Dan Cullum

We can learn so much more when we have 1) a dictionary by our side, 2) a red pen, and 3) a resolve to circle and look up any word we don’t understand.

I was transported back to the 90s this morning.

I was searching for a tax advisor.

I received a recommendation from a colleague, checked out the company’s Google Reviews, and went to their website.

The tan brown background, ill-cropped photo, and buttons with animations would normally put me off. But I’m looking for tax advice, not a website redesign.

I got enough signal to form a base level of trust with the company—at least enough to make contact with them.

Sometimes, design doesn’t matter.

It’s now been more than a year since Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal.

Given the benefit of time and space since the event, we can now look back on how a gust of wind disrupted global trade in innumerable ways.

The Suez Canal enables 12% of global trade. Without it, container ships would need to circumnavigate the African continent. That’s a 6,000 mile journey!

However, when Ever Given ran aground, it blocked all traffic for 6 days, and it took engineers more than 100 days to free it. There are some estimates the cost to businesses and governments was in excess of $60 billion.

That’s an expensive gust.

But it shows how interconnected, interdependent, and fragile our systems of global trade are. One event can have mind bending, knock-on effects throughout the world.

The violin has a quality that sets it apart from other instruments.

Violinists rest the instrument on their shoulder and press their chins against the instrument for a specific reason: there is only skin covering the jawbone.

Sound waves travel from the violin, up through the jawbone, and into the inner ear. Violinists experience a deeper richness and resonance than the audience because they are literally feeling the music vibrate through their bones.

If this feels crazy, check out the headphone company Shokz. You don’t put any buds into your ears, the headphones transmit sound into your ear canal via jawbone vibrations.

Feeling sound through our bones isn’t new. It started with the first vertebrates 300 million years ago; they used jaw-like bones to hear ground-borne sounds.

Here’s hoping that from now on you’ll see the violin in a new light. I know I will.

I first picked up The Lord of the Rings when I was nine. It was too dense.

I tried the Economist in my teens. It was unintelligible.

But give me a few years, a few new experiences, a little more life lived, and all these things suddenly made sense.

I first listened to Meatloaf in my twenties. It felt odd compared to everything else I was listening to.

If something doesn’t make sense now, it doesn’t mean it’s a write-off forever. An openness to things we once found distasteful may allow us to discover things we now deeply enjoy.

I appreciated this thought from Shane Parrish.

“One of the biggest keys to success at anything hard is believing that you can figure it out as you go along. Because most hard things can’t be figured out in advance people never start. As Picasso observed, “To know what you are going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”

We don’t need to have it all figured out before we take the first step. I find that reassuring.

When I sit down to write, I usually have an idea, a structure, and a clear point I’d like to make.

Sometimes, though, when I put the words on paper, they don’t feel right.

So I rearrange them.

I scratch some.

I repeat others.

I turn sentences on their head.

I jumble and mix words around.

Still, something feels off.

On these days, I admit defeat. I acknowledge the post wasn’t ready for the world. I put it in draft, and come back to it another day.

Admitting defeat isn’t a bad thing. It’s simply a lesson in finding the limit.

And we can, and should, be confident that there’s always another idea waiting in the wings.

I was 16 when I first watched Taika Waiti’s ‘Two Cars, One Night’. It’s the story of two boys and a girl, waiting for their parents in a parking lot of a rural New Zealand pub. The short film was different to anything I had seen before. It was equal parts hilarious, poignant, and distinct.

Years later, I’d see this distinct humour all over the big screen: in Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit, and Thor: Ragnarok. It was, of course, the work of the inimitable Taika Waititi—possibly the most exciting and irreverent director in Hollywood at the moment.

I recently learnt a bit more about Taika’s story. He spent his twenties making art, making music, and performing comedy. Two Cars, One Night was his first experience with film, and that was in his thirties. He never went to film school, so much of his craft and work is guided by intuition.

In particular, Taika’s refinement process stood out to me: he watches scenes and he’ll rework whatever makes him feel embarrassed.

It’s difficult to look at your work with a fresh pair of eyes, especially when you’ve already given it so much time and attention. But if you can manage it, it’s a superpower that unlocks a higher standard of work. You can see this superpower in action by seeing Taika’s finished products.

Wired Magazine, one of my favourite publications, shared a list of things that could derail a long stretch of economic growth. The image below shows their list that was written back in 1997.

To put that in perspective, Bill Clinton was the US President, 911 hadn’t yet occurred, Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple—the iPod was merely a twinkle in his eye, Google didn’t exist, and the Nintendo 64 was the hottest new gaming console on the market.

It was a long time ago.

But the predictions are poignant, and some, scarily accurate. It makes me question and think about the predictions people are making now for 2050, and about whether or not we’re building the world we want others to inherit.

New Zealand played Costa Rica in a playoff yesterday. The winner would secure the final, and 32nd spot, in the upcoming Football World Cup in Qatar.

I remember the elation of the All Whites making it to the World Cup in 2010. I was in a room with 20 of my friends and we were jumping and crying at the thought of seeing our country’s team on the world stage for the first time in our lives.

Costa Rica is ranked 31st in the world. New Zealand is 101st. It was always going to be a battle. But the bright side was all the pressure was on Costa Rica.

I watched the match in earnest, but an early goal from Los Ticos, plus a disallowed goal for the Kiwis, ultimately led to New Zealand losing 1-0.

They played well, and put pressure on Costa Rica throughout the match, but it wasn’t meant to be.

I’ll wait patiently for 4 more years.

I came across a unique study today. It was published back in Jan 2020, so no wonder it didn’t make waves back then!

Researchers used machine learning and deep neural networks to analyse 6 million videos of human facial expression across 144 countries. What they found was “16 facial expressions occurred systematically across thousands of contexts… and were 70% preserved over 12 world regions.”

Not only is a smile or laughter universal, they also found the same to be true with facial expressions for elation, pain, surprise, anger, triumph, and doubt.

It reminds me of my time learning Spanish in Ecuador back in 2013. I’d find myself in a place like a bakery and lacked the words to respond to the shopkeeper. A cheeky grin and raised eyebrows would often be enough to make them laugh, and either speak slower or gesticulate. Within a couple seconds, my face communicated everything they needed to know to be able to respond.

We’re 7 billion people, and we’re much more alike than we think.

We can fume at the weather app.

We can ignore the newspaper forecast.

We can scoff at the barometer.

But it’ll still rain.

Similarly, when trusted friends and family are all saying the same thing, perhaps it’s wise to pack the metaphorical umbrella.

President Ford once said the following to a group of business leaders, “We see nothing but increasingly brighter clouds every month.”

The business leaders felt assured. Things were getting better, right?

But did anyone look out the metaphorical window?

Was it sunny with scattered clouds? Overcast? Drizzling? Pouring? Torrential rain? Thunderstorms? A hurricane?

Much can be hidden, and the masses placated, with vague words.

It takes courage to say what’s really happening out the window.

Learning is just as much about unlearning, as it is about gaining new knowledge.

Habits. Assumptions. Perspectives.

The wrong ones can hold us back.

Sometimes we need to let go of things before we’re ready to learn something new.

Most people write for the “in crowd”.

They do it without knowing or thinking about it.

They use acronyms, jargon, and odd phrases. They don’t give context. They assume prior knowledge.

But inevitably, someone from outside the “in crowd” will come along.

And they’ll be baffled.

So why not ask ourselves the question anytime we put pen to paper: “Will the uninitiated be able to understand this on the first reading?”

If the answer is “no”, we still have work to do.