Blog

For those that have been following the blog for a while, you may know the Mississippi River holds a special place in my heart.

I spent 6 months—along with some great friends—figuring out how to build a boat from recycled materials and travel it’s 3,000+ kilometre length.

Natchez was one of the towns where we got the warmest welcome. A local family gave us a room for a couple nights, hosted us for multiple meals, and the father—Greg, a manager at a local golf course—took us for a hit at his course.

A video of came up in my feed today of Greg sowing poppy seeds at the bank of the Mississippi River in Natchez. I then learned that every year in October he plants tens of thousands of poppies, weeds them all winter, and then lets the community enjoy them come April. Greg’s actions have been dubbed a sort of “random acts of floral largesse”.

Greg is such a bright character who is full of life, and I loved seeing him at it again: making people smile.

I enjoyed reading this article on the 5 most common jobs in a medieval city.

What’s cool about the work is the author uses tax records from 14th and 15th century Montpellier to get a picture of the distribution of work across the population.

Unsurprisingly, farming took the top spot with 16% of taxpayers—this job was mainly filled by peasants who resided outside the city walls. Carpenter was understandably 2nd, but at a much lower 6%. Interestingly, shoemaker was 4th on the list with 4%.

Due to the industrial revolution, the emergence of the limited liability company, vertical integration, and globalisation (I’m sure among many other factors), we now have large corporations who now fulfil our farming, carpentry, and shoe producing needs with a tiny fraction of the effort that was once required.

I couldn’t help but wonder what they would think about our jobs today; all these people scurrying off to monolithic, glass blocks in metropolitan cities to type away at keyboards, only to then head home 8 hours later.

In December 1985, Cray launched the world’s fastest “super computer” at a supposed cost of $15 million.

As a crazy point of comparison, today’s smart phones have more processing power.

This fact also makes me think about how little we know—and can predict— about what the world will look like after another 35 years.

It’s not the absolute change in processing power, but rather what it unlocks for humanity, that’s important.

I’m about a year late to the party, but I just finished watching The Queen’s Gambit and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I can now understand the reason for chess’ resurgence over the past year, and it also explains why multiple friends invited me to matches via mobile apps.

My timing to watch The Queen’s Gambit was also serendipitous, the World Chess Championship is currently happening. It’s a 14 game showdown between the world’s highest ranked chess player for the last 11 years—and widely considered to be the GOAT—Magnus Carlsen, and challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi.

Although they’re streamed live on YouTube, the games aren’t exactly easy watching: each game takes about 3-4 hours. So I usually skip to the end game.

The first 5 games all ended in a stalemate. But yesterday, in a 7 hour epic, Carlsen managed to push ahead. I came across this great video that shows the exciting last 15 minutes of the game.

I then went down a YouTube rabbit hole watching Carlsen beat 3 people blindfolded.

They say after 4 moves, there are over 3 billion different combinations available to players. But despite all the possibility, chess is a game where the stage is set, the pieces are known, and despite a slim advantage being given to the white pieces, it’s an insanely great game.

Today I came across the work of Jon Foreman, a UK land and sculpture artist.

In particular, his work using sand as his canvas impressed me!

I love the ephemeral nature of his work. What he creates will only exist for a few hours. Wind will rise, tides will wash away, and humans will trample. But in the few hours they exist, they’re magic.

He also works with a range of other materials in a range of other spaces.

Enjoy!

It’s really hard to understand the magnitude of a problem, or opportunity, when looking at numbers in a table.

Some people can do it, but the vast majority of us do better when looking at a chart or graph.

Being able to communicate data in a simple, clear, and quick way is important. The faster we can get people to understand with our recommendation, the more impact we can have.

Whenever we see a table with data, we should ask: could this message be clearer in a chart?

If individuals, teams, and companies asked this question each time they see a table with data, I think average impact per decision would increase across the board.

I love this twitter thread showing the back-and-forth emails between famed investors Paul Graham and Fred Wilson in 2009 about AirBnb.

What I love is Graham’s fierce conviction that AirBnb could become a massive marketplace that competes with hotels, and how persistent he is on selling the idea to Wilson.

I also chuckled when I saw Graham wrote, “There’s no reason this couldn’t be as big as Ebay.”

AirBnb is now worth 2.5 eBays, at $106b and $42b market cap respectively.

Finally, Wilson is known for making many good bets, but the thread also shows that even the best make mistakes.

P.S. I really enjoy reading Graham’s essays, and reading Wilson’s blog posts!

There was a puzzle game that I loved when I was a kid: Rush Hour.

It’s a board with a bunch of cars and trucks that can slide around. The goal is to get the red car to the exit by moving the other vehicles out of the way.

Little did I know that I’d eventually have a real life ‘Rush Hour’ experience at one of the Park & Fly services in Miami. Upon returning from Mexico, we were greeted with this sight.

