Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men,
and anyone else that's interested.
My sons,
We’ve been discussing the concept of hospitality, first generally and then as it applies to work. We shift our focus now to how it applies in life.
I’ve always desired to be hospitable. When I was younger, I lived in a tiny 500 sqft studio apartment, but would regularly host groups of 4-5 of my friends to have a home cooked dinner and to play board games until late into the evening. I didn’t even own a dining table, so we all sat cross legged on the floor around my coffee table, which doubled as our board game surface once dinner was done. Every home I’ve had since then has been purchased with a view of how I can entertain people, and how I can grow the set of things as I learned to be more hospitable.
The more I’ve learned though, the more I’ve discovered that my view of hospitality was limited and very, very incomplete.
For whatever reason, my view of hospitality was that it was simply the willingness/desire for people to host others in their home. This was almost a direct reflection of a few traits:
- Willingness to clean up after people leave
- Enjoyment of making food or having food delivered
- Comfort letting others into your space
As I learned more about what it really means to be hospitable, I realized that hospitality is not just about your willingness to physically serve others. It is a mindset. The hospitality mindset is one of putting people at ease, of being more interested in the lives of others than in telling others about our own lives, and of having the thoughtfulness to think of others even when you’re not physically with them.
How to cultivate a mindset of hospitality
One of the hardest things to do in this life is to adjust one’s mindset. There are a myriad books out there that talk about this - Think Again by Adam Grant and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath are two of my favorites and provide great insight into the psychology of our default behaviors as well as some greatly actionable advice on how to challenge and change our own thinking and behaviors.
Once we’ve identified, acknowledged, and determined the need to change our mindset and have understood the mechanics of changing our behaviors, we need to determine what new habits to instill, and what the goals of those habits are.
1. Build a rich thought life
One of my favorite books of all time is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I first read this book in my teen years, and again many times since, but that very first reading changed my life. In the book, our hero Edmond Dantes is wrongfully imprisoned for several years, and during that time he meets a prisoner that has been there even longer than he, yet who seems to have discovered a way to avoid the madness and depression that isolation typically brings. Instead, he has developed a rich thought life, one that keeps him busy studying, inventing, analyzing, and exploring, all within the recesses of his mind.
I loved that example and aspired to have that same richness in my thought life. As a teen, I realized that there were any number of mundane times where I was left alone without anything to distract. Whether it was sitting on the bus on the way to school, showering every morning, or the minutes dozing before falling asleep at night, there were many daily spaces that could be utilized better, so as often as I could remember, I started making adjustments.
I started small. I simply got myself to think about an idea instead of a situation. Instead of reliving the day on my bus ride home, I’d take an idea and work it out. Instead of imagining waking up early and playing my favorite epic video game (Final Fantasy 2) while falling asleep Friday evening, I’d think about the themes of the game (loyalty, betrayal, love) and ruminate on how I’d seen those themes play out in my life.
Over the years my thought life has developed to the point where I no longer experience boredom acutely, and where I welcome times of inactivity throughout my day so that I can spend time expanding on these ideas, themes, and debates in my mind. This is constantly challenged by the temptation of picking up that little rectangular device and being entertained by it, but the combination of identity (I believe that I am not a person that wastes time on my phone) and habit (I have a daily ritual of reclining in my Eames chair with a glass of wine to read) has helped me fend that off pretty effectively.
2. Put yourself in a position to experience hospitality from others
There are many great things about our hyper connected world and the technologies that enable it. One down side however, is that it enables - nay, causes - our world to become smaller. Why go through the discomfort of striking up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop when your little rectangular device enables you to interact with people you already know? Why put yourself through the stress of not understanding everything on the menu at a new restaurant when you can eat at your favorite haunt again, or can eat at home on your own?
By shrinking our world, we experience the hospitality of others less. By staying in the same small social circles, we limit our understanding and experience of hospitality to those we already know.
In contrast, expanding our world allows us to experience new ways of being hospitable. By trying new restaurants, by meeting new people and being invited to share in their hospitality, and by going to different countries to see how other cultures behave, we grow our awareness and understanding of hospitality and further our own style in how we demonstrate it to others.
3. Talk about it with others
In many ways, hospitality has fallen out of fashion in our modern world. Just the other day, we went to a digital food court. The whole idea is that you order your food via touch screen and the machine assigns you a locker number. Once you’ve ordered, someone somewhere prepares your food and deposits the food into the locker through the back and triggers the notification so that your locker lights up and you can open the front door to retrieve your food. Completely contact-less.
Why this is a feature and a desired experience I don’t know, but it was a reminder of just how much technology has enabled our world to become less hospitable.
As such, it becomes incredibly important for us to discuss, to share our experiences, and to talk about our ideas of hospitality with others! We are a social species. We learn from others. We think through talking. If we want to grow our mindset of hospitality, we need to be discussing it with others.
Making magic
Hospitality is about making magic for others. It is about caring for another’s experience. It is about thoughtfully surprising others with how valued, cared for, and known they are. And it is contagious!
Every child has wanted to be a magician at one point in their lives. Some entertain the thought for a mere minute while others spend summers at magic camp. But regardless of how intense the interaction, when one experiences the pure delight and joy that magic brings, one immediately desires to replicate and to be able to perform such feats themselves.
So too is the magic brought from hospitality. When we experience a truly magical moment of hospitality we are compelled to share it. Let us then discuss these moments with others, and let us arm ourselves with the skills to recreate these moments so that we can bring more magic to our world.