Archives for January 2024

There are no shortage of advertisements on the London Tube promoting financial trading apps and products.

One advertisement caught my eye today. It touted things like “world renowned platform” and “broker of the year”.

Yet at the bottom of the ad there was a disclaimer that read, “73.5% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading … with this provider”.

Something is wrong if the “best” player in a market has a group of customers where 3 out of 4 lose money.

I’m grateful we have organisations like the Financial Conduct Authority and the Advertising Standards Authority. The enforced transparency is likely to help a few people avoid the snake oil.

Did you face headwinds today? Or did tailwinds propel you forward? Maybe it was a calm day where the wind was neither slowing you down nor at your back?

If we know the wind changes all the time. It’s then all about making progress, however small, whenever we can.

There is a bit of meme in our building: the lift is always broken. We have one small lift, and for the past 6 months it’s been plagued with issues. I’ve been stuck in it, and so have many neighbours—all of us needing wait for the lift maintenance company to come and let us out.

We live on the 4th floor, so all those flights of stairs over the past 6 months has made me curious about the benefits of stair climbing—a sort of “mathematics of taking the stairs”.

According to a study in Atherosclerosis Journal that collected data from more than 400,000 participants in the UK, “climbing five flights of stairs daily can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 20%”. The study found that short bursts of stair climbing is more effective for our cardiovascular health than getting our 10,000 steps in.

Even when the lift is working, I’m now often choosing to take the stairs. And at the office, I’m making the same decision multiple times per day.

One flight of stairs won’t make a difference, but doing it everyday will likely lead to benefits over time.

Compounding in action again.

I’ll never run in the marathon at the Olympics, nor enter the World’s Strongest Man competition, nor play football for my country.

But what I can do is learn to run a little faster, train to become a little stronger, and play football with a little more stability and coordination.

I don’t need to target being the absolute best. A relative goal is good enough. The self-improvement game is much more fun when we’re looking at ourselves, not others.

We often think in terms of maximising benefits, but thinking in terms of regret minimisation can help us see our options—and their trade-offs—differently.

I was extremely lucky to take a little over half a year to travel between finishing university and starting my first job. I got to swim in the seas of countries far from home, eat foods I didn’t know existed, and learn a new language.

When I look back on that experience, I regret nothing. Although I didn’t have a lot of money, I didn’t have any responsibilities. It was the right life experience for the right time of my life.

As I think about the future, I’m thinking deeply about regret minimisation. I’m asking myself, “What experiences do I want for myself and my family that I know we’ll never regret? And I’m thinking about how to make them happen.

What are your regret minimisation options?

Today I learnt about a famous 1954 study called ‘They saw a game’.

Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril had Dartmouth and Princeton students watch a game of “penalty-ridden” football.

When asked about the game, students from each side mainly saw the fouls committed by the other team.

The students saw the same game, but they were looking for different things.

It’s a sobering insight. This was a game where there were zero consequences to having a biased viewpoint. But what happens when we extrapolate these behaviours to complex political, societal, social, and moral contexts?

It’s a reminder that we all carry biases when we’re watching our own games.

There is a famous line from the movie Dodgeball where in their first training, the coach says to the team of ragtags, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” He then begins to throw wrenches at the team, with a number of them getting hit by the tool.

The scene is nonsensical and hilarious, but it has some truth to it.

If you’re trying to accomplish something, why not train on hard mode?

Why not make our training harder than the task will be? By putting ourselves under pressure before the event, we give ourselves breathing room to better deal with the nerves, adrenaline, or things that could go wrong on the day.

The detours, inconveniences, delays, and wrong turns, can be all those things.

Or they can be a chance to seeing something new, trying something for the first time, and explore and learn a little more.

Everyone nods their head in agreement when someone proposes the workaround.

It may be a hack, but it solves the short term problem. The longer term solution can wait for when we’ve got the time, and space, and resources to solve it properly.

But people get comfortable with the workaround.

They get used to its quirks, and accept its faults.

The workaround becomes the final product.

And over time, the workarounds add up, and mediocrity seeps into the product or service.

My mum has a rule for deciding on a restaurant: go where it’s busy.

Even if you need to queue for a seat, or wait a bit longer for the food. People work hard for their money, so the busyness is a signal that the place they’re buying from has worked hard to earn their trust.

Healthy self down motivates us. It helps us prepare, focuses our mind, and increases our intensity.

However, self-doubt is dangerous when it paralyses us. When our uncertainty prevents us from making any forward progress.

Self-doubt will usually accompany any6 new or meaningful work. We need just enough of it to give us the energy to rise to the challenge and the occasion.

When it’s cold and there has been snow or rain, salt is often thrown on the roads and footpaths to prevent ice from forming.

I was cycling this morning in sub-zero temperatures—which is odd for London—and I was grateful for the salt along my path.

Someone out there thought of it, planned for it, and made it happen.

It made me think: every family, friendship group, and organisation needs someone to throw the ice at some point, and we’ll often take turns doing it to help each other out. It’s a great metaphor for the essential, unseen work that keeps us safe and secure.

There is an unbelievable story sweeping the UK. It’s a battle that’s been going on for more than 20 years, but it has more recently leaped with ferocity into the public consciousness due to the an ITV produced mini series called ‘Mr Bates vs. The Post Office‘. The final episode of the four part series has now been viewed over 10 million times; in other words, more than 15% of the country has seen it.

The context is in the late 90s, the Post Office, which is a state-owned enterprise, procured and launched a piece of software developed by Fujitsu called Horizon. The Horizon software manages financial transactions and accounting for more than 11,000 post offices around the UK.

Due to a bug in the Horizon system, the end of day cash balances for many post offices were incorrect. Rather than balancing, they showed a shortfall. The people running these post offices, called subpostmasters, repeatedly complained to the Post Office that there was an error with the software, but no action was taken. Instead, the Post Office fired many for their cash shortfalls, and convicted hundreds for fraud, theft, and false accounting. Four of these subpostmasters even committed suicide due to a combination of stress, financial hardship, and shame.

It’s hard to imagine that such a large miscarriage of justice can happen in the UK, but the evidence is clear—it happened.

A few things baffle me more than others. First is the deliberate cover-up from Post Office executives and their refusal to acknowledge the issue. Second is how not a single executive from the Post Office has found themselves in any hot water over the Horizon failure. And finally, the tragedy that many subpostmasters are still fighting for full compensation; a full twenty years after their quest for justice began.

This miniseries is a great example of media launching this issue back into the spotlight. I sincerely hope that its success helps earn justice and restitution for the honest, hard-working subpostmasters, and that it serves as a lesson so that nothing of the sort is repeated.

My dental check-ups make me feel like I’m back in school.

I work throughout the year—brushing and flossing and rinsing and cleaning—but when I sit in that chair, I’m nervous for the upcoming exam. Afterwards, I realise it wasn’t so bad, and that I did reasonably well with my preparation after all.

The exam parallels are strikingly similar. Above all else, if you do the work, the results are usually what you expect them to be.

Note: I also realise that I probably blog about the dentist each time I visit them. It’s a routine life experience, but it’s never comfortable, and I always end up thinking up a post whilst in the chair. Perhaps that’s just my way of escaping the pain of the clean.

I love to know, what are your two favourite apps, and why?

It could be on your phone or PC, or it could be a messaging app or a game. What it is doesn’t matter, but I’d love to know why they’re your favourite.