Archives for 2024

The craftsperson makes by hand. The process is slow and thoughtful. It’s filled with care, vulnerability, and imperfection. And The outcome is one of a kind.

The machine makes things at scale. Perfectly cut, ironed, shaped, and refined. Everything identical.

Neither are bad. It’s just important to know what we’re building, how we’re building it, and why we’re building it that way.

I participated in a pub quiz today; my first one in a long time. It was a relaxed Sunday evening at a local pub, the quiz master was excellent, and the vibe was cheerful.

I forgot just how obscure some of the trivia questions can be though. It often felt like a flip of a coin as to whether or not we’d get a question we’d know the answer too.

Another team got almost every question right, and that’s when I realised: I’m comfortable with my current level of obscure facts. I’ll still go because it’s super fun, but I don’t need to win the pub quiz.

Maru told me about a culinary adventure, and we’re considering trying it.

London is a city bursting with cultural richness. And on the topic of food, you can find restaurants and dishes from every culture in the world here. So why not make a list of every country, and try food from each one?

It seems like a pretty daunting project to take on, one that would take years to complete, but it sounds super fun.

Any thoughts or ideas on how to do it well?

I’m a big fan of country music.

I remember walking around Nashville when I was eighteen and listening to the music outside the honky-tonk bars in the cold because I was still below the legal drinking age, so I couldn’t enter.

A few years later, I made up for it in a Memphis bar listening to immensely talented country performers as my friends and I travelled down the Mississippi river.

Years later I listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast ‘The King of Tears’ where he says the magic of country is in its specificity. Country artists describe specific places, moments, conversations, and emotions. When compared with most other genres that speak in obscure metaphors, there is something vulnerable and relatable about country music. Gladwell’s point of view stuck with me.

So I’ve started to make my way through the Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Country Albums of All Time. I’ve got through the first ten, and I intend to continue through the rest. When a song catches my ear, I save it to this playlist, which will include songs from albums in the Top 100, but I’ll also add other country songs that catch my ear.

I’m drawn to the happier and upbeat albums, so ‘Fly’ by The Chicks (#5), ‘Come on Over’ by Shania Twain (#8), and ‘Fearless’ by Taylor Swift (#10), were my favourites.

If you’ve got country artist recommendations, send them my way. Despite loving the genre, I don’t really have a great map of the best artists and albums, which is why I started with the Rolling Stone list.

I was reminded today of Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Myopic focus on moving a single number rarely ends well. It encourages behaviours and optimisation decisions that wouldn’t have passed the sniff test otherwise.

Every so often I see a video that talks about “longevity correlations”. For example, good oral hygiene and high levels of grip strength are correlated with longer life spans.

The wrong conclusion to come to would be to (1) brush your teeth more, and (2) buy grip strength trainers for those long meetings.

It’s more likely that good oral health and grip strength are leading indicators for a concert of health and wellness behaviours that compound over time.

If you eat mostly vegetables and avoid high sugar foods, your oral health is likely to be excellent. If you’re regularly strength training, a by-product of that training is likely to be improved grip strength. And when you put together these behaviours of a health diet and exercise, you start to see populations that are living healthier for longer.

Don’t get lost in leading indicators. They’re more useful as signals that the rest of the system is working well.

I heard a stunning statistic today.

In 2003 when Michael Jordan retired, Nike sold $700m of Air Jordan products.

In 2023 the Air Jordan brand earned more than $6.59 billion.

That’s an almost 10x increase in revenue off an already mind-blowing base number. Furthermore, this happened twenty years after Jordan’s retirement.

It’s an amazing example of the brand transcending the person and becoming it’s own thing. A juggernaut like few others.

Sometimes the answer, no matter how much prep has been done, isn’t to get things right on the first try.

Sometimes it’s just trying a handful, a dozen, sometimes hundreds of things, before we find something that works.

Knowing when we’re playing a numbers game is important. It changes the way we approach the problem.

I read a stunning New York Times article over the weekend about a trade that occurred in 1667.

