On Love: "Elevate" - Part 10 of ...

And I did everything that I did on my own
I'm a one-to-one for real, there can never be a clone
Better talk to me nice, better watch your tone

The wedding planning experience can be the above quote put to action in life, or you can choose to work together.

2 weeks ago today I got married.

The process of getting married involves a lot of dimensions. I'd say those dimensions are

1. Emotional

2. Familial

3. Spiritual

4. Financial

5. Creative

Wedding globe detail

My wife, Sofia, is an amazing person. We have spent years together already, but I know that the life we have ahead will be an amazing one. And that's a big part why I decided I wanted to marry her. She has a way of approaching the world with the perspective that you shape your place in it and your circumstances don't shape you.  I think that's something I aspire to and with her by my side I really believe we can both have that perspective and form a life together that will be remarkable. She is remarkable.

I want to spend the main part of this post talking about the creative side of planning a wedding. Many more things can be said about the emotional, familial, spiritual and financial sides of a wedding. So don't read this as if those things aren't the main importance in your decision to get married. It's just that someone else can spend the time to dig into those details. I'm not that person. We had a great celebration and I love Sofia and her family and I'll leave the emotional side at that for now.

As I get a little bit more distant from the experience itself, it's pretty interesting to think about all of the design and creative decisions that are a part of a wedding. And honestly it's something that took a lot of creative bandwidth from what I would normally do day to day. 

Let's go through the list of things that we decided we're important for our wedding:

• Not spending a lot of money

• Keeping the focus on things that were important to Sofia and I

• Having it be a celebration where families feel comfortable

• Having the ceremony reflect our values 

With those priorities stated, it meant we would do a lot of the lifting for creating things like the website, invitations,  save the date cards, ceremony programs, signage table, and place cards ourselves.  Although we had a day-of coordinator, I ended up offering to do the bulk of this design, because it's something that I enjoy and it's one less thing Sofia would need to worry about. (The groom typically doesn’t have to coordinate the additional vendors of hair, makeup, bridesmaid activities, and associated decision fatigue that all these things entail.) Having a somewhat typical American wedding was a big decision for her to agree to and whatever I could do to relieve the burden of planning an event even though it was small by wedding standards (about 50 guests), these design activities were something that I wanted to do.

I'm writing this now because a lot of these decisions were almost like starting a small business that would run for about six months and then be disbanded. We can think about the Save the Date as a minimum viable product to gauge interest, the invitations as a test of stating what our passions would be for the business, and premarital counseling like a board of directors giving advice and perspective on the important things to watch out for in marriage. These are all very analytical ways of viewing the process but hey, that’s why this is my blog and not yours.

 Some questions to think about for any brand’s design guidelines:

• What do you want people to notice?

• What do you want people to think of when they see your brand?

• What will be the primary means of interacting with your brand?

 For our wedding answer to the first question - “What do we want people to notice?”

We wanted people to notice that we had thought about every aspects of the celebration that we included. We didn't toss a bouquet, we didn't have a professional photo booth, we didn't personalized cake cutting utensils, we didn't have a garter portion of the reception, we didn't have a brunch the next day, we didn't have a large guest list. These were all intentional decisions so we could focus more intently on what we did include in our celebration. Our wedding venue was a Black-owned business,  representative of my background. Our wedding caterers were a Peruvian business, representative Sofia's background.  We had a celebration small enough where we could sit for a few minutes at each table without feeling rushed and where a brunch the following day just to acknowledge guests wasn't a necessity. We wanted people to notice that we were a team and putting the wedding together rather than approving pre-decided rituals that were not put together by us.

For the second question, “What do you want people to think of when they see our brand?”

