Dan's Daily

Chess boxing is a real thing.

How it works is there is eleven rounds that alternate between chess and boxing. The game swings between rounds of intense physical contact and analytical thinking until a competitor either wins by checkmate or knockout.

The lack of overlap in the Venn diagram of skills for chess and boxing is precisely what makes Chess Boxing appealing to a small but passionate audience.

And although I initially thought Chess Boxing was absurd, the more I think about it, the more I believe that life is Chess Boxing.

In our jobs, families, friendships, and communities, we all play multiple roles. Rarely do we specialise in one thing. For example, think of a parent coming home after a stressful day of fighting fires at work, the moment they walk through their front door they put aside the pressures of the day to be present with their children.

To succeed, we end up learning how to code switch between environments, and to turn up for people in different ways depending on the need of the situation.

Chess Boxing isn’t absurd. Life is Chess Boxing.

My high school drama teacher described theatre as “life without the boring bits”. It also works for novels, films, and poems.

In these stories, we typically meet characters at a critical turning point in their lives. We observe them work their way through a physical, intellectual, or moral dilemma that will forever alter them and their life’s journey. We witness them at their most vulnerable, decisive, timid, and triumphant.

It’s not that life on stage or screen is more exciting, it’s just that they are only showing us the peak moments.

There’s only a short window—perhaps 3-4 years—between which a child (1) can comprehend, and (2) still believes, in Santa.

My nephew is firmly in that window, and everyone in our family is relishing watching his joy. He skipped and laughed his way to bed (making sure he was asleep before Santa arrived), but not before he put out milk, cookies, and a little something for the reindeer.

It’s a window that comes and goes quickly, so we’re savouring it.

Restaurants, theme parks, customer service centres, ecommerce sites, and almost all services businesses: each have their own versions of “lines and waiting times”.

In simple terms, they can either (1) make people wait longer, keep utilisation high, and keep costs down, or (2) server people faster, have less efficient utilisation, and have a higher cost per unit of output to pay for the slack in the system.

Too far in one direction of and the business dies from churn. Too far in the other direction and the business dies from not making enough money.

There is no universal waiting time ratio. Each business decides what game they’re playing, and what objective and time period their optimising for.

When I think of the businesses I love, they’re almost always playing the long game at some expense to short term outcomes. And I’m certain that isn’t a coincidence.

I recently heard that no matter the talent or years of experience of a pilot, they’ll still use a pre-flight checklist.

I’m always on the hunt for examples of the basics done well, and this is one of them.

No pride, no arrogance, no hubris.

Just turning up and doing the rational thing over and over again.

I recently had an issue with a reservation made via Booking.com.

So I called them. They picked up the phone fast and resolved the issue promptly.

To provide that level of service, there needs to be some slack in the system. Someone needs to be trained, present at work, and waiting to take the call. Some people would view that as inefficiency ripe for trimming.

I view it as an investment in winning me over for the long haul. And it’s working!

“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”—John Maynard Keynes

If the formula is so simple, then we ought to investigate the when and the why behind holding on to beliefs longer than we should.

Changing our mind with enough time to act is a prized skill.

I get to see my nephew every 6 months if I’m lucky, and every 12 months in a normal year. I wish our reunions were more frequent.

A consistent theme each time were together is play. He’s a boy’s boy, so there’s a lot of wrestling, and running races, and lego building.

I used to think I was being helpful by suggesting activities, or leading the play session. But I’ve since switched to allowing my nephew to do all the leading. He decides what games we play and how we play them.

Young kids live a pretty structured life with school and their parents deciding what happens most hours of the day. But play time is different. It’s the one time where there are few limits, and they can decide how everything works.

I love seeing my nephew create worlds, and games, and rules, and ideas for how we should play. Seeing his creativity at work is a joy, because he’s not bound by anything.

Many people will rush to frame the problem as an ‘either / or’.

‘Either / or’ situations are simple. They’re binary. They’re clear.

However, too few question if that ‘either / or’ could be turned into an ‘and’—and thus miss out all the other possibilities that come with that change in mindset.

The holiday season is almost here, and when my family gets together, we usually play a lot of board games. And over the years, I’ve tried to move us away from competitive games to cooperative ones.

Even in the fiercest of games, we were never at risk of getting angry with one another, but the joy of overcoming challenges and succeeding together in cooperative games far outweighs the enjoyment derived from the more competitive games.

We’re tackling a time trick tackling card game this year called, [Crew]. The story evolves over 50 missions as the group aims to explore the outer reaches of the solar system to discover a new planet.

I was talking with a friend recently about writing for self vs. writing for others.

It reminded me of a [post] that Rohan wrote back in 2019—a whole 6 months before I started daily writing.

At it’s essence, the trade-off is between the intrinsic benefits from writing for yourself (e.g., growth, clarifying one’s thinking, enjoyment) and the extrinsic benefits from writing for others (e.g., a larger readership, reputation as a subject matter expertise, the opportunity to sell products and services).

I’m glad I chose to write for myself. I think I would’ve lost patience and interest long ago had a picked a niche and had to stick to it.

Staring at a blank canvas is hard.

We suffer from the burden of choice. Do we paint, or draw, print, or splatter?

But constraints lead to creativity. We forced to see more opportunities when we create artificial limitations.

So try it. Set a word limit for that presentation, sign up for that half marathon, or only move on to the next hobby until you’ve given the current one a good shot.

Create constraints and see what doors they open.

I recently posted about the non-linearity of returns when looking at the success of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

I’ve since come across another example and I couldn’t resist sharing.

A couple of days ago, Seth Godin posted about how Netflix released their first-ever in-depth analysis on the hours watched for the top 18,000 shows on their network. Data file here.

I took the data and plotted it on a chart. Immediately, we can see non-linear results.

The top show, the Night Agent: Season 1, had over 800 million hours streamed. This was 3x the title in 10th place, FUBAR: Season 1, with 266 million hours watched. And 8x the title in 100th place, That 90s Show – Part 1, with 95 million hours streamed. Once you get down to the 1,000th title, the top title had 37x the watch time.

The spoils are always non-linearly distributed.

At previous points in my career I’ve allowed myself to think thoughts like, “I’m doing well,” “I’m crushing this,” and “I’m finding this easy”.

Over time I’ve spotted a pattern: whenever I allow myself to think these thoughts, something unexpected happens to humble me.

I doubt that’s coincidence.

I’m not advocating for a constant state of fear or paranoia. But I do think there is something about keeping close tabs on our confidence.

A quiet confidence coupled with an awareness that things could go wrong any moment—that’s healthy.

Excessive confidence to the point where we have blind spots to issues and errors—that’s a recipe for pain.

Long time readers of this blog know that I read Steven Pressfield’s War of Art on an annual basis—primarily to re-inject the important lessons about fighting Resistance into my soul.

Despite reading Pressfield’s non-fiction books annually, I have yet to read one of his works of fiction. So I decided to pick up ‘The Legend of Bagger Vance’.

Apparently he spent 30 years toiling before finally having a hit with this book.

As I turn each page, it’s proof that Pressfield turned up each day and fought resistance. It’s adding a little extra kick to what’s an enthralling story.