Decade in Review (EP.05)
Last Updated
December 31, 2019
It's the end of a decade, and Lauren and I totally missed that's what everyone has been posting items about. In this episode, we sat down for a virtual fireside chat to record reflections on the past decade. Soft launch your new decade with a look back at ours.
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guests
LAUREN OLIVIA RUFFIN currently serves as Fractured Atlas’s Chief External Relations Officer where she is responsible for the organization’s marketing, communications, community engagement, and fundraising. Prior to joining the team at Fractured Atlas, Lauren served as Director of Development for DC-based organizations Martha’s Table and the National Center for Children and Families. She was also fortunate to serve in various roles at and various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders, and AAUW. Before entering the nonprofit sector, Lauren held the position of Assistant Director of Government Affairs for Gray Global Advisors, a bipartisan government relations firm. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Black Girls Code. And in her spare time, she can be found mountain biking or gesturing wildly at the teevee in support of Duke University’s men’s basketball team.
TIM CYNOVA spends his time assisting teams and organizations with the things they need to create workplaces where people thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), a trained mediator, on faculty at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and New York's The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Leadership & Team Building. He is a certified trainer of the Crucial Conversations and What Motivates Me frameworks, and is a firm believer that Work. Shouldn't. Suck. He currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Fractured Atlas where he oversees the FinPOps team (Finance, People, and Operations, as well as is a member of the organization’s four-person, non-hierarchical shared leadership team). Prior to that, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled across the United States.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about that. On this episode it's the end of the decade as we know, it but for Ruffin and me, we actually didn't. Who saw that coming? Now that we've figured out why everyone has been posting those 10 year recaps on social media, we're game for our own reflections.
Tim Cynova:
For this journey into the past, I'm again joined by podcasting saver co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Lauren, how's it going?
Lauren Ruffin:
Hey. It's good. So, how is your vacation? You've got a nice fireplace behind you.
Tim Cynova:
I do, it's really heating on my back. So-
Lauren Ruffin:
You look a little red in the face. But we should really do this with a video at some point because this is amazing. We're wasting a video.
Tim Cynova:
Well, I've go one image that I'll post to show our listeners what this is like.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay.
Tim Cynova:
So yeah, it's the end of the decade, neither of us saw this coming, but we've decided to go year-by-year and pick out something that is a memorable highlight or just something to fill the space. So we'll let the listeners be the judge at what falls into which category there.
Tim Cynova:
How did you approach your compiling of your top 10 list for the decade?
Lauren Ruffin:
I did one of my favorite exercises which is I just picked random dates in my email. I've had the same Gmail account since 2002 or 2003, so there's lots of nuggets of fantastic-ness in there.
Tim Cynova:
All right. Let's get going.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Let's do it. Are you going first or am I going first?
Tim Cynova:
Do we want to go one by one?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Let’s just take turns.
Tim Cynova:
Okay, great. So 2010, start of the decade, what did you pull up?
Lauren Ruffin:
My random email from 2010 was my dad, an email scam, where my dad and I had started this charter school and it's a board of older people, and he apparently got hacked and it said he was in Mallorca, Spain without the money. And so, I wake up in the morning to all of these emails from old people being worried about him. My dad is definitely not in Spain. He is most certainly in Woodstown, New Jersey where he's been for the last 25 years.
Lauren Ruffin:
So that was my random email. But yeah, email scams were a whole thing.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I like that. That's the second time I've heard that story. It still is funny as the first time. All right. So, for mine, I decided to flip through all of my photos on my phone starting back in 2010 and pick something that seemed like a highlight from the decade.
Tim Cynova:
For 2010, I have photos of us moving into our new Fractured Atlas office which you'll see a theme for how this bookends my decade. It was the first time I ever had a chance to envision what an office might be like. It was pretty generic though, it looks like an office from 1980s, 30 years later. That was the first thing that I came to. I had a lot of photos from that office, so it's more quantity than quality, I think, for 2010, but that was what I picked for 2010.
Lauren Ruffin:
It didn't occur to me to look at photos. That's brilliant.
Tim Cynova:
I think picking a date and looking in email is also brilliant.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, my list is such a random hodge-podge of randomness.
Tim Cynova:
We're only a year in, so-
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Okay. No, I have something to do for the next decade, actually have an account with photos on it would be a step up for me.
Tim Cynova:
Well, in 10 years we'll come back and I'll do the email and you do the photos.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, I should also say that 2010 was the year I switched from government affairs, lobbying corporate stuff to the non-profit sector. That was the year it happened.
Tim Cynova:
That's nice. Well, and so that also bookends your decade.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. That's why I need you.
