Dan Cullum

I regularly see people deflect compliments.

Maybe the they feel uncomfortable with the attention, believe they’re undeserving of the praise, or think anyone could’ve done the work.

Despite being well intentioned, it can appear dismissive.

I’m guilty of this too. In fact, I was recently told by a coach, “Dan, let it land.”

When someone is thoughtful and generous with their feedback, we owe them the same in our acknowledgement.

It doesn’t take much. A pause, just long enough to look the other person in the eyes, and a genuine thank you.

It goes a long way.

H/T to the coaches from Sanctus, who bring wisdom and perspective each week to Team Bulb.

Most of the important ideas for success are hidden in plain sight. However, they are often dismissed as simple and boring.

Health: take the stairs, and eat more veggies

Personal finance: don’t spend more than you earn, and save some for a rainy day

Relationships: treat others like you’d want to be treated

Losing weight: eat fewer calories than you expend

Learning: ask someone you admire what books changed their life; read those

There will always be someone trying to sell you something complicated. If it’s complicated, and has a price tag that makes you feel uncomfortable, it’s got to work, right?

However, it’s usually the simple ideas, executed well, that are the best place to start.

It’s easy to only talk about the work.

“What are our goals?” “How are we tracking?” “What’s the next priority?” “How long will it take?” “Could we be improving?”

Some colleagues spend years together and only know superficial details about the other’s life. It’s cold, robotic, and stale.

Regardless of our goals and targets, we’re all just humans who want to belong, be known, and be appreciated.

It can feel costly to have these human conversations in the workplace because they require vulnerability, trust, and time.

But what’s the cost of not having them?

Andy Grove, the long-time CEO and Chairman of Intel, went home each day when he was tired, not when the to-do list was finished.

His realisation was that our to-do lists will never get done. There will always be more we can do. A few extra hours we can put in.

This fast becomes unsustainable, and unhealthy.

Each day, we’re given a set number of hours to pick the most important work, do it to the best of our ability, and call it a day when we’re tired or it’s time to go home.

Letting go of the burden to finish the to-do list is liberating.

H/T Andy Grove’s High Output Management

Back in 2014, a friend of mine shared with me his spending philosophy: it’s better to spend money on things that remove unhappiness, rather than spend on things that add happiness.

He hated doing his laundry, so he paid to have his work shirts washed and ironed. He figured this was a better use of his earnings than, say, a coffee each morning.

After a long-held resistance, we’re experimenting with this idea.

Maru and I live in a small 1-bedroom apartment in London. For the past 3 years we’ve thought about using a house cleaning service, but each time have decided to save the money and clean the apartment ourselves.

However, after a taking a long look at our distraught oven this week, we’re trying Handy.

Handy is an app-based house cleaning service, and we’re trialing a fortnightly clean for 3 months. We want to see if it 1) has an impact on the tidiness and cleanliness of our home, and 2) removes unhappiness by giving us a few precious hours back each weekend we would’ve spent cleaning.

I feel I’m teetering dangerously close to “unnecessary-spending millennial” territory, but it’s an experiment, and I’ll report back in a few weeks on how it goes.

What would happen if you ignored the news? Would you miss out on something important? Would it put you at a disadvantage in your job or social circles?

One of my university professors admitted they didn’t follow the news. They trusted that truly important news would come up in conversation with friends and colleagues in the day ahead. By spending less time filtering one-sided click-bait publications to find the few articles of substance, they could spend time on more meaningful things, like their family and research.

However, the danger with this approach is ending up in an echo chamber of groupthink, where you’re only reading articles shared by people who think, dress, and act like you.

Today, I generally follow a lean-news diet, a sort of light version of my professor’s approach. I’ve found it liberating to let go of a daily publication-scanning routine, and I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything important either.

I learn most of my earth-shattering news fast enough through word of mouth and the daily email from theSkimm. And for issues relating to product and technology, I keep a close eye on TechCrunch.

I’d be interested to hear your approach to news reading in the comments below, particularly how you deal with quantity, and filter for quality.

Following on from yesterday’s post, about being okay with appearing clueless on matters irrelevant to our most important work, I love this Sherlock Holmes quote from A Study in Scarlett:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. — Sherlock Holmes

We don’t need Sherlock-level focus, but we can be more deliberate. If we don’t decide how we spend our time, someone else will. If we don’t choose what information we consume, someone else will.

If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.” — Epictetus

Just like we don’t go to our lawyer for a health check, we don’t go to our doctor for legal advice.

It’d be unfair to expect either of them to be knowledgeable about the other’s work. Heck, if the surgeon was about to operate and started giving me advice on how to write a will, I’d be terrified. It’s clear there is value in focus.

If we want to make meaningful progress in our personal or professional lives, we need to be comfortable being seen as clueless on topics that are unrelated to the impact we wish to have in the world. We need to become exceptional at saying no to the inconsequential.

Maru and I spent the weekend in Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales; tucked away in a petite cabin with dear friends.

Rain arrived on Friday evening, and its drizzle persisted for the entirety of our 2 days in the park.

As I sat on the porch this morning, reflecting on the weekend before the others woke, I realised no one in our group had complained about the weather. Not once.

We still hiked the valleys and swam the streams, but when the rain forced us indoors we passed the time in laughter and storytelling.

There’s a lesson here extending beyond the Welsh backcountry.

When situations are out of our control and things don’t go to plan, traveling companions who see the positive in the world make the journey easier and the burden lighter.

I wonder how many tools exist that 1) we don’t know about, and 2) could make our lives a lot easier?

