Archives for August 2019

Andy Grove, the long-time CEO and Chairman of Intel, went home each day when he was tired, not when the to-do list was finished.

His realisation was that our to-do lists will never get done. There will always be more we can do. A few extra hours we can put in.

This fast becomes unsustainable, and unhealthy.

Each day, we’re given a set number of hours to pick the most important work, do it to the best of our ability, and call it a day when we’re tired or it’s time to go home.

Letting go of the burden to finish the to-do list is liberating.

H/T Andy Grove’s High Output Management

Back in 2014, a friend of mine shared with me his spending philosophy: it’s better to spend money on things that remove unhappiness, rather than spend on things that add happiness.

He hated doing his laundry, so he paid to have his work shirts washed and ironed. He figured this was a better use of his earnings than, say, a coffee each morning.

After a long-held resistance, we’re experimenting with this idea.

Maru and I live in a small 1-bedroom apartment in London. For the past 3 years we’ve thought about using a house cleaning service, but each time have decided to save the money and clean the apartment ourselves.

However, after a taking a long look at our distraught oven this week, we’re trying Handy.

Handy is an app-based house cleaning service, and we’re trialing a fortnightly clean for 3 months. We want to see if it 1) has an impact on the tidiness and cleanliness of our home, and 2) removes unhappiness by giving us a few precious hours back each weekend we would’ve spent cleaning.

I feel I’m teetering dangerously close to “unnecessary-spending millennial” territory, but it’s an experiment, and I’ll report back in a few weeks on how it goes.

What would happen if you ignored the news? Would you miss out on something important? Would it put you at a disadvantage in your job or social circles?

One of my university professors admitted they didn’t follow the news. They trusted that truly important news would come up in conversation with friends and colleagues in the day ahead. By spending less time filtering one-sided click-bait publications to find the few articles of substance, they could spend time on more meaningful things, like their family and research.

However, the danger with this approach is ending up in an echo chamber of groupthink, where you’re only reading articles shared by people who think, dress, and act like you.

Today, I generally follow a lean-news diet, a sort of light version of my professor’s approach. I’ve found it liberating to let go of a daily publication-scanning routine, and I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything important either.

I learn most of my earth-shattering news fast enough through word of mouth and the daily email from theSkimm. And for issues relating to product and technology, I keep a close eye on TechCrunch.

I’d be interested to hear your approach to news reading in the comments below, particularly how you deal with quantity, and filter for quality.

Following on from yesterday’s post, about being okay with appearing clueless on matters irrelevant to our most important work, I love this Sherlock Holmes quote from A Study in Scarlett:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. — Sherlock Holmes

We don’t need Sherlock-level focus, but we can be more deliberate. If we don’t decide how we spend our time, someone else will. If we don’t choose what information we consume, someone else will.

If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.” — Epictetus

Just like we don’t go to our lawyer for a health check, we don’t go to our doctor for legal advice.

It’d be unfair to expect either of them to be knowledgeable about the other’s work. Heck, if the surgeon was about to operate and started giving me advice on how to write a will, I’d be terrified. It’s clear there is value in focus.

If we want to make meaningful progress in our personal or professional lives, we need to be comfortable being seen as clueless on topics that are unrelated to the impact we wish to have in the world. We need to become exceptional at saying no to the inconsequential.

Maru and I spent the weekend in Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales; tucked away in a petite cabin with dear friends.

Rain arrived on Friday evening, and its drizzle persisted for the entirety of our 2 days in the park.

As I sat on the porch this morning, reflecting on the weekend before the others woke, I realised no one in our group had complained about the weather. Not once.

We still hiked the valleys and swam the streams, but when the rain forced us indoors we passed the time in laughter and storytelling.

There’s a lesson here extending beyond the Welsh backcountry.

When situations are out of our control and things don’t go to plan, traveling companions who see the positive in the world make the journey easier and the burden lighter.

I wonder how many tools exist that 1) we don’t know about, and 2) could make our lives a lot easier?

We’re leaving tomorrow to go camping in Wales for the weekend. I needed to do laundry before leaving but didn’t have time this morning to wait for a load to finish.

It was only then I discovered our washing machine’s delay feature. No sitting damp in the machine all day. I had perfectly washed clothes when I got home from work.

It made me think about other examples of latent potential. The tools in our lives that are seldom used, but packed with power.

For example, the ideas held in books hold an extraordinary amount of latent potential if applied wisely by the reader. So too do the empty seats in the bumper-to-bumper traffic jams of major cities (we could reduce carbon emissions and commuting durations at the same time if carpooling was the norm).

