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I’ve been playing in a weekly Trivia League with some friends since lockdown started.

There’s 8-10 of us, and we each take turns being Quiz Master.

Today was my turn, and I thought I’d share my quiz in case you’d like to have a go at answering the questions, use it with your family and friends, or modify it for your own purposes.

How does it work?

1. We use Jeopardy Labs, but structure our questions in the traditional trivia Question —> Answer format, rather than Jeopardy’s Answer —> Question format.
2. There are five categories of questions, and five levels of question difficulty—100 points for the easiest questions, going up to 500 points for the most difficult ones.
3. For incorrect answers, we play -50 points for 100 and 200 point questions, and -100 points for the rest.
4. We all jump on VC, the Quiz Master shares their screen, and when a question is shown, teams send a “!” in the VC’s chat functionality to simulate a buzzer, so we can determine which team gets to answer first.

Have fun out there, and let me know how you get on with the questions!

Today marks 10 years since Maru and I met.

In the decade we’ve spent together, I can’t recall a single boring conversation.

That small fact has me looking forward to—and hoping for—many more decades to come.

Perhaps best-friendship is just that: a relentless and ever-enjoyable stream of conversation and laughter.

Kevin Kelly said in a recently blog post, “Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.”

I love this.

Of course, the value of enthusiasm can’t be quantified, but I love how Kelly uses the 25 IQ points as a way of saying, “A bit of enthusiasm can take you a long way!”

And I’m sure you’ve felt it before. You walk into a room or meeting and there is someone across the table with a genuine and heartfelt enthusiasm for the work they do. It’s inspiring.

Here’s to more enthusiasm!

I came across a great line recently:

“Brevity shows you’re a bad ass.”

Short sentences will do.

Simple words are better.

And there is magic to be found in the re-write of a first draft.

I’m one of those people who sets 8-10 alarms on my phone to make sure I get up on time each morning.

Once I’m up, instead of turning off the alarms one-by-one, I ask Siri to turn them all off in one go.

It won’t come as a surprise to you that I usually say, “Hey Siri, turn off all alarms.”

And the response I received for a long time was, “Okay, disabling all alarms.”

However, at some point in the last year, I noticed Siri’s language become a little more human.

It suddenly became, “Okay, turning off all alarms.”

“Disabling all alarms,” always made me feel like I was talking to a computer, so when it changed to something more natural, it was noticeable.

This “sounding more human” phenomenon doesn’t just apply to computers and artificial intelligence, though.

It’s much nicer talking to people without the crutches of jargon, formality, and stuffiness.

Interacting with humans, in human language, is always feels better.

I’m not a huge football fan, but the German Football League—Bundesliga—returned over the weekend and it sparked an interesting reflection.

Most major football leagues around the world require the players’ names to be at the top of their jerseys so that fans can easily see which player has the ball.

However, the Bundesliga doesn’t have this rule. This has led to 13 of the 18 teams putting the team name at the top of the jersey, and the name of the player below the number.

The logic is straightforward: the team comes before the player, and the team will endure, while players will move on.

It’s a small change, but I bet it has an outsized impact on the attitude of those teams.

Pre-lockdown, I’d go to the gym 3-4 times a week. I’d only do resistance training—either weightlifting or bodyweight exercises.

Despite loving Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, I’ve never liked running. Cardio feels like voluntary pain to me.

So in a time when gyms are closed, and park runs are the most common form of exercise, what is a non-runner to do?

If I’m being honest, I’ve even found it hard to block out half an hour each day for bodyweight exercises at home.

So, being wary of my own psyche, about 6 weeks ago I set up a game for myself that I try and beat every day.

I broke a stick of dried pasta into 10 pieces, each piece representing what I’m calling a ‘micro-set’: A) 10 pull ups, and B) 10 push ups.

The pieces begin their day in the darker container, and when I complete a micro-set, a single piece of dried pasta is moved over to the lighter container.

Each time I walk past my dining room table, it’s a visual reminder of how many micro-sets I’ve done, and how many I’ve got left.

By the end of the day, I aim to have moved all the dried pasta to the lighter container; thus having successfully defeated the Darth Vader and the dark side…

What I find interesting about this method is I wouldn’t be able to do 70-100 pulls up in a typical 30-minute exercise session, but I can achieve it when they’re spread out over the course of a day.

And although it isn’t my normal routine, my hope is that these micro-sets add up over time.

This certainly isn’t the most effective or efficient form of exercising, but it’s working for me, for now, and I’m okay with that.

What are you doing to exercise or stay active during the lockdown?

I’d especially love to hear if you’re doing something slightly weird to help motivate yourself! The games we play to inspire action are fascinating!

With big-chain supermarket supply chains struggling, I’ve looked to smaller subscription services for my weekly groceries.

I’ve been getting an Oddbox delivery for a month now, and I love it.

Each Monday morning, I get a box of fruit and vegetables delivered—enough to last me the week.

But the best part is all the produce falls into one of 4 categories. Each category represents a reason for the produce being discarded by the grower:

• Surplus (we have too much of it)
• Size (it’s too small, or too large)
• Colour (it looks “unnatural” or not what people expect)
• Shape (“this isn’t how a banana is supposed to look”)

Perhaps the thing I like the most about Oddbox is it’s a business model where their success is almost 1:1 correlated with a good outcome for the world.