Tim Cynova:
All right, so that's 2010. What's 2011?
Lauren Ruffin:
2011 was a lot of basketball games because I was playing in four different leagues. So there's a lot of emails about basketball, and the occasional one about volleyball. I don't remember playing in a volleyball league, but apparently I did.
Tim Cynova:
You just played in so many leagues you forgot.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm a terrible volleyball player and I need to email people on that chain to be like, "Did I ever show up to these games?" I have no recollection of playing volleyball.
Lauren Ruffin:
And then Netflix. Getting the red envelope. I was getting emails constantly about what I was getting, what I needed to return, and then taking these to other people's houses to watch a movie.
Tim Cynova:
Oh, nice.
Lauren Ruffin:
Remember that?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And then, it was the person who had the Blu-ray machine.
Lauren Ruffin:
Nobody I knew had a Blu-ray machine.
Tim Cynova:
I had a friend that had a laser disc machine, but all he had were operas to play on it, so we never went over to his house.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Do you want to watch a six hour opera about somebody pulling a sword out of a tree?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. No.
Tim Cynova:
No.
Lauren Ruffin:
No, I don't. Remember those mini discs? What happened to those? They seemed like they could have been cool, but they really never took off.
Tim Cynova:
They were so much easier to lose than the regular sized discs.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I don't know.
Tim Cynova:
I had a mini disc that had my business card on it for a little while when I worked at the Parsons Dance Company.
Lauren Ruffin:
And you hand it out?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay.
Tim Cynova:
It was the cool thing to do for a year.
Lauren Ruffin:
Huh. New York. Only in New York.
Tim Cynova:
You only could do them in the tray disc players and you couldn't do them in the ones that inserted in, and so once those became popular with Apple, whatever.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
All right, so a lot of leagues. That's great. And Netflix. Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
So let's see. 2011, I have that it was the fifth and final time that I attended the Tour de France.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh.
Tim Cynova:
I used to be a regular. Well, for five times, it was a summer vacation, to go spectate at the Tour de France. It was the year that I came to realize that it was disillusionment with elite professional cycling, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true, because that was at the end of the Lance Armstrong, where people were still doing amazing things and it was just getting too tough to believe. So-
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
It was still a great vacation, you just have to ignore-
Lauren Ruffin:
The drug scandal?
Tim Cynova:
Ignore the drug scandal and it's beautiful. It's castles and-
Lauren Ruffin:
Wealthy white men doing drugs in public, in plain sight.
Tim Cynova:
That's right. While everyone picnicked. Picnics along the side of the road.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
So quaint. All right. So that was 2011. 2012?
Lauren Ruffin:
The Olympics. Every Olympic year is a highlight for me.
Tim Cynova:
So you had a lot of emails that included information about the Olympics?
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Watching parties, or?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, watching parties. Where are we going to go hang out? Yeah, no I guess I spent a lot of time thinking about the Olympics that year. There were a lot of emails of the Olympics. That was also the year Katie and I started dating. That was also the year that I got laid off from my first non-profit job. I didn't know non-profits laid people off. I thought only corporations did that.
Tim Cynova:
That's quite the list.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
You're covering a lot of bases on that year.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, I did, I found a lot of... There was an email thread that I found in September of 2012 that recapped my summer of the Olympics to a friend.
Tim Cynova:
What were the highlights of that?
Lauren Ruffin:
Talked about hurricane Sandy which, the house that I grew up in, slid into the ocean, and so there was a picture on the front page of the Express that day. I had just gotten laid off, so I had a job interview that morning, and then talking about me and Katie and how we'd started dating.
Lauren Ruffin:
So that happened to be the day, the email that I found for that day.
Tim Cynova:
That's a great email.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. No, it summarized apparently the entire year. I was done in September.
Tim Cynova:
Just play this one out for the next four months.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
What are your Olympic highlights? What do you watch? What do you have to watch for summer Olympics.
Lauren Ruffin:
I have to watch track and field. That's the most less interesting. It's one of the few. Basketball is an option but it's a little less interesting to me, but for me, it's track. How about you? Do you watch the summer Olympics or you a winter Olympics guy, or neither?
Tim Cynova:
I do. I seem to get really invested in obscure sports, but not every Olympics. I think I usually watch, at this point, winter Olympics more than summer Olympics. I get invested in winter Olympics in a way that, I don't know.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Summer Olympics don't hold it for me.
Lauren Ruffin:
I got hooked on winter Olympics, was it last year? Yeah, 2018? Yeah. I discovered this sport where you're cross-country skiing for a million miles, and then you have to do it with a gun, and then you have to take the gun off, lay down on the cold ground and shoot at a target, and then get back up and ski some more. I got obsessed with that sport.
