I mostly read science fiction. My wife read Theo of Golden with her book club and suggested it to me several times. This summer I finally picked it up because I had nothing else to read. I read it a few pages at a time on my Kindle, in the weeks right before I left Google. I went slowly on purpose, because it’s a book that rewards that. It ended up as one of my favorite books of the year.

The first passage I highlighted was the opening: “Theo was in Golden for only a year, from springtime to springtime. He arrived just before Easter, when the Boughery and the Promenade were an ocean of dogwood blooms and azaleas.” Allen Levi tells you on the first page that the visit is short. The rest of the book is about what one person can do with a year if he pays attention.

When I wrote the two-year anniversary post for this blog, I said I’d keep bringing more of my outside interests here, and that some book reviews were coming. This is one of them, and like most of what I read, it got me thinking about work.

The Portraits on the Wall

Theo is an older man who arrives in Golden, a small Southern town, with no obvious reason to be there. Ninety-two pencil portraits of ordinary townspeople hang on the wall of a local coffeehouse. Theo buys them one at a time and tracks down the person in each drawing to give it to them. He calls them the rightful owners.

That’s most of the plot. You wouldn’t think it would be enough for a novel, but in this case it is. Theo clearly loves art, and rivers, and music. But the book is really about his attention. He shows up in person when a phone call would do. He notices the custodian, the accountant, the cellist, and the woman living on the street. Being seen that closely changes each of them, and over the year it changes the town.

I won’t tell you how it ends. Theo lives the way most of us mean to and rarely manage: slowly, generously, and with his eyes open.

Some readers will find it too sweet. It’s comfort food for the soul, and I’m fine with that. At this point in our history, we could all use a little kindness to remind us of the people we should aspire to be.

There’s a quiet Christian faith running through the book. I’m not religious myself. I’ve read the texts of many of the world’s major religions without practicing any of them. But I admire the reported words of Jesus, and I admire people of any faith who actually live what they believe. Theo is one of those people. You don’t need to share his faith to be moved by that.

A Flurry of Questions

Most of Theo’s attention comes out as questions. In one scene with two girls, Levi writes, “Theo was a flurry of questions. The two girls were a flurry of half-formed answers and fully formed dreams.”

I keep coming back to that line because of how much of engineering runs on questions. We ask them in design reviews, code reviews, interviews, and one-on-ones. The person on the other end can almost always tell why you’re asking. Some questions are there to find the hole in someone’s reasoning. Theo’s are there to find out who someone is and what they want, and the girls answer with dreams because his questions leave room for them.

I once took a leadership class built around the idea of listening to learn, and I’ve tried to practice it ever since. You listen without waiting for your turn to say the next thing, and you ask questions to learn rather than to score points. That’s what Theo is doing in that scene.

Managers can choose which kind to ask. “What’s blocking you?” is a question about the project, and you should still ask it and clear what you can. But once the blockers are handled, ask the bigger question. I often put it this way: “If you had a magic wand, what would you wave it at?” Sometimes you’ll get the dream.

Recognition Costs Almost Nothing

A portrait of yourself is a strange gift. It tells you that someone noticed you and that you belong to this place. Most workplaces are bad at saying that. We celebrate launches and promotions because they’re visible. We say much less to the person quietly keeping everything running.

Years ago I was coaching an engineer who was going through a hard stretch and doubting whether they belonged on their team. I told them their work mattered. They’d gone through the same process as everyone else to get their job, which meant they’d earned the right to fully participate in it. It was a simple thing to say, and it brought them to tears. Years later they told me that moment of recognition had been one of the most important things anyone had done for them.

I didn’t come up with that. I learned it from a former boss of mine who was also a close friend.

Make It for Mercy

Another passage I highlighted: “If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don’t hurt nearly like bad justice.”

Mercy is attention under uncertainty. When you’re judging something someone did, you’re rarely seeing all of them, and this passage tells you what to do with the part you can’t see.

Engineering already has a version of this in the blameless postmortem. It’s partly an information strategy, since blaming a person for what the system did teaches everyone watching to hide their errors. It’s also an agreement about atmosphere. At Google we used to say “assume good intent,” meaning assume the people around you are trying to do the right thing with the information they have. Failures will happen, and when they do, we’ll learn from them and work to prevent the next one. That part is mercy, written into a process.

Sometimes you’ll get it wrong. Someone really was careless, and you treated it as a process failure. That mistake isn’t free. Teammates pick up the slack, and the standard slips a little for everyone. But look at how the passage starts: “If you not sure what to do.” Mercy is the default when the evidence isn’t there yet. The other half is trust but verify. You extend the benefit of the doubt and keep looking, and once the evidence is clear, holding off is just avoidance.

The same goes for a performance calibration, where a room of managers judges a year of someone’s work from a few paragraphs. You won’t have the full picture. When you’re unsure, the book’s advice holds up.

Where the Book Found Me

The timing mattered. I read it in the weeks before I left Google, so it was fresh when I sat down to write my goodbye note. I could only recall about a hundred and fifty colleagues. So I had an agent read twenty one years of my sent mail and help me say goodbye to several thousand. Theo spends a year handing people back their own faces. I was trying a version of it on my way out the door. The difference is that Theo doesn’t wait until he’s leaving to do it.

Read it slowly if you can. And if a name comes to mind while you do, someone who saw you before you’d done much to deserve it, that’s worth acting on.

The book also brought him back to me, and I haven’t been ready to write about him until now. That’s the next post.