We wanted people to think that the world is a possibility. Our relationship thankfully has included seeing and getting to know each other on different parts of the globe, so we chose a globe as the main icon or image of the wedding. A globe with simple colors of indigo, gold and blue. the first item people received when they arrived to the ceremony was a postcard with their name and their global destination, (their dinner table) which was the name of a country that was important to Sofia and I.  Each of these reception tables had a travel book from that same country and these books were books that we took on the trips themselves. We wanted to feel like the people we had invited had been a part of our past relationship and would be part of our future relationship. Perhaps on a trip, or perhaps sharing a table together at a restaurant in the future. We were careful to keep things simple overall. Where we perhaps strayed from this was working through our choices for flowers. Initially we thought silk flowers would suffice but that didn't seem genuine to The Outdoor Experience of the venue. However, in hindsight flowers can be beautiful but it feels like they're not something people notice and it's an area where you can spend a lot of time if you decide to opt for a lower cost. Our flowers looked beautiful, I'm just not sure our guests cared.

The last question of “what is the primary means of interacting with our brand”?

The website and printed materials were a big part of this. The website was easy to navigate from your phone or from a computer it was written in both English and Spanish and thanks to it from the program for more information about the songs and lyrics your chosen for the ceremony. In addition we had printed materials for the wedding ceremony program, invitations that were mailed and save the dates that were mailed or sent via email. We didn't have a wedding hashtag, because we wanted our guest to focus on the main experience and not that social media after glow. We decided at the last minute to have a videographer because we wanted to capture the ceremony not just for our own benefit but more for our family is to have a record of in the future. The Reverend who was our officiant was a part of the same church that we had premarital counseling at. Even though we didn't know her very well, our marital counselors Mark and Willis help us a lot in working through hard questions prior to the marriage ceremony. And we wanted to has the spiritual side of our marriage be reflected in what people saw. 

Overall, our wedding brand reflected us. And that was our goal. I've never planned an event that big, with so many vendors, was so many guests, and with so many things need to happen within a few hours on the same day. From an analytical perspective it was great experience to see just how many logistics would need to be in place to execute something that will only take a day. It's an event that really marks how you approach life both with my new spouse Sofia and with the considerations of all of our family and friends. I think we did the process justice and showed each other just how important cultures, preferences, musical tastes, weird traumas that we would have to overcome small decisions that seemed inconsequential in our celebration.

Overall, I think the lesson is that when you have a clear vision for a temporary business, the most important thing you can do is decide what is important. This includes being intentional about deciding what you don't want to focus on. Once you've made these decisions, the rest should follow, and hopefully you'll live a life happy ever after.

The Uncanny Valley of Automation - Lessons from a Car Crash

A few days ago marked the one year anniversary of when I crashed my car. Like any accident - car or otherwise, there were many contributing factors, but the facts of the event are that I was distracted - I was looking for my phone to confirm an address, looked up and saw my car way too close to a car parked on the side of the road. A road that I would have sworn did not have as much of a curve to it before this trip. I contributed to the damage by hitting the accelerator instead of the break while turning the wheel sharply. Accelerator or no, I still would have hit the trailer behind the car on the road.

After this point, I’m less clear on what happened. After hitting the trailer behind that car, with the added acceleration, my car gripped part of the trailer or SUV that was pulling the trailer, and my car ended up on its side. I and my daughter in the back were buckled in our seats the whole time, her in her car seat and me in the driver’s seat. Before I knew what had happened, the car or my phone, I’m not sure which, had dialed 911. I did my best to explain what happened and where I was. Like many accidents, I was close to home (crazily less than 0.3 miles from my front door). Following the call, passersby stopped to help. I don’t know any of their names, but they opened the rear passenger’s side door to get my daughter out of her seat. I was able to climb out of the window of the front passenger side door and hop down to the ground from the overturned car. Neither of us had any injuries and the paramedics that came to the scene and medical visits the next day confirmed this.

The pictures below show the extent of the damage and the hectic aftermath in the eerie light of police sirens while my car was on its side and after a tow truck flipped it back on its wheels.

What Went Right:

• We both had our seatbelts on and a secure car seat.

• Safety protocols in the car assisted in calling emergency help.

• When the tow truck flipped the car back on its tires, the airbags had deployed. Either from the jolt of being back upright, or during the accident.

