Archives for March 2022

If you feel like your inbox has a habit of growing from a small hill into an unassailable mountain, then this may be the trick you need.

Three sentences is permission to treat your email like you would an SMS. Simply limit your reply to three sentences or less.

Focus on only communicating the most important information. Do away with the formalities. Don’t fear coming across as brusque; people will come to respect it.

This is just another opportunity and example of letting self-improved constraints work their magic.

It’s that time again: I see a stunning chart from Our World in Data, and I just have to share it.

Humans on the planet today account for 7% of all humans who have ever existed.

And half of all humans were born in A.D., even though A.D. only accounts for a small part of our long history.

This chart also puts into context the immense impact the agricultural revolution had on our ability to survive and grow as a species.

Although we’ve been around for a long time, we’re living in an unprecedented and extremely special time.

When we think a piece of writing is finished, it rarely is.

It can always be shorter.

Clearer.

Punchier.

So give it a day.

Allow it some time to breathe.

Come back the next day, and have another go at making it better.

Maru and I are visiting friends in Oxford this weekend, and we just finished one of Uncomfortable Oxford’s walking tours.

Uncomfortable Oxford is a social enterprise run by students. They offer a range of walking tours highlighting the darker parts of the city and university’s history. They put the buildings, landmarks, and stories into context, and encourage a level of reflection and discussion from participants that I haven’t experienced on other tours.

They covered everything from the controversial history of Cecil Rhodes, the slave money behind one of the most prestigious colleges, and the challenging experiences of some of the first women and minorities admitted to the university.

I like their commitment to helping the public—students, locals, and tourists alike—have open, engaging, and thought provoking conservations about these uncomfortable histories.

We need more of this!

Early during the pandemic, one of the comments frequently—and incorrectly—thrown around was, “It’s just a flu.”

Of course, it wasn’t. COVID was much more serious.

However, recent data published by the Financial Times now puts the risk of dying from COVID in the UK at less than the risk of dying from the flu.

I like how the data clearly outlines the three underlying causes of the reduced mortality risk.

1. Vaccinations
2. The reduced severity of Omicron, and
3. Immunity via infections

Even though daily life is very much normal, or “pre-pandemic”, this does mark a symbolic turning point.

Many of us live without fear of the flu, and as of now, this data gives us a benchmark to feel the same way about COVID.

Here’s something I’ve been mulling over:

The more we are willing to be proven wrong, the more likely we are to find the right answer.

It’s important to check the ratio of our default responses:

What percentage of the time are we responding with an opinion?

What percentage of the time are we responding with a question?

And where does this ratio lead us in the long run?

Ernest Shackleton and his crew set out on an expedition in 1914 with the goal of a completing a trans-antarctic crossing.

Their expedition fell apart when their ship, Endurance, became frozen within an ice floe in the Weddell Sea. They spent the winter camping on the ice, and held hope that the ship would become free in the spring.

When spring rolled round, the breaking of the ice put immense pressure on the ship’s hull, and the boat was lost.

Shackleton and his crew spent two months on a floating pack of ice in the hopes they’d be carried to an island 250kms away. Unable to reach this island, they hopped into lifeboats, and travelled for 5 days to arrive at Elephant Island; an inhospitable place far away from any shipping routes.

Shackleton then took 5 of his men, and only 4-weeks worth of food, and set sail for South Georgia; knowing that if they didn’t make it, they and crew left on Elephant island were all likely to perish.

Eventually, Shackleton made it to South Georgia, and after an almost 2 year ordeal, his men were rescued.

Why do I write all this? Because it puts the recent discovery of the sunken Endurance into perspective. Marine archaeologists recently found the ship in the Weddell Sea at a depth of 3,000 metres, and they’re immensely excited.

“Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen – by far. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation,” said marine archaeologist Mensun Bound

The video imagery of the sunken wreck is breathtaking! Enjoy!

Back in 2019 I wrote a post called French Onion Ceiling.

It tells the story of how I dropped a steaming bowl of French Onion soup, how it splattered everywhere (even the ceiling), and how Maru reversed my foul mood as we cleaned by cracking jokes about how our ceiling never looked so good.

