Archives for July 2020

A stretch, a cup of coffee, a shower, a made bed, a walk, or a prayer.

Even when we don’t feel like it, there are small actions we can string together each morning to give ourselves a pep talk and say, “Here I am. I’m ready for today.”

Stand close to a Monet, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on.

Take a step back, however, and the water lilies come into view.

Although Monet applied his brushstrokes close to the canvas, it would’ve been impossible to produce his masterpieces without taking a step back and benefiting from perspective.

There’s a lesson in there for us all.

For any given problem, what’s the best answer you can come up with in 1 minute?

How different is the “1 Minute Answer” to the answer you’d come up with if you had hours, days, or weeks?

I’ve recently been experimenting with this idea.

When I’m faced with a challenging question, I start with a blank piece of paper and try to come up with my best answer in 1 minute.

Forcing myself to get to an answer within 1 minute often gives me a strong direction, hunch, or hypothesis to pursue when I do the more lengthy, methodical problem solving.

Perhaps you’ll find the 1 Minute Answer idea to be a helpful forcing function in your problem solving, too! Let me know if you end up using it, and how you find it!

Think about some of the most memorable moments in your life.

How many of them were planned? And how many just happened—or were unexpected?

What’s the split between the two?

What does the split mean for your future decisions?

I’ve been consuming more than my fair share of time travel related stories recently. I previously blogged about Outlander, and since then I’ve been making my way through the German Netflix series, Dark.

Its blurb is, “Children start vanishing from the German town of Winden, bringing to light the fractured relationships, double lives, and dark past of four families living there, and revealing a mystery that spans four generations.”

What I appreciate about Dark is its respect for the audience. The story moves at pace, it leaves clues, but it doesn’t serve answers on a plate. It requires viewers to work and pay attention to detail.

It made me think about how some of the best works of art, music, fiction, and film, make the audience feel smart by requiring them to work for their enjoyment.

H/T to Mark for the Dark recommendation!

What if you had 1 month for that project, instead of 2?

What if you had 12 hours in the day, instead of 24?

What if you only had 30 seconds to land that message, instead of the scheduled 30 minute meeting?

The question is no longer what do we fill the time with, but rather what do we leave out?

The mental exercise of reducing the time available helps us discover what’s most important.

In the past few months, I’ve met dozens of people for the very first time over video conference; many of them starting a new job without ever having set foot in our offices.

In these conversations, I like to start by asking, “What’s your story?”

We’re all human. We all have a story. And questions like this create the space to find the common ground that connect two worlds.

It’s a powerful question, and maybe one you’ll find helpful, too!

Have you ever picked up a book and not been ready for it?

Or how about reading one and wishing you’d found it at an earlier moment in life?

I tried to read The Lord of the Rings when I was 9.

Trainwreck.

But when I was 19, you couldn’t peel me away from the pages of The Return of the King; I was trapped in its prose.

I saw Ryan Holiday’s ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ in 2014 in an Auckland bookstore, but passed on it. Yet in 2017, it became the spark that got me hooked on stoic philosophy.

I believe there is such a thing as Right Time Resonance: the moment a book was destined to meet us—either when we’re ready for it, or when we need it most.

Do you have a book that hit you at either the right or wrong time? Do you think Right Time Resonance exists? I’d love to hear about it!

I’ve been getting back into fiction. The short story, to be precise.

In the last 20 years, we’ve switched our story gobbling habits to over-index on movies, tv series, audiobooks, and podcasts. However, the short story is a remarkable medium, and one that—in my humble opinion—deserves more attention.

Why? Well, in a few short pages, the short story author must make us feel all the emotions that a movie or novel has many hours to accomplish.

I recently came across the excellent story, The Harvest, by acclaimed author, Amy Hempel.

It takes about 5 minutes to read it, but in that short period of time you’ll marvel at the twists and turns, you may discover a new way to tell a story, and you’ll likely question the line between truth and fiction many times over.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

A few days ago, I wrote a post called ‘The Unused Prescription’.

The idea: just like a doctor’s prescription is useless unless we go and get the medicine, ours plans to fix a problem have little value until we put them into action.

I received two interesting replies which I thought were worth sharing.

Geoff shared that sometimes we don’t need “a plan to fix it”, but that we’re often better off scrapping what had to be fixed in the first place. For example, cumbersome processes in the workplace.