Latent potential has the ability to improve our lives, and the lives of others, if we keep our eyes open for it.

This week, Proctor and Gamble announced it was writing-down the value of its Gillette shaving products brand by $8 billion.

It’s a bit hard to put $8 billion into perspective, so here are a few things you could buy with that kind of money:

• Two Manchester Uniteds
• 140 SpaceX Falcon 9 launches
• 1.6 million round-the-world flights
• 8 million iPhones
• 1.1 billion pizzas from Dominos

Filtering out the corporate jargon, P&G’s reason for the write-down was: millennial males are now growing beards and aren’t shaving as much as they used to.

Sure, that makes sense, but we should also consider the impact ’direct-to-consumer’ brands like Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, and Cornerstone, are having on the Gillette-style incumbents. By delivering the same product, at a lower OPEX, with more youthful branding, it’s no surprise Harry’s was bought for $1.4 billion earlier this year.

The bigger lesson for me is how company valuations can be so fickle. A company’s valuation is the estimate of its present-day value based on its expected future financial performance. In this case, the P&G executives took a massive bet that the future of male grooming would be clean shaven. It’s now clear that assessment was patchy at best.

But at least patchy is now in vogue.

If there was anyone who had reason to stay out of the mental health spotlight, it was John Kirwan.

The man is a New Zealand rugby legend. One of the best to ever set foot on the field. If you need evidence, check out this moment when he was playing for the All Blacks and single-handedly cut through 15 burly Italians to score one of the tries of the century.

Rugby has a lot of machismo. Probably too much. So one can only imagine the pride and pressure one must feel at the top of the game to keep up appearances.

However, 10 years ago, Kirwan broke with all tradition and spoke out publicly about his battle with depression.

You couldn’t miss him. He was all over billboards and the evening ad breaks (No Netflix yet, folks!). And his message was simple and clear: depression and mental health challenges are real, and it’s ok to talk about them.

I’ll be honest, I dismissed his message at the time. In New Zealand, mental health just wasn’t spoken about in school, with friends, or even among family members.

It’s only now that I can connect the dots.

Over last few years we’ve seen a societal shift on this issue. It’s now normal to talk about healthy professional boundaries, taking time-off to recharge, and to admit when we’re not feeling 100%.

We can have these conversations because of the great work of many brave people, but there is a reason why I specifically remember John Kirwan.

In a time and environment when he was seen by many as the epitome of strength and masculinity, he spoke publicly on a very real issue; one that was deeply personal and laced in stigma.

Someone of his pedigree could’ve comfortably hidden behind their fame. Someone of his wealth could’ve funded and fought the battle privately.

But when someone like John Kirwan is brave enough to tell their unexpected story, suddenly there’s an audience.

I overheard an odd conversation last Sunday in a newly-opened cafe next to my home.

Employee: “How are you today? Are you a regular?”

Customer: “I’m good, thanks. Yeah I am, I get a scone here every day.”

Employee: “Hmm, you should consider a gym membership. These scones are really fatty, so if you keep eating them, you’ll probably need it.”

Silence.

With raised eyebrows, I slowly turned around to check-in on the gentleman who attempted to laugh off the comment before high-tailing it out the door.

With every interaction, we get an opportunity to tell a story, a chance to build trust with our audience, and to give them a reason to come back.

And unless we’re superhuman, at some point we’ll need to trust someone else with the story. It pays to pick wisely.

When someone in your team does great work, praise them publicly.

Although goals and targets guide our daily planning, I’ve yet to see a tasty-looking metric produce a bigger smile than a sincere, specific, and public display of gratitude. At the end of the day, we’re all humans who want to belong and be valued for the work we do.

We should also be aware of the inverse of this maxim: when someone is underperforming, we should provide criticism privately. Criticism delivered in one-to-ones, directed at the work and not at the person, shows we care enough to speak the truth in a safe environment. This builds trust. And soon enough, they’ll provide opportunities for us to praise them publicly.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a few of my reflections on Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madsen. I picked it up after a glowing recommendation from the legend Steven Pressfield, and it hasn’t disappointed.

I also have a soft spot for improv. When I was 13, it gave me my first taste of the theatre, and helped me discover a self-confidence I didn’t know was there.

People usually put improv in the “I could never do that” or “Hell no, I don’t wanna look like an egg” category. Mostly, it just means very few have tried it.

This is where the first, and most important, rule of improv comes in: to say “yes!”

For example, if one of the actors in your troupe opens a scene with, “Watch out, there’s a bucking bronco running straight at us!”

You don’t say, “No there isn’t…”

That’s called blocking.

