GHDR Report 0303: Adding Friendship as Mission

⊕captionThis is my friend Sid's photography studio, a place where many a fun collaboration was born. I'd like to get back to those days!

Happy Groundhog Day Resolution Report Day! It's time for a look back at the month since kickoff and see how well I followed through with my original goals and make adjustments. As usual, the report follows a winding path of recalled insights as I feel my way through the process of discovery.

My mood is improving

For the Feb02-Mar03 report period, I was mainly preoccupied with doing difficult project work while coming out from severe Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). There were several habit changes I have made to help stabilize my mood:

• Restarted the daily Starbucks Habit to get out of the house every day, despite the cost. This was a small price to pay for billable work productivity. What is unusual about my local Starbucks is that it's one of the brightest light-filled spaces I've seen and is located just five minutes from my house.
• Put my daily wakeup routine into Finch App, a "self care app" that has you check off tasks on a todo list to earn points that go toward the care of a curious cartoon bird that goes on daily adventures. Each step of my wakeup routine from "get out of bed" to "get out and see people" is in the daily repeating to do list, and I also keep reminders like "do laundry" and "call a plumber" in there so I feel assured I won't forget them.
• Moved my daily work log from a private Slack channel to the #dsri-strategic-disco inside of the DSCAFE Discord. Unlike the Slack channel, posting on Discord gave me the hope that other people could see what I was doing and maybe ask about it out of interest. A second boost came from the act of sharing the day-to-day challenge of learning new things, which is an important way for me to be open, transparent, and authentic.

This seemed to help elevate my baseline mood and energy, as did the GHDR Mastermind Group on the Discord. There are about 10 of us, providing a slow trickle of reflections and updates throughout the week that makes me feel less isolated. It also makes me really happy to see people post about what they're doing on their goals, which gives a big boost to my day!

I've been focused on work

I'm very preoccupied with work, both for income purposes and because I'm planning a month-long family trip in April. I have to get things done.

I got quite a lot done for the first three weeks of February, learning how to build custom web components alongside a custom router and view system in vanilla HTML/Javascript that will hopefully pave the way to simpler applications for the learning sciences research software I help develop. As funding for science research in the United States is in danger of drying-up this year, it's also a good skill to burnish for the resume. This was a big win!

More of a lesson in humility was the last week of February, when I started to create the packaged library for URSYS aka Sri's Universal Realtime System, of which the web components are part of. The idea is that the packaged version of URSYS could be imported into our old legacy products to gradually improve them, but I vastly underestimated what I knew about library packaging in the Node.js / TypeScript ecosystem. Despite using ChatGPT Plus and later its "Deep Research" option, I could not get it to work entirely right. Eventually, I realized that I was focused far too much on getting a working configuration so I could get to the next step; I actually needed to do a deep understanding dive because I was probably not asking the right questions. Despite that setback, I've refined my understanding of module resolution and packaging in the grand Javascript ecosystem. There are many conflicting tools and legacy practices to deal with, and my configuration itself is not typical. This could be seen as a "win in progress" if I were to frost it with optimism!

Reviewing what I wrote is a chore

As I've been focused heavily on work, I didn't put as much effort into reviewing what I wrote about my Groundhog Day Resolutions. I seem to dislike reading my own words, even though I make an effort to be clear. I think my resistance is because there are three different reasons I write at all:

1. To think on paper in a stream-of-consciousness form, which helps me stay focused by helping me remember what I was thinking 5 seconds ago. The stream-of-consciousness form is verbose and unclear, raw and emotional. A lot of my blog posts are lightly cleaned-up versions of a stream-of-consciousness session.

2. To create a reference doc that is useful for refreshing my memory of complex models and their relationship to intention, action, purpose, and concept. These are ideally designed to be quick to scan and use, unlike a stream-of-consciousness text.

