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Some good friends gave Maru and I a wedding gift that was a “dining in the dark” experience at Dans Le Noir?. We went last night and loved it.

Much like it says on the tin, you dine in complete, pitch-black darkness, and for two hours you go on a five course culinary journey.

It starts with your visually impaired waiter guiding you to your table. As you moved through the room, you hear all the normal sounds of a restaurant—people chatting, cutlery clinking, and waiters moving about.

As each course is brought out, you navigate the plate with your cutlery, your nose, and sometimes your fingers. You guess what each dish and drink pairing is, and are extra careful to put everything in a place where you won’t knock it off the table.

The experience is an amazing empathy building exercise. The Dans Le Noir? website says it best, “When the blind person guides the sighted person, this inversion is an astonishing exercise of empathy that forces us to make an unusual transfer of trust. It is an amazing approach to raising positive awareness of blindness and disability.”

Make sure your creative tools are within arms reach.

The pencil and notebook. The watercolours. The instrument. The apron. The gardening equipment.

Make it as easy to pick up your tools as it is to pick up your phone.

When consuming is easy and creating is hard, making it easy to pick up the tools and to get started is half the battle.

I used to jump straight to page one when reading non-fiction books. I treated the book like it was a story; expecting it to take me on an adventure.

However, I now spend time with the table of contents before deciding to read a non-fiction book. When I can see the core message of a book in the table of contents, I gain confidence that the author has a coherent and clear point of view to share. Conversely, when I see a confusing table of contents, I worry that either the author hasn’t done the work to package their thinking up into something easily digestible, or that they’re trying to be too clever.

The purpose of non-fiction writing is to educate and change people’s minds. There’s no need to hide the message.

Every Wednesday my office does a fire alarm test. Although it only takes a few minutes, it happens at 10:10am when many people are already deep into a meeting.

It’s loud, so we mute the conference room microphones and sit there quietly waiting for the test to finish.

People make jokes about the inconvenience it causes, but no one is serious in their complaint. The test is there to make sure we’re prepared in the event of an emergency.

It’s a inconvenient by design.

We’re proudly a mixed culture house that chooses to be “both/and” instead of “either/or”. Maru is a proud Argentine, and when it comes to Argentina’s national football team playing in a major competition, we don our Messi jerseys and sing all the songs.

On Sunday we saw Argentina successfully defend their Copa America title. It was a close match bursting with energy, and was ultimately decided by a stunning Lautaro Martinez goal four minutes from time.

However, in what could be his last major tournament, Messi left the pitch after 64 minutes due to an ankle injury. As every non-Colombian watching around the world collectively groaned, Messi sat silently on the sideline watching his team play.

In a quote attributed to Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Note: I wasn’t able to verify the quote, but the insight is valuable nonetheless), he says Messi watched the game without reacting, without playing the hero, and without giving his team instructions. Messi leads when he is on the field and has the ball at his feet. But when he’s off, he trusts his team to get the job done.

It’s tempting for leaders to exert more control than they should, especially from the sidelines. But when a leader realises they won’t always be around to steer the ship, they create and leave space for others.

A fallow year is a farming term where a field is left unseeded during a growing season. Its goal is to give the land a break, and the soil a chance to replenish nutrients.

The term is also being used to describe how the Glastonbury festival will have a fallow year in 2026. It’s fitting because Glastonbury takes place at a place called Worthy Farm.

Although I’m sure the fallow year does the land a lot of good, there’s also value in scarcity. An in-demand cultural event that takes one year off every handful of years returns to insatiable demand. It’s similar to the artist who is forever touring and releasing music; they don’t give their fans a chance to miss them. Conversely, there’s a reason why we get so excited for the Olympics and the World Cup.

Scarcity sells.

One way to understand our own ignorance on a difficult subject is to write about it. Even better is forcing ourselves to summarise the most important information on a single page.

The writer’s block. The half-formed sentences. The bits that feel wrong.

That stuff is important. They’re signals we don’t know the material well enough.

The act of writing the first draft is not to publish, but to map our own ignorance.

I’m regularly asked about my dietary restrictions; whether it’s friends putting on a dinner or for a work event. So I thought I’d put them in post that I can send to people.

Dan’s Dietary Restrictions

1. None. I eat everything.
2. Except oysters. I don’t like them.

Last updated: 14 July 2024

Note: Okay, admittedly this post is two parts satire, and one part serious. But at least I’m going to chuckle to myself when I send people: http://dancullum.com/dietaryrestrictions

My family in New Zealand went to the All Blacks game last night. It was a three-generational outing with my 5-year-old nephew going to his first match.

My sister sent me a wonderful video of the stadium wave. The wave moved across the stands and when it arrived where my family were seated, I saw my nephew and my parents jump up and throw their hands into the air. My nephew—enthralled by it all—laughed alongside my dad at the sight of 50,000 people doing something in unison.

It was the first time my nephew saw a stadium wave. My sister captured the moment because she knew it was special. And my dad validated my nephew’s excitement by matching his energy.

In one 10-second video I saw one generation living a new experience, and two generations reliving it.

As someone who has yet to have children, it made me think about the important role children play in helping us remain astonished, curious, and joyful.

I love a good Ryanair £30 flight to Europe. Small bag only. No seat selection. No priority boarding.

But when I booked that 07:15am flight to Milan, I selectively ignored the required 03:30am wake up. That was, of course, a problem for my future self.

I made a mental a note to book a later flight next time. But I already know that won’t happen.

Ryanair knows that won’t happen either.

I re-read Kevin Kelly’s ‘Excellent Advice for Living’ yesterday. It’s an excellent short read.

For his 68th birthday, Kevin penned down 68 pieces of advice for his kids. He added to this list over a couple of years and ended up with 450 pithy lessons for life.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Kevin; not only for his professional accomplishments, but also for his outlook on life, eclectic hobbies, and deep-keel values.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

“Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.”

“Taking a break isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.”

“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.”

“Trust is built in drops but lost in buckets.”

“Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.”

Most books or articles I’ve read on habits converge on the same point: remove decision making and the need for will power.

If you expend zero energy making a decision about whether to do something or not, you’ve got a little more energy to just do the thing in the first place.

However, when self-negotiation is involved, there’s always going to be a good reason to back out.

Being selective about our habits is important too. When we have too many, life can feel like an endless routine of chores and must-dos.

Pick a few that matter. And don’t negotiate.

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.