Lauren Ruffin:
What crazy person said, "Let me just have these people ski through the woods in a pack with loaded guns on their back, lay down on the cold-ass ground and shoot at targets."? That is insane.
Tim Cynova:
I could see you getting really into actually doing that sport.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah. When I was 16, if I had known this existed, it would have been all in. It was like me spending two and a half hours just screaming and laughing at the TV, being like, "This is amazing. Why didn't I know this existed?"
Tim Cynova:
I bet you're going to spend maybe half an hour on the internet trying to find places where you can actually go and do this, and then that's going to be a vacation soon.
Lauren Ruffin:
Well, that's the best thing about being in Albuquerque. All the outdoor stuff that I want to do here is around the corner. I can just go throw knives at a knife-throwing range here. I'm like, "Awesome. I don't have to do it in my backyard anymore.", where the neighbors got really angry at me downtown. Someone throwing those knives poorly at a wooden board makes a lot of noise.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I might get angry for different reasons than the noise. Errant knives flying through your backyard. Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. No, metal slamming against wood at high velocity. The butt of the knife. It was so bad. But my attitude is as long as I can hit the thing, you could take somebody out with the pointy end or the blunt end. It doesn't matter. I'm just throwing them.
Tim Cynova:
Oh God. All right. The Olympics, great. 2012. Yeah. Just on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, that was the year my mom died.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh gosh. Yeah, that's more grieving.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah this is the regular point in our episodes where we talk about grief. So that's about all I'm including for 2012. That's a pretty life-changing experience.
Lauren Ruffin:
I have been thinking about the holidays so I'm hugging people a lot. So I'm thinking about the story you told about how your mom gave great hugs. I've been thinking about someone I've never met way more than is probably normal.
Tim Cynova:
You would remember the hug.
Lauren Ruffin:
I love a good hug.
Tim Cynova:
All right. So that was 2012. 2013?
Lauren Ruffin:
2013 is pretty short. The email I found reminded me that I was in my first development director job that year, and more basketball. Still playing a lot of basketball, still probably pretty fit and sexy. Yeah. That's it for me that year.
Tim Cynova:
Nice. Do you still play basketball? Still doing development-ish, so.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Not a whole lot. Just a basic year. No elections, no Olympics, no nothing.
Tim Cynova:
That's right. Just regular emails.
Lauren Ruffin:
Regular odd-numbered year.
Tim Cynova:
2013 was the year I biked the 340 miles from my apartment in Manhattan to Canada in two days. Started on the first day with a double century.
Lauren Ruffin:
Wow.
Tim Cynova:
And that's the first time I've ever biked 200 miles in one day.
Lauren Ruffin:
Wow. That's a thing.
Tim Cynova:
The idea was to bike Manhattan to Montreal because the alliteration is great. Montreal, I think where I was going to stop was about 40 miles north of the Canadian border. The first time I tried, it was about 50 degrees and raining and I made it 156 miles from Manhattan to Albany and pulled the rip cord. I was stopping every 10 miles at gas stations to fill up with hot water because it was just on the verge of being too cold.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. 50 degrees and raining is pretty miserable in the saddle.
Tim Cynova:
The next time, it was beautiful. It was one of those days where you get out on the bike at five a.m. and the sun is just coming up and it was clear skies, no wind. The 200 mile day, it was actually 202 miles. During the last two miles, a half mile of that I had to walk because I was going through an unpaved road.
Tim Cynova:
It was at that point, my legs were just cramping. I couldn't get my leg off the bike without it seizing up and I couldn't get it back on without it seizing. So it was this really painful thing, but it was a great day in the saddle.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. That's awesome. I can't imagine going that far, and then having to relearn how to walk like a little baby. How do you do that?
Tim Cynova:
If you're ever up for a 200 miler, let me know.
Lauren Ruffin:
I will, especially now that I have an electric bike. I can do it pretty much any day.
Tim Cynova:
What's so hard about this?
Lauren Ruffin:
What are you complaining about, Tim?
Tim Cynova:
But I made it to Canada, took a picture, hopped in the car, called it a day. All right. That was 2013. 2014?
Lauren Ruffin:
2014, from my emails, from what I can tell I think that was the year that I finally stopped bartending. I bartended well after I had a well-paying job just because I felt like I needed to keep talking to people, force myself to be an extrovert.
Lauren Ruffin:
Also, I worked really hard that year. So the organization that I was working for, the National Center for Children and Families, had its centennial celebration and it was the entire year. I found the host letter that we sent out in February and the thing wasn't until October.
