Archives for March 2025

Maru loves having fresh flowers in the home, so for my UK readers, here’s a great flower hack: buy them from Tesco.

Yes, your run-of-the-mill supermarket has excellent flowers. They last for at least a week, sometimes up to ten days, and are often 20-30% of the price you’d pay at a florist.

A few times I’ve bought flowers for Maru from a dedicated florist thinking the quality would justify the price, and I have been consistently disappointed.

Maru now buys a few bunches from Tesco and makes her own arrangements. She often puts them in little vases she made at pottery. It brings a unique liveliness and colour to our home.

There is a strong correlation between the amount I’m reading, and the ideas I have for this blog. When I’m reading a lot, I feel like I have ideas coming out my eyes. But when I’m in a busy spell at work and I’m struggling to find the time, I’m more likely to spend time staring at a blank page.

When I get into an ideas rut, I remember the Charlie Munger quote, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.”

Perhaps there’s a reason why the saying goes, ‘Draw a line in the sand’.

Once we draw the line, the tide, the wind, and that dog running along the beach will all work to erase the line.

We have to keep drawing it to remind ourselves repeatedly of why we’re here, and what we’re willing and unwilling to do.

It’s not always about getting everything right.

Sometimes the real value is in making mistakes faster; enabling us to learn and change approach before we spend too much time on a dud idea.

I have a folder in my writing software called Emergency. The idea behind the folder is to have a few blog posts on hand in case I find myself in a pinch and need to post something quickly.

The funny thing is many of these posts have sat in that folder for years, and when I’ve gone to use them, I’ve found that the message either no longer resonates, or I would like to communicate the point differently.

It’s definitely something that sounds good in theory, but doesn’t really work in practice. It’s better to just sit down, think, and write a fresh post.

“It’s impossible for a person to begin to learn what they think they already know.”—Epictetus

I’m trying to increase my ratio of questions to opinions.

When an idea hits me for a post, I have to write it down, right away. At least the concept or idea.

If I don’t do it, I’ll typically find myself later in the day forgetting the idea, and spending a bunch of time trying to remember.

My blog posts are low stakes — I can always come up with another idea. But the principle of “write it down, right away” is especially useful for higher stake tasks.

I watched the Best Picture nominated film Conclave today. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The conclave is the process by which cardinals of the Catholic Church appoint a new pope after one has either died or resigned. It’s essentially rounds of voting that continue until a cardinal has a majority. The factions that form around the leading cardinals and how their support waxes and wanes over days is fascinating.

Ralph Fiennes is excellent as the Dean of the College of Cardinals, and following him as he runs the conclave is a unique—albeit dramatised—insight into a very secretive process.

I have a caffeine double standard.

Scenario 1: During Sunday-Thursday, when I have work the next morning, my last coffee will be around 15:00.

Scenario 2: If I’m on holiday, or say at a wedding, my last coffee could be after midnight. An espresso at the end of a meal, for example.

In scenario 1, I’m afraid of missing sleep.

In scenario 2, I’m less concerned.

Ironically, I’ve never had a problem with caffeine in scenario 2. But I have had problems with scenario 1 if I have a coffee too late in the afternoon.

If attention can be crudely split into undivided and distracted attention, what split do you give your family, friends, and colleagues each day?

How much time is spent thinking about other things, checking our phones, or working on something else in the background.

Distracted attention is hardly attention at all.

There’s a great ad for dogfood on the Tube that leads with the line, “Taste-tested by humans. Made for dogs”.

They get it. It’s humans who buy the dogfood. And if it’s good enough for humans, it’s good enough for dogs.

A coffee shop open in my neighbourhood recently called Redemption Roasters. They are part of a chain of coffee shops that provide barista training for people in prison; helping them transition into to the workforce once they leave. It’s a great concept.

However, the Redemption Roasters in my neighbourhood barely survived a few months. There’s a lot of competition in the area, and despite their coffee being good, it felt like the space and their selection of food just didn’t quite fit with what other cafes were offering.

It’s a real shame because I think they deserved a better shot at it, especially given what they stand for.

When I was a teenager, I loved the song ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ by the Arctic Monkeys.

I was desperate to learn how to play it on the guitar and sing it at the same time. However, the strumming pattern on the guitar is completely at odds with the vocal melody. I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

I asked someone who could do it for advice, and they said to practise the guitar part until I could do it in my sleep. Only then try to add the vocal in.

It seemed obvious once he told me, but it never occurred to me before. When you invest on two fronts at the same time, progress can be hard. But dedicate the time to getting one thing right, to making it automatic, and the other part comes.

When I could play and sing the song at the same time, it felt like magic, like a secret code that I finally cracked. It was an awesome feeling.

Maru knew for a long time she wanted to take up pottery as a hobby. And mid-last year we found her a class a short walk from home.

My default is to be proud of her for everything she does—she’s my wife and life partner after all. But she took to pottery like a duck to water. Her years of architecture, design, and art all translate so smoothly into this hobby.

My favourite piece of hers are these hugging spheres; inspired by a pottery studio called Claymen that we visited in India back in 2023.

There’s a famous quote from Jeff Bezos that when the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.

The reason for this is usually due to measuring—and caring about—the wrong thing.

It’s hard to overstate the value of direct feedback from customers, users, and colleagues.