Dan's Daily

All meaningful, long-lasting progress is built on consistency.

We don’t need the big product launch. Start small. Test quickly. See how things go.

We don’t need the deep clean. We just need to do a little work each day to keep our home in order.

We don’t need fad diets. We just need a nutrition system we can maintain in the long run.

Greasing the groove is about starting, and starting small. When we persistently apply pressure, we’ll find momentum begets momentum, and that progress happens bit by bit, not overnight.

If you haven’t used Shazam before, it’s an app that listens to a song and tells you both its name and the recording artist.

I was recently in an Uber and liked a song on the radio. I didn’t have Shazam on my phone, so I quickly went to the App Store to download it. Once complete, I opened the app, and hit the big blue button.

The whole process took about 25 seconds.

The team at Shazam knows the average length of a song is 3 minutes, so they built with that constraint in mind, and it has resulted in a user interface that has remained largely unchanged for more than 10 years.

There is no complicated sign-up process. It’s laser focused on helping the user complete the most important job on their mind.

I love it.

When building software products, teams often talk about “blockers”, which is anything that stops or slows down the delivery of a product.

When dealing with these challenges, we often use language like, “We need to ‘unblock’ the problem.”

But there’s another way.

By solving the issue, what we’re really doing is unlocking opportunity.

This subtle shifts in language can have a dramatic impact on the way our teams and organisations turn up, and the way our customers experience our products and services.

Looking at this another way: why is it called a Stop Light?

Why not a Go Light?

I almost lost access to my password manager this morning.

And it terrified me.

For years I’ve maintained complex, randomised passwords for all my online accounts in Lastpass. They’re protected behind a master password and 2-factor authentication.

What I didn’t realise was my master password had became part of my muscle memory—much similar to the 6 digits we use to access our phones.

So today, when I paused and thought about the password—the specific letters and digits—I blanked.

I tried multiple times, attempted to reset, used Face ID to see if that made a difference, was temporarily suspended from logging in, and finally tried to contact Lastpass’ customer service, but nothing worked.

And given this is a password vault, it has the odd quirk of being completely inaccessible if the recovery methods don’t work.

Don’t worry though, I eventually regained access, but only through an unlikely method. After trying all of the obvious online methods, I sat down with a pen and paper and started to write the possible combinations and variations of my master password.

And finally, it clicked.

A few lessons from my morning:

1. Carefully judge when it’s safe to rely on muscle memory. Some things are too important to be complacent about.
2. Sometimes the advanced, automated approach can’t beat the basics
3. There is still a lot of power in the paper and pen

Lauded investor, Howard Marks, developed the Consensus-Contrarian Matrix to show how being a contrarian, and being right, leads to outsized returns for a business or investor.

The path of least resistance is consensus. The journey is easy when we agree. There’s little pain when we all see the world with the same pair of glasses.

The hard part is getting things right. But when we do, and when we think, and act, based on a contrarian point of view, magic can happen.

In the future, no matter how horrid, weird, or ghastly, I don’t want to tell my kids to turn down their music.

It’s also an attitude I’d like to extend far beyond the car or kitchen playlist.

You may have seen images of Michelangelo’s work. His ceiling in the Sistine Chapel has inspired visitors for over 500 years. And his statue of David unfailingly outshines every other sculpture in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

It’s an easy trap to fall into: looking at the finished product—of the artist, the founder, the Olympian, the speaker on the stage—and finding it hard to imagine how they got there.

However, when we look at Michelangelo’s unfinished work, it puts his completed works into perspective.

“In every block of marble, I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it.” – Michelangelo

Michelangelo turned up every day, without fail, slowly revealing the masterpiece hiding inside the marble. When we look at the finished product, we only see what remains.

In sport, a team’s win / loss ratio shows successful they’ve been that season. A number >1 is a “winning” season—where more games are won than lost.

I love a good sporting analogy and how they can help us think about other parts of our lives, but this one—in my opinion—isn’t a good one.

In sport, a loss is a loss.

In life, a loss is only a loss if we don’t learn from it.

I bought my beloved Brompton Bike in 2018, and it’s been my go-to form of transport ever since.

I started with the best intentions: I planned to get some bike cleaner and give it a wash and scrub every 3-6 months.

However, after almost 3 years, I still hadn’t given it a proper clean. I knew that if I wanted my bike to last, I’d need to take better care of it.

