Archives for July 2024

I loved this tweet (and accompanying image) from Massimo on Twitter explaining the evolution of Tennis’ gameplay by looking at the grass wear at Wimbledon over the years.

For context, Wimbledon is a tournament played on grass—not artificial, but real grass. And over the course of the tournament the grass wears down.

In the 70s and 80s the players used wooden rackets, which were much heavier than the carbon fibre and graphite rackets of today. This made it hard to win points from the baseline, so players often won points by playing close to the net. However, in the photos from the 2000s you can see how there is very little wear near the net, with the majority of points now being won from the back of the court.

I love how someone took these photos of Wimbledon over the years and connected it to gear and gameplay evolution. Super interesting!

I’m really enjoying Haruki Murakami’s book ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’.

Murakami is a famous novelist, but he’s maintained a running habit for the majority of his adult life—usually running about 10kms per day. The book is part memoir, part musings on running.

He often gets asked, “What do you think about when you’re running?”

He replies, “I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void… the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void.”

I’m interested and can’t quite relate… yet.

Last week, my friend Russell and I were chatting about running; both of us are training for a half marathon at the end of the year.

We discussed our music playlists and our frustration at not having a set of songs at the perfect beats per minute to match our strides per minute cadence.

When I said I wanted to manipulate my favourite songs to match 160 beats per minute, Russell mentioned he’d already done it. The next day he sent me over a 25 minute playlist with some upbeat bangers all slightly modified to be the exact same beats per minute. I loved it!

When you’re running to the beat, everything clicks. It makes a huge difference!

Following on from yesterday’s post about ‘Art is the thing nobody asked you to do’, I want to share The Driftwood Horse with you.

We live near a school in North London that has a mysterious sculpture of a horse on top of the roof of one of its buildings. It is made entirely of driftwood, is life-sized, and has captured mid-gallop.

There are grass, plants, and weeds also growing on the roof. During the spring, the foliage grows, surrounds the horse, and completely hides it from view. Then during the summer break, a gardener comes along and cuts back all the growth, once again revealing The Driftwood Horse.

The odd thing is the sculpture is difficult to see from the road. It’s like it’s deliberately hidden, or placed in just the right place for second and third floor classrooms to gaze down on it.

Although nobody asked for it, I’m glad it’s there.

“Art is the thing nobody asked you to do.”

I loved this thought from artist, Babak Ganjei. It says so much with only a few words.

Although there’s no contract, no payment, no obligation, and no expectation. We create, and try, and share, and fail, and improve. And, most importantly, we learn something new about ourselves each time we try.

The Olympics are about the kick off and it looks like Paris is buzzing!

In reading up on the games, I was surprised to learn the first Olympics were held in 776 BC, continued every four years for more than a thousand years, and were stopped in 393 AD.

It was more than 1,500 years before French historian Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern games in 1896.

All of us have grown up with the Olympics being an event that visits every four years. But just because it has always been with us, lessons from the original Olympics remind us that traditions only persist if we’re deliberate in keeping and maintaining them.

Here’s a Spotify hack you may not know about: they’ve gone big on ebooks. If you have a premium subscription, you can listen to a vast library of ebooks for free.

To put into perspective just how good their coverage is, I’ve searched for maybe 5-6 ebooks over the past 2 months, and all but one were available to listen to via my Spotify premium subscription. That’s an impressive amount of value packed into my monthly fee.

Another reason why I think this is a good play is people don’t typically re-listen to audio books; so streaming is perfect. And if Spotify is including the content in their subscription, why should people keep paying Audible?

I suspect this is costing Spotify a tonne, and probably isn’t sustainable. But whilst there are ebooks aplenty, happy listening!

When we’ve had a hard day, are feeling low, or are in the midst of overcoming a setback, we should listen a little less to what our mind has to say.

We should wait at least until we’ve had a night’s sleep and some quality time with family and friends before we believe everything our mind tells us.