Lauren Ruffin:
And that was my entire year, was wrangling a huge, affluent, incredible host committee and fundraising for the thing, and doing logistics for the thing. That was just the beast of a year. It was no sports, man. I couldn't find any. Did I play basketball? What did I do that year? It was just the centennial.
Lauren Ruffin:
We had people which had been involved with the organization who were still alive for 60 or 70 years. So it was wealthy, affluent people, and then really old people who didn't do email, so I was doing house visits, and they all had their memories that I became this basket of memories for this organization that was 100 years old. It was just a lot. It was a very busy work year.
Tim Cynova:
How were you collecting them?
Lauren Ruffin:
Paper. Paper, in my head, in notes, people sending letters. I had a lot of handwritten letters.
Tim Cynova:
What did you do with them?
Lauren Ruffin:
They're probably archived still at NCCF.
Tim Cynova:
Were they supposed to be in some book or something, or?
Lauren Ruffin:
Everyone had a memory of the organization. The organization was originally 140 acres and they sold off the land to build the community. So the entire community that is North Bethesda now was part of this orphanage, it's all Baptist homes. And so, there are people who are still alive who had bought the plot of land and built their houses in the '40s and '50s who were still living there, who remembered, who had this longstanding relationship with this organization that had these kids living on the grounds.
Lauren Ruffin:
There were kids who had grown up on the grounds who were now in their 50s, 60s, 70s who remember being there. So you do become, not the actual memories physically, you became this holder of memories that everybody wanted to be involved and celebrate this thing.
Lauren Ruffin:
But it was really meaningful and it I look back at my emails and remember how tired I was that entire year. I just worked. It was emotionally hard work, just a lot.
Lauren Ruffin:
So that's the second oldest Baptist home in the country. It might be the longest continuing, so the records there. One of the things that I really wanted to do that I didn't have a chance to do there was to really build out an archive. There was just so much stuff that I came across just, I'm not an archivist. But someone should do that. They have pretty meticulous records, there's never been a fire or a flood, or anything. Digitizing that stuff would be amazing.
Tim Cynova:
Well, for any of our listeners, there's a project there.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Seriously.
Tim Cynova:
Right, so that's 2014. My 2014, I have a random collection of things that I find very interesting. So that was the year that I visited Zappos, which was a highlight in itself. I started a daily micro-journal that I still continue to this day, where I write a one sentence journal entry at the end of my day, and sometimes include a photo, and it includes a lot of commas and semi-colons to make it one sentence and capture everything for my day.
Tim Cynova:
I read Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, and she had mentioned something about that so I started that. So I still do that. And that was also the year that I got hit by a car on my bike and broke my collarbone and five ribs. So a little bit of everything in 2014.
Lauren Ruffin:
That is a little bit everything. Was your collarbone break the most painful break you've had?
Tim Cynova:
No, ribs are far more painful. The collarbone was annoying in that, until they plated it, it slides back and forth, and every time you moved you could feel your collarbone slide back and forth because it's not connected to itself. But the ribs, by far, were the most painful because you breathe, you laugh, you can't sleep laying down. You have to sleep sitting up and you can't do anything about it except just wait.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I've heard ribs but I was talking to someone not too long ago about breaking his collarbone and he's broken a fair number of bones. He said that was the most annoying. But he's also a basketball player so I imagine that I'm using the collarbone probably.
Tim Cynova:
It's also, if you could break one at a time, and then compare them then maybe it is, but five ribs compared to one collarbone, the amount of pain that was going on, the ribs felt worse than the collarbone. Yeah. That was my 2014.
Lauren Ruffin:
2015 right? Is that where we are? So 2015 was the year I got married, at the very end of the year, and I also think, in reflecting on it, it was the year that my attitude about work changed.
Tim Cynova:
How so?
Lauren Ruffin:
We had that conversation early on about work as a vocation and I stopped feeling like work was a vocation in 2015. I really felt like the work I was doing an NCCF was really meaningful. It felt like a calling to me. I grew up, my father started group homes, and I grew up with kids whose parent's couldn't take care of them. We had 130 of them.
Lauren Ruffin:
And 2015 was the year where I was like, "I just need a job, so I'm just going to go ahead and..." I hopped over to Martha's Table, we did a capital campaign, and yeah, that was when work became a job. That was when my understanding of laborer versus owner really changed. That was 2015, but other than that, I was, again, just working.
Tim Cynova:
As I look back on this decade, it was, for me, the decade that my relationship with work and understanding work changed, maybe because of the work that I actually do around trying to understand work, for myself and others, and I would say this is the decade that I found what my purpose is in work. But if I looked at other decades, it would be a different thing. It would be a different relationship to my work.
