The Best Meetings I Ever Had Were With My Dog
Lego taught me more about what matters than 30 years of tech ever did.
Real John here, this week I want to talk about Lego and the impact he had on me and how things matter. I miss you Lego. LOVE YOU!
I’ve sat in boardrooms with VCs. I’ve led all-hands meetings where I had to deliver bad news with a straight face. I’ve shipped products at midnight, argued over architecture until 2am, and navigated layoffs that I never want to navigate again.
None of it prepared me for last week.
We lost Lego.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know Lego — our dog, Susie’s dog, Ella’s best friend, and honestly, mine too. He wasn’t a background character in our apartment. He was the whole vibe. The one who didn’t care if the sprint was going sideways or if a client was being impossible. He just wanted to be near you. That was the whole job. Show up. Be present. Love unconditionally.
Sounds simple. Turns out, most of us are terrible at it.
What Grief Actually Does to Your Priorities
I’ve always said execution beats perfection. Ship the thing. Don’t overthink it. Move fast.
But when Lego got sick, I stopped. Hard stop. The Slack notifications didn’t matter. The backlog didn’t matter. The product roadmap I’d been sweating over — didn’t matter. Everything that felt urgent the day before felt like noise the day after.
That’s the brutal gift of grief. It’s a clarity filter you didn’t ask for and can’t turn off.
I found myself sitting on the floor of our apartment with him, just present. No phone. No laptop. No “quick check.” Just there. And I realized — this is what I’ve been optimizing away from for years. The stillness. The presence. The nothing-productive that is actually everything.
We talk a lot in tech about moving fast. Build fast, ship fast, fail fast. But nobody talks about stopping fast. About recognizing the moments that deserve your full attention, not your divided attention, not your phone-in-hand attention.
Lego always knew. If I had my laptop open, he’d put his head on my arm. Hard to type. Probably intentional.
The Perspective Tax
Here’s what I’ve noticed in 30 years of building things: the higher the pressure, the more you convince yourself the pressure is real. Deadlines feel existential. Outages feel catastrophic. A bad quarter feels like the end.
It’s not. Almost none of it is.
The things that are actually urgent don’t come with Jira tickets. They don’t respect your sprint cycle. They show up without warning and they don’t care about your OKRs.
I’m not saying nothing at work matters. I’ve cared deeply about the craft of building software my entire life. I still do. But Lego dying reminded me of a hierarchy I’d let drift — Susie, our dogs, the people in my actual life, then the work. In that order. Always.
When that order gets flipped — and it does, quietly, gradually — grief has a way of flipping it back.
What I’m Taking With Me
I’m not going to tell you to hug your dog more (though, do that). I’m not going to wrap this in a 5-step productivity framework. That would be insulting to what this week was.
What I will say is this:
The most important meetings I’ve ever had weren’t in a conference room. They were on walks in Central Park. On the couch at 11pm. At the foot of the bed where he decided, unilaterally, that was his spot now.
He didn’t care about my title. He didn’t care about my GitHub commits or my runway or my Substack metrics. He cared that I showed up. Fully. Every single time.
That’s the standard I want to hold myself to — not just with Susie and Ella, but in everything I do. Show up fully. Be actually present. Stop performing productivity and start doing the thing that matters.
If that thing is code, write the code. If it’s a hard conversation, have the conversation. If it’s sitting on the floor doing nothing because someone you love needs you there — do that. Do it without the phone.
Lego was a good boy. The best, actually.
We’ll miss him every day. And I’ll spend the rest of my time making sure I don’t forget what he kept reminding me.
Go be present with someone who matters.
John Mann is the founder of Startups and Code LLC, a software engineering executive, and someone who is going to take Ella on a very long walk today. Subscribe for weekly takes on AI, startups, and building things that actually matter.