It’s not doing the chore, planning the meal, or performing routine maintenance that is the problem. It’s the burden of thinking about the work.

Maru and I talk often about the importance of sharing the mental load in the home. It’s inevitable that the balance can sometimes swing more towards one person than the other, and if that happens we discuss how we can return things to equilibrium. Likewise, when one person has a lot of their plate, we figure out how the other person can take on more of the mental load.

Every family, friendship group, and team has a mental load. We do ourselves a favour when we talk openly about how we can share it.

Much of my job is writing, so I struggle to work to music with lyrics. I’m always on the hunt for good focus music, and I have a few favourites that I go back to time and again: Lord of the Rings Lofi and Mario Jazz being two of them.

I then thought it’d be a good idea to crowdsource some records, artists, or playlists and share that list back with you.

So, send them in! What do you listen to when you’re working and trying to focus? Looking forward to hearing your soundtracks over the coming weeks!

Some good friends gave Maru and I a wedding gift that was a “dining in the dark” experience at Dans Le Noir?. We went last night and loved it.

Much like it says on the tin, you dine in complete, pitch-black darkness, and for two hours you go on a five course culinary journey.

It starts with your visually impaired waiter guiding you to your table. As you moved through the room, you hear all the normal sounds of a restaurant—people chatting, cutlery clinking, and waiters moving about.

As each course is brought out, you navigate the plate with your cutlery, your nose, and sometimes your fingers. You guess what each dish and drink pairing is, and are extra careful to put everything in a place where you won’t knock it off the table.

The experience is an amazing empathy building exercise. The Dans Le Noir? website says it best, “When the blind person guides the sighted person, this inversion is an astonishing exercise of empathy that forces us to make an unusual transfer of trust. It is an amazing approach to raising positive awareness of blindness and disability.”

Make sure your creative tools are within arms reach.

The pencil and notebook. The watercolours. The instrument. The apron. The gardening equipment.

Make it as easy to pick up your tools as it is to pick up your phone.

When consuming is easy and creating is hard, making it easy to pick up the tools and to get started is half the battle.

I used to jump straight to page one when reading non-fiction books. I treated the book like it was a story; expecting it to take me on an adventure.

However, I now spend time with the table of contents before deciding to read a non-fiction book. When I can see the core message of a book in the table of contents, I gain confidence that the author has a coherent and clear point of view to share. Conversely, when I see a confusing table of contents, I worry that either the author hasn’t done the work to package their thinking up into something easily digestible, or that they’re trying to be too clever.

The purpose of non-fiction writing is to educate and change people’s minds. There’s no need to hide the message.

Every Wednesday my office does a fire alarm test. Although it only takes a few minutes, it happens at 10:10am when many people are already deep into a meeting.

It’s loud, so we mute the conference room microphones and sit there quietly waiting for the test to finish.

People make jokes about the inconvenience it causes, but no one is serious in their complaint. The test is there to make sure we’re prepared in the event of an emergency.

It’s a inconvenient by design.

We’re proudly a mixed culture house that chooses to be “both/and” instead of “either/or”. Maru is a proud Argentine, and when it comes to Argentina’s national football team playing in a major competition, we don our Messi jerseys and sing all the songs.

On Sunday we saw Argentina successfully defend their Copa America title. It was a close match bursting with energy, and was ultimately decided by a stunning Lautaro Martinez goal four minutes from time.

However, in what could be his last major tournament, Messi left the pitch after 64 minutes due to an ankle injury. As every non-Colombian watching around the world collectively groaned, Messi sat silently on the sideline watching his team play.

In a quote attributed to Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Note: I wasn’t able to verify the quote, but the insight is valuable nonetheless), he says Messi watched the game without reacting, without playing the hero, and without giving his team instructions. Messi leads when he is on the field and has the ball at his feet. But when he’s off, he trusts his team to get the job done.

It’s tempting for leaders to exert more control than they should, especially from the sidelines. But when a leader realises they won’t always be around to steer the ship, they create and leave space for others.