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Earlier today, I had my headphones on and was typing away when I heard, “Dan!”

I peered out my third-floor flat’s window to see a cheery-faced couple down below. Some close friends of Maru and I had popped by to say a distanced “Hello!” while on their walk for the day.

I instantly had a flashback to when I was a kid. After Saturday sport and a hearty lunch, I’d usually hear a knock at the front door, and it’d be a collection of the neighbourhood kids asking me to come out and play.

The unannounced knock, the expectation that I’d be free, and the warm fuzzies from simply being asked to join, all make for a rich collection of emotions and memories.

When things were “normal”, we didn’t get this kind of serendipitous visit here in London. The commute was too far to risk travelling only to find your friend wasn’t home. And dinners or hang outs were usually organised weeks in advance.

But when there is little to do—or little time allowed outside—like this lockdown has afforded us, it’s heart-warming to see these moments of connection and serendipity creeping back into our days.

I’ve been a Queen fan since I was 14, and guitarist, Brian May, has been a fount of generosity during this global lockdown.

He’s been releasing “micro-concerts” on his YouTube channel and encourages people at home to play along with him and re-upload them online for others to enjoy.

One of my favourite Queen songs is ‘Hammer to Fall’, and when I saw Brian had posted the guitar parts, I was easily persuaded to join in and create my own cover.

I found another musician on YouTube called Chris Allan who allowed me to use his drum track, I added the bass and the vocals last weekend, and here it is.

For the past 2 months, I haven’t really struggled with Working From Home. I don’t miss my commute, and I rarely struggle to focus.

However, I found the beginning of this week difficult.

I was sleeping poorly. I was feeling lethargic. I felt unstructured. I felt off.

My natural tendency is to break everything down and figure out what’s going wrong. And perhaps my biggest win this week was choosing to not do that.

Instead, I sat on my couch, paused for a minute, and told myself, “Whatever you’re feeling right now is okay. You don’t need to have it all together.”

There is a certain power and liberation that comes with admitting that, and admitting it publicly, too.

With most of us still in lockdown, I’m sure some of you will have had these days, too. The above isn’t a prescription (I wouldn’t do that to you!), but rather a small reminder that if you’re not feeling 100%, you’re not alone.

Adam Grant shares a concept in his excellent book, Give and Take, called the five-minute favour.

He learnt it from Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Adam Rifkin.

The idea is that if someone asks you for a favour that will take you less than 5 minutes to complete—even if you’ve just met that person for the first time—you should do it.

Five minutes isn’t a huge investment, but it could change another person’s life.

A introduction could help someone make a career change. A piece of advice could help someone successfully pivot their business. Or you could just make someone’s day by doing something small and helpful for them.

The five-minute favour is an interesting concept that’s worth experimenting with.

At the beginning of 2019, my team at Bulb had a daunting challenge ahead. We were new to each other, new to the subject matter, and we faced tight timelines.

It was easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed.

I remember finding solace in Anne Lamott’s 4 sentence short story.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”

I find it amazing that Anne is able to say more about grit, patience, and perseverance in 4 sentences than a mountain of self-help books.

This story resonated throughout 2019, and it still reminds me on a regular basis to approach every challenge and task day-by-day and step-by-step.

I hope it helps and inspires you, too.

On the musical scale, there are singular notes that have two names.

For example, A# and Bb are the same note, we just call them differently depending upon where we’re coming from—we go from A to A# when moving up the scale, and from B to Bb when moving down the scale.

Although I’m not a fan of categorising everyone as introverts or extroverts—as I think we’re all a bit of both depending on the day, time, or situation—this idea did get me thinking about how we all have different energy levels.

On any given day, that meeting or social gathering that may require “high energy” from me, may only need “low energy” from you.

This has been a helpful reminder for me, particularly at this time when the majority of my interaction with the outside world is over video conference.

I’ve been using Ulysses for all my writing since August 2019. I’ve loved it since Day 1, and I thought I should share why I think it’s a great product.

First, what is Ulysses?

It’s a writing app, aimed specifically at creative writers.

What makes it great?

A simple, distraction-free interface

All I want is a clean screen, simple fonts, and to write in a comfortable, familiar place each day.

Ulysses makes it so easy write. Here’s a picture of what today’s post looks like in the editor.

Writing in Markdown

What are those hashtags and blue fonts?

Ulysses uses Markdown, which is a simple markup language that keeps your formatting consistent, regardless of your writing’s final destination. For example, if you place a # at the beginning of a line, the text on that line becomes Heading 1. If you use ## instead, the text becomes Heading 2.

People typically write in markdown because when the text is put through a markdown processor, it’s converted into HTML and usable for websites. However, markdown in Ulysses is helpful because it means you never have to leave the keyboard to format your work. All writing and formatting can be done just by typing.

Customisable organisation

Other writing apps that I’ve tried—like Evernote—have buggy and poor file organisation. It’s so frustrating to use a product every day that is sub-optimal.

Ulysses just works. And that may be its best quality.

There is seamless iCloud syncing, meaning I can write my blog on the train going into work (when we used to commute; remember that?), and then pick up where I left off on the desktop app later in the day.

I order all my posts in reverse date format, so today’s post starts with the label ’200503’, which allows me to quickly navigate and search my posts.

So who’s it for, and is it right for you?

If you write on a regular schedule, want a reliable, distraction-free interface, and good file and post management, Ulysses is an excellent product.

It’s made by a small team of people in Germany, and although it’s $40 per year, or $5 per month, it’s money I don’t hesitate to spend.

Note: This is not a paid post or advertisement; it’s just a blog post written by a fan!

My dining room table has been taken over by an A1 Flipchart Pad and black Sharpies.