Tim Cynova:
Well, it's a good thing that this podcast is also about work because then we just talked about it. So, great.
Lauren Ruffin:
I did that on purpose. See how smart I am?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. That's right. As if we had planned it. 2015, this is also... I came across a number of different photos in my highlights. It was the year I turned 40. It was the year I raced the Gran Fondo in New York, which is a 100 mile race from the George Washington Bridge up to Bear Mountain and back. Except for that other race, it was my sole race-race that I actually trained for.
Tim Cynova:
I went to Prince Edward Island for a vacation to cross something off my mom's bucket list for her.
Lauren Ruffin:
Cool.
Tim Cynova:
And the thing that they don't tell you, the thing Anne of Green Gables doesn't tell you is that in certain places of Prince Edward Island there's a lot of mosquitoes during the summer, so it's not very pleasant. Yeah. It's beautiful but you don't want to stop for too long.
Tim Cynova:
2015 was the year that my journey in anti-racism and anti-oppression began.
Lauren Ruffin:
Cool.
Tim Cynova:
It was the year that we really started doing work at Fractured Atlas and I found pictures of some of the sessions that we did together, and then as it related to training in crucial conversations that I did that year.
Tim Cynova:
So it was a busy year, a lot of different things, photographic memories and proof.
Lauren Ruffin:
Prince Edward Island. I felt the same way the first time I went to Assateague, because you read those books, Misty of, or something like that, those books about the wild horses on an island off the coast of Maryland. I feel like those books never mentioned the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are unbearable, and the wind. It's a barrier island.
Lauren Ruffin:
I probably missed a big event that must have been maybe in 2013. I think that spring, I took Katie and the kids camping for the first time. We went to Assateague. We went there for spring break in March, and when we booked, I have this habit of booking things two weeks early because the weather is nice. The weather was beautiful when we reserved the camping site. We reserved it for the first day the park was open, and then there's a snowstorm that happened two weeks later.
Lauren Ruffin:
So it's me and Katie camping on a barrier island on the beach with wind. Enzo might have been two years old and Cassidy might have been five. It was winter survival. So there were these angry, skinny, hungry horses from the winter and they were wild and running around the campsite and I'm trying to pitch the tent and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. As I'm putting the stakes down, Enzo is so little he doesn't know. He's running behind me pulling the stakes up. And the wind is blowing.
Lauren Ruffin:
At one point, and it was actually really serious wind. It's maybe 20 or 30 miles an hour wind. We should not have been out there. And the tent falls over and smacks me so hard in the face I thought I broke my nose. But mosquitoes, islands.
Lauren Ruffin:
It was so bad that my dad, who doesn't worry about anything, he was at his girlfriend's house. She happened to live 15, 20 minutes away. I didn't have a cell phone so apparently he drove around the island looking for us because he was worried.
Lauren Ruffin:
He said he was outside yelling my name into the wind. I have this image of my father standing at the beach, click Ahab yelling. Yeah. Anyway. That's a flashback to 2013. Islands and mosquitoes. Ugh. What a trip.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
So where are we? 2016. Dun, dun, dun. The schism. That's when I started working with you.
Tim Cynova:
Seriously a highlight of a decade, getting to work with you.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. It might have been. Yeah. That was the highlight for that year. Low lights, I stopped playing basketball pretty much that year. That was when I started traveling too much to really be in a league. The
Lauren Ruffin:
That was also the year that the election happened and I talked a lot about moving to Belize.
Tim Cynova:
Every other conversation, you were mentioning Belize and looking into Belize.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah. I had a lease ready to sign in my email. I was ready to go. Let's really test out this remote work policy at Fractured Atlas.
Tim Cynova:
That would have been too soon. Oh.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Too soon.
Tim Cynova:
All right. 2016, let's see. That was the year that I studied for and passed my senior professional in HR exam.
Lauren Ruffin:
Awesome.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. That was a crap ton of work, a lot of studying. I don't have a formal background in HR so it was three months non-stop of studying for that. Passed it on the first try so very thankful for that.
Tim Cynova:
That was also intertwined with our entire office renovation. I remember studying for that exam in different stages of prep for renovation, completely gutted, and then in our new space. So yeah, that was 2016 in photos.
Lauren Ruffin:
So I think your year is pretty front-loaded because I don't remember '80s office.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
I don't remember office number one.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. March to May was that part because our colleague Pallavi had to work from a picnic table in the middle of our... We had great cubicles except we took out some in the middle of the office and built a backyard with a picnic table, an umbrella and synthetic turf, and a fence around there, like a backyard fence, and pink flamingos, and a garden gnome.
Tim Cynova:
And we were all out of desks by time Pallavi started so she had to work from the picnic table.
