Archives for May 2022

We create, view, and store thousands of documents, presentations, letters, and bills each year. Having clear folders to organise these documents are important, but equally important is having a good chronological sorting system.

Organising by ‘Date modified’, ‘Date added’, or ‘Date created’ can be helpful, but there’s a lot of sorting, filtering, looking at dates in different columns.

Here’s a method I learnt a few years ago that has saved me a tonne of time.

At the beginning of each document title, write the date in YYMMDD format, and then sort all your folders on the ‘Document Name’ column by Z to A.

You’ll then have all your documents presented to you in the order they were created in. Finding documents is a breeze. And knowing the original creation date has been a big help when versioning documents too.

We can choose to get frustrated, hot headed, and blustery.

Or we can step back, take a deep breath, figure out the next best step, make it, figure out the next best one, and so on.

We gain little by getting worked up.

Note: This post may seem painfully obvious, but I’m preaching to the choir here. I wrote it after the 3rd flight change I’ve had to deal with on this trip, which has had a cascade effect on car, hotel, and onward travel plans.

They’re a good chicken-or-the-egg pairing.

Patience affords us perspective.

When the world around us is messy, alternate perspectives help us develop patience.

It also reminds me of a quote I heard recently via a saccharine rom com (of all places!): if you sit in the question long enough, the answer will find you.

How often do we find ourselves thinking or saying the above?

There’s always going to be an ‘X’ we can blame. We don’t have the look hard.

The ‘X’ doesn’t even have to be real.

But what happens when we stop blaming ‘X’ and take full responsibility for ‘Y’?

The past won’t change, but the future might.

There’s no such thing as being on time.

We’re either early or late.

We get to decide which.

H/T Kevin Kelly – another from his list of life advice that’s been on my mind.

I love companies that focus on doing one thing really well.

They know their customers. They know the problem. And they put all their care, thought, effort, and attention into their singular solution.

Crocs. Gorilla Glue. Tabasco. Lucas Papaw Ointment. And my favourite London dessert shop, Cafe de Nata.

Expansion is hard. But focus is harder.

It takes extreme discipline to shun the shiny new thing and focus on the core.

One of the best parts about visiting family in Malaysia is sitting and listening to my Poh Poh’s (grandmother’s) stories.

They’re filled with surely-that-can’t-be-true plot twists, hilarity, and a healthy dose of Chinese proverbs. They’re made all the more funny due to my mum having to translate the 50% of Cantonese words I don’t understand.

During one of her stories today, Poh Poh said something to me that stood out: “In our family, there’s no need to say thank you.”

Once she explained her logic, I found it to be powerful and profound.

When you do things for yourself, like doing the dishes or cleaning the home, you don’t say ‘thank you’ to yourself. You just do the thing and move on.

In our culture, a family unit is, and operates, as one. Come rain or shine, we’re committed to one another. So in the same way that we don’t thank ourselves, my Poh Poh has no expectation for anyone in the family to say thank you to her.

‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ are such ingrained habits that I’m unlikely to let go of them when with family, but I really liked this new way of viewing the family unit.

Writer Jenée Desmond-Harris shares a great way to improve our daily to-do lists:

“I started dividing my to-do list into 1) things I have to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do.”

Desmond-Harris found she was often not getting to 3. And how having 3 was a way to introduce boundaries into our lives.

Small change. Outsized effect.

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about how we almost missed out on Spider-Man.

I also commented, “you can’t go anywhere without seeing a child in a Spider-man t-shirt or with a Spider-man backpack.”

Fast forward 3 years, and I see this playing out so evidently with my nephew. He’s obsessed with Stan Lee’s creation—running around the house pretending like he’s Spider-Man. It’s also his clothing, toys, and TV shows!

It’s wonderful to see the excitement I had for Spider-Man occur with my nephew. It also made me realise there are only a few characters that truly transcend generations and make such inexplicable connections with fans.

You can choose to see see it as some tires, the lid of a bucket, some paint, and a small tree.

Or you can choose to see something completely different.

Maru and I are currently in Malaysia visiting family and having the best time. Minion seen in Melaka at a Kopitiam.

I came across this interesting, London-based carbon capture start-up today. Their focus is on the container ships that spew more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than planes.

Their proposed technology “works by routing the exhaust into a container that’s filled with porous, calcium oxide pebbles, which in turn “bind to carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate,”— essentially limestone.”

Readers who are fellow climate nerds, would love to hear your thoughts on this!

It’s an odd statement.

The open wound was the painful part.

And now that it’s healed, we get to remove the bandaid.

Ripping it off is a small price to pay for what we receive in return.

The idea that “only a few moments matter” has been a repeated learning this year.

We wake up early, eat well, head to the gym, and perform a number of warm-up sets. It’s then that we face the growth set. It’s the one where we’re lifting at the limit, and it determines whether we grow or not.

We join a meeting, people present their plans, we discuss the option and trade-offs, but the path forward is still murky and confusing. It’s that moment we get to practise bringing structure, clarity, and judgement.

We come home after a long day, we sit down at the dinner table, and we begin to chat with our family. It’s that moment that we show we can let go of everything else and focus on what matters most.

Only a few moments matter.

“Never hungry, never full,” is a great mantra from my trainer when it comes to diet.

We don’t need to go without, nor should we burst at the seems.

Deliberate moderation, balance, and planning is a superpower.

I’ve seen Nassim Taleb, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Paul Graham all tackle this idea in different ways over the years: a percentage increase and decrease feel similar on the surface, but are drastically different in reality.

Paul Graham framed it well recently:

“Many people implicitly assume that if a number shrinks by x%, it has to grow x% to get back to its old value. That’s not far off for small x. A number that shrinks by 10% only has to grow about 11.1%. But a number that shrinks by 75% has to grow 300%.”

The decline is immeasurably more dangerous than the increase.

Act accordingly.