Dan's Daily

Here’s a Spotify hack you may not know about: they’ve gone big on ebooks. If you have a premium subscription, you can listen to a vast library of ebooks for free.

To put into perspective just how good their coverage is, I’ve searched for maybe 5-6 ebooks over the past 2 months, and all but one were available to listen to via my Spotify premium subscription. That’s an impressive amount of value packed into my monthly fee.

Another reason why I think this is a good play is people don’t typically re-listen to audio books; so streaming is perfect. And if Spotify is including the content in their subscription, why should people keep paying Audible?

I suspect this is costing Spotify a tonne, and probably isn’t sustainable. But whilst there are ebooks aplenty, happy listening!

When we’ve had a hard day, are feeling low, or are in the midst of overcoming a setback, we should listen a little less to what our mind has to say.

We should wait at least until we’ve had a night’s sleep and some quality time with family and friends before we believe everything our mind tells us.

It’s not doing the chore, planning the meal, or performing routine maintenance that is the problem. It’s the burden of thinking about the work.

Maru and I talk often about the importance of sharing the mental load in the home. It’s inevitable that the balance can sometimes swing more towards one person than the other, and if that happens we discuss how we can return things to equilibrium. Likewise, when one person has a lot of their plate, we figure out how the other person can take on more of the mental load.

Every family, friendship group, and team has a mental load. We do ourselves a favour when we talk openly about how we can share it.

Much of my job is writing, so I struggle to work to music with lyrics. I’m always on the hunt for good focus music, and I have a few favourites that I go back to time and again: Lord of the Rings Lofi and Mario Jazz being two of them.

I then thought it’d be a good idea to crowdsource some records, artists, or playlists and share that list back with you.

So, send them in! What do you listen to when you’re working and trying to focus? Looking forward to hearing your soundtracks over the coming weeks!

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.”