Instead, you say something like, “Yikes! Grab the saddle, let’s ride!”

You may not know where your fellow thespian is going. They may throw you a ridiculous, off-piste suggestion, but your responsibility is to go with it. Together, you’ll discover the story waiting to be told.

There is a lesson in there too for how we approach new opportunities, friendships, and the unknown. A “yes”, rather than a “no”, can take us to some weird and wonderful places.

Since 5 October 2015, large retailers in England have been required by law to charge 5p for all single-use plastic carrier bags.

The latest statistics from Defra were made available earlier this week for the 2018-19 period and the results were good.

Looking at the UK’s 7 largest retailers, 70% fewer plastic bags have been issued between the 2016-17 and 2018-19 periods, which is a reduction of 778 million plastic bags.

What struck me most about the above was just how bad Tesco was. In 2016-17, Tesco was issuing more than 3.4x the number of plastic bags than any other retailer (640 million plastic bags per year vs. Morrison’s 191 million). Even when normalised for its overwhelming market share, Tesco was a horrible performer.

Since then, Tesco has managed to reduce plastic bags issued by 515 million, or 80%. This is good progress.

The below chart shows the improvements that each of the 7 large retailers have made over the past 2 years.

I wouldn’t be too quick to compliment Tesco and throw shade at Sainsbury’s though. Tesco was severely obese on the plastic bag front and had a lot of “quick win” kilograms to lose, whereas Sainsbury’s was performing much better than Tesco in 2016-17.

What’s more helpful is to look at the 7 large retailers’ market share vs. their share of plastic bags issued.

What we can see here is that Tesco and Sainsbury’s are leading the way, with both of them issuing fewer plastic bags than you’d expect based on their market share of the 7 largest retailers.

We then see that Marks and Spencer and The Co-operative Group are issuing double the number of plastic bags relative to their market share.

This final reflection is purely anecdotal, but I feel the above conclusions in my weekly grocery shopping routine. Tesco and Sainsbury’s both charge 10p for a sturdy plastic bag that can be reused. Marks and Spencer charge 5p for a plastic bag that is flimsy and easily broken. It’s easy to see why Marks and Spencer issue more plastic bags relative to their market share when they make decisions like that.

Overall, I think this piece of regulation is excellent, predominantly due to its high leverage: a small change in regulation (charging 5p for a bag), that requires minimal measurement and enforcement from government, has resulted in a reduction of more than 750 million plastic bags each year.

Note on my analysis for full transparency

Note: There are many ways to analyse and interpret data like this, and journalists will often manipulate data to get better/worse figures for a story. So I’m linking my analysis here. Feel free to make a copy and play around with it.

I took the Defra dataset and removed all retailers except the largest 7 (Asda, The Co-Operative Group, Marks and Spencer, Morrisons, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose).

The only information I added was the market share data. I could get the 2018 market share data for all retailers from Wikipedia, except for Marks and Spencer, as it isn’t strictly a supermarket.

Therefore, the method I used to determine Marks and Spencer’s market share isn’t perfect, and I want to acknowledge that. I took their food revenue from Statista, and then derived their market share (3%) by normalising it against Tesco’s 2018 revenue (£57bn) and market share (27%).

I then performed simple sums and percentage change calculations to reach the above conclusions.

I get my haircut at Jimmy’s. He’s a one-man band operating out of the same North London locale for more than 30 years. He’s cheery, nearing 7ft in height, super-greek, and a joy to chat with each month.

I went to see Jimmy early this morning and was shocked with what I saw.

“Jimmy, you look fantastic!”, I said.

“Thank you for noticing, my friend. I’ve lost 21 kilograms in the last three months!” replied Jimmy.

But he didn’t need to say a thing. The grinning smile behind his huge handlebar moustache said it all.

For the next 20 minutes, Jimmy told me all about how his low-carb diet and disciplined cheat days (where he could eat whatever he wanted) enabled him to go from 138kgs to 117kgs.

Jimmy gave me a great gift today. He exemplified the lesson that no matter our age (he’s in his late 60s), we’re all capable of change. We don’t need to be the victims of habit and circumstance. We can change.

I work with some remarkable, humble people at Bulb. Many of whom go above and beyond in all they do.

However, some of them work with such quiet determination and diligence that I often only learn about their herculean feats through others.

I sometimes wish they’d preach what they practise.

How would it change the way we approach our work if we understood the care with which they approach theirs? How would it change the way we see our challenges if we understood the way they see theirs?

But perhaps the most important reason for them to share their work, is for us to have the opportunity to give them the praise they deserve.