Lauren Ruffin:
Knowing Pallavi, that's really priceless.
Tim Cynova:
I think Pallavi was excited that we didn't have that in the new office. A couple months sitting on a picnic table bench, not the most comfortable.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And I also missed your exam, because I remember you, that must have been toward the beginning of the year too.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I think that was April or May is when I took that.
Lauren Ruffin:
I have to tell you. Before I met you, I didn't know HR was an actual profession. I didn't know that people studied for things. I had never met someone who actually knew what they were doing. Yeah, I just didn't know. You changed my mind about it. There are actually skilled professionals in HR. There should be more of them.
Tim Cynova:
There should be more of them.
Lauren Ruffin:
Do you think you would ever go to law school?
Tim Cynova:
I thought I would go to law school. Early in this decade, actually, I was really considering going to law school, and then I thought, "Why don't I just take all of the books that my friends who went to law school studied before they passed the bar, and then just see if I can pass the bar without going to law school."
Lauren Ruffin:
New York is one of the few states you can do that.
Tim Cynova:
I got that far. And then I thought, "Do I really want to spend all that time studying for the bar exam or maybe...", and then that's where I saw HR stuff, and I thought, "This is actually the law that I get really interested in." Yeah. I don't know. I've got a lot of things on my wish list for life.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Law school is tumbling down toward the bottom. All right. So that was 2016. We've got three more years. 2017. What's on your list?
Lauren Ruffin:
Man, I only had one thing. Artist Campaign School.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. That was a great one. That's a great highlight.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's all I had.
Tim Cynova:
It's one of the examples that I go to when I highlight the diversity of teams, and thought, and backgrounds, and what can happen when that actually happens. Artist Campaign School is the perfect example.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
You knew the people, you heard what people were saying. It was the right moment and you just did it. We didn't have a strategic plan for that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Cynova:
MVP, and it was terrific. And then, someone came out of that, ran for office and got elected.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I talk about it on how non-profits and their boards need to be nimble, and give the staff the flexibility to do what they want to do. I just didn't hire someone that year, and did the program. I made the sacrifice that we were just going to pick up a little bit more workload because the program needed to happen.
Lauren Ruffin:
Not to spend forever and ever planning and fundraising and just do it. Yeah. That was the highlight for that year, and again, I had never worked some place where I had the flexibility to be able to do something like that. Every place else I'd worked would have made that so complicated, and I was like, "Let's just do it. Let's bring in a consultant, let's just do it." So yeah, that was my highlight.
Tim Cynova:
My 2017, I think the highlight is, it was the year I started to slow down. I bought a camera, an actual camera. It actually caused me to slow down on hikes, or if I went to the beach because I was trying to get the photo. Of course, that led to a whole series on site-specific bourbon that was an unintended consequence of having a camera.
Tim Cynova:
But that was also the year that I started meditating with regularity. Daily meditation, and also owning a camera and noticing what's around you in the world were highlights for 2017.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's awesome. So I'm two years behind you on the slowing down and buying a camera. I wonder if there's a correlation between camera-buying and slowing down.
Tim Cynova:
I think there probably is. You could take a lot of really crappy photos, I guess, but to actually figure out how you want to photograph something and you have to get up earlier, you have to stay up later, you have to try different settings.
Tim Cynova:
There's a course that Diane Ragsdale teaches, she created and teaches, Beauty in Business, the Aesthetic Advantage, and part of it is she takes business people without arts backgrounds out into the woods and just lets them stand there for a little while and just start to notice what's around you.
Tim Cynova:
And I feel like she was creating that course at the same time that I got a camera and I felt like, "Oh yeah, right. That's what that camera does." You just have to stand there and wait to see what's happening. And then, if it's not sunny, you've got to take different photos because photos with a gray sky aren't that interesting, unless you're Ansel Adams and you're shooting in black and white.
Tim Cynova:
So you have the new camera.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. It's New Mexico so I could take pictures of the landscape here, and the people, and random little... Katie and I were driving down the Turquoise Trail yesterday and stopped into Cerrillos, they turned the entire town into the set for Young Guns forever ago.
Lauren Ruffin:
We go into this little saloon yesterday and it's just gorgeous. You could just wander around New Mexico taking pictures of interesting things forever, and maybe that's just me because I'm not from here. I understand what as far as the eye can see means now. I've got bad eyesight and I was, "Whoa." But now I'm like, "Oh wow. Even my bad eyes can see really, really far."
Lauren Ruffin:
So yeah, but slowing down. Yeah. And I never was one of those people who had my iPhone out taking pictures all the time anyway. I take more pictures now with a camera than I ever did with my phone.
