Dan's Daily

Imagine you’re in a race.

There’s your pace, and then there’s the path.

Your pace may change from minute-to-minute, but as long as you stay on the right path, you’ll eventually reach the finish line.

Although life isn’t a race, it’s a great metaphor for any habit we hope to build, or goal we want to achieve.

It’s easy to focus too much on our pace: how fast am I progressing towards my goal?

When what really matters is simply staying on the right path.

Go too fast, too early, and we’ll run out of steam before the end. Go too fast and we also risk veering off track and losing our way.

Worry less about pace. Care more about being on the right path.

We’ll get there eventually.

“You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.”—Tom DeMarco

I believe most of the challenges in the workplace—my own included—are due to focusing too heavily on the former: improving efficiency.

And that adding more slack into our days, following the 80/20 slow down rule from yesterday’s post, will allow us to be more creative, purposeful, and impactful. By slowing down, we get to spend more time answering the effectiveness question: what is the right thing to do right now?

The 80/20 rule says 80% of the output comes from 20% of the input.

It’s also known as the Pareto Principle, after Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. He then went on to research how this 80/20 relationship can we found in many other places (e.g., 80% of the work is done by 20% of the employees, 80% of road accidents are caused by 20% of drivers, etc.).

The 80/20 rule is often used to optimise: how do I get the maximum impact for the minimum input?

However, I’ve recently been experimenting with the 80/20 rule as a “slow down” mechanism. What do I mean by this?

When I’m commuting by bike, I usually try get to my destination as quickly as possible, even though I sometimes I get stressed because travelling at higher speeds is more dangerous. Recently, however, I started travelling at 80% of my normal speed. The journey takes a little longer, but the pleasure of the ride increases by an order of magnitude.

Similarly, I now try and stop eating when I’m 80% full—adopting a “never hungry, never full” approach to nutrition. This helps me feel lighter and more alert. And on the odd occasion when I’ve overeaten, I’ve felt horrible and my body has immediately started craving for a more tempered amount.

I’m still a big fan of using the 80/20 principle to optimise, but it’s also a helpful tool to help us slow down and get more enjoyment out of our daily activities.

“Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.”—Homer, The Iliad

In one of the oldest works of western literature—written in circa 800 BC—we find a pithy sentence that still helps put things into perspective today.

It’s a Lindy Line.

A number of you enjoyed my post on optimism earlier this week. So I thought I’d keep the theme going—after all, this blog is about noticing, reflecting, and sharing!

The seeds, when they gathered, all looked down—trying to find a clear patch of soil to settle on.

One, however, looked to the skies.

The others laughed.

“Where will you find a place to grow your roots,” they said.

“You’re destined to fail,” they chided.

The lone seed, against all odds, found a spot, in a gutter, atop an old church.

Again, the other seeds laughed.

“Why are you spending your time in the dirty gutter?”

“There’s no soil up there.”

“You’ll never grow into—or amount to—anything.”

But as the winter days passed, the lone seed put down its roots, committed to its new home, and when spring arrived, it’s flowers came into bloom, and it remarked:

“The view is so much better from up here!”

Photo taken of the lone seed, in the gutter, of the old church, near my home here in London.

I was listening to the news this morning and my stomach sank when I heard the following headline: “US Government backs waiving intellectual property rules on vaccines; pharmaceutical companies oppose.”

After a year of living with the pandemic, seeing the current tragic scenes in India, and knowing developing nations have only vaccinated a tiny fraction of their populations, I couldn’t help but picture pharmaceutical executives scheming to retain their IP and control the production and distribution of vaccines.

I know there is an immense amount of complexity, nuance, and subtext to this debate—and I’m not going to pretend that I understand it—but this feels like a moment when these companies can, and should, put humanity before profits.

Here’s hoping this situation unfolds to give billions around the world better and faster access to much needed vaccines.

A room has 4 walls, but it’s the empty space between them that’s valuable.

A door is only useful if the void it creates allows us to pass between two spaces.

A cup finds its purpose in the hollow space.

There is value in the empty spaces.