Our car is the one in the middle with the trunk open.

It took more than half an hour for the staff at the Park & Fly to the find the keys for the other cars and to, one by one, move them out of the way so we could get out.

I had to laugh in the moment, but it got me thinking: if we’re going to do anything, we might as well do it well. A bit of upfront thinking and planning—or in this case, parking the cars in the order in which they’re going to be picked up—can save a lot of time.

I was completely blown away by this video today.

It’s a 2-min clip of Paul McCartney writing ‘Get Back’ as part of the recent Beatles documentary directed and produced by Peter Jackson.

What I love is that the first 30 seconds is objectively bad. It’s messy, lacking conviction, and basically sounds like the guy at the party who is poorly holding a tune on the acoustic guitar.

But this is part of the process.

Slowly, McCartney allows the song to emerge.

By 1:15, the verse melody arrives: the chugging guitar and rhythmic lyrics. And by 1:40 we hear the iconic chorus that is now famous around the world.

I highly recommend watching the whole clip.

Would we have ‘Get Back’ if McCartney was embarrassed to messily explore? And what could this mean for our own standards and expectations for creative exploration?

I’m really proud of my friends, Dan and Chris, for their work at Amber. Amber is a renewable energy retailer in Australia disrupting the incumbent business model.

For a $15 AUD membership fee, Amber customers get access to the wholesale price of energy and the Amber app, where they’re incentivised to shift their energy consumption to greener periods of the day.

Recently, one of their fellow renewable energy retailers, Powershop, sold to Shell. An ironic move considering the values Powershop were founded upon.

Dan and Chris pounced at the opportunity to buy a full page ad in The Age, writing an obituary of sorts to Powershop selling out. They’re also committing to donate $100 AUD to environmental charities for every Powershop customer that switches to Amber before Nov 30.

If you’re one of my Aussie readers, you should check Amber out! They’re awesome!

In high school I competed in Dragon Boat Racing. A team of 20 students paddle a long, wooden canoe over a distance of about 500 metres. Schools from around New Zealand come together each year to have their teams compete against one another.

One thing our coach taught us early on was that the size and strength of each individual is unimportant—no one person can carry a team to victory. But what is most important is paddling in unison. Complete synchronisation is a force multiplier.

One person sits at the front of the boat and beats a drum. The first two paddlers—who each sit at the front of a 10 person paddling line—time their strokes with the beat. Every subsequent paddler looks at the person diagonally in front of them and matches their stroke. If this is done perfectly, and all paddles hit the water at the exact same time, and each paddler has the exact same stroke length, the dragon boat flies.

Dragon Boating taught me a lesson: I’d much rather be in a great team, than in a team of greats.

I was doing a some WordPress spring cleaning this past week and realised my 9 September 2021 post was still sitting in the Drafts folder.

I wondered: is that the 2.5 year daily writing streak broken?

I quickly brushed off those thoughts.

Even if a WordPress glitch or human error meant the post wasn’t published, what matters is I know I turned up, took notice, and put pen to paper on that day.

It’s the good habits that matter; and they’re usually enough to outshine the odd technical slip.

P.S. I remember being quite proud of this post when I wrote it, so I’m sharing it here: ‘Musical Metamorphosis’.

Another goodie from ‘The Agile Comms Handbook’.

“We can be brief.
And clear.
And unambiguous.
And interesting.”

It’s a helpful reminder that great communication isn’t either/or.

My bet is too much work gets sent out in first draft format, and then stays in first draft format. And that the above is achievable when we send out the first draft, and then continue to refine, and refine, and refine.

I’m reading Dune for the first time, and I’m looking forward to watching the film once I finish the book.

One of the characters, Lady Jessica, makes a statement that got me thinking: “Growth is limited by that necessity which is found in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favourable condition controls the growth rate.”

For example, let’s take a plant: it needs sunlight, water, and soil to grow. If it has a lot of sunlight and soil, but no water, the absence of water limits its growth.

Or say we’re trying to build muscle. We need to train, eat sufficient protein, and get a lot of sleep. Although we train consistently and eat cleanly, without adequate sleep we won’t grow.

These examples are simple. The inputs and outputs are clear and causal. But the concept gets murky when we start to apply it to teams of people working together.

The ingredients for success for one team, project, or company, may be completely different from another.

Some teams thrive on sprints followed by rest, others prefer a consistent, steady pace. Some teams need blue-sky opportunity to get them motivated, others need a burning platform. Some teams want clear direction given to them, others want to forge their own path.

Although we aren’t able to define universal ingredients for success for teams, that’s not the point. The point is to, as quickly as possible, identify the limiting factor.

What’s the thing that’s stopping our teams from growing?

And we start there.

When nature has laid its roots, sometimes it’s better to build around it, rather than try mold it to our view of the world.

Works for trees and boardwalks, and may also work for teams that bring ideas to life.