What Skills and Habits Did Your Mom Instill In You?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - Let's move on.

00:00:06.420 | What do we got?

00:00:07.240 | - Okay, moving on here.

00:00:09.180 | We got a question.

00:00:10.940 | Basically, he has a question about,

00:00:13.540 | he thinks that your mom might be a computer scientist

00:00:15.980 | and she--

00:00:16.820 | - She was a computer programmer.

00:00:17.980 | - Okay, so he's got a question about that

00:00:19.620 | and types of values she instilled in you.

00:00:21.940 | - All right.

00:00:23.180 | - Hey Cal, this is Michael from Falls Church, Virginia.

00:00:26.360 | I recently read in one of the magazine articles of yours,

00:00:29.380 | I think it was in New Yorker,

00:00:30.940 | you said your mother was a computer scientist.

00:00:33.740 | So I can imagine she must have instilled some values

00:00:36.300 | and habits into you that are different

00:00:38.860 | from most mothers your generation growing up.

00:00:41.940 | Could you probably share some of these values

00:00:43.980 | and habits that she instilled in you

00:00:45.980 | that helped shape who you are today?

00:00:48.420 | Thanks and I hope to see you at an in-person event

00:00:51.020 | or a talk or a bookstore around DC one of these days.

00:00:54.960 | - Well, yeah, first of all, to your second point, yes,

00:00:58.140 | we should hope to see you in person at some point

00:01:00.860 | once Jesse and I get our act together

00:01:02.180 | to organize something.

00:01:03.020 | Falls Church is not too far from here,

00:01:05.060 | so that would be great.

00:01:06.220 | Yeah, so my mom, the article you're talking about

00:01:11.060 | was an article I wrote early in the pandemic

00:01:13.140 | about remote work.

00:01:13.980 | She wasn't a computer scientist,

00:01:15.260 | she was a computer programmer, COBOL programmer

00:01:18.820 | on series seven IBM mainframes for the Houston Chronicle

00:01:22.380 | back when we was born and raised in Texas.

00:01:26.700 | And so, yes, so I talked about in that article

00:01:31.700 | the fact that she was one of the first remote workers

00:01:33.980 | and they had set up a terminal,

00:01:35.620 | but that's important for your question

00:01:37.740 | because what it meant was is we had computers,

00:01:40.140 | personal computers in our house in the '80s

00:01:42.220 | at a relatively early period,

00:01:44.500 | because again, as a very early remote worker,

00:01:47.140 | she had a personal computer that she could connect

00:01:49.780 | into the mainframe and program from home there in Houston.

00:01:53.900 | So we had computers in our house in a very early age.

00:01:56.820 | So that had an impact on my interest in computers

00:02:01.300 | and eventually in computer science,

00:02:03.140 | because I could ask her what she's doing

00:02:05.580 | and she'd tell me what computer programming was.

00:02:07.100 | I knew what computer programming was.

00:02:08.420 | We had computers in the house.

00:02:09.500 | So at a pretty early age, I started computer programming.

00:02:12.540 | And I got pretty deeply into that.

00:02:15.300 | And that set up my whole computer science career.

00:02:17.340 | Of course, ironically, as soon as I got to MIT

00:02:20.340 | in grad school, I said, "I'm done with computer programming.

00:02:22.300 | "I wanna be a theoretician."

00:02:23.300 | And I haven't programmed a computer since, more or less,

00:02:26.540 | but that was very useful.

00:02:28.860 | The other influence here, and I'm gonna say right now,

00:02:31.060 | I'm just focusing on influences relevant

00:02:34.380 | to my public professional life.

00:02:36.020 | Obviously, there's very important influences on my values

00:02:39.420 | and me as a person and character,

00:02:41.620 | but I don't wanna get into all of that right now.

00:02:43.660 | But in terms of things that are publicly visible

00:02:46.580 | in my professional life, the other important thing

00:02:49.820 | that I got out of my mom is that when we moved,

00:02:52.620 | we moved to New Jersey, and I have three siblings,

00:02:56.900 | so there's four of us.

00:02:58.740 | And we moved to New Jersey, she stopped working

00:03:02.220 | for the Houston Chronicle and was just helping

00:03:05.180 | to raise the kids because we were at an age

00:03:07.180 | where it's four kids, it's a really hard job.

00:03:10.860 | And we generated a lot of chaos.

00:03:12.700 | There's a lot of paperwork and things that happen

00:03:14.740 | when you move.

00:03:15.580 | And my memory was it was quite overwhelming

00:03:19.020 | until one of her friends sold her on a Franklin Planner.

00:03:24.020 | It was like the Franklin Planner

00:03:27.300 | is a productivity organizational system

00:03:29.620 | that was in particular quite popular in the '80s and '90s.

00:03:32.660 | And she got very organized, and it made all the difference

00:03:36.780 | in the world.

00:03:37.620 | And it went from chaos, like a completely organized

00:03:40.140 | household, a completely organized childhood,

00:03:42.460 | in a way that was very impressive and very comforting.

00:03:45.100 | So I had been exposed all throughout my childhood

00:03:47.900 | to the power of being structured and organized

00:03:51.500 | in terms of your calendar, your to-do list, your days,

00:03:54.540 | your plan for what should happen.

00:03:56.060 | There's a lot of ideas from that original

00:03:58.340 | Franklin Covey system that permeate

00:04:02.700 | the time management systems I talk about today.

00:04:05.220 | Looking to the week ahead, figuring out in advance

00:04:08.420 | when things were gonna happen, full capture of things.

00:04:10.860 | You had all the information in place.

00:04:12.740 | Avoiding the chaos of what do I wanna do next,

00:04:15.180 | and instead having the structure of what's my plan

00:04:17.260 | for the day.

00:04:18.100 | A lot of that I saw happening as we were growing up.

00:04:19.900 | And it meant a very stable, structured household.

00:04:22.460 | Oh, it's this holiday happening,

00:04:23.980 | those decorations come out, there's these events we do,

00:04:27.260 | everyone gets their, we gotta get clothes for the kids,

00:04:29.820 | that was a big thing, because you grow out of your clothes

00:04:32.020 | so fast, and my mom would bring down the catalogs,

00:04:34.580 | be like, okay, you have to go through

00:04:35.700 | and circle what you want, and there would be the day

00:04:37.580 | she called and ordered it.

00:04:39.020 | And that, I think I took to heart for sure.

00:04:43.020 | And that would lead me to be someone that had productivity

00:04:46.020 | and productivity systems instilled in my DNA.

00:04:48.740 | So those are my two things I will say,

00:04:50.540 | in terms of my mom's influence on my public,

00:04:54.020 | my public, professional, visible lifestyle.

00:04:58.340 | Me as a computer scientist, and me as someone

00:05:00.460 | that does some productivity guru-ing,

00:05:03.620 | that goes back to her.

00:05:06.940 | Nice, good question.

00:05:09.300 | (upbeat music)

00:05:11.900 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

What Skills and Habits Did Your Mom Instill In You?

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