It’s a nice reminder to fill our days with less—to allowing for more meaningful, creative, and purposeful thinking.

I write regularly about momentum. I hold it in high regard because I’m a big believer in the value of small, consistent actions adding up over time. In other words, compound interest—not just in finance, but in all areas of life.

But what happens on the days when we don’t feel it, when we’re unwell, when circumstances are out of our control, and we’ve been thrown for a loop?

We should just do what we can.

Without judgement or admonishment for missing the high bar we set for ourselves.

It’s more effective to slow down from a gallop to trot than to fall off the horse altogether.

Momentum matters. Just do what you can. Yesterday ended last night, and tomorrow is a new day.

Optimism is a small fishing line, an inner-city canal, no bait… and a really big net.

Spotted today on my cycle along Regent’s Canal in London.

The Lindy Effect is “a theorised phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to its current age.”

Basically, the longer something has survived, it’s also likely to have a longer life expectancy.

Plato. Shakespeare. The Beatles. We can reasonably expect the works of these masters to last well into the future. But in this case, we’d expect Plato to survive a lot longer than the Beatles, and for Shakespeare to fall somewhere in between.

For me, the Lindy effect is super useful when deciding what to read next. To “read a Lindy book” is to read texts that have stood the test of time. Compare that to books on the current New York Times bestseller list, like Matthew McConaughey’s memoir ‘Greenlights’. Sure, McConaughey is a big star now, but his book’s prominence and relevance will eventually wane, and it’ll one day just be noise.

Focusing our limited time and energy on Lindy books, will give us the maximum return on investment in the long run.

I love this video from the Association of Tennis Professionals on how Andre Agassi was able to read Boris Becker’s serve through one of Becker’s small ticks: before he tossed the ball, he’d stick out his tongue; if he poked it out straight, the ball would be served down the middle, if he put it out to the left, the ball would go wide.

The part I found most interesting though was how Agassi used this information to his advantage. He says, “the hardest part wasn’t returning his serve, but rather not letting him know that I knew this.”

Agassi would save reading Becker’s serve until he needed to win an important point in a match, so he didn’t give away that he knew.

Agassi’s genius wasn’t in the “mind reading”, nor was it in returning the serve (although that was pretty hard to do too!), it was in knowing when to selectively, deliberately, and specifically use the information to his advantage.

In his final letter to Amazon shareholders as CEO, Jeff Bezos quotes biologist, Richard Dawkins:

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Although Dawkins’ quote is talking about the physical world, Bezos uses it as a metaphor for “being distinct”. He goes on to say in his letter:

“In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.

We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.”

What’s the price you’re willing to pay to be distinctive?

Step 2 is usually easier than Step 1.

Steps 1 is fighting inertia, the unknown, imposter syndrome, and any other form of Resistance that stops from you getting going.

Step 2 is about building on a base, gaining momentum, and greasing the groove.

We need some initial motivation to get going, but it’s habits that get us there.

Hair salons and barbers recently re-opened here in the UK. Comically, I heard a story about someone receiving a really bad haircut.

The reason—and the apology from the hairdresser—was, “I’m so sorry, I’m just out of practise.”

It reminded me of a piece of advice given to me by a friend who worked for a large electronics manufacturer—think kettles, toasters, and sandwich presses—he said, “Never buy a new electronics product in the first 6 months after its release. The company will still be ironing out bugs in the product it wasn’t able to identify during testing. After 6 months, the products on the shelves will be much more stable and reliable.”

Whether you’re offering a service or building a product, how can you avoid being out of practise?

The fruit from the grocer sits in the fridge, hidden inside a brown paper bag. A few days go by, then a week, and when we’re rummaging for something else, we realise we forgot about the fruit, and it has now spoiled.

The simple act of making food visible—taking fruit out of paper bags, or using clear tupperware—helps us waste less.

Although a banal example, it’s a good metaphor for our own personal goals. What we see every day will inevitably get more of our attention and focus.

I’m a fan of writing out goals—whether they’re daily, weekly, quarterly, annually, or life goals— and putting them up on the wall.

We can’t work on them if we forget they’re there.

Make them visible.