Archives for 2022

Productivity is easy.

Squeeze in another task. Optimise the schedule. Plan, execute, repeat.

Presence is hard.

Be still. Hold no expectations. Create space for curiosity, joy, and wonder.

Realism > Expressionism > Blue Period > Rose Period > African Period > Cubism > Neoclassicism > Surrealism.

Picasso deliberately changed his style over and over and over.

Even at the height of his fame, Picasso eschewed the safe formula and committed to explore, reinvent, and take risk.

When there is nothing to lose, it’s easy to take the risk.

But when there is already a foundation of success, the courage to take the risk sets apart the good from the great.

Maru and I landed in Argentina yesterday. We’re here for a couple weeks to celebrate the wedding of close friends and to spend some time with family.

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years since my last visit. It would’ve been much sooner, but, you know, pandemic.

I love it here. The people, the food, the streets, the sun, and the songs on the radio. Not to mention the challenge of trying to improve my Spanish!

It’s always a joy visiting each other’s home country. The anecdotes are placed in context, special places are revisited, and new memories are made.

Both Tom Petty and Meat Loaf passed away within the past few years.

Whilst they were alive, I rarely paid attention to their music. But since they died, I’ve become a fan of both.

Tom Petty for his iconic melodies and chugging guitar. And Meat Loaf for his rock operas and eccentricity.

I can’t help but wonder: would I have become a fan if I had sat down for a deliberate listen whilst they were still alive? Or was it their deaths that put their music on my radar?

And does it even matter?

Part of the allure of modern music is the possibility of seeing your favourite songs performed live. And part of the romanticism of older music is how the record is all we have left of the magic.

Regardless of how we become fans, what matters is that we get there.

There’s something inexplicable—and uniquely human—about being moved by a melody.

I got gifted a cactus last year, but I accidentally threw out the instructions.

They’re hardy plants though, capable of surviving in the harshest of conditions.

Based on this tough-guy reputation, I assumed my cactus only needed a little bit of water every now and then.

Wrong.

Cacti need to be drenched. Soaked. Swimming!

But infrequently.

If I had paused for a moment, I may have figured it out: deserts rarely get rainfall, but when they do, it’s heavy.

Many things seem obvious in hindsight.

It also pays to hold on to instructions.

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.