Tim Cynova:
The newest iPhone has a pretty awesome camera. I've seen professional photographers that I follow on Instagram that are posting some pretty amazing low light shots especially. But I think it's just a different thing. When you pick up a camera, you're doing something different with it than when you have your phone in your hand that also has a really good camera on it.
Tim Cynova:
The common phrase is the camera you use is the camera you have on you, or something like that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I took a picture of local, neighborhood coyote on my little two megapixel Nokia phone the other day.
Tim Cynova:
Nice.
Lauren Ruffin:
I was like, "Oh, you can kind of see it there." So yeah, you're right. I had a camera in my hand and I used it.
Tim Cynova:
That seems like an Instagram feed you could do. Just photos on your Nokia.
Lauren Ruffin:
I've been thinking about posting that one because it just looks weird. You don't see things in such poor resolution anymore.
Tim Cynova:
All right. Cool. So, let's see. That was 2017. So, 2018. What's on the list?
Lauren Ruffin:
I moved to Albuquerque, 2018. Squeezed that in at the end of the year. And then Crux. That's when Crux really crystallized in my head, and everything that started in 2015 around workers and ownership, and tech, and everything else fell into one place. That was my 2018.
Tim Cynova:
That's great.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Oh, hamstring is seizing up. So I've got nothing to come back.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm like, "Tim really didn't like that story at all."
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. No. Oh yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Sorry. Do you need-
Tim Cynova:
The searing pain is, no, no. It will be fine. I've got a hamstring on one side, and then I've got a hip that might be getting too old to go running.
Lauren Ruffin:
They make new ones now that are amazing. It almost makes sense, I think, at this point to get new hips when you stop growing at 18 or 20. Apparently the titanium ones are amazing.
Tim Cynova:
It's probably not medically sound advice. So if anyone is listening.
Lauren Ruffin:
There's a reason why I'm not a doctor.
Tim Cynova:
So why did you choose to go the Albuquerque?
Lauren Ruffin:
Low cost of living. Depending upon who you ask, 320 or 340 days of sunshine. And just the pace. I've been done with the east coast for, God, probably 10 years. It was time to go some place else and broaden my horizons. It's a great place to live, and it's just visually stunning. Artists hang out here because of those things too. I think people who are ready to make the leap and who realize they can have a life outside of either coast, this is a really good place to call home.
Tim Cynova:
Crux is two years old?
Lauren Ruffin:
Crux is two years old. Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Time is flying.
Lauren Ruffin:
It really is. It really, really is. I think 2018 might have been the year when I knew how to do my job at Fractured Atlas too. It took that long.
Tim Cynova:
Well, it's not a typical place where you just go through one cycle and you're like, Okay, I've got it."
Lauren Ruffin:
Yup.
Tim Cynova:
Which is the interesting thing but also the thing that is exhausting.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, yeah. So I feel like I finally, by 2018, had a 90% understanding of the job. The job, we do so many things that just haven't been done before, so it was that, but the routine stuff, I'd wrapped my brain around by then.
Tim Cynova:
I feel if you've got to 90%, that's 5% better than I have at this point. Get above 80, and then it's like, "Okay. Great."
Lauren Ruffin:
You're dealing with people. People will always keep you on your toes.
Tim Cynova:
That's right. Yeah, if you could just operate at 50% if you're dealing with people, you're doing well.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
All right. 2018. It was the year that I was invited to serve on the faculty of both the Banff Centre and the New School. Yeah, my habit of saying yes to things that sounded interesting has proven to be deeply rewarding and extremely exhausting, because neither of those things are my full time job and they're a lot of work when I'm doing them.
Tim Cynova:
But that was 2018. It was also the year that we officially started our shared leadership team.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh yeah. Officially.
Tim Cynova:
Officially.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. We had been doing it for the previous year when Adam was on his sabbatical, so unofficially, about three years now but that was two years ago we started doing that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, that's been really rewarding. I should have put that down.
Tim Cynova:
Well, that's shared leadership. One person puts it down.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
We don't all need to put it down. Just one of us needs to remember.
Lauren Ruffin:
We all might now be thinking that it's a great thing.
Tim Cynova:
That's true. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's totally a good thing. I was going to put that one down too.
Lauren Ruffin:
It was on my mind. I just figured somebody else would say it. Oh man, I crack myself up. Oh man, we are coming up on two years of that. Okay. I might have to do a reflection there too.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Well, I think that's the exciting thing that we have the entire leadership team together and you're all going to be guests at my New School class around leadership and team building, so 2018, the strings are coming together on that one.
Tim Cynova:
So both New School and shared leadership, and then we'll share our pros and cons in other things with people who are interested.
