Archives for December 2024

Maru and I just finished the Netflix mini-series on the life of Ayrton Senna, one of the greats of Formula 1 whose life was cut short at the age of 34 in a tragic accident in 1994.

From a modest upbringing in Brazil with no way of funding a prolonged racing career in Europe, Senna’s journey from karting through to three-time Formula 1 world champion is equal parts inspiring and daring. He had to win it all on the way up to find sponsors and teams willing to take a bet on him at the next level.

In the photos and videos I’ve seen of Senna, his eyes communicate a unique maturity and focus, a quality that Gabriel Leone does an excellent job at portraying. It’s worth a watch for Leone’s performance alone.

Overall, the mini-series races by due to how much they pack into the six episodes. And it’s a great insight into the single-minded determination and commitment of one of the greats of the sport.

I’m not a fan of Starbucks, but I am impressed with their commitment to calling every customer’s order by name.

It would’ve been much easier to implement a system with order numbers.

There is something about the effort calling of customers by name that makes the experience feel personal and premium. It’s a small action that has a positive impact on the way its customers view their brand.

After persisting with this blog for five years, I’ve noticed my motivations to write go through an ebb and flow cycle.

Some months the words just fall on to the page without trying. It’s a joy to write and I feel there’s always some interesting topic just around the corner.

Most months I need to work and think and try, but the posts still feel natural and easy.

And some months it feels like a grind. It’s not that I dislike writing, but rather I feel there is a lack of inspiration and ideas. When I feel like this, I remind myself of the Patricia Ryan Madsen concept “There’s always something in the box”, and remember that the practise matters most when we don’t feel like it.

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”—John Muir

I liked this quote from John Muir. A paved road is comfortable, easy, and smooth. But most of the adventure, and most of the mess, come from the dirt trails.

It doesn’t all have to be dirt, but there should be some!

Long time readers will have seen some of my posts on musician Jacob Collier.

He is a grammy-winning musical genius that has won the respect of giants like Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, and Herbie Hancock.

Earlier this week I attended one of his concerts for the first time. It was at London’s O2 arena and it didn’t disappoint. Collier breaks all the traditional rules of music and somehow makes even the most odd chords sound beautiful in his arrangements.

A standout moment was when Chris Martin from Coldplay emerged and the pair sung the song ‘Fix You’. Collier has made it his thing to turn his whole audience into a choir, so 15,000 of us got to accompany the duo as they sung. Here is a great video of the moment.

If you ever get the chance to see Jacob Collier live, I couldn’t recommend it more!

A friend once told me that you only need two things for a trip: your passport and a credit card. Even if you forget everything else, you can get by with those two things.

It’s a helpful reminder that in many other situations it’s likely that there’s only a few essentials that we can’t do without.

It’s that time of year where it’s dark soon after 4pm and the days are their shortest.

Although we’re only ten days away from the winter solstice, each grey and wet day has me wishing winter was over.

But soon enough, as it does every year, we’ll notice how the days are getting longer and brighter, and we’ll welcome the summer and warmth.

I keep this in mind as we inch towards the winter solstice.

In the relentless and single-minded pursuit of efficiency, there’s often little room left for magic.

This is because efficiency is easy to measure and easy to reward. So our teams, organisations, and incentives are structured around it.

Magic, on the other hand, is hard to measure, and is often born from a meandering, inefficient journey.

It’s not either/or or all-or-nothing, it’s just a reminder to create space where magic can happen, and not to get efficiency tunnel vision.

Whenever I’m in San Francisco for work, I bring back a loaf or two of San Francisco Sourdough.

I get it from Boudin Bakery, which has used the same sourdough starter since 1849; likely making it one of the longest still-in-use starters in the world.

The best part is they have a shop at the airport where you can buy take-and-bake loaves. To finish them off they simply require 10-mins in the oven at home.

There’s something special, albeit irrational, about taking two loaves of sourdough across an ocean to have them baked, warm, and fresh in London. It’s a unique experience that always serves as a nice bookend to a trip.

Maru is the plant whisperer in our home. I take care of the terrariums because they’re infinitely harder to kill.

She keeps track of all our plants and knows when they’re root bound and need to be repotted. One way we can tell is the plants’ leaves start to go yellow because there is insufficient soil for the roots and the plant needs more moisture than our regular watering schedule provides.

Once repotted, our plants often go through a growth spurt and need less frequent waterings as they grow into their larger pots.

There’s a nice metaphor there about the pots we find ourselves in, and making judgment calls as to whether or not we need repotting.

The flight time matters, but it’s all the other bits that can make a trip lengthy and tiring.

A 1-hour flight from London to Paris seems short, but the ride to the airport, the checking-in, the security, the waiting at the gate, the boarding process, the customs and immigration checks on the other side, and the trip to your hotel. All of it adds up.

Measuring our travels, our projects, our plans, or how long it takes to make a nice meal for friends by “flight time” alone is simply forgetting all the other bits.

My highschool football coach worked hard to develop a strong passing game in our team.

He’d often say, “The ball travels faster than the player.” And it’s a phrase that has stuck with me because it’s a great metaphor for how other teams should work too.

Even if you have people on the team that are individually brilliant, they can rarely take the ball past all eleven players on the other team and score a solo goal. They almost always need to rely on multiple of their team members. In fact, the most efficient and effective path to goal is passing, trusting, and collaborating.

The absence of the ball at our feet isn’t a failure if we’ve given the ball to another open player further up the field, and if we’re putting ourselves back in an open position to advance our team’s game.

And when the team get comfortable with the passing game, they can see immediately that the ball always travels faster than even the best players.

When making plans, how do we know if we’ve set the right level of ambition for ourselves and our teams?

A helpful exercise is to “double it”.

Put together the best plan you can, and then ask yourself these types of questions: How might we double our impact? How might we double our speed to get there? How might we double our audience? How might we double our conviction that we’re doing the right thing?

If a “double” result feels doable, then the level of ambition probably wasn’t right in the first place. But if the “double” exercise encourages us to stretch ourselves a little further, it’s serving its purpose to help us find our limits.

Generally speaking, us humans can only do one thing at a time.

So even if the to-do list is long and feels insurmountable, our responsibility is really to choose the one thing we ought to do first.

The list may never get smaller, but at any given moment, we’re at least doing our best to spend our time on the right thing.

Plug in a destination into your GPS and it’ll spit out an estimated time of arrival. This is the best case scenario. And rarely, if ever, do we get there early.

However, the weather, traffic incidents, congestion, or an unlucky run of traffic lights, can all delay us. They make the best case scenario look like a wishful guess.

If it takes us a few minutes longer to get somewhere, that rarely matters. But in other areas of our lives we should we wary of relying on best-case-scenario estimates. For example, professional projects usually take longer, are more costly, and more complicated than originally planned.

The idea for this post came from today’s particularly long drive; one that ended up being a lot longer than the estimate.