3. To communicate my experiences and insights to other people, which is takes more work than the previous two kinds of writing. Most of what I present on my blogs is intended to serve in this role, but I have a meandering style of writing that tells the complete story from insight to actionable takeaway in the context of how I think, feel, and process both emotion and data. This is neither quick to scan or easy to write, and I suspect it isn't easy to read or understand. That said, I strive to present my experiences in an authentic, transparent, and honest manner in alignment with my values. This naturally complicates the narrative, I think, because the writing is broad, deep, and littered with personal references that may be unclear.

As I mention, the third type of writing is what I'm trying to do with these Groundhog Day Reports, but they aren't in a form that's particularly easy for me to reread at a glance. What I want is a quick summary that is also emotionally resonant and values aligned, something that maybe fits on a poster. Readers of last month's kickoff might remember this poster:

⊕captionI thought this was great last month, but I hate looking at it now. Link to source diagram

At the time I thought this was pretty cool, but looking at it NOW I find that I don't want to read it at all. I think my poor reaction is because it's intended to justify and explain this year's GHDR as an experiment to other people. It lacks the emotional resonance and alignment with values, and it's also too much text. I need something that will fit on a refrigerator magnet or 4x6 postcard. Something short and to the point with meticulous wording that truly captures the spirit of my goals.

Declaring a more heartfelt mission

As I was pondering the above problem, I recalled how several members of the GHDR Mastermind Group had taken the time to craft their own mission statements. I had not picked one this year. I had come up instead with lists of criteria and strategic goals. I did not have a strategy, though, beyond "pursuing a direction and seeing if I felt better", which started out as something like this.

This is accurate, but boy is it a hard read. The statement is packed with loaded terms that mean very specific things to me, and so is a good personal reference. However, I want something that rolls off the tongue more easily. I want something that feels very Sri.

Looking deeper into myself, my inner self wants to say this:

In my naive and tender heart, I wish that everyone could be friends and get along. However, my coldly analytical brain recognizes that the world is a harsh place where people are in conflict over desire and power. I think this has kept me from saying what I really want out loud, but there...I've said it. This is the most important thing to me, and I think everything good for Sri comes from that.

This is a short-enough mission statement that I can wrap around myself like a warm blanket, as it is intertwined with my own personal experiences and tendencies.

The mind supports the heart in its desires

With the above mission statement, this reminds me that I choose to lead with my heart. However, my brain is what provides support and has come up with several strategic objectives that supports my heart's desire and personal values:

• Nurture a "functional culture""functional" in this sense means that there are clear guidelines of behavior that are in alignment with the mission goal of stability. I've borrowed the idea from structural functionalism. that embodies values of truth, authenticity, transparency, and functional quality as the basis for psychological safety.
• Encourage sharing of experiences and stories, to enrich our collective knowledge and provide the basis for getting to know each other over time.
• Facilitate opportunities for meaningful interaction that can lead to collaboration and eventual friendships.
• Call out the tangible benefits that result from a culture of sharing and caring.
• Develop a model of governance that helps communities like ours sustain themselves, grow, and spread to others.

Neither the mission nor the strategic objectives had been well-defined this year, but now they are!

Guidelines for mission-oriented action

The below are actions that people take (i.e. tactics) to actualize the objectives. They are strongly based on my own values, but I hope to expand them with other participants:

• Develop and promote all communities that resonate with my mission.
• Copiously share the mission and ideas.
• Copiously share what we are doing and what we have made.
• Elucidate and demonstrate the functional cultural values as a basis for psychological safety and kinship.
• Be unafraid to share values in an inclusive manner, demonstrating the existence of psychological safety.
• Develop guides with examples for 'team play', 'functional culture', and other ideas that need examples to help people practice them for everyone's benefit.

