Archives for October 2024

This ain’t a science, but I believe success is closely correlated with one’s ability to tolerate frustration.

Success often—but not always—comes after doing hard things. And hard things are often frustrating. So the more we’re able to tolerate frustration, the more hard things we can handle, the greater the probability of success.

Cherry picking happens when someone chooses and presents the data that best supports their argument.

For example, if someone points to discrete cold weather events as evidence against global warming, whilst ignoring the mountain of scientific evidence of long-term temperature changes, they’re cherry picking.

Cherry picking often isn’t deliberate or malicious either; it is easy to do because we all want to believe the story in our heads.

It takes discipline to (1) avoid cherry picking, and (2) be on the hunt for it when others share their analysis and recommendations.

Sometimes the data speaks, and sometimes it punches you in the face.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the Tesla Vehicle Safety Report.

In Q3 2024, cars running on Tesla’s Autopilot had one crash per 7 million miles travelled vs. the US average of one accident per 670,000 miles travelled. In the most literal sense, Tesla’s Autopilot is an order of magnitude safer than the average.

Looking at my own situation, I have a “normal” second-hand car. It’s ten years old and has no frills; no lane assist, no blindspot signals, and certainly no autopilot.

But given the lifetime risk of dying in an automobile accident is 1 in 93, the next time I buy a car I need to ask myself: what am I willing to pay to reduce my automobile mortality risk by an order of magnitude? Perhaps the Tesla will end up feeling cheap when compared to the peace of mind it provides.

Executive coach, Harvey Goldberg, said that what you tolerate becomes your culture. It becomes the baseline; the standard that everyone accepts.

The idea feels equally applicable from orchestras, to friend groups, to theatre troupes, to the office, and to families.

Someone’s high standards may seem frustrating, but when the situation is reframed around what they’re willing to tolerate or not, those high standards may seem a lot more reasonable.

The draft is the place to try new things, to explore, to make mistakes.

If everything is perfect in the draft, we’re being too conservative.

To get to the good ideas, we need to push through a lot of bad ones.

Poet Jack Grapes has a nice example of why it’s the mechanics that matter in any creative or sporting pursuit.

When he was a boy his father took him to the golf course. Whilst his father played a round, Grapes would have a coaching session. The coach didn’t let Grapes hit a single ball, all they worked on was how to swing a club. Grapes said that if the coach let him hit a ball from the beginning, he’d have worried more about where the ball was going rather than the swing. The ball would distract him from what mattered most.

Once Grapes got the mechanics down pat, it was time to hit a ball, and when he did there was no hook nor slice. Grapes’ shot was straight and true.

Learning the mechanics is an essential part of any discipline worth pursuing.

I’ve done a millennial-in-their-thirties thing and bought a film camera.

The truth is I got bored of the iPhone’s abundance.

Have you ever noticed how when you ask someone to take a photo of your group, say at a restaurant, they take at least 5-10 photos? Repeat this a few times and you can easily end up with close to a thousand photos whilst on a weekend trip. I rarely go back to these photos because there are too many of them.

A film camera forces you to be judicious, to be careful, to be thoughtful, to make decisions about what makes the cut before you take the shot.

There is romance in scarcity.

Phone snatching has become a real problem in London. Balaclava-clad thieves whip around on electric bikes, swipe phones from the hands of pedestrians, and escape at pace. Last year alone there were 11,800 offences accounting for 33% of robberies in the capital. There simply aren’t enough police officers to keep petty crime like this in check, which has led to its rapid growth.

Furthermore, there are stories of people having their bank accounts drained despite having Face identification and two-factor authentication enabled. If a thief has your pin and access to your email and SMS messages, they can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

I’m not a cynic, nor do I want to propagate fear around phone snatching, but I’m considering a tightening of my financial security measures. Specifically removing all financial apps from my primary phone that I take with me, and having a secondary phone that stays at home used only for banking services.

The secondary phone is a relatively cheap insurance policy in the event my primary phone is stolen, and it provides an extra layer of defensive friction against anyone trying to access accounts that they find via email.

Do you, or anyone you know, do this? Or do you have a more secure method that you follow?

We check our watches, phones, computers, and clocks for the time, all the time.

Yet there’s little time allotted for play, for rest, for meandering, and for doing nothing.

We convince ourselves that we’ve got things to do.

But when I think about it, most of the magic, most of the fun, most meaningful things, happens when we lose track of time.

When I’ve had a few big weeks, particularly after travel, I’ll often arrive at the next weekend pretty tired.

I’ve learned that I have two options: (1) have a good nap and catch up on the sleep, or (2) operate in a low-grade stupor where I don’t feel I’m 100% present.

I’ve found it’s almost always better to pay the price of the nap. A little bit of extra rest drastically increases the quality of the rest of the weekend and coming week.

I’m heading to Prague this coming weekend with Maru and my in-laws, and I’d love any recommendations from those of you who have been.

Maru and I usually prioritise beaches and less populated places when we travel, but I’m excited to spend a few days staying in Prague’s Old Town.

You folks delivered with the recommendations when we went to Poland, so please don’t hesitate to send them over!

This quote from Friedrich Nietzsche struck a chord with me:

“Artists have an interest in … so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shines down like a merciful light from heaven.

In truth, the good artist’s or thinker’s imagination is continually producing things good, mediocre, and bad, but his power of judgment, highly sharpened and practiced, rejects, selects, joins together; thus we now see from Beethoven’s notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings.

The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.”

In short:

1. Make a lot of stuff.
2. Get good at telling the good from the bad.

I loved this video from Rory Sutherland about the power of “making something visible”.

Sutherland starts by poking fun at North Londoners and our inability to get around without the tube map. This part is true—I’ve been a North Londoner for eight years and I mostly rely on the tube map. South Londoners on the other hand are much more adept at London travel as they frequently use trains that aren’t on the tube map.

The London Overground is the bright orange line on the London Tube Map. It’s a convenient way to get from North London across to the east side of the city, as well as down to south of the river. However, for 20 years it was called Silver Link Metro and it wasn’t on the tube map. But when it received a name change, a paint change, and was included on the London Tube Map, its usage tripled.

Very little changed to the actual train line, almost all of the uptick in usage came from making the thing visible. I love that.

I was at Cardio Tennis the other evening, it’s where we have 10-12 people turn up at the club to play mini games for an hour.

I found myself (silently) frustrated or annoyed at everyone. The comments they made on the court, the way they played, how the coach decided the teams. I almost convinced myself everyone else was the problem.

I then realised that I was the one who was tired and with a short fuse. The problem was not them, it was me. I had a chuckle to myself, gave myself a bit of grace, and (most importantly) kept my mouth shut. I saw out the session and resolved to be better rested for the next one.

It’s how they treat you when things go wrong that matters most.

Anyone can be a fair-weather friend, but it takes guts to stand with someone through a tough time.