The Musings
Everyone has their routines. Their habits. Their little peccadillos.
I’m sitting at a Starbucks and it’s 5am. Couldn’t sleep and the only place to go to for a cup of coffee at this hour is the ‘bucks. I ran out of coffee yesterday so I couldn’t make any at my apartment. Proper planning is a must in life.
I was the first customer for the day and a few minutes after I sat down with my redeye, a homeless man came in. I’ve seen him around before panhandling at Western and Chicago Avenue. He seems like a nice man that just fell on hard times. I think I’ve given him some scratch in the past if I had it but I cannot recall.
Anyway, he comes into Starbucks and begins to help setup the tables and chairs. Just a nice deed that I imagine he hopes is paid forward. He did get a drink and the Starbucks employees seemed to know him by name so I would not be shocked if he was a regular with a known ritual of coming to the Starbucks at open to prepare for his day.
All of this to say, well, I don’t know. I suppose I want to humanize a typically dehumanized group of people. The homeless are not some scourge. They are people. Too often we forget that. I forget that. I should do more in my local community to help those in need. Perhaps I’ll volunteer more, I need to.
It’s also just interesting to see the world at odd hours. Going for walks before the sun rises is a great way to see parts of life you normally wouldn’t, like the men lining up at a job site looking for a day’s wage or the garbage men going through the alleys before the rest of the world knows what’s up. I find that after 4am, the only people really out and about are either working or heading to work. Before that, you get the partiers and hooples looking for trouble. I’ve been there too.
The Rundown
Reading
13 Lessons from Aydin Senkut via Confluence VC.
This is from a VC-focused newsletter that I subscribe to. Most of the time the insights and thoughts are not relevant to me or my work but I found this nugget to be interesting, “People loving adding more things in order to scale rarely think what to take out in order to scale easier. More is usually less.” From a work perspective, it’s an interesting concept for a scaling company. What can we stop doing, remove from our workload, in order to more efficiently scale? From a personal perspective, I think it’s also interesting. How can I minimize the stressors in my life by offloading some mental (or material) baggage? You can’t take it all with you. In fact, you can’t take anything.
Listening To
I think that’s all I got for today, the hottest day of the year here in Chicago. It’s also my birthday? I have never been a birthday person personally. But give a shout if you’d like. I always love to hear from you.
Best,
Rob
P.S. If you weren’t raised by VH1 and MTV, this is the song referenced in my subject line and preview text.