Finally, there are the specific actions that I must take to ensure that my values-first emotion needs are well regulated, otherwise I fall into depression and sadness:

• Embrace that I am driven by emotion first; my process-driven approach to life is just a tool that's easiest to see.
• Embrace that I desire to exist practicing truth, transparency, authenticity, and equality.
• Practice my work and social interactions as support vessels to further my mission and strategic goals, not the other way around.
• Harness the motivation that comes from copious sharing that might lead to connection, with cheerful whimsy, as this is the nature of Sri.

Promoting team play over being a team player

Everything I wrote makes sense to me, but it's all hypothetical until someone really buys-into my mission and strategic objectives. However, having worked and lived in isolation for the past 20-something years, I've developed some poor habits.

First of all, while I want to be part of a community of people, I have hangups about being part of a team due to insecurities and negative experiences of the past. Some of this I have processed under the lens of being a "neurodivergent" individual with both systemized information processing and high sensitivity to emotional nuance, and have laid many of those old memories to rest. That said, I still have the following proclivities that work against me in the team environment:

• I don't think of myself as a "team player" because the term has strong connotations with "conforming to social pressure" and "bowing to authority" for the sake of appeasing authority that prioritizes emotional comfort of a few over effective and mission-focused work.
• I overemphasize adherence to excellence, principled thinking, and aspirational action. This is good for individual performance, but it does not develop strong personal bonds within the team.
• I prioritize personal competence and tangible work as the basis of my confidence talking to other people so I have something valuable to trade; I don't believe that people inherently want to interact with me otherwise. This causes me to overprepare and hesitate when I am uncertain, which is not an attractive trait for a team member.

These thoughts are intrusive even when I'm playing video games with friends, a problem that I had been aware of for a few years and blamed the stress I feel when playing co-op because it reminds me of bullies in PE class. With friends, though, there are no bullies but the memory of being mocked for being "bad at sports" had oversensitized me to playing poorly...or when others played poorly.

But then I watched a great video essay from Helldivers 2 player QuantumBucket, who clearly enjoys playing the game with his friends and wanted to try making an all shields strategy simply because he likes the idea of being in a phallanx of shield-bearing warriors. After talking with famed team play advocate CommissarKai about strategy development, the conversation shifts to how to create roles for a team at the 9:13 mark instead of being "four people playing as individuals".

The real takeaway, though, came from the footage of the creator's testing of his new approach, which doesn't go that well. But...everyone was having such a good time and no one was getting angry at each other. They were all friends, making mistakes and panicking, and it occurred to me that for this level of team play to exist there was tremendous psychological safety between each person, and their friendship presumed that having fun was the basis of their interaction. Not "being good" or "being the best" or "winning the most".

With respect to my mission, I have not accounted for the necessity of having fun, which includes me. I had only been thinking about meeting emotional needs for psychological safety, trust, and collaborative productivity. But really...it should also be fun for everyone. And that is a different kind of leadership than what I'd been thinking.

I've been thinking a lot about being the kind of friend who prioritizes not just caring and authenticity, but the kind of fun that leads to psychological safety in an inherently joyful way. Of course, fun to someone like me is deconstructing the world into malleable elements to synthesize novel things that make my friends grin. It's also about learning what people like and helping them have those experiences on the way to developing a good relationship and perhaps someday becoming friends.

I'm not sure how I'll put this into practice, but it's a new factor to consider in the design of that place where we can all be supportive friends, creating and sustaining together.

The whole video is well worth watching, particularly the takeaway at the end about friendship.

Looking ahead

To recap, I have a new mission statement! It makes everything fit together and is easy for me to remember:

and

I want to be an architect of a place where:

• We find ways to sustain ourselves, and grow together.
• We help establish a strong culture of cooperation and discovery.
• We help co-develop a functional specification for psychological safety and belonging.
• Economic measures of success depend on the number of productive collaborations and friendship-based projects.

It does not have to be a BIG place at all. What's important is that people feel they can be themselves and see the benefit of contributing to the growth of the community.

I'll reflect on that over the next couple of weeks and see if I can come up with something.Thanks for reading!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS