Archives for 2022

What’s the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning?

What does it tell you about your priorities? Does it reaffirm them? Or does it inspire you to reconsider them?

There’s much we can unpack by questioning ‘the first thing’.

Since getting back into Touch Rugby—a sport that requires sprinting, rapid changes in direction, and a small degree of physical contact—I’ve been adhering to the principle: not above 70%.

Yes, I could run, attack, defend, and play at 100%, but I don’t. I throttle my effort to 70%.

The risk of injury is non-linear. My estimate is a large proportion of injuries happen in the 90-100% zone. So operating at a lower range of intensity significantly reduces this risk.

It’s not about being timid, or playing in a half-hearted way, it’s about staying in the game.

Avoiding injury means I can continue playing for a long time: week after week, year after year. That’s far more important than winning any in-the-moment point.

Principles are few, but methods are many.

Many will try and give us advice based on their methods—the thing that worked for them.

The challenge is picking out the principles amidst the methods, and choosing the ones to bet on, adopt, and adhere to.

I was originally baffled by Amazon Video, Disney+, Hulu, Apple+, and a myriad of other streaming services entering the market.

I thought Netflix had gobbled up most of the pie, and that others would struggle to win customers.

What I didn’t expect was to discover many of my friends have multiple subscriptions—myself included.

Of course, I only have access to a biased and skewed sample, but a quick Google shows that between 50-60% of US households have more than one subscription.

It made me realise that what I once thought was a zero sum game in the streaming industry, is actually a much larger opportunity.

It reminded me of a piece of advice I heard: avoid playing zero sum games—it’s more fun to grow the pie than split it.

A friend recently shared an excellent excerpt from an interview with Eliud Kipchoge—the first person to run a marathon in under 2 hours.

The interviewer asked, “How do you develop self-discipline?”

Kipchoge’s answered, “Rule number one is to get Vitamin N.”

Kipchope paused.

The interview asked, “N is for?”

The straight-faced Kipchoged replied, “It’s to learn to say ‘No’.”

I agree with the principle, but I also love Kipchoge’s delivery. He deliberately caused confusion and built suspense to ensure the resolution was more impactful.

It’s not my style, but I love it when other’s use the tactic well.

I tell myself I’d like an endless summer, but I do like how each of the four seasons mark the passage of time.

In particular, shoulder seasons give us a signal as to how the world is changing around us. They give us clues as to how we need to adapt. And they teach us a lesson if we don’t heed their advice.

Our careers, friendships, relationships, and personal projects also have shoulder seasons—when a warm summer feels like it’s approaching, or that we may soon be trudging through a winter.

Why not take a moment and think about what season may be approaching?

Every so often I like to take a look at my baselines and consider whether or not they need a reset.

When I say baselines, I mean quantifiable expectations we set for our growth and self improvement.

A good example are the targets many of us set on fitness trackers. When I first bought an Apple Watch, I started with the default move target of 500 calories. I have periodically reviewed my daily goal, and increased it slowly over time.

Another is the number of focused minutes of Cantonese and Spanish practise that I complete between my weekly lessons. I often find myself the day before a lesson trying to cram in some reading or vocabulary to make the lesson worthwhile. I realised I was setting my expectations too high, and that some consistent daily practise was better than none.

The goal of resetting baselines isn’t to create a laundry list of tasks we need to complete. That’s exhausting, and the opposite of what I’m getting at.

Resetting baselines is about choosing the few things that matter, setting new and high standards for what we expect of ourselves in those few things, and deliberately dropping the rest.

…when you’re in a foreign city, walking at 50% pace, listening to an album for the first time, and have a willingness to pause at the slightest curiosity.

This post was written whilst walking the streets of Zurich with a couple hours to spare before my flight home.

Give it a try some time!

All you need is one person in the group who can ask great questions to completely change the course of a conversation.

It’s true for work, play, and for meeting new people.

The good part, it’s a skill that can be learned.

I clearly remember my first visit to Zurich almost 12 years ago because of the video that plays on the airport train taking passengers between terminals.

There are a series of screens mounted on the walls of the tunnel. As the train moves past them, the screens’ frame rate is synced to the speed of the train. This means that despite moving past the screens at speed, you see a clear and coherent image unfold.

I was in Zurich this week for work, and made sure to capture the screens to share with you. Unfortunately, the FPS capture on my iPhone is different to my eyes. So what was a clean image for me looks a little more stuttering on video.

It also makes people smile every time, which is reason enough to do it.

Staying on the wagon is most of the battle.

Even if today’s progress is slow, tomorrow’s the weather looks poor, and next week’s route is an uphill slog.

Falling off, or breaking down, requires a costly stop or repair to get back on the road.

Even if we feel like we’re not making as much progress as we’d like, just turning up everyday and inching forward keeps the momentum going.

I got some feedback that my recent blog posts have skewed more towards ‘lessons learnt’ rather than ‘interesting observations’.

This reader went on to say that “not every post needs a lesson”, and that “it was more fun reading about the things you noticed going on around you”.

The feedback resonated.

So, expect a little more dancing between the two.

I recently found out a childhood friend from
New Zealand moved into our London neighbourhood; literally two minutes walk down the road.

What are the chances?

It’s been great catching up with them, and realising that even though this city is vast, and the world much larger, connection can happen seemingly random places.

Next time you’re writing an important document, blog post, or email: edit back to front.

Start at the last paragraph, and check your work in reverse.

When we read our work from beginning to end, we’re more likely to believe we’re making sense—we’re biased after all!

Reading in reverse forces us to edit with greater caution, and thus increases the probability of finding faulty logic and mistakes.

I’ve recently been using a language learning platform called italki to practise Spanish and Cantonese. It’s an online marketplace connecting teachers and students.

I used to think these types of marketplaces didn’t have a shot; especially for services that can easily be taken “offline”—where a person could pay the service-provider directly.

However, I’ve been convinced otherwise because of italki’s excellent tools and a critical mass of students and teachers.

As a student, I want to know I’m getting a good teacher, and that the price is reasonable. With their platform, I’m able to easily filter by reviews, price, and experience (i.e., number of classes taught). I can quickly select a teacher for a trial lesson that I feel confident could be a good match.

A teacher may have 50+ students, and scheduling is a nightmare when lessons are on an ad-hoc schedule and online. Italki provides a very simple scheduling tool, allowing teachers to choose when they work, and places the responsibility on students to pick a time that works best for them.

The combination of these factors mean both teachers and students are happy to pay a percentage of fees to italki to take the hassle out of matching and scheduling.