We’re leaving tomorrow to go camping in Wales for the weekend. I needed to do laundry before leaving but didn’t have time this morning to wait for a load to finish.

It was only then I discovered our washing machine’s delay feature. No sitting damp in the machine all day. I had perfectly washed clothes when I got home from work.

It made me think about other examples of latent potential. The tools in our lives that are seldom used, but packed with power.

For example, the ideas held in books hold an extraordinary amount of latent potential if applied wisely by the reader. So too do the empty seats in the bumper-to-bumper traffic jams of major cities (we could reduce carbon emissions and commuting durations at the same time if carpooling was the norm).

Latent potential has the ability to improve our lives, and the lives of others, if we keep our eyes open for it.

This week, Proctor and Gamble announced it was writing-down the value of its Gillette shaving products brand by $8 billion.

It’s a bit hard to put $8 billion into perspective, so here are a few things you could buy with that kind of money:

• Two Manchester Uniteds
• 140 SpaceX Falcon 9 launches
• 1.6 million round-the-world flights
• 8 million iPhones
• 1.1 billion pizzas from Dominos

Filtering out the corporate jargon, P&G’s reason for the write-down was: millennial males are now growing beards and aren’t shaving as much as they used to.

Sure, that makes sense, but we should also consider the impact ’direct-to-consumer’ brands like Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, and Cornerstone, are having on the Gillette-style incumbents. By delivering the same product, at a lower OPEX, with more youthful branding, it’s no surprise Harry’s was bought for $1.4 billion earlier this year.

The bigger lesson for me is how company valuations can be so fickle. A company’s valuation is the estimate of its present-day value based on its expected future financial performance. In this case, the P&G executives took a massive bet that the future of male grooming would be clean shaven. It’s now clear that assessment was patchy at best.

But at least patchy is now in vogue.

If there was anyone who had reason to stay out of the mental health spotlight, it was John Kirwan.

The man is a New Zealand rugby legend. One of the best to ever set foot on the field. If you need evidence, check out this moment when he was playing for the All Blacks and single-handedly cut through 15 burly Italians to score one of the tries of the century.

Rugby has a lot of machismo. Probably too much. So one can only imagine the pride and pressure one must feel at the top of the game to keep up appearances.

However, 10 years ago, Kirwan broke with all tradition and spoke out publicly about his battle with depression.

You couldn’t miss him. He was all over billboards and the evening ad breaks (No Netflix yet, folks!). And his message was simple and clear: depression and mental health challenges are real, and it’s ok to talk about them.

I’ll be honest, I dismissed his message at the time. In New Zealand, mental health just wasn’t spoken about in school, with friends, or even among family members.

It’s only now that I can connect the dots.

Over last few years we’ve seen a societal shift on this issue. It’s now normal to talk about healthy professional boundaries, taking time-off to recharge, and to admit when we’re not feeling 100%.

We can have these conversations because of the great work of many brave people, but there is a reason why I specifically remember John Kirwan.

In a time and environment when he was seen by many as the epitome of strength and masculinity, he spoke publicly on a very real issue; one that was deeply personal and laced in stigma.

Someone of his pedigree could’ve comfortably hidden behind their fame. Someone of his wealth could’ve funded and fought the battle privately.

But when someone like John Kirwan is brave enough to tell their unexpected story, suddenly there’s an audience.

I overheard an odd conversation last Sunday in a newly-opened cafe next to my home.

Employee: “How are you today? Are you a regular?”

Customer: “I’m good, thanks. Yeah I am, I get a scone here every day.”

Employee: “Hmm, you should consider a gym membership. These scones are really fatty, so if you keep eating them, you’ll probably need it.”

Silence.

With raised eyebrows, I slowly turned around to check-in on the gentleman who attempted to laugh off the comment before high-tailing it out the door.

With every interaction, we get an opportunity to tell a story, a chance to build trust with our audience, and to give them a reason to come back.

And unless we’re superhuman, at some point we’ll need to trust someone else with the story. It pays to pick wisely.

When someone in your team does great work, praise them publicly.

Although goals and targets guide our daily planning, I’ve yet to see a tasty-looking metric produce a bigger smile than a sincere, specific, and public display of gratitude. At the end of the day, we’re all humans who want to belong and be valued for the work we do.

We should also be aware of the inverse of this maxim: when someone is underperforming, we should provide criticism privately. Criticism delivered in one-to-ones, directed at the work and not at the person, shows we care enough to speak the truth in a safe environment. This builds trust. And soon enough, they’ll provide opportunities for us to praise them publicly.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a few of my reflections on Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madsen. I picked it up after a glowing recommendation from the legend Steven Pressfield, and it hasn’t disappointed.

I also have a soft spot for improv. When I was 13, it gave me my first taste of the theatre, and helped me discover a self-confidence I didn’t know was there.

People usually put improv in the “I could never do that” or “Hell no, I don’t wanna look like an egg” category. Mostly, it just means very few have tried it.

This is where the first, and most important, rule of improv comes in: to say “yes!”

For example, if one of the actors in your troupe opens a scene with, “Watch out, there’s a bucking bronco running straight at us!”

You don’t say, “No there isn’t…”

That’s called blocking.

Instead, you say something like, “Yikes! Grab the saddle, let’s ride!”

You may not know where your fellow thespian is going. They may throw you a ridiculous, off-piste suggestion, but your responsibility is to go with it. Together, you’ll discover the story waiting to be told.

There is a lesson in there too for how we approach new opportunities, friendships, and the unknown. A “yes”, rather than a “no”, can take us to some weird and wonderful places.