Archives for June 2022

Observe the people you admire.

Do they ask more questions than answers?

Or do they answer more than they ask?

What does the ratio tell you about them, their experience, their confidence, and their curiosity?

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is one of the most famous, recommended, and useful books on writing.

William Zinsser, in his excellent book On Writing Well, says Strunk and White’s book should be an annual read for any aspiring writer.

I’ve been particularly enjoying the ‘Approaches to Style’ chapter—where there are simple suggestions to affect a better style, but no hard rules.

I’ve summarised 7 of my favourite below.

1. Write in a way that comes naturally. Write like how you speak.
2. Work from a suitable design. Great writers plan.
3. Write with nouns and verbs. Don’t use adjectives nor adverbs in writing — they’re OK in speech though.
4. Revise and re-write. No writer’s first draft is any good.
5. Avoid the use of qualifiers. Our writing will be much better if we exclude ‘rather’, ‘very’, ‘little’, and ‘pretty’ altogether.
6. Be clear. Any fool can make something complex.
7. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity. Avoid acronyms. Write things out in full.

The below tweet from the Orange Book stood out to me. It says much in few words.

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Take care of your health when you are already healthy.

Start investing when you are already financially secure.

Find a better job when you already have a job.

Build meaningful relationships when you are already happy.

The best time to start is when you don’t need to do it.

Today I came across a stunning pairing of content related to Kobe Bryant—one of the all-time basketball greats who tragically passed away in a helicopter crash in 2020.

The first was Bryant’s poem to basketball—published after his retirement in 2015.

The second was the final 3 minutes of his last game—where he scored a mind blowing 60 points for the Lakers at 37 years old.

In the first, Bryant states his obsession with the game. In the second, we get to see that obsession in action. We get to witness the outcome of a life of dedicated practise.

Both are poetry.

We can either be on the front foot, the back foot, or be caught flat footed.

I love working with people who have a front footed attitude.

They bring energy, they make stuff happen quickly, and they always find way forward.

It’s not an innate trait. It’s a chosen behaviour.

Their momentum begets momentum, and they pull others along with them.

They set an example I strive to emulate.

The best people I’ve worked with have a striking trait in common.

When faced with a hard problem, they’re willing to sit with it for a long time, they’re willing to dig deep into the ambiguity, and they’re willing to pull at the loose threads until slowly the knot begins to unravel.

The most important word in the above paragraph is “willing”.

Innate talent isn’t a prerequisite to solving a hard problem. It’s a voluntary willingness to sit with, dig deep, and pull at the loose threads.

We can learn so much more when we have 1) a dictionary by our side, 2) a red pen, and 3) a resolve to circle and look up any word we don’t understand.

I was transported back to the 90s this morning.

I was searching for a tax advisor.

I received a recommendation from a colleague, checked out the company’s Google Reviews, and went to their website.

The tan brown background, ill-cropped photo, and buttons with animations would normally put me off. But I’m looking for tax advice, not a website redesign.

I got enough signal to form a base level of trust with the company—at least enough to make contact with them.

Sometimes, design doesn’t matter.

It’s now been more than a year since Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal.

Given the benefit of time and space since the event, we can now look back on how a gust of wind disrupted global trade in innumerable ways.

The Suez Canal enables 12% of global trade. Without it, container ships would need to circumnavigate the African continent. That’s a 6,000 mile journey!

However, when Ever Given ran aground, it blocked all traffic for 6 days, and it took engineers more than 100 days to free it. There are some estimates the cost to businesses and governments was in excess of $60 billion.

That’s an expensive gust.

But it shows how interconnected, interdependent, and fragile our systems of global trade are. One event can have mind bending, knock-on effects throughout the world.

The violin has a quality that sets it apart from other instruments.

Violinists rest the instrument on their shoulder and press their chins against the instrument for a specific reason: there is only skin covering the jawbone.

Sound waves travel from the violin, up through the jawbone, and into the inner ear. Violinists experience a deeper richness and resonance than the audience because they are literally feeling the music vibrate through their bones.

If this feels crazy, check out the headphone company Shokz. You don’t put any buds into your ears, the headphones transmit sound into your ear canal via jawbone vibrations.

Feeling sound through our bones isn’t new. It started with the first vertebrates 300 million years ago; they used jaw-like bones to hear ground-borne sounds.

Here’s hoping that from now on you’ll see the violin in a new light. I know I will.

I first picked up The Lord of the Rings when I was nine. It was too dense.

I tried the Economist in my teens. It was unintelligible.

But give me a few years, a few new experiences, a little more life lived, and all these things suddenly made sense.

I first listened to Meatloaf in my twenties. It felt odd compared to everything else I was listening to.

If something doesn’t make sense now, it doesn’t mean it’s a write-off forever. An openness to things we once found distasteful may allow us to discover things we now deeply enjoy.

I appreciated this thought from Shane Parrish.

“One of the biggest keys to success at anything hard is believing that you can figure it out as you go along. Because most hard things can’t be figured out in advance people never start. As Picasso observed, “To know what you are going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”

We don’t need to have it all figured out before we take the first step. I find that reassuring.

When I sit down to write, I usually have an idea, a structure, and a clear point I’d like to make.

Sometimes, though, when I put the words on paper, they don’t feel right.

So I rearrange them.

I scratch some.

I repeat others.

I turn sentences on their head.

I jumble and mix words around.

Still, something feels off.

On these days, I admit defeat. I acknowledge the post wasn’t ready for the world. I put it in draft, and come back to it another day.

Admitting defeat isn’t a bad thing. It’s simply a lesson in finding the limit.

And we can, and should, be confident that there’s always another idea waiting in the wings.

I was 16 when I first watched Taika Waiti’s ‘Two Cars, One Night’. It’s the story of two boys and a girl, waiting for their parents in a parking lot of a rural New Zealand pub. The short film was different to anything I had seen before. It was equal parts hilarious, poignant, and distinct.

Years later, I’d see this distinct humour all over the big screen: in Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit, and Thor: Ragnarok. It was, of course, the work of the inimitable Taika Waititi—possibly the most exciting and irreverent director in Hollywood at the moment.

I recently learnt a bit more about Taika’s story. He spent his twenties making art, making music, and performing comedy. Two Cars, One Night was his first experience with film, and that was in his thirties. He never went to film school, so much of his craft and work is guided by intuition.

In particular, Taika’s refinement process stood out to me: he watches scenes and he’ll rework whatever makes him feel embarrassed.

It’s difficult to look at your work with a fresh pair of eyes, especially when you’ve already given it so much time and attention. But if you can manage it, it’s a superpower that unlocks a higher standard of work. You can see this superpower in action by seeing Taika’s finished products.

Wired Magazine, one of my favourite publications, shared a list of things that could derail a long stretch of economic growth. The image below shows their list that was written back in 1997.

To put that in perspective, Bill Clinton was the US President, 911 hadn’t yet occurred, Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple—the iPod was merely a twinkle in his eye, Google didn’t exist, and the Nintendo 64 was the hottest new gaming console on the market.

It was a long time ago.

But the predictions are poignant, and some, scarily accurate. It makes me question and think about the predictions people are making now for 2050, and about whether or not we’re building the world we want others to inherit.