Lauren Ruffin:
2019. 2019 was the year that I officially felt like I had three full time jobs at various points of the year.
Tim Cynova:
Seems to be a theme.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I had two with Crux and Fractured Atlas for most of the year, and then, thanks to you, Tim, I crossed something off my bucket list, which was to teach a college course. When that was in full swing for six weeks, that was another full time job.
Lauren Ruffin:
It was a lot of just karmic and intellectual, and also systems. The systems that people use to work really matter. And that became a full time job just because I wasn't accustomed to working with the systems and maybe they were a little clunkier than they should have been.
Lauren Ruffin:
But that was something you hooked me up with that crossed off my bucket list. I would love to teach more at the college level. I think it's something I've always wanted to do, but I think I'd be pretty good at it.
Tim Cynova:
Well, I'm glad that you're able to do that. I think that's a really exciting thing to watch you pull together from the idea that you had, of just an idea that you were thinking about doing, and then how it developed into an actual course that people were taking.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. The whole thing. Okay, so what's your 2019?
Tim Cynova:
So 2019, continuing with the theme for the decade, so I lost my dad earlier this year, so I lost both of my parents this decade, and also, on the less grief-related, fully virtual organization, and closing out the decade similar to how I started the decade with looking at how people use physical and virtual spaces to do their work and thrive.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. You've done such a good job with that. It's cool hearing the arc of everything at Fractured Atlas. You might be Fractured Atlas at this point, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
Ooh. That's a heavy mantle.
Lauren Ruffin:
No, exactly. You've done a lot. If you were to summarize your decade, for you, in one sentence, how would you summarize it?
Tim Cynova:
Probably something around what it really means to live and how you can use that information to help others thrive. How do you summarize your decade?
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm just torn between, I'm still not very grown up. I might be as grown as I'm going to get. I think this was the year that I grew up as much as I'm going to grow up. I still really prioritize fun, but I've gone from being a wilding Ruffin to being a little bit more anchored.
Lauren Ruffin:
I always think about mortality because my mom died when she was so young and I was so young, but as I approach her age, I'm probably thinking more than a healthy 38-year old should think about mortality, and it's increasing all the time.
Lauren Ruffin:
But yeah, probably just this is probably the decade I grew up. People grow up in their 30s, I hear.
Tim Cynova:
Thinking about mortality allows you to recognize what being present actually means, and I think that's, for me certainly, it's been reflecting on mortality allows you to show up in a way that's more present, and engaged, and more meaningful, and I think people deal with that at different ages, having realizations where that comes together.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, and I guess it's less morbid mortality. I've been on my own since I was 17 years old. I've always taken care of myself, but I've also crammed a lot of fun into my life because I know how life quickly can be gone. Sleep when you're dead. I'm legit trying to suck every ounce of life out of what I have.
Lauren Ruffin:
And for some reason, I feel like this is just a decade where I got a little bit more serious, maybe. We'll go with Patty Pan grew up. That was probably what it is.
Tim Cynova:
Are you a person who does New Years resolutions?
Lauren Ruffin:
I do.
Tim Cynova:
Are you currently making them?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. They're good to ground. Yeah, I've got a couple. They're not super-serious.
Tim Cynova:
I have a to-do list of things I'd really like to get done but I don't make resolutions. We're recording this right before the new year. It would be the end of January before I'd go, "Oh crap. I probably need to write something down."
Lauren Ruffin:
I don't know. I'm continuously improving. So my New Years resolutions are, 1) I'm only going to wear sweatpants two days a week. This is going to be very hard for me. I anticipate that going quicker than a gym membership. [crosstalk 00:38:43] That's probably not going to last through week one.
Lauren Ruffin:
And then, my second is, I've never been to Europe, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
Where do you want to go in Europe?
Lauren Ruffin:
I want to go to Prague. I've never been. Whenever I've had the time I've not had the money, whenever I've had the money, I've not had the time, because of work. I'm going to go to Europe this year. Those are my two resolutions. But yeah, the sweatpants, I'm already going to fail. I haven't actually bought any pants. I don't have any pants. If New Years is really coming in a couple of days and I don't go shopping, which I'm not going to do, then it's not happening. I just don't have enough pants in my world.
Tim Cynova:
Go to Prague instead.
Lauren Ruffin:
So my New Years OKR is going to be at 50% for this year. I already know it.
Tim Cynova:
That's a solid percentage.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Well, Lauren, I hope you have a restful and restorative rest of the decade and look forward to seeing what's next in the years to come. Getting to work with you has been a highlight of my 2010 decade so very excited for the 2020s to roll around here too. Happy New Year, Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Happy New Year, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
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