No lines. More space.

I can’t work in ruled notebooks. Diagrams, arrows, and pictures are messed up by the light blue lines that stretch across the page.

A piece of A4 paper is also cramped. There isn’t enough space to properly explore an idea.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of an A1 Flipchart, though, is the feeling of openness and possibility each time I approach the pad.

Whatever the idea or topic, there is space to explore, the freedom to make mistakes, and the opportunity to try again.

Salt makes everything taste better.

It even makes ice cream taste better, and that’s a hard thing to do.

However, it’s effectiveness also makes it dangerous. It can become a crutch. We can become dependent on it to make a tasty meal.

But what if we throw away the salt? What then? What would we do differently? What spices would we find in the back of our cupboards? What condiments, flavours, aromatics, and methods would we seek out to bring life to our dishes?

This post isn’t about salt or cooking, though. It’s about constraints and creativity.

What happens when we remove the luxury items of time, cash, or “more humans” from any project we’re working on?

What would we do differently if we had less?

And do we need to have less in order to do things differently?

I’m really proud of my home country, New Zealand.

It was announced earlier this week that it had eliminated coronavirus.

To be clear, there are still people with the virus, but the government is confident there are no unknown cases of community transmission.

Despite this huge success, there are dissenting voices within the country. Echoes of “we should’ve opened the economy faster,” and “the government overreacted,” can be heard.

I think this logic is ludicrous, and here’s why.

In any normal situation (e.g., business, non-profit, investment), it’s hard to tell if you picked the right strategy. You can’t turn back the clock and choose a different approach to see if things would’ve played out differently.

However, in this global pandemic, every country is broadly facing the same virus, and a clear correlation has emerged between countries that have taken a more relaxed approach (e.g., the United Kingdom, and the United States), versus those who were vigilant and pre-cautionary at an extremely early stage (e.g., Australia, and New Zealand).

Sure, New Zealand has structural advantages (e.g., a population of 4.5 million people, and it’s a 3-hour flight to the nearest neighbouring country), but it still has achieved what no other country has been able to do.

The point here is that even in the face of wild success, there will always be dissenters.

In this case, and for the sake of my family and friends, I’m so glad my country “over reacted”. I’d take that any day over the alternative.

As promised, today I’m sharing the project I mentioned in this post.

I’ve had a small set of home recording equipment for 5 years, but I never got far enough up the learning curve enough to produce something I was happy to share.

So, like many others who are picking up old hobbies during the lockdown, I’m doing that with music and home recording.

I made this Work from Home parody video to share with my colleagues. It’s to the tune of Happy by Pharrell.

I hope you enjoy it!

When Seinfeld’s pilot episode aired in 1989, a research report said, “No viewer was eager to watch the show again.”

Audiences found the lead character to be wimpy, and they complained nothing happened in the show.

Did the writers, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, change anything, though?

Not a chance.

And fast forwarding to the finale, they clearly did something right: over 76 million people tuned in to watch it, and the series has since grossed over $3 billion in syndication fees.

There are competing hypotheses as to why Seinfeld succeeded despite its rough start. However, many of these end up coming back to David and Seinfeld’s unwavering vision and execution. They didn’t give up control, they micromanaged everything, and they prioritised what was funny. If it got a laugh, it went in; even if that meant “not much happened,” in that episode.

It’s got me thinking about the principles we consciously—or unconsciously—use when we build products, make art, or bring anything new into the world.

What balance do you strike between commitment to a vision, and bringing other people into your creative process?

In the next day or two, I’ll share a little project I’ve been working on. It’s along the same lines of my silent film debut from early in the lockdown—something to hopefully get my colleagues laughing.

Over the past few days, I’ve been completely absorbed in the process. I wake up and begin working on it, and almost forget to eat meals and hydrate properly.

Getting lost in the work is a gift; a precious one.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your actual job, a painting, a musical number, or a short film, it just matters that it happens; and that when you find it, you chase it.

I went to a small primary school. It was so small that when I started the 5-7 year olds were all in one class.

I had no older siblings to learn from, so this age gap resulted in some “educational” moments for me—the young kid.

I’ll always be grateful that my parents taught me the basics of reading and phonetics before I started school, but they never prepared me for Joel.

One morning, I arrived early and found one of the ‘Big 7-Year-Olds’ with a comic book.

He was silent. Dead silent. Not even a peep.

I walked over to him and said, “Hey Joel, what are you doing?”

“Mmh, reading,” he replied.

“How?” I asked.

“With my eyes,” he said.

“How are you reading when you’re not saying the words?” I managed to utter, even though I knew he was getting frustrated.

He looked at me with a blank stare and said, “I’m reading silently. I just hear the words in my mind.”

I remember running to the bookshelf, picking up the first book, and opening it up to find that I, too, could read silently.

I’d read so many books with my parents before bed, but we’d always say the words out loud. Joel taught me otherwise. He helped me discover silence.

And that, folks, is my first recollection of being mindblown.

There is a technique used in every film called ‘Save the Cat’.

It’s the moment the protagonist “saves a cat stuck in a tree,” and wins the adoration of viewers.

Of course, saving the cat is just a metaphor for a small, selfless act.

It’s the moment Aladdin, a thief, gives his only loaf of bread to a group of hungry children.

It’s the moment Annie stops a group of boys from bullying Sandy the Dog.

It’s the moment Katniss volunteers as tribute to protect her sister from entering into the Hunger Games.

So keep an eye out, and you’ll start seeing this technique in the films you watch and the stories you read. You may also find it a handy tool to include into your own storytelling.

H/T Blake Snyder for coining the Save the Cat idea back in 2005