Take Two

Me again! Thanks for not unsubscribing.

Mini Musings

This past Sunday I got lunch with a dear friend of mine (hi, KG!) and, as it typically goes when you’re catching up with a best friend you haven’t seen in a while, we talked about just about everything under the sun.

Under the myriad of topics we covered, millennials and housing was one we stayed on for a while, with my friend asking a question that neither of us had an answer to: what does the end of this look like?

One argument that constantly comes up is the promised wealth transfer from Boomers to Millennials coming that plenty of people think will solve everything. To me, that feels like a cheap band-aid and a band-aid that probably only covers 1/8 of the wound.

That specific part of our conversation reminded me of a concept I learned about last year from Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: naive realism. It’s a fancy way of saying we, as humans, have the tendency to believe our perception of the world reflects it exactly as it is, unbiased and unfiltered. For example: a boss griping over someone being out sick for a week with the flu because “when I had the flu it only lasted 2 days!” (Yes, that’s a real example of a conversation I had with a prior manager.) Check out some other examples here.

In the context of our conversation, it’s easy for someone in a position who knows their children will inherit a life changing amount of money to assume everyone else has the same luxury and millennials will be fine. For me, a person who lives largely without social anxiety, it’s all too easy to project my own calmness onto others in social situations and assume everyone else is getting as much energy from the exchange as I am.

There’s no actual solve for this and I have no idea what the housing market will look like at the “end” of all this, but brushing up on naive realism has definitely helped me check myself in the last few days.

PS: I promise I’ll stop talking about the housing market soon. Billionaire Wilderness is just too good of a book and has my wheels spinning.

Artiste In The Making

Ladies and gentleman, my finished Butte Bagels drawing! I’m so, so pumped about how the colors of this one came out.

Funny story, I used to think of myself as someone with a horrible lack of attention to detail. At my last job I felt like I was constantly making small, silly errors: a formula not summed correctly in Excel, a spelling error in an email or slack, mis-labeling products, and whatever corporate errors you can imagine. (see: the ones that feel like the worst thing anyone has ever done the moment they happen.)

Art, by and large, has taught me to question the things I believe about myself and challenge them. I spent the better part of my life thinking I wasn’t a creative person because of a comment a teacher made in my high school art class that was idiotic at best and insensitive at worst. 15 year old McCall didn’t have the life experience or perspective to know that someone’s opinion is exactly that — just their opinion. So I took that comment as fact and told myself, on repeat, that I wasn’t a creative person. For a decade.

The whole story of how I rediscovered art and fell in love is a story for another time, but what I’m saying now is art helped me fall back in love with the details and the messiness. After I finish a drawing, I spend a solid 3 hours going back over it with a graphite pencil to perfect the shading and add the most minuscule details. And I love every single second of it.

I’ve described myself to clients as “detailed obsessed” and at in-person showings, I always get feedback that my art is “so detailed!”. Do me a favor and scroll up, spend a few extra seconds staring at the Butte Bagels drawing, and take in the shadows and shading. I promise every single stroke of it is intentional.

So, what am I trying to say here? Don’t take anything you believe about yourself as fact. We’re all as malleable as the art we’re making.

The Wild, Wild West

I love Colorado for a multitude of reasons, but among those is the fact that I went skiing on Sunday, June 4th and then took this photo hiking on Friday morning, June 9th.

My original plan for this section was to explain a fun fact my friend told me about why Arapahoe Basin has the luxury of closing so much later than a lot of other ski mountains. Sadly, despite a solid 30 minutes of googling, I couldn’t find a single bit of evidence to corroborate what I assumed was true (if a friend said it, it has to be true, right?).

Instead, I’ll give you my plans for this coming weekend: on Sunday morning, I’ll be waking up at approximately 3:15AM to head out to Leadville, Colorado to hike Mount Sherman.

Mount Sherman sits at 14,043’ and is typically one of the “friendlier” 14ers in Colorado. It’s a five mile out-and-back trail, meaning 2.5 miles up, 2.5 miles down and has juuust over 2K feet of elevation gain. Cue me already packing my hiking poles.

The biggest hurdle with this expedition will be timing it right. Like I mentioned last week, the snow line starts right around 11.5K feet, and from reviews of the trail, people who hiked it recently said the snow is consistent starting around 13K feet. With that comes the challenge of hiking on the snow while it’s still firm and not super slushy — when you’re hiking on slushy snow, you run into safety issues when your ankles naturally splay out as you walk to stabilize you, or you can start postholing and risk hurting yourself. Microspikes help with the former and snowshoes are great for the latter, but it’s best to get it done before the snow starts to melt (typically around 9:30AM).

My favorite part of hiking 14ers is getting back to the parking lot around 9:30-10AM and feeling like you’ve already lived a full life. This’ll be my 6th 14er (…I think?) and I’m already looking forward to 1. drinking an entire Camelbak of water 2. eating a pound of dried mango and 3. watching the sunrise in the mountains.

If you need me this Sunday, I’ll be slamming a turkey sandwich on the summit (fingers crossed!) around 7AM.

What I’m Noodling On

• My lovely friend Meredith wrote an article on hustle culture and the pressure to perpetually progress forward, then leaves us with the question: What if Your Success Was Your Joy?

• I recently discovered Hello Hayes’ newsletter and her writing feels like a long hug. My new life goal is to be able to give advice that’s half this eloquent

• I’ve been listening to Noah Kahan’s extended version of Stick Season on repeat since last Friday and you should too. This man deserves every bit of success that’s headed his way

Until next week! You know where to find me in the meantime.

- McCall