Archives for July 2024

A fallow year is a farming term where a field is left unseeded during a growing season. Its goal is to give the land a break, and the soil a chance to replenish nutrients.

The term is also being used to describe how the Glastonbury festival will have a fallow year in 2026. It’s fitting because Glastonbury takes place at a place called Worthy Farm.

Although I’m sure the fallow year does the land a lot of good, there’s also value in scarcity. An in-demand cultural event that takes one year off every handful of years returns to insatiable demand. It’s similar to the artist who is forever touring and releasing music; they don’t give their fans a chance to miss them. Conversely, there’s a reason why we get so excited for the Olympics and the World Cup.

Scarcity sells.

One way to understand our own ignorance on a difficult subject is to write about it. Even better is forcing ourselves to summarise the most important information on a single page.

The writer’s block. The half-formed sentences. The bits that feel wrong.

That stuff is important. They’re signals we don’t know the material well enough.

The act of writing the first draft is not to publish, but to map our own ignorance.

I’m regularly asked about my dietary restrictions; whether it’s friends putting on a dinner or for a work event. So I thought I’d put them in post that I can send to people.

Dan’s Dietary Restrictions

1. None. I eat everything.
2. Except oysters. I don’t like them.

Last updated: 14 July 2024

Note: Okay, admittedly this post is two parts satire, and one part serious. But at least I’m going to chuckle to myself when I send people: http://dancullum.com/dietaryrestrictions

My family in New Zealand went to the All Blacks game last night. It was a three-generational outing with my 5-year-old nephew going to his first match.

My sister sent me a wonderful video of the stadium wave. The wave moved across the stands and when it arrived where my family were seated, I saw my nephew and my parents jump up and throw their hands into the air. My nephew—enthralled by it all—laughed alongside my dad at the sight of 50,000 people doing something in unison.

It was the first time my nephew saw a stadium wave. My sister captured the moment because she knew it was special. And my dad validated my nephew’s excitement by matching his energy.

In one 10-second video I saw one generation living a new experience, and two generations reliving it.

As someone who has yet to have children, it made me think about the important role children play in helping us remain astonished, curious, and joyful.

I love a good Ryanair £30 flight to Europe. Small bag only. No seat selection. No priority boarding.

But when I booked that 07:15am flight to Milan, I selectively ignored the required 03:30am wake up. That was, of course, a problem for my future self.

I made a mental a note to book a later flight next time. But I already know that won’t happen.

Ryanair knows that won’t happen either.

I re-read Kevin Kelly’s ‘Excellent Advice for Living’ yesterday. It’s an excellent short read.

For his 68th birthday, Kevin penned down 68 pieces of advice for his kids. He added to this list over a couple of years and ended up with 450 pithy lessons for life.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Kevin; not only for his professional accomplishments, but also for his outlook on life, eclectic hobbies, and deep-keel values.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

“Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.”

“Taking a break isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.”

“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.”

“Trust is built in drops but lost in buckets.”

“Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.”

Most books or articles I’ve read on habits converge on the same point: remove decision making and the need for will power.

If you expend zero energy making a decision about whether to do something or not, you’ve got a little more energy to just do the thing in the first place.

However, when self-negotiation is involved, there’s always going to be a good reason to back out.

Being selective about our habits is important too. When we have too many, life can feel like an endless routine of chores and must-dos.

Pick a few that matter. And don’t negotiate.

Margins are meant to be written in. Sentences should be underlined. Pages should be dog-eared.

Reading is a conversation, not a lecture.

Sometimes I’ll write a post and it just won’t feel right. There may be a logical flaw, the flow might feel off, or I may end up disagreeing with my own point of view.

At that point, the answer isn’t to try and fix it, but rather to throw it away. There will always be another idea, a new perspective, and an opportunity to try again on a fresh piece of paper.

The more comfortable we are with throwing work away, the more confident we’ll become that the next idea will arrive in no time.

Jesse Itzler has a thing called the ‘Big A## Calendar’. Every year, he prints out an A0 calendar and marks it up with important events and important goals for the year.

Although I organise my life in Google Calendar, I miss the scaled visualisation that comes with a large, physical calendar. It makes a meaningful difference to see all the weeks on one page, and realise how much (or little) time you’ve got between trips, work milestones, and personal goals—like my first half marathon in November.

Itzler sells his calendars for $50, which is pricey. So I found an A0 template on Etsy for a few pounds, and sent a pdf of the 2024 and 2025 calendars to the printer. I’ve now got a huge 2024 calendar hanging on my wall, and it’s been helpful to externalise every important thing for the year on a piece of paper I can reference within seconds.

If a meeting is worth having, it’s worth spending time preparing for it.

If we can’t find the time to do the preparation, we should either move or cancel the meeting.

We should accept no middle ground.

Prepare, or it doesn’t happen.

Note: I’m not saying we need to hold our colleagues to this standard. The rule is still valuable even if it’s only a personal commitment.

As I turned on the BBC at 10pm to watch coverage of the UK general election (news outlets aren’t able to report on the election until the polls close at 10pm), I paused and appreciated the BBC live streams showing ballot counting sites around the country.

In school halls and auditoriums thousands of people were at work. Some were delivering large, plastic, zip-tied-shut boxes, others were running those boxes to tellers, and the tellers themselves were sitting in long rows counting votes.

I was grateful to watch the wheels of a peace democracy turn live in front of me.

I appreciated this post from Fred Wilson, about how writing online is a conversation.

“You are not trying to publish complete ideas. You are engaging in a conversation with the world and you are a participant in that.”

When the goal isn’t a one-way broadcast, the writing doesn’t need to be perfect, complete, or polished. When the goal is to start a conversation, we just need to turn up and earnestly share what we’ve got.

On Sunday morning I went down to a cafe near home, sipped my coffee, and sat alone with my thoughts.

No book. No notepad. No scrolling on my phone. No laptop to do work.

I know I use my phone as a way to pass the time, avoid my own thoughts, and to be mindless rather than be mindful More broadly, scrolling on our phones as a gap-filler has become a habit we’ve collectively normalised.

To stop this habit, like developing any new skill, it’ll require intentional practise to get better at it. Perhaps I should turn Sunday’s experiment into a more regular thing.

Most bookshops maximise the amount of space for aisles and books. They do away with open space and reading zones. As you move through each aisle you can feel the square-footage-squeeze calculation of the finance department at head office.

Every so often though you come across a bookshop with sofas. And the sofas say a lot. They say, “Welcome,” “We’re not in a rush,” “Make yourself comfortable,” “Pick up a book, have a seat, see if you like it.”

Guess which kind of book shop wins people over in the long run?