Blog

A friend once told me that you only need two things for a trip: your passport and a credit card. Even if you forget everything else, you can get by with those two things.

It’s a helpful reminder that in many other situations it’s likely that there’s only a few essentials that we can’t do without.

It’s that time of year where it’s dark soon after 4pm and the days are their shortest.

Although we’re only ten days away from the winter solstice, each grey and wet day has me wishing winter was over.

But soon enough, as it does every year, we’ll notice how the days are getting longer and brighter, and we’ll welcome the summer and warmth.

I keep this in mind as we inch towards the winter solstice.

In the relentless and single-minded pursuit of efficiency, there’s often little room left for magic.

This is because efficiency is easy to measure and easy to reward. So our teams, organisations, and incentives are structured around it.

Magic, on the other hand, is hard to measure, and is often born from a meandering, inefficient journey.

It’s not either/or or all-or-nothing, it’s just a reminder to create space where magic can happen, and not to get efficiency tunnel vision.

Whenever I’m in San Francisco for work, I bring back a loaf or two of San Francisco Sourdough.

I get it from Boudin Bakery, which has used the same sourdough starter since 1849; likely making it one of the longest still-in-use starters in the world.

The best part is they have a shop at the airport where you can buy take-and-bake loaves. To finish them off they simply require 10-mins in the oven at home.

There’s something special, albeit irrational, about taking two loaves of sourdough across an ocean to have them baked, warm, and fresh in London. It’s a unique experience that always serves as a nice bookend to a trip.

Maru is the plant whisperer in our home. I take care of the terrariums because they’re infinitely harder to kill.

She keeps track of all our plants and knows when they’re root bound and need to be repotted. One way we can tell is the plants’ leaves start to go yellow because there is insufficient soil for the roots and the plant needs more moisture than our regular watering schedule provides.

Once repotted, our plants often go through a growth spurt and need less frequent waterings as they grow into their larger pots.

There’s a nice metaphor there about the pots we find ourselves in, and making judgment calls as to whether or not we need repotting.

The flight time matters, but it’s all the other bits that can make a trip lengthy and tiring.

A 1-hour flight from London to Paris seems short, but the ride to the airport, the checking-in, the security, the waiting at the gate, the boarding process, the customs and immigration checks on the other side, and the trip to your hotel. All of it adds up.

Measuring our travels, our projects, our plans, or how long it takes to make a nice meal for friends by “flight time” alone is simply forgetting all the other bits.

My highschool football coach worked hard to develop a strong passing game in our team.

He’d often say, “The ball travels faster than the player.” And it’s a phrase that has stuck with me because it’s a great metaphor for how other teams should work too.

Even if you have people on the team that are individually brilliant, they can rarely take the ball past all eleven players on the other team and score a solo goal. They almost always need to rely on multiple of their team members. In fact, the most efficient and effective path to goal is passing, trusting, and collaborating.

The absence of the ball at our feet isn’t a failure if we’ve given the ball to another open player further up the field, and if we’re putting ourselves back in an open position to advance our team’s game.

And when the team get comfortable with the passing game, they can see immediately that the ball always travels faster than even the best players.

When making plans, how do we know if we’ve set the right level of ambition for ourselves and our teams?

A helpful exercise is to “double it”.

Put together the best plan you can, and then ask yourself these types of questions: How might we double our impact? How might we double our speed to get there? How might we double our audience? How might we double our conviction that we’re doing the right thing?

If a “double” result feels doable, then the level of ambition probably wasn’t right in the first place. But if the “double” exercise encourages us to stretch ourselves a little further, it’s serving its purpose to help us find our limits.

Generally speaking, us humans can only do one thing at a time.

So even if the to-do list is long and feels insurmountable, our responsibility is really to choose the one thing we ought to do first.

The list may never get smaller, but at any given moment, we’re at least doing our best to spend our time on the right thing.

Plug in a destination into your GPS and it’ll spit out an estimated time of arrival. This is the best case scenario. And rarely, if ever, do we get there early.

However, the weather, traffic incidents, congestion, or an unlucky run of traffic lights, can all delay us. They make the best case scenario look like a wishful guess.

If it takes us a few minutes longer to get somewhere, that rarely matters. But in other areas of our lives we should we wary of relying on best-case-scenario estimates. For example, professional projects usually take longer, are more costly, and more complicated than originally planned.

The idea for this post came from today’s particularly long drive; one that ended up being a lot longer than the estimate.

The vista is more beautiful when you’ve climbed the mountain rather than taken the cable car.

The victory is sweeter when you’ve sweat for it rather than having it handed to you on a plate.

The home-cooked meal is infused with love in a way that no restaurant can match.

The effort is part of the reward.

Today I was working from a desk at the office overlooking a small field. I saw a father and son practising baseball pitches.

I looked up from my work every now and then, and for about an hour the father played the role of catcher, received each pitch, and gave his son pointers on how to improve.

I smiled because it reminded me of the times I’d kick a rugby ball with my dad, where he’d have this way of effortlessly spiralling the rugby ball through the air by hitting it with the side of his foot. I would try to mimic it and make the ball sail just as smoothly.

It’s rarely about the activity. It’s almost always about the time spent together.

If we rote learn a set of prescriptions, we aren’t thinking for ourselves. Solved tasks will be easy, but any new terrain will feel overwhelming.

On the other hand, if we’re armed with a set of principles, we’ll have a way of thinking that is malleable to the moment and will help us traverse the unknown.

If the work we’re doing has no sceptics, it may be a signal that we’re not being ambitious enough.

When there are sceptics, it’s a healthy sign that you’re trying to push the boundaries.

We shouldn’t ignore the sceptic, nor get defensive at their feedback. Instead, we should use their doubts as inputs for when we double and triple check our plans.

I once stayed at a hotel where there was an issue with my room. I called the front desk, and they kindly offered to move me. When I entered the second room, I realised the art on the wall was exactly the same as the first room. Of course, every room probably had the same artwork.

Hotel room art is selected to be uneventful and un-opinionated. It’s purchased in bulk, and the prints are cheap, and cheaply framed. They not trying to win you over with their art. They’re doing the bare minimum.

Art is certainly not the same as hotel room art.