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You’ve bought all the ingredients, the cook book is open to the recipe, and you’ve got a clean workspace. You’re ready to make a new dish.

You follow the instructions. You measure, and pour, and dice, and stir. You plate up, and it’s a success.

But you look at the kitchen, and it’s a disaster. The counter is a mess, the sink is piled high with dishes, and your apron has new stains.

Don’t worry. The first meal is always a mess. You’re finding your way. You’re trying something new. You’re experimenting. Optimisation can come later.

The real lesson here lies beyond the kitchen.

Many of you know I have a soft spot for the Mississippi river. In the group chat with friends who travelled down the river with me, we recently marvelled that our journey was over eight years ago now.

Related to the river, I loved reading Seth Gordon’s post today called ‘The Mississippi River paradox’. It’s got a great lesson in there (via a Mississippi river metaphor) about the changing nature of people and organisations.

I’m going to paste the whole post below because it is short and it’s hard to select a quote without the essence being lost.

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There’s no water in that river that was there ten years ago.

The boundaries have shifted in that time as well, there’s no riverbank that’s exactly where it was. And the silt and the fish have all moved too.

So, what’s “the Mississippi River”?

It’s a label, a placeholder, and a marker–when the Mississippi does something we don’t expect it to do, we comment on it.

People are like this as well. What if you could only be known for the best (or the worst) thing you ever did? You’re not that person now, and it’s likely you’ll never be that person again. But that’s the label we gave you.

When we talk about the organization or the brand or that neighbor down the street, we act as these are immutable objects, basic unchanging elements or static facts.

But like rivers, people change.

When the label stops being useful, we should change it. The problem with holding a grudge is that it makes your hands too full to do anything useful

I enjoyed this thought from James Clear:

“Boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it, then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored.”

It’s a nice reminder than the common, obvious, and easy ideas always come first. We want the unique, creative, and original ideas—but are we willing to sit with the boredom long enough to get there?

This morning I jumped on a completely empty carriage as I took the Tube into Central London.

It got me thinking about how most complex systems have periods of peak activity that contrast with periods of minimal activity. Think public transport networks, electricity grids, hospitals, and the teams you work in.

It’s moments of peak stress that matter, not the average workload, when designing the capacity of the system. There should always be enough slack in the system to be ready for the peak.

A colleague started a call today with an emphatic, “Happy Friday!”

Despite it being Wednesday, I loved the upbeat positivity.

We could do with a bit more Friday energy in the middle of the week.

I loved this tweet (and accompanying image) from Massimo on Twitter explaining the evolution of Tennis’ gameplay by looking at the grass wear at Wimbledon over the years.

For context, Wimbledon is a tournament played on grass—not artificial, but real grass. And over the course of the tournament the grass wears down.

In the 70s and 80s the players used wooden rackets, which were much heavier than the carbon fibre and graphite rackets of today. This made it hard to win points from the baseline, so players often won points by playing close to the net. However, in the photos from the 2000s you can see how there is very little wear near the net, with the majority of points now being won from the back of the court.

I love how someone took these photos of Wimbledon over the years and connected it to gear and gameplay evolution. Super interesting!

I’m really enjoying Haruki Murakami’s book ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’.

Murakami is a famous novelist, but he’s maintained a running habit for the majority of his adult life—usually running about 10kms per day. The book is part memoir, part musings on running.

He often gets asked, “What do you think about when you’re running?”

He replies, “I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void… the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void.”

I’m interested and can’t quite relate… yet.

Last week, my friend Russell and I were chatting about running; both of us are training for a half marathon at the end of the year.

We discussed our music playlists and our frustration at not having a set of songs at the perfect beats per minute to match our strides per minute cadence.

When I said I wanted to manipulate my favourite songs to match 160 beats per minute, Russell mentioned he’d already done it. The next day he sent me over a 25 minute playlist with some upbeat bangers all slightly modified to be the exact same beats per minute. I loved it!

When you’re running to the beat, everything clicks. It makes a huge difference!

Following on from yesterday’s post about ‘Art is the thing nobody asked you to do’, I want to share The Driftwood Horse with you.

We live near a school in North London that has a mysterious sculpture of a horse on top of the roof of one of its buildings. It is made entirely of driftwood, is life-sized, and has captured mid-gallop.

There are grass, plants, and weeds also growing on the roof. During the spring, the foliage grows, surrounds the horse, and completely hides it from view. Then during the summer break, a gardener comes along and cuts back all the growth, once again revealing The Driftwood Horse.

The odd thing is the sculpture is difficult to see from the road. It’s like it’s deliberately hidden, or placed in just the right place for second and third floor classrooms to gaze down on it.

Although nobody asked for it, I’m glad it’s there.

“Art is the thing nobody asked you to do.”

I loved this thought from artist, Babak Ganjei. It says so much with only a few words.

Although there’s no contract, no payment, no obligation, and no expectation. We create, and try, and share, and fail, and improve. And, most importantly, we learn something new about ourselves each time we try.

The Olympics are about the kick off and it looks like Paris is buzzing!

In reading up on the games, I was surprised to learn the first Olympics were held in 776 BC, continued every four years for more than a thousand years, and were stopped in 393 AD.

It was more than 1,500 years before French historian Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern games in 1896.

All of us have grown up with the Olympics being an event that visits every four years. But just because it has always been with us, lessons from the original Olympics remind us that traditions only persist if we’re deliberate in keeping and maintaining them.

Here’s a Spotify hack you may not know about: they’ve gone big on ebooks. If you have a premium subscription, you can listen to a vast library of ebooks for free.

To put into perspective just how good their coverage is, I’ve searched for maybe 5-6 ebooks over the past 2 months, and all but one were available to listen to via my Spotify premium subscription. That’s an impressive amount of value packed into my monthly fee.

Another reason why I think this is a good play is people don’t typically re-listen to audio books; so streaming is perfect. And if Spotify is including the content in their subscription, why should people keep paying Audible?

I suspect this is costing Spotify a tonne, and probably isn’t sustainable. But whilst there are ebooks aplenty, happy listening!

When we’ve had a hard day, are feeling low, or are in the midst of overcoming a setback, we should listen a little less to what our mind has to say.

We should wait at least until we’ve had a night’s sleep and some quality time with family and friends before we believe everything our mind tells us.

It’s not doing the chore, planning the meal, or performing routine maintenance that is the problem. It’s the burden of thinking about the work.

Maru and I talk often about the importance of sharing the mental load in the home. It’s inevitable that the balance can sometimes swing more towards one person than the other, and if that happens we discuss how we can return things to equilibrium. Likewise, when one person has a lot of their plate, we figure out how the other person can take on more of the mental load.

Every family, friendship group, and team has a mental load. We do ourselves a favour when we talk openly about how we can share it.

Much of my job is writing, so I struggle to work to music with lyrics. I’m always on the hunt for good focus music, and I have a few favourites that I go back to time and again: Lord of the Rings Lofi and Mario Jazz being two of them.

I then thought it’d be a good idea to crowdsource some records, artists, or playlists and share that list back with you.

So, send them in! What do you listen to when you’re working and trying to focus? Looking forward to hearing your soundtracks over the coming weeks!