Andrew shared that sometimes coming up with a plan is enough to make the patient feel better. For example, a common strategy to reduce overprescription of antibiotics is to have the prescription valid from 2-3 days after the prescription is written, in case the patient gets better on their own. He wondered if similar situations happen in companies.

I like how both these points challenged my initial idea, and have expanded how I think about the unused prescription.

Thank you for the new ways of looking at this idea, gents!

Team, I can’t quite believe it, but it’s been a year since I started Dan’s Daily!

After hearing Seth and Rohan share the benefits of daily blogging in late 2018, it gnawed at me for half a year—I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t think I could keep up the habit.

The beginning was agonising; in the completely-avoidable self-inflicted sense. I spent hours writing each post. I stressed because I had no idea what I’d write about the next day. I was sheepish about my blog’s place in the world because my readership didn’t extend much farther than Maru and my Mum. And it was almost 2 months before I started telling anyone else about it.

But after a year, this blog has now started to feel like a friend—one I sit down with each day and tell them what I’ve been learning about or reflecting on.

Undoubtedly, though, my biggest thanks goes to you. Waking up each day to a few thoughtful replies to the latest post make this experience a delight. It feels less like a one way blogging street, and more like a conversation. Thank you for your generosity, wisdom, and for a few minutes of your time each day. I cherish it.

And so that concludes the project…

I’m kidding, I’ll be back tomorrow. This train hasn’t stopped yet, it’s just warming up.

I cut the small watermelon in half, held one of the two pieces like it was a bowl, sprinkled Tajin on it, attacked it with a spoon, and cleaned it out.

It was a summer treat that had me feeling like an adult and a child at the same time.

Watermelon was a treat when I was a kid, so buying my own feels like an adulthood thing. But enjoying it with a spon? Well, that made me feel like a kid again.

Here’s to summers, fresh fruit, and memories.

Maru and I are looking for a new apartment. We love our current flat—we’ve been here almost 4 years, which is a long time by my standards—but given the work-from-home forecast extending into 2021, we’re on the hunt for a slightly bigger place to accommodate for more time spent at home.

Additionally, when we realised asking rental prices in London have fallen 8-18% since the pandemic started, it gave us yet another reason to move.

House hunting during COVID isn’t easy, though. There are fewer viewing slots—this is to prevent having too many could-be tenants visiting a property at the same time. It’s a hazard to travel to and from flats if you need to use public transport. And letting agencies are strict about masks and social distancing rules.

Even without COVID, the best London flats are only on the market for a few days before getting snapped up, so there’s time pressure, too.

After viewing dozens of flats online, and visiting four, we found one we liked, and we put an offer 1 hour after viewing the flat.

Once you know—when it’s clear the opportunity is better, when it moves the needle, when it passes the test—move fast.

It applies to flat hunting in a big city, and many other life decisions.

P.S. Interestingly, rentals in London have fallen due to the tanking AirBnb market. The decline in tourists to the capital have forced many property owners—who lease out their flats via AirBnb—to turn to long term leases. The increased supply of properties into the long term lease market has driven down prices across the city.

Go one week without writing:

• Very
• Rather
• Really
• Quite
• In fact
• Actually
• Just (in the merely sense)
• Of course
• So (in the very sense)
• Pretty

I got the above from Benjamin Dreyer’s delightful book, ‘Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style’. Dreyer has been a copyeditor for 30 years, and is currently copy chief at Random House; so he knows a thing or two about writing.

The above advice is powerful, and if put into practise, will see results.

Dreyer also provides two clarifications:

1. When you speak, you can still use these words. It’s hard to function as a human without them. Otherwise, people may think you’re a robot, or something.
2. Don’t let the rule stop your flow. If you write with the rule at the forefront of your mind, you may find it hard to get anything down. So write your first draft with any words that feel natural, and then go back and remove the above words from your prose.

Finally, the rule applies to all types of writing. Yes, even emails and text messages. Every sentence is an opportunity to get better.

If you’ve identified the symptom, travelled to the doctor, received a diagnosis, and have a prescription in hand, why stop short of the pharmacy?

I find it strange, then, when I hear stories of teams in the workplace who identify a problem, come up with a plan to fix it, and then… nothing happens.

The unused prescription amounts to nothing.