Archives for September 2024

There’s a public running track about 3 kilometres from my house. It’s well-maintained with a thin gravel finish, and is set within a pocket of greenery on the outskirts of London’s Regents Park.

I spent an hour and a bit there on Saturday as part of my half marathon training, and I enjoyed seeing the large number of people using the track. There was a personal trainer and their client doing weight training at the edge of the grounds, people doing tempo runs and training for sprints, and couples doing intervals and long runs together.

It’s hard to measure the value of a well-maintain, highly-utilised public good. But I know the community would feel the impact of its absence if it wasn’t there.

There’s a great line from the film Margin Call, “Speak to me like a small child, or a golden retriever”.

Sam Lessin, one of the co-founders of Slow Ventures, builds on it by saying, “if you can’t explain it the way a golden retriever would understand, it probably isn’t gonna work.”

It’s a good reminder that even the simplest, clearest ideas ought to be simplified over and over again before they’re ready.

I was passing the famous Savoy hotel earlier this week. It was raining buckets. However, the valet was in a morning suit and top hat, protected only by his umbrella (which only does half the job on a truly wet day!).

He stood with pride out on The Strand, and with a smile he waved down taxis for guests waiting underneath the covered hotel entrance tucked away from the road.

There’s something about turning up in a morning suit and top hat, rain or shine, with a smile. It’s impressive. It signals an intention. It’s a commitment to doing things well.

There’s a positive correlation between the quality of my writing and how long I let it sit in my drafts folder.

If I’m rushed and post quickly, the quality of my writing suffers.

If I allow a day or two after writing a first draft to let my subconscious do its work, there’s always a glaring error or obvious improvement.

Hurry prevents the rewrite. And the rewrite is essential for good writing.

Plan accordingly.

Forecasts can lull us into a false sense of security about the future. We want to believe them because they allow us to feel like we have a degree of control—or certainty—over a situation that is often out of our hands.

However, a forecast is still a guess. It’ll likely be the best guess we have, but it’s far from certainty.

Once we get comfortable with this, we can use forecasts to guide our direction of travel, but we shouldn’t mistake it for the path.

I came across a crazy piece of data today. The market cap of Novo Nordisk, the creator of the drug Ozempic, is now larger than the GDP of its own country, Denmark.

Although these measures are not like for like, it does illustrate Novo Nordisk’s outsized and impressive role in the Danish economy. It also goes to show how the rise of semaglutide has had a profound impact on the world in a short period of time.

Persistence is admired.

Stubbornness is frowned upon.

There is a fine line that separates them, and sometimes it’s hard to know which side of the line we’re on.

Outsiders looking in will say the cause of our success was persistence, but they’ll also be willing to call our failures a consequence of our stubbornness.

My take is that if you’re going to dance with persistence, someone is inevitably going to call you a stubborn fool. And the strength of our convictions, despite the criticism, is determines how long we’ll keep going.

I’m about three months into a tennis obsession and my interest shows no sign of waning (although a friend rightly pointed out that I tend to go deep on a hobby and then emerge just as rapidly as I entered—so I’m not making any bets here on how long this phase may last).

The more I play, the more I appreciate that tennis is one big balancing act. It’s power vs. placement, physical vs. mental, conscious practice vs. being in a state of flow, and hitting winners vs. avoiding unforced errors.

These trade-offs give players a choice as to how they’ll develop their game, and the depth within each trade-off leads to an addicting pursuit of improvement.

You dial a number, someone picks up, and you say, “Hey, it’s me”.

The people who know immediately that it’s you, they’re likely your closest family and friends. That list is likely to be fewer than five people.

It’s not that other people don’t matter, it’s just that the “It’s me” test helps us realise there are some relationships that we have to invest in first.

I loved this thought from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Your real body of knowledge maps to the number of your social, moral, ethical, technical, business, financial, culinary, political, and scientific mistakes that you still remember and realize were mistakes.”

I like thinking about the inverse of Taleb’s rule.

How many mistakes have we forgotten?

And how many mistakes do we refuse to recognise as mistakes?

The sum of the above two questions could be classed as “avoidable ignorance”—meaning, we could be smarter, but our own errors of omission have left us in a worse spot.

If you go to a concert, the theatre, or a sports match, it’d be great to see a “world first”. You get to see people at the top of their field perform seemingly miraculous feats.

However, if you go to the doctor, dentist, or optometrist, it’d be a scary proposition if they said you were getting a “world first” treatment that was only available at their clinic.

Context is everything.

Last month I wrote about how Haruki Murakami runs to “acquire a void”.

I was dealing with something tough this morning so I decided to put my reflection into practise.

I put on my running shoes and started moving. No music, no podcasts. I let thoughts come to me, but I let them go. I tried to preserve the void and give my subconscious the space and time to do its work.

I’m not an expert, but I am a student. Trying, toiling, and testing.

Maru and I are going to the Harry Potter Studio Tour this weekend. It’s an activity we’ve always wanted to do but we kept on putting it into the “we live in London so we can do it some other time” bucket. However, we finally bit the bullet and got tickets (they’re often sold out months in advance!).

As part of our build up to the tour, we’re re-watching some of the films; specifically the last four. Some of them are over fifteen years old, but we were both surprised at how well the visual effects have held up. They still feel novel, believable, and fun. Sure, the standard of VFX today is better, but it feels like the rate of improvement has plateaued.

The depth and richness Rowling’s world creation is a joy to delve back into, and we’re really looking forward to peering into the behind the scenes on Sunday.

Every so often a song comes along and ferociously punches you in the gut. Well, Colin Hay’s song ‘I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You’ packed a mighty punch.

It’s piercingly honest, lacks production (in a good way), and is raw. The lyrics are specific and descriptive, and are coupled with a stripped back vocal performance that let them shine. Hay is also playing in an open guitar tuning which adds a rich droning tone to the song.

I love the feeling of finding a song that you immediately know will be on your listening list for many years to come.

H/T to Dan for sharing this song with me on his fleeting visit here in London.

Back in 2012 I remember staying at an AirBnB in Rio de Janeiro and being woken up by a raucous noise. It was the sound of hundreds of children playing in the playground of a local school at 07:30 in the morning.

At the time, I was frustrated. I had no idea I’d booked an AirBnb next to a school, and there was no way I was getting back to sleep.

However, over the course of the week I got used to the sound. In fact it transported me back to my own childhood; scampering around a playground, playing sport on the field, and making my own raucous noise.

I then began to appreciate that the sound of children laughing and playing is a sign of health and vibrancy in our communities. And also how that sound is exactly the same the world over.

We recently moved flats here in London and there are a few schools within ear shot. After my experience in Rio, I now refuse to ever let the raucous noise get to me.