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Actually, in Silicon Valley, some people check the "other" box on standardized forms. Maybe the category on those dreaded forms that confounds you is ethnicity or gender or even age (you might feel like a different age than you technically are.) For me, that category is "occupation" or "profession". I just don't fit into any of the standard options. Pretty much ever. My TEDx talk on the The Joys of Otherhood is about just that.
Read MoreActually, in Silicon Valley. "Are you somebody? That's what someone asked my father when he and my mom were at the Apollo 11 space launch at Cape Kennedy in Florida on July 16, 1969.
Read MoreActually, in Silicon Valley. On a recent neighborhood walk, I experienced a rare sighting in Palo Alto.
A Trump lawn sign.
I imagine that there are more Trump supporters in Palo Alto than one might suspect. What’s noteworthy to me, however, is our neighbor’s willingness to be transparent. While my own views could not be more opposite, on one level, I admire their courage to display views that are so clearly in the minority here.
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Actually, in Silicon Valley, some engineers do still work with their hands, some people appreciate the beauty in broken things and some people help each other for free for the fun and good will of it. Here's a story of how that happened all at once for me.
One of my guiding beliefs was best articulated by our son, Ben, at age 10: "Not perfect is perfect. Perfect is not perfect." I was hanging a bulletin board in Ben's room and doing that thing where you keep tilting it back and forth slightly - skewing a little too much to one side and then the next, never quite getting it level. Finally, Ben calmly uttered those words. I took a medium deep breath, as if to mostly acknowledge that he was totally right and just how ridiculous my pursuit of the perfect had been in a situation without much import. My Virgoian tendencies were overplaying. We were done. I felt better and Ben's bit of 10-year-old wisdom stuck with me.
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