So I spent two hours today scrubbing and scrapping 3-years worth of caked-on dirt and grime.

I wasn’t listening to music or a podcast, so it gave me the time and headspace to reflect on the task at hand.

It’s inevitable that grime, grease, and dirt will build up in our minds, in our bodies, in our hearts, and on our bikes. And although a deep clean is great. The regular one is even better.

Writer’s block. No ideas. Tired. Frustrated.

Give me a second, and I could come up with an excuse not to write today.

On these days, it’s easy to think I “have to” write something.

And my immediate antidote is: I don’t “have to”, I “get to”.

That subtle shift brings a wealth of energy, focus, and effort. It’s a privilege to turn up every day, and practise, share, and chat with you all.

So what if we took this idea and used it elsewhere in our lives?

We don’t have to eat healthily, we get to.

We don’t have to turn up to work, we get to.

We don’t have to take care of our family and kids when they’re unwell, we get to.

We don’t have to do anything, but with each new day, we get an opportunity to do something.

I’ve posted before about desire paths, which is “a path created as a consequence of erosion caused by foot traffic” rather than by design.

I love them.

They’re a subtle, collective protest. They’re evidence that a group of humans—who have never met—can agree that there is a better way to travel than the footpath.

Whenever I see a desire path, I feel compelled to walk it.

I want to contribute to, extend, and solidify its existence.

Desire paths are a reminder that there’s always another way.

It’s easy to tell when someone is pretending to listen, but they’re really just waiting for a chance to reply.

Their facial expression is often the giveaway. Sometimes they look a little distant, like they’re lost in thought. Sometimes they look plain impatient, having already disconnected with what the current speaker is saying.

I too am sometimes guilty of preparing my own reply before someone else has had a chance to finish. There’s never a good reason for this, and by writing about it, it’s a helpful reminder-to-self to keep working at it.

Listen to others as you’d like them to listen to you.

I used to get crippled by seasickness.

I remember being 9-years-old, looking down at the churning waves, and feeling my stomach turning in knots.

I’d try to lay down to stop my head from spinning, but it only made things worse.

It wasn’t until I was 19 that I got over my seasickness.

“Look at the horizon, and don’t take your eyes off it,” I was told.

An unwavering focus on the flat, immovable horizon helped bring a calm to my mind and stomach.

Whether you’re on a boat or not, where are your eyes focused today? Down at the waves, or out at the horizon?

When facing a problem, we’re addicted to addition.

We add new processes at work. We add new features to products. We add more rules to keep schools, organisations, and societies in check.

But what about subtraction?

I recently came across this great piece of research where study participants were given a simple problem solving experiment: “In the below structure, a roof is supported by a pillar at one corner of a building. When a brick is placed on top, the roof will collapse onto the figurine. Researchers asked study participants to stabilise the structure so that it would support the brick above the figurine, and analysed the ways in which participants solved the problem.”

The study found that participants consistently consider additive solutions, when subtractive solutions are 1) available, and 2) are more efficient.

And it wasn’t because people didn’t see the value in subtractive solutions, it’s because they didn’t even consider them in the first place.

This has some profound lessons for our every-day decision making.

1. When faced with a problem, before we add anything, we should remember to ask if we can subtract anything and achieve the same result.
2. We’re not any less creative because we chose to subtract rather than add. If anything, I deeply respect when someone is able to simplify, because making things simple is complicated stuff.
3. Finally, we have to fight against sunk cost bias. Just because we invested time in that process or feature in the past, it doesn’t mean it should still exist if there is a better, subtractive alternative.

Yesterday’s post—about how training a team can feel costly, but it doesn’t compare to the cost of not training them—got me thinking about how easy it is to confuse tangible and intangible value.

Take standard of living and quality of life, for example.

At first glance, they look and feel similar. But when we dig a little deeper, their differences are stark.

Standard of living is a monetary measure. In general, as income increases, so does the standard of living. It’s tangible.

However, quality of life is different.

We can’t put a price on our relationships. We can’t estimate how acting with integrity allows us to have a peaceful night’s sleep. We can’t quantify, at least precisely, how having a calm mind and a fit body impacts all other parts of our lives.

It’s a theme I’ve been pondering a lot recently: not everything of value can be measured, and just because it’s intangible, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be optimising for it.