Dan Cullum

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?

A reliable recipe for tackling big challenges is deceptively simple: take the big thing and break it down into it’s smallest logical pieces, order them by importance, and tackle each of them one by one.

It’s deceptively simple because some will think complex problems need complex approaches, when this isn’t the case. Although following the recipe doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s very likely to leave us in a better state than when we started.

In these final weeks of the year, many companies and brands have sent polished wrap-ups of their year; it’s their last chance to get a word in about what they accomplished for the year.

But in this cosy corner of the blogosphere, I simply want to thank you for joining me for another trip round the sun. It’s been a blast!

I wish you health, happiness, and adventure for your 2025. May it be a year where you learn new things about the world, yourself, and those closest to you.

Tim Urban, the author behind Wait But Why, introduces a concept called ‘Forgettable Wednesdays’ in one of his blog posts. It’s about how marriage isn’t butterflies, nor honeymoons, nor once-in-a-lifetime events. Rather it’s the joy we find on hundreds of ‘Forgettable Wednesdays’.

It’s the simple, the mundane, and the normal. This is what makes up most of life. Finding happiness in the day-to-day, and not in the grand adventures or big displays of affection, that is what is important.

I’m lucky to still have grandparents on my mum’s side of the family. My grandma, or Poh Poh in Cantonese, has always been known within the family (and further afield) for her cooking. However, now that she’s approaching 90, she no longer has the energy to cook.

However, she makes one exception. When any one of her eleven grandchildren visits, she cooks. She buys ingredients weeks in advance, partially cooks each dish, freezes them, and assembles a banquet for when we arrive.

It’s a literal labour of love, filled with thought, care, and love. And our hearts and bellies are full because of it.

I only see my nephew for a few weeks per year, but I love playtime with him when we’re together.

There are a few things I’m trying to get better at when it comes to playtime:

1. It’s his world. If we’re going on a mission, or playing a game, or simply having a chat. I follow where he leads.
2. Yes and. I try and follow the classic improv principle of accepting every idea and expanding on it; always opening us up to more avenues for adventure.

Playtime changes each year as he gets older and his interests evolve. It makes me appreciative of each stage that I get to share with him.

There’s a joke about guitarists that they’re addicted to buying pedals. Pedals are the electronic devices that sit between the guitar and amplifier that modify the sound and tone of a guitar’s signal. They can be used to add distortion, compression, delay, and a wide range of other effects. Whatever sound you can imagine, there’s probably a pedal that allows you to do it.

The reason why pedals are a joke among guitarists is because they consistently get sucked into buying “yet another pedal” with the hope they’ll create a new sound that’ll work for a yet-to-be-written song. But everyone knows that it’s rarely a new pedal that helps you write a good song.

Deep down, guitarists know that the time, energy, and money spent on pedals would be better spent on investing in the fundamental skills that make one a better guitar player or a better song writer. But pedals are a fun distraction that give an illusion of progress.

In every job and every hobby, there’s likely a similar “yet another pedal” mistake that is all too easy to make. The hard part is having the discipline to invest in core skills and avoid the distraction.

Billions of photos are snapped around the world each year. And although I’ve got nothing against a selfie, some photos are better than others. And the best ones communicate a lot via a single snap, they are nuanced, and they are always visually striking.

Which is why I enjoyed looking through the BBC’s 12 most striking images of 2024. Someone has gone through the effort of synthesising the world’s photos from 2024 down into a simple set. There is a mix of impressive, haunting, historic, and tragic in there. But all of them a reflection and representation on the year gone by.

Have a scroll and enjoy!

I was at Christmas Eve dinner when I heard American Airlines were having a “technical issue” grounding more than 3,000 flights the morning before Christmas.

As someone who travels every year to be with family for the holidays, I felt a lot of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of people trying to get home for Christmas.

Given the British Airways 2017 outage lasted for three days and impacted 75,000 people, I imagined the chaos if a similar-sized issue occurred at American Airlines.

Thankfully, within a few hours of the reported groundings, passengers were starting to board their flights, and I assume most—if not all—will make it home for Christmas.

Close call, American Airlines!

Warren Buffett is well known for asking his employees to share bad news quickly because “good news will take care of itself”.

Over the years I’ve been curious about how to best build a culture where the messenger is celebrated, and not shot, for sharing bad news.

For example, if implemented well, how much time does it buy an organisation? And how many problems can be solved before they become bigger ones? And how much more satisfying is it to work in a place where we don’t shy away from the bad news?

Making it safe for the messenger is a high leverage principle.

When I meet up with family at the end of each year, we tend to pack our schedule full of activities. Since we all live in different places, we see activities as a way of making the most of our time together.

This year we’re in Indonesia, and due to a combination of rainy weather and illness, we’ve been taking things slower than usual. Although it has been an “unplanned” rest week, I’m grateful for it after what has been a busy year.

Wishing you and your families a restful holiday season!

One big advantage the ride-sharing apps have over taxis is price predictability.

Sitting in a taxi in a traffic jam is stressful. You watch the meter creep up, and because there is no upper cap on the fare, you could be paying well beyond what you estimated.

In comparison, the ride-sharing apps all provide fixed fare quotes which give riders price predictability. There is no stress during the ride because a ceiling has been placed on the fare.

When it can be provided, there’s a lot of value in price predictability.