Gregory Heller

I'm a communications/presentation coach and career coach at the UW Foster School of Business MBA Program.

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I’ve got a podcast about careers, career advice and related topics including mindfulness and resilience.

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Who is Gregory Heller?

I just migrated my website.  Probably won’t post much here on tumblr ever again (as is perhaps obvious by the fact that I haven’t posted here in 6+ years).

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#madewithstudio

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[seattlish]

Seattle In Progress maps all of the active construction projects in town

One of the hardest parts about Seattle’s abundance of growth right now is the fact that it maps it kind of difficult to get around. The City of Seattle is garbage at ensuring that pedestrian safety (and, honestly, just pedestrian ease) is even a factor in construction, leading to tons of closed sidewalks on every goddamn block. 

Last year in November, Ethan Phelps-Goodman launched Seattle in Progress, a map app that shows where all of the current construction projects are. The information is sourced from data.seattle.gov (aka the Bible) and mapped onto a Google map, which makes it easy to plan your route and also inquire about all the shit going up in your neighborhood. 

Phelps-Goodman has written about his concerns regarding the tech industry’s ambivalence about the housing crisis in Seattle.

As election season heats up, prospective City Councilmembers will be required to answer for issues like affordable housing (and Ed Murray’s largely unenforceable promises) this kind of data visualization is going to be pretty key. An informed, engaged voting class is one of the most effective and important tools for positive change.

So, you know. Poke around at this. Wonder why construction sites are allowed to close down busy sidewalks. Ask your potential politicians what they’re doing to ensure that all this growth is in the best interest of not just the people moving here but the people living here. 

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Time and money will be wasted

This weekend 80 to 100 coders will join others at the Seattle Hack The Commute Hackathon. The one thing I can guarantee that will happen is time and money will be wasted. Some might say I am being negative, but I firmly believe there is no software that can solve the commute and traffic problems that Seattle is experiencing. How much money? Well, 100 coders who command an average rate of $100 will blow through $160,000 in (free) labor across 2 8 hour days.  

Let’s be clear, the problem is not construction, the problem is too many people want to drive private and often single occupancy vehicles to and from work in the central business district.  The problem is also that there are not sufficient fast and convenient public transit options.  Software cannot solve these two problems.  We need to fund more transit options and create serious disincentives for people to drive SOVs into the CBD every day. 

Here is my free advice: make parking cost a minimum of $25/day in the CBD. That will modify behavior. Pass a transit package that will increase frequency and reliability of mass transit. Build more mass transit with dedicate, grade separated right-of-way. 

We don’t need more hackathons with largely homogeneous groups of coders and tech people trying to solve problems with software that actually require policy solutions. 

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“As much of an impact”

The problem with that Obama quote i just shared is that linguistically, semantically, it is problematic: “I can have as much of an impact on the things that are important to people as anybody on the planet.” This is the kind of phrase we use often, but when you break it down, it almost means the exact opposite of what it is intended to mean.  Anybody on the planet probably can’t have much of an impact on the things that are important to people, and especially not as much as Obama can. It’s like the, “I’m as big a supporter as anybody of [fill in the universally supported blank].” But that presupposes that everyone is equally a supporter, which often might be true. In the case of the Obama quote, he should have said, “I can have more of an impact on the things that are important to people than just about anybody on the planet.” That would smack of ostentation and chutzpa. But it would be true.

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I can have as much of an impact on the things that are important to people as anybody on the planet.

President Obama, Interview With Vice, March 2015

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Share vs Rent

I am constantly surprised  (and a little dismayed) when an article that is ostensibly about sharing, and the sharing economy talks about renting. This quote,"You could start to equalize standards of living if you allow people who have a lot of stuff to comfortably rent out things to people who don't," from  Arun Sundararajan, and NYU researcher, is even more alarming. The article I lifted the quote from is on FastCoExist, “How The Sharing Economy Could Help the Poorest Among Us” How does it help the poorest among us for those who have stuff to charge the poor to use it. That sounds pretty much like the world we live in now. The paradigm shift (and I hope the quote was taken out of context) is when those who have stuff will lend it to those who don’t have stuff, ideally NOT for money. IE Share the stuff with people, not rent the stuff to people.

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1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Kurt Vonnegut:

How to Write with Style

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Unlike Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and Mr. Holder, who were roundly faulted by police groups for their critical remarks about law enforcement, Mr. Comey, a former prosecutor whose grandfather was a police chief in Yonkers, was praised for his remarks.

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A Better Way to Introduce Your Friends at Parties

Let’s stop introducing the people we love based solely on what they do, who they cash their checks from, or what’s on their twitter profiles. Let’s instead start reminding them of who they are. Let’s start conversations that don’t begin and end with who has the most interesting job in the room. 

Networking builds an empire, but thoughtful introductions build a community. Where will you lay your bricks?

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"Stop referring to yourself as consumers. Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings."

James Howard Kunstler, http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia?language=en#t-1170331

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While the most effective conservation policies are rooted in good science, their implementation takes place in a sociopolitical context that has little to do with science.

Alan Rabinowitz, from An Indomitable Beast

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“Governance. New power favors informal, networked approaches to governance and decision making. The new power crowd would not have invented the United Nations, for instance; rather, it gravitates toward the view that big social problems can be solved without state action or bureaucracy. Often encountered in Silicon Valley, this ethos has at its core a deep and sometimes naive faith in the power of innovation and networks to provide public goods traditionally supplied by government or big institutions. Formal representation is deprioritized; new power is more flash mob and less General Assembly.” Understanding “New Power” https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding-new-power via Instapaper

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Between 2010 and 2013, Seattle renters took a bigger hit to their pocketbooks than renters in any other large U.S. city. The gross median rent here — that is, rent plus utilities — spiked by $113, or nearly 11 percent. That’s the sharpest rise in rent among the nation’s 50 most-populous cities.

The next time someone tries to tell you that there isn’t an affordability crisis in Seattle, bust this little nugget out of your pocket and shut that shit down. 

(via seattlish)