Archives for 2025

Flowers for a birthday. Flowers when they’re unwell. Flowers when you’re sorry. Flowers for the guests.

But the flowers mean more when there isn’t a reason for them.

Flowers “just because” say a lot.

After this month, we’ll officially be closer to 2050 than we are to 2000.

I had to pause and let that one sink in when I heard it.

I played a tennis match earlier this week and narrowly lost.

Throughout the game my opponent was quick to congratulate me on a well-fought point.

It was genuine and honest praise, and it evoked a reaction in me: I applauded him for his good plays too.

The whole match was one big positive vibe, and I’m here for it.

“What the hell is going on here?” was one of Charlie Munger’s favourite questions.

I don’t think many people could get away with using it without it coming across as dismissive or condescending. However, the essence of the question is what I like.

It was Munger’s way of signalling something was wrong, and forcing the conversation to focus on heart of the problem.

Finding a way to do this over and over to get to the most important issues is a skill worth cultivating.

A big part of experience is pattern recognition.

When someone is “experienced” it means they’ve seen a lot and they’ve synthesised that observation into a set of heuristics that help them identify good and bad situations faster than others.

Just because someone has 20 years experience in an industry doesn’t mean they’ve developed a useful pattern recognition muscle.

It’s the intentional sorting, storing, and synthesising of observations over time that makes pattern recognition useful.

Longevity influencer, Bryan Johnson, says we should sleep like it’s our job. More specifically that we should take it as seriously as we do our work.

The better we sleep, the better we’re able to perform in all other areas of our lives. Our quality and speed of thinking, our temper, our ability to avoid illness—much of it is influenced by the number of quality hours we get per night.

In tennis, everyone wants to hit a winner. It’s when your shot is so good that the opponent doesn’t even touch it.

But trying to hit winners expose us to risk. We try and hit harder, we try and play faster, but we also risk losing our form and composure.

It’s a much higher probability game to minimise errors, focus on consistency, and let the other player make unforced errors.

Applies to much more than tennis.

Ask ten experts for advice and you’ll get ten different answers.

Some will certainly be wrong.

Be wary of any expert without skin in the game. Rank experts by believability (i.e., who has seen, lived, or survived the problem before). And remember that the expert will never be in your shoes and have to bear the brunt of the consequences — good or bad.

When people are careless with their words, they can make others carry pain with them for years, decades, and sometimes for life.

Once said, words can’t be taken back. So in a moment of frustration, a deep breath goes a long way to avoiding a lot more pain down the road.

Sometimes we can’t avoid context switching. We may have many projects on the go, or there may be a fire (or multiple) that we need to attend to.

When this happens I try to stay on one topic long enough to either (a) get to a resolution, or (b) get a clear next step where either I, or someone else working on the project, is unblocked to make more progress.

Switching before getting to either (a) or (b) leads to spinning wheels and little progress.

They’ve been around for more than a decade, but I’ve never tried an escape room before.

However, this weekend Maru and I did one with one of our nephews—it was a prison escape story—and it was excellent. It was challenging and well designed.

If you’re willing to suspend disbelief and immerse yourself in the storyline, the experience is even better.

Although I’ve never been a vocal advocate for them in the past, I won’t hesitate to do one in the future.

I was astounded recently after visiting friends who have two young children. The youngest, a mere five years old, was obsessed with chess. We played together for 40 minutes without a break, and he was completely absorbed in the game.

He knew all the pieces and rules. And although he lacked a cohesive strategy, that took nothing away from how impressed I was.

We discussed his moves, and how alternative moves opened up more options for him, and things were clicking in his brain.

It made me realise that games like chess provide a safe space where one can learn how each decision has consequences, and that making better decisions leads to better options and end games further down the road.

I’m trying a new thing: Spin — a tennis app.

Spin solves the problem of finding well-matched tennis partners close you. You sign up to a local league, and your “Spin Rating” determines what division you get put into. The Spin Rating is the app’s version of Chess’ Elo Rating; if you win more matches, your Spin Rating goes up and you compete with better players.

Over the course of the three month league you self-organise and play with 15-20 people in your division. The division results don’t really matter though, it’s the Spin Rating that matters in the long run.

One of the big issues with apps like this is the non-committal and flakey parts of human nature. Things feel more optional when free.

The simple way Spin solves this is by charging £20 to participate in each 3-month-long league. Because the people who have signed up have paid money, and because aversion to loss drives action, the players are proactive, organised, and punctual. Of course, this benefits Spin in the form of recurring revenues.

I like how they chose a punchy £20 for their fee. The marginal cost of delivering software to the next user is not £20, but the value created for the user and the commitment they get from users because of the £20 fee is the real secret sauce.

Notebooks. Post-its. Apps.

It doesn’t matter where the to-do list is stored, what matters is the act of externalising the list in our heads. What matters is seeing that list in its entirety and being able to determine the next best action.

When it’s all in our heads, it’s a jumble. When it’s out of our heads, we have a shot at structure. We have a system to get things done.

I recently had two online customer service experiences, in different countries as, with the same company.

The first was the US branch where I was 178th in line. The second was the UK branch where I was first in line.

Now it may have been coincidence, but something tells me that somewhere along the way, someone allowed there to be a massive disparity in service level between branches.

It really got me wondering: why?