Archives for January 2025

When learning how to strength train, everyone focuses on how to lift weights correctly. Once they learn an exercise, they move on to the next one.

But learning how to fail correctly should be the next thing people learn.

I’m grateful that a personal trainer taught me how to fail a squat. He made me practise it in a packed gym and everyone looked at me for the loud sound I made. But I needed to feel the sensation of releasing the bar and letting the weight fall off my back, I needed to understand what it meant to move forward out of the way, I needed to hear the clatter of the bar to the ground to not be afraid of doing it if I ever needed to.

Lift right, fail right.

Any policy, once set, risks being diluted when put into practise. It’s true for governmental policy, company processes, and even family rules.

People will eventually try and bend the rules, find an alternative interpretation, or make an exception.

The simpler, clearer, and more understandable the policy, the greater chance it has at succeeding.

Don’t wait for the plant to wilt before you water it. Don’t let its leaves turn yellow, or for the soil to harden, before you pay it attention.

The best time to water a plant is before visible signs of dehydration and damage.

The same goes for ourselves. We all need a bit of rest, relaxation, and fun to be our best. Don’t wait until you’re wilting.

I just watched Wicked Part 1, and it’s fantastic. As a fan of the musical (I’ve seen it three times), I was nervous about its translation to film, but I was unnecessarily worried.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are excellent leads. Their characters are believable, their singing technical, and they are fun! There was so much expectation surrounding this film, but they rise to the challenge.

The original Wizard of Oz was written in 1900, the first film adaptation in 1939, and then Gregory Maguire wrote ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’ in 1995. Maguire essentially wrote a fan fiction where he took elements from the original Wizard of Oz and created a revisionist backstory for the characters; in particular the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba.

It took eight years for that book to be adapted to a musical, and a further 20 years for that musical to be adapted to the film we have today. That’s an impressive 124 year journey from the original book. And given what Wicked the movie has accomplished, it really feels like the ultimate fan fiction.

I have a strong conviction there is a correlation between a person’s willingness to have difficult conversations and their personal growth.

As someone who previously avoided hard conversations, but has a wife who is excellent at them, I know that a willingness to have those them saves many headaches down the line.

I also see excellent examples of people in the workplace who can disagree agreeably. It allows them to make progress and decisions quicker than those who avoid confrontation.

The exact degree of correlation doesn’t matter, believing in its existence is enough for me.

A rule I try to live by is “just stay on the horse”.

Even if you’re moving slowly, the fact that you’re on the horse and making forward progress is what really matters.

However, after a nice break with family over the holidays, coupled with food poisoning and a cold, it’s safe to say I fell off the horse with respect to exercise and training.

As I got back into strength training and running this week, my body has felt unusually sore. I know that pain is just the pain of getting back on the horse, and it’s ample motivation to stay on it.

Back when I lived in Australia—more than 10 years ago now—I went surfing on the coldest day of the year down in Phillip Island. It happened by accident though. I went surfing and only learned after the fact that it was the coldest day of the year. I wore it like a badge of honour.

This week the UK is likely experiencing some of its coldest days of the year; some parts of the country have fallen to -10 degrees Celsius. When a cold spell rolls through, it reminds me of that day surfing back in Australia. Although it isn’t surfing in freezing waters, I’m proud of myself if I mustered up the courage to get out of the house and work out.

The narrative I tell myself is that if I can motivate yourself to workout on the coldest day of the year, I can do it on all the other days too.

Don’t practise until you get it right, practise until you can’t make a mistake.

Say you practise a new piece on the piano a hundred times, and you play it right once, your success rate is 1%. If you try and play it in front of an audience, you’re likely to make a public mistake.

On the other hand, if you practise that same piece a thousand times, but the final 100 play throughs you don’t make a single error, then you’ve practised until you can’t make a mistake.

How much are you practising? And are you stopping too soon?

The other day I was trying to catch the tube home from Kings Cross. Delays on multiple lines meant the platforms were dangerously overcrowded so they weren’t letting more people into the station. There were a few hundred people impatiently waiting.

A staff member announced numerous times that walking to a nearby station would get people on their way faster than waiting, but almost everyone stood unmoved. Maybe they didn’t believe it, or perhaps they couldn’t be bothered doing the walk.

But after 10 minutes of waiting with no solution in sight, I decided to take their advice and head to Euston. It ended up being a short walk—no fuss, nor drama—and I quickly got on my train home.

It was a lesson in being less stubborn, in not thinking that I know better, and acting faster when someone with more information gives you a helpful hint.

The plane needs to fly, like the car needs to drive, like the human body needs to lift or run.

The work keeps us sharp and functioning, and the stress can be a good thing.

Infrequent stressors can be just as, if not more, dangerous.

It’s unwise let your electronic devices run down to 0% battery. Deep discharges lead to increased battery, potential issues with inaccurate battery readings, and increased heat generation. Aiming to keep your battery above 20% is better for your device.

Hmm, there’s definitely a lesson in there for our human batteries.

Once you go beyond immigration and security, most airports have poor quality food options, with poor service, at expensive prices.

This is because the airport is a transient place. The majority of travellers are there briefly and infrequently. And they’re a captive audience; they can’t leave the airport to get better food elsewhere.

It’s an ecosystem where no one has to be excellent to survive, and that has the consequence of bringing the overall quality down to an unusually low level.

At this point, it makes sense why airports bring in the big fast food chains. It’s likely no airport executive got fired for signing a contract with McDonald’s.

I don’t have a solution because I don’t think there is one. Any ambitious restauranteur would likely make better margins elsewhere, so it looks like we’re stuck with mediocre airport food for a while yet.

For those that have a Kindle, you’ll be aware of the feature that allows you to see which are the passages other readers have heavily highlighted.

I like it because when I see that 415 other readers have highlighted a particular sentence, it makes me pay extra attention and figure out why it stood out to them.

It got me thinking that aside from this feature and the Kindle’s instantaneous dictionary, the Kindle is devoid of features, and.its reading experience has remained unchanged in the 10+ years that I’ve had one.

I’m sure this is deliberate to keep the reading experience as close to a physical book as possible, but a few optional features that one could turn on and off would be interesting to consider.

What if you could “pair read” and see the annotations in the margins from your Kindle friends or famous thinkers?

What if complex fantasy and science fiction novels had in-built context so that when you tap on the name of a character or fictitious item you’d see a definition and summary?

What about an indicator that showed how many people dropped off and stopped reading the book?

There are many features Amazon could add, but I do applaud their restraint. They’re trying to do one thing really well, and my above ideas are all nice-to-haves.

The less we care about what other people think, and the more that we care about the truth, the better our judgement will be.

I can’t remember the source or else I’d quote it, but I came across this thought recently and it struck a chord.

Who are the people in your life that are best at being present?

What little, tactical, specific things do they do that set them apart?

What’s stopping you from adopting a few of their habits for 2025?