The context is the Dutch owned Manhattan, and the city within it was called New Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the English had colonised an island called Pulau Rhun, which was one of the only places in the world that grew nutmeg—a spice which at the time was worth its weight in gold.

As part of a treaty in 1667 following the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch agreed to trade the island of Manhattan for the island of Pulau Rhun. The English promptly renamed New Amsterdam to New York.

The roads these two islands have taken since couldn’t be more different. But it’s fascinating to look back on how these two islands—on opposite sides of the world—are connected in the history books.

Nike got its start in the shoe market by importing and reselling track shoes made by Japanese company, Onitsuka.

If you’ve read Shoe Dog, you’ll know the relationship between the two fractured as Nike came into their own.

It made me smile today as I walked through Oxford Circus, a well known shopping district in London, and saw the Nike store directly opposite the Ontisuka store. Both companies thriving on the high street.

Few people likely know the back story, which makes spotting the easter egg all the more fun.

If the game is one of inches, where every little advantage adds up, and every incremental gain compounds, then the nuance matters.

So about that nuance, embrace it. Enjoy it. Wrestle with it. Let it frustrate you. Care less about it. Then care about it more than anything else. Spend all your time on it. Then spend no time on it. Approach it like a puzzle. Be dogged in your persistence.

The nuance is hard. It’s dealing with trade-offs that other people want to avoid.

But, it’s where much of the magic happens.

Some markets are big. There have ripe fruit just waiting to be picked from a myriad of trees in the orchard. These are good markets.

Some markets are small and scarce. Their opportunities are like crumbs that have fallen from the table. Not enough to survive on.

In my experience, teams and companies don’t spend enough time thinking about, and critically challenging, the markets they’re in. It could be the different between a bounty harvest and chasing crumbs.

Maru and I have a polaroid camera and we ask guests to take a snap when they come over. The photo then goes into a little guest book where they also write a note.

Each photo and message is like a little window that allows us to peer back in time to a happy memory of when we shared our home with friends and family.

It’s the one-off, instantaneous nature of the photo that makes this tradition even more special.

Back in 2011, I remember walking the streets of Pisa in Italy on an overcast afternoon. I had no place to take cover when the rain started pouring down. Like clockwork, men appeared on the street selling umbrellas. “Perfect,” I thought. I bought one for 5 Euros and happily continued to exploring the city. However, within 2 hours, the umbrella had fallen apart. It had completely broken, it was still raining, and I was soaked again.

As a contrast to the above, my mum gave me a Blunt umbrella seven years ago. It’s a brand known for its durability, construction, and longevity, and it hasn’t disappointed. It’s survived seven rainy London winters, and works just as well today as it did the day it was given to me. There is not a single rip, tear, or broken piece.

It’s tempting to go for the cheap and convenient option, but it’s often the more pricey, robust option that wins out in the long run.

A few weeks ago, I asked readers to share their two favourite apps and why those apps made the list. The last of the responses have now come in, and I thought I’d share a short summary.

I think the best way to categorise the apps is into the ‘Blockbusters’ and ‘Useful niche apps’.

In the Blockbuster category, it’ll probably come as no surprise to hear the names ChatGPT, Spotify, YouTube, and Calm. Used universally, with great reliability, and outstanding UX.

WeChat was also mentioned by a reader who used to live in China, and who misses it a lot. Now that they’ve moved back home, they’re still shocked at how nothing like this exists outside of China. It’s an app that is basically “WhatsApp + Uber + Expedia + Deliveroo + Venmo + Apple Health + Amazon + whatever banking app you’d use to pay all your bills”.

In the ‘Useful niche apps’ category, there was iA Writer, a markdown-based writing tool. Libby, an app that allows you to rent e-books from your local library, which I thought was awesome.

I’m also throwing in my preferred writing app into the mix: Ulysses. It’s been a joy to write using their software for almost 5 years, even if they suffer from iCloud syncing issues every now and then.

Thanks for sharing, folks! Was really interesting to read the responses!