As their business grows, agricultural waste decreases.

If I ever start a company one day, it’s a goal of mine to structure my business around this type of model.

Amazon is well known for its idiosyncrasies.

And how employees are expected to communicate at the company is one of its most widely talked about idiosyncrasies.

For example, at Amazon, there are no slides or powerpoint presentations, all documents are written in prose. Jeff Bezos believes this forces a clarity of thinking that can be masked if one uses bullet points in slides.

A friend recently shared with me an interesting LinkedIn post titled, ‘Write like an Amazonian’.

What I love about this post is that it crystallises many of the lessons generous bosses have tried to teach me over the years.

It’s not easy to follow these rules, but if you do, your communication in the workplace will be better understood, and better received.

Here are my favourites from ‘Writing like an Amazonian’:

1. Use fewer than 30 words per sentence
2. Replace adjectives with data (e.g., “Sales increased significantly,” becomes “Sales increased by 30%”)
3. Does your writing pass the “so what” test? At the end of your document, has the reader learnt anything that will help them make a better decision?
4. Use subject-verb-object sentences with “doers” and “action”
5. Avoid clutter words and phrases (e.g., “due to the fact that,” becomes “Because”)
6. Avoid jargon and acronyms as much as possible. They exclude newcomers and non-experts
7. Remove weak words like: would, might, should, significantly, and arguably

H/T Dan for sharing the post with me.

As the UK slowly begins to lift its lockdown restrictions, one of the parts I’ve found most enjoyable is meeting friends in the park for (slightly distanced) walks.

It’s the laughter about nothing in particular, grass underneath my toes, and familiar voices (in real life!), that make these simple moments special.

Even the tickle from my hay fever is welcomed.

And when you’re grateful for hay fever, you know something is different.

I’m still unpacking what this means.

An former colleague once asked me this question: if you had two identically qualified candidates for a job, how would you determine which one to hire?

They weren’t seeking advice from me, though, they were teaching me about the Communication Superpower Hiring Rule.

When I said I didn’t know, they replied, “Give them a writing task on a complicated topic, and whoever articulates their thoughts in the clearest and simplest way should get the job.”

This rule is simple, but profound.

Its obvious benefit is it helps you hire people who are good communicators—both written and oral.

However, there are other benefits, too!

You can’t write or communicate clearly without first thinking clearly. Someone who can write well, is also likely to think well. And I think we’d all like to hire people who think clearly! (As a personal aside here, this is one of the reasons why I write this blog! I often find my thinking to be muddled, so committing to writing on a daily basis is my way of practising better communication every day).

Finally, writing scales well. A well crafted email is easily understood by all team members. On the other hand, a poorly written one will cause every team member to pause, stop, question, and ask for clarification. Multiply that over tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, and that’s a lot of wasted time and energy.

Whether hiring is a part of your job, or not, this is an interesting rule to carry with you.

Rohan inspired me to start this blog, and he just hit a big milestone: 12 years of daily blogging.

That’s 4,380 consecutive days of careful thinking, writing, and publishing. His quiet and consistent dedication to publishing every day has enriched my life, and I’m grateful for that.

This milestone reminds me of an article I read recently called, ‘Be So Prolific They Can’t Ignore You’. The purpose of the article is to encourage readers to turn up, produce, and publish. To do it regularly. And to make it a habit.

After 12 years of daily blogging, it’s safe to say that Rohan is truly prolific. I hope he continues for another 12, and for many more!

Congrats, Rohan!

A number of you replied to my recent post, ‘Not a prescription, just a reminder’, sharing your lockdown stories.

I’ve been reflection on a few things from this experience.

Firstly, I’m grateful for your trust. It goes without saying that these replies will always be private, but I also think that’s why I got to hear rich tales of both the joys and challenges of this period.

Secondly, vulnerability begets vulnerability. I’m always nervous before publishing a vulnerable post, but those posts are the ones where people reply saying, “I get it! That’s me, too!”

Don’t worry, I’m not going to over-pivot to these kinds of posts, but I’ve found it reassuring to see that there are shared patterns of feelings and emotions among many of us at this weird time. It makes our socially-distanced world feel a little smaller, closer, and human.

Here’s a question I’ve been pondering: how much of success is attributable to a willingness to sit patiently with the challenge longer than others?

Patience and persistence don’t make up for a lack of talent, but they certainly have a non-trivial role to play in success.

There’s an inverse relationship between scale and connection.

You can have 10,000 friends, but you can’t have a meaningful relationship with more than 150 of them.

This is an idea I’ve thought about often since starting this blog.

If I had 10,000 readers, I’d have some semblance of “scale”, but I also wouldn’t be able to reply—at least thoughtfully—to every email I receive from readers.

“You reply to every email?” I hear someone thinking.

Yeah, I do.

And precisely because it doesn’t scale, and that it doesn’t make sense within any “grow your brand” mental model, is perhaps what makes it special; it’s perhaps what makes the connections real.

My reader count is private, and like many things that are unseen from the public eye, they serve as intrinsic motivators, rather than extrinsic medallions of success.

It’s an honour to hear from you, learn from you, and to have the privilege of sharing a few thoughts and words everyday.