NOT bad at physics. I was just not good at it yet, and I could change that with some elbow (brain? brain elbow?) grease.

For the first time in my life, I had the confidence to keep going at a tough challenge. When the all-male study group told me I didn't get the right answer because I was a girl and girls are bad at science (they were serious, by the way, and this was in the early 2000's), I got mad because I knew they were wrong. Some of them had taken the course before (I knew one girl who sat in the lectures for all of next year's classes to get a head start) and others had been doing research in the field (at local universities, etc.). And so I studied more, and I beamed inside when I beat their exam scores. Once I got a 99% on a tough test and a friend happened to see my score. For the next four years, anytime I relapsed into "poor me I can't do this" mode, he'd say, "Whatever, 99." I entered college a failed music prodigy, according to me. But I left college knowing that I could improve at just about anything. 

A few decades later, I'm watching Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing and it is a disaster. I don't think I would have been hired as a babysitter with her answers, let alone hired to oversee American education. That aside, an interesting moment for me was when Senator Al Franken asked her about her views on proficiency versus growth. DeVos's answer was as incoherent, uninformative and unprepared as her others, but the question was a critical one - should educational success be measured by individual students' growth or by whether they meet a set of standards? A light bulb went off. I was living proof that a growth mentality enhances learning more than a proficiency one. I went from being someone who judged her abilities by some impossible standard, who met challenges with the fear of failure, to someone who believes she can do just about anything with enough courage and effort, and who seeks out challenges. Senator Franken reminded me how important mindset is to the ability to learn. 

For this reason, it's a good thing I quit piano while I did. I needed time to realize my own potential, to have the confidence to tackle harder challenges. And building a performance career is the most challenging thing I've ever undertaken. It grows my mind, body and spirit every single day. I now play piano better than I ever thought I could, and I know I will continue to improve the longer I work at it. We all have real limitations, but over the years I've realized that my attitude doesn't have to be one of them.