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Margins are meant to be written in. Sentences should be underlined. Pages should be dog-eared.

Reading is a conversation, not a lecture.

Sometimes I’ll write a post and it just won’t feel right. There may be a logical flaw, the flow might feel off, or I may end up disagreeing with my own point of view.

At that point, the answer isn’t to try and fix it, but rather to throw it away. There will always be another idea, a new perspective, and an opportunity to try again on a fresh piece of paper.

The more comfortable we are with throwing work away, the more confident we’ll become that the next idea will arrive in no time.

Jesse Itzler has a thing called the ‘Big A## Calendar’. Every year, he prints out an A0 calendar and marks it up with important events and important goals for the year.

Although I organise my life in Google Calendar, I miss the scaled visualisation that comes with a large, physical calendar. It makes a meaningful difference to see all the weeks on one page, and realise how much (or little) time you’ve got between trips, work milestones, and personal goals—like my first half marathon in November.

Itzler sells his calendars for $50, which is pricey. So I found an A0 template on Etsy for a few pounds, and sent a pdf of the 2024 and 2025 calendars to the printer. I’ve now got a huge 2024 calendar hanging on my wall, and it’s been helpful to externalise every important thing for the year on a piece of paper I can reference within seconds.

If a meeting is worth having, it’s worth spending time preparing for it.

If we can’t find the time to do the preparation, we should either move or cancel the meeting.

We should accept no middle ground.

Prepare, or it doesn’t happen.

Note: I’m not saying we need to hold our colleagues to this standard. The rule is still valuable even if it’s only a personal commitment.

As I turned on the BBC at 10pm to watch coverage of the UK general election (news outlets aren’t able to report on the election until the polls close at 10pm), I paused and appreciated the BBC live streams showing ballot counting sites around the country.

In school halls and auditoriums thousands of people were at work. Some were delivering large, plastic, zip-tied-shut boxes, others were running those boxes to tellers, and the tellers themselves were sitting in long rows counting votes.

I was grateful to watch the wheels of a peace democracy turn live in front of me.

I appreciated this post from Fred Wilson, about how writing online is a conversation.

“You are not trying to publish complete ideas. You are engaging in a conversation with the world and you are a participant in that.”

When the goal isn’t a one-way broadcast, the writing doesn’t need to be perfect, complete, or polished. When the goal is to start a conversation, we just need to turn up and earnestly share what we’ve got.

On Sunday morning I went down to a cafe near home, sipped my coffee, and sat alone with my thoughts.

No book. No notepad. No scrolling on my phone. No laptop to do work.

I know I use my phone as a way to pass the time, avoid my own thoughts, and to be mindless rather than be mindful More broadly, scrolling on our phones as a gap-filler has become a habit we’ve collectively normalised.

To stop this habit, like developing any new skill, it’ll require intentional practise to get better at it. Perhaps I should turn Sunday’s experiment into a more regular thing.

Most bookshops maximise the amount of space for aisles and books. They do away with open space and reading zones. As you move through each aisle you can feel the square-footage-squeeze calculation of the finance department at head office.

Every so often though you come across a bookshop with sofas. And the sofas say a lot. They say, “Welcome,” “We’re not in a rush,” “Make yourself comfortable,” “Pick up a book, have a seat, see if you like it.”

Guess which kind of book shop wins people over in the long run?

I got a new MacBook last month and I found the predictive text feature to be jarring. It works similarly to a mobile device: when you’re typing, Apple suggests the rest of the word.

However my typing is about as fast as the predictive text can predict, so as I type the words seem to jump about on the line.

I figured out quickly what was going on, but I’m confident there is a non-trivial number of people confused with why their writing seem to change without them pressing the keys.

I get why Apple would offer this feature, and I’m sure it helps many people, but I find it odd that they chose to turn it on by default in the OS settings.

The default for this feature should’ve been opt-out; it’ll cause less confusion.

There was a recurring theme in some of my early posts. I’d write about something that’s either difficult to do or comes at a non-trivial cost; for example, exercising regularly, eating healthily, saving consistently, or buying travel insurance. And at the end of the post, I’d ask, “What’s the cost of not doing it?”

Maru pointed out that it’d become a repetitive phrase, so I stopped using it in an attempt to make my points in new and distinct ways.

However, five years on, I still think about this idea all the time.

The hard things are still hard to do, but I’m even more convinced now that the cost of not doing them will be far greater down the line.

I really enjoyed discovering this passage on ‘truisms’ in Chuck Palahniuk’s book ‘Moments in my writing life after which everything was different’.

“The best writers seem to read our minds, and they nail exactly what we’ve never been able to put into words.”

He goes on to share a few pithy quotes.

Nora Ephron in her novel Heartburn wrote, “When you’re single you date other singles. And when you’re a couple you date other couples.”

Or Amy Hempel, who wrote, “What dogs want is for no one to ever leave.”

Great writers say in a few words the essence of a truth, an emotion, or a scene we’ve seen play out many times.

I recently heard about this famous paragraph from Mark Forsyth’s book, The Elements of Eloquence.

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

Yes, the adjective order itself is impressive. But even more impressive is how native English speakers know this rule intuitively but not consciously.

It made me think about how much we learn and replicate subconsciously.

The first draft is rarely good.

The second draft isn’t much to look at either. Although the logic is starting to take shape, the piece is yet to sing.

At this point, we’ve usually run out of time, and the deadline forces us to hit send.

Yet if we baked in a little more time—enough for a third draft, or maybe even a fourth—we would’ve got to a level of simplicity, clarity, and thoughtfulness achieved by few others.

Few people are patient enough to hang around until the third draft. What are they missing out on?

I was in the market for a tradesperson a couple months ago to fix a piece of in-built furniture. I went to Checkatrade and requested a quote.

Within an hour I had received multiple phone calls and messages. I could quickly compare, negotiate and price, and book a date for the job.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, I was just happy to get my problem sorted quickly. But now I realise that their communication speed and willingness to accommodate my schedule revealed a lot about the competitive nature of their market.

People don’t need to take care of the customer as much in markets with few competitors. They’ll win the business anyway. But in competitive markets, the small details make the difference.

There’s no shortage of people willing to give an opinion. They’ll pull out a metaphorical playbook and share what worked for them. They’ll assume that because they found success with one approach, that you’re likely to find the same.

These people are undoubtedly well meaning, and sometimes their advice will be worth its weight in gold, but for many of life’s challenges, there is no perfect playbook.

Your career, hobbies, friendships, and families are a unique blend circumstances, emotions, complexities, and challenges that have never existed in that combination before. That’s special, but also difficult. You’re navigating it for the first time ever.

Sure, we can learn from others, try out their plays, and incorporate the ones that work into ours, but it’s liberating to know there is no perfect playbook. We’re all making it up as we go along.