• The car was structurally sound throughout the accident - we were able to open all doors and windows and access electrical systems up until days later.

• Insurance covered most of the damage, and I was in a replacement car a few weeks later (probably with higher insurance rates… ).

• The available data from the car’s cameras and sensors makes understanding what happened much clearer.

• My speed was below 30 mph for the entire trip - had it been higher, it could have been a lot worse.

What Contributed to the Accident:

• I was exhausted. Not from anything in particular on this day, but cumulatively. We had finished moving to a new neighborhood a few weeks ago with an almost-two-year-old, and living the life of a parent trying to adjust a child to sleeping in a new place and still working a full day after closing on a house, packing and moving in the weeks leading up to the accident was a recipe for exhaustion.

• I did not know local roads well (hence looking for an address).

• I had been using Tesla’s Full Self Driving (Supervised) feature more and more for the past year. FSD (Supervised) was not enabled during the drive and didn’t contribute to the car’s reaction. The reliance on a driver assistance system did however lead to complacency on my part, and in turn a loss of situational awareness due to an over-reliance on automation.

So What’s the Point?

This is not written as a hit piece against Tesla. (Although some will read it that way. But at least note there was no fire, exploding battery and the generally high safety ratings of Teslas from multiple sources.)

I’m writing this as a caution to understand the limits of automation - read as AI, ADAS or any other upcoming system. Automation and AI are at the uncanny valley - a term often used to describe how computer graphics render human faces where they do not appear completely natural and we can’t explain completely why that is. Similarly, with automation of daily tasks, technology appears helpful, until certain realities happen and a situation goes sideways.

While Tesla does have its approach to automation systems using cameras as its main sensor source, many cars are also adding automated driver assistance systems (ADAS). We are coming to a point where many of these systems are becoming increasingly capable, to the point of fully driving the vehicle. My point for sharing what happened is to reiterate what’s said over and over again - that it’s when we’re in this transition period - when automation is very capable - whether it’s your latest ChatGPT answer, or your car helping you on the highway - when the most attention is needed. Until the capabilities of these tools are well beyond what humans can do, caution is needed.

The graph below shows the increasing amount of mileage I used the ADAS system compared in orange compared to driving on my own in blue. The time scale is for about 15 months, from July 2023 to October 2024. In this time, the software received frequent updates and I become more comfortable relying on it to get me from Point A to Point B.

I was fully away of its capabilities and faults but still was caught of guard in the moment of a strange situation. It’s similar to many high profile aviation accidents where a sequence of events leads to over-correcting or being complacent with automation. A summary of two occurrences where automation led to an unfortunate accident are below:

• Air France Flight 447 - The autopilot disengaged after the pitot tubes iced over, leading to inconsistent airspeed readings. The non-flying pilot, likely suffering from automation surprise and a failure of basic manual flying skills (due to over-reliance on automation), incorrectly applied and maintained a nose-up control input, which contradicted the aircraft's stall protection logic and caused the A330 to enter an unrecoverable aerodynamic stall. The pilots did not recognize the stall condition until it was too late.

• Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 - A faulty radar altimeter on the captain's side caused the autothrottle to retard thrust to the idle setting prematurely during the approach to Amsterdam. Crucially, the crew was not monitoring the airspeed, assuming the autothrottle was maintaining the correct speed. When the speed dropped dangerously low, the pilots were late to react and failed to increase thrust manually, leading to a stall and crash just short of the runway. This is a classic case of complacency and the loss of situational awareness due to over-reliance on automation.

For those who are curious, I share the data for what happened on the day of the accident below. I was at fault, clearly. I am lucky? blessed? that things did not turn out another way, especially for my daughter.

So the least I can do is share my story in the hopes that others can be vigilant when needed. Moreover, I’m writing this as an anniversary reminder to myself that life is short—we’re not guaranteed to walk away from any event.

Build up your fitness so you can help yourself and others when misfortune occurs, read your history so you can prevent repeating the same mistakes over again, and get some sleep. We could all use some more rest.