History repeated itself today. This time it was a smoothie. It went all over the carpet. And I was the culprit. Again. Does anyone else see a theme here?

Maru’s first words when she saw the mess, and my frustration, and before we even started to clean up, was, “French Onion Soup.”

On this International Women’s Day, when there are already so many reasons to celebrate the amazing women in our lives, Maru gave me yet another reason.

It’s the daily acts of care, empathy, patience, and love that add up to a lifetime worth sharing together.

Intelligence is hard to define.

In school we’re conditioned to measure intelligence against arbitrary and archaic benchmarks: can I remember this fact, or spell this word, for example.

This creates habits that can become harmful if we don’t unlearn them before adulthood.

It was only in university, and in my first job, where I started to learn that critical thinking, curiosity, flexibility, empathy, persistence, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to synthesise, were better measures of intelligence than fact regurgitation.

But my above list is just a hodgepodge, cobbled-together collection of ideas based on my own experience. It’s by no means a definitive or exhaustive list.

Which is why I really liked this excerpt from Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid’:

“No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behaviour and intelligent behaviour lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations flexibly;
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
• to recognise the relative importance of different elements of a situation;
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them;
• to synthesise new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;
• to come up with ideas which are novel.”

Seeing intelligence as a pattern of behaviours rather than as a defined set of ‘have or don’t have’ skills is a great starting point for self-improvement.

I really liked this recent tweet from The Orange Book. It sums up a lot in so few words.

“People take you seriously once you take your commitments seriously. Have a long-term coherent vision, calmly execute every day.”

Multiple friends have recently, and independently, brought up the topic of Effective Altruism.

I’d like to learn more.

The basic idea is “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis”. This could include donating a certain percentage of one’s income to impactful causes, or making career decisions that maximise good over the long term.

Apart from some appetiser-sized reading, I have little to no understanding of the deeper nuances, who are the leading thinkers, and what are the most pressing topics in the field.

I have a feeling a number of you will have already explored this topic in some depth, and I’d love if you’d be willing to share some of the articles and people that got you thinking!

Product and technology companies are obsessed with Product-Market Fit.

The key question is does our product solve a customer’s need well enough so they pay us for it? And are we solving this problem for a meaningful number of customers, meaning are we making enough money to stay afloat?

In the early stages of a company, this is really all that matters.

One thing that product teams often get wrong is a poor definition and understanding of Product-Market Fit. They define arbitrary metrics and targets thinking that when those targets are reached, they’ve achieved Product-Market Fit.

That’s just not how it works.

The more time I spend working in technology, the more I believe Product-Market Fit is a feeling. It’s when people can’t wait to recommend your product, when your product is flying off the shelf, and when you can’t keep up with orders or customer queries. There’s a papable buzz in the team where it feels like you’ve discovered the secret sauce.

The data, metrics, and targets are just guides.

Real Product-Market Fit is a feeling.

My usual barber—Jimmy, who I’ve written about before—was closed earlier this week, so I tried a new place.

I went to a place in a downtown, office-riddled part of the city. The barber and I started chatting, and we quickly got to how they fared during the pandemic, and what it’s been like since the UK has re-opened.

Sadly, they’re still struggling. With many people embracing hybrid working, and fewer people returning to the office than they anticipated, this year is make or break for them. They’re in limbo. They don’t know how things are going to play out.

For the most part, the way I live my life is now very similar to pre-pandemic life. But it’s moments like these that make me realise there are second and third order consequences from the pandemic that are still being felt by people and businesses. And how there is still an arduous and uncertain road ahead for many.

It’s an important thing to keep in mind when we think about where we shop, and from whom we buy.

You can double, triple, and quadruple check your writing, but if your title has a typo, you’re going to undo some of the hard work.

Despite double checking my posts before they go out, a typo found its way into the title of my post yesterday.

Those of you who replied to the post were gracious, you didn’t point out the error. But I cringed and went back to the post to change it.

Many will say a typo doesn’t matter.

But it does.

How we do anything, is how we do everything.

The way we treat even the smallest typo communicates something about how we turn up each day, how we approach problems, and how we strive for better.