Dan's Daily

I ordered a bottle of San Pellegrino sparkling water in Rhodes, Greece.

The label claimed Italian heritage, but Singaporean import information, as well as Australian recycling instructions, and something else in Greek.

I chuckled and imagined a San Pellegrino branding executive telling their label designer to go off in a bunch of directions without thinking about the whole.

I enjoy noticing these oddities and trying to piece together why they happened.

The experience of swimming in a bay filled with rocks and sea urchins is made infinitely more enjoyable with a pair of goggles and water shoes.

Being able to see what’s below the surface and place your feet anywhere without risk of an injury gives the swimmer peace of mind to explore without fear.

These two small things have an outsized impact on the overall experience.

What other small things make other experiences infinitely more enjoyable?

Trial and error is not an end point. It’s a loop.

We try, we err, we make note of what needs to change, and we repeat the process. Over and again.

Formula 1 is a tough sport to break into. There are only 20 drivers in the world who make it onto the “grid” each year.

With 2-3 of those being sons of billionaires who have paid their way in, and with some drivers staying in the sport for over 20 years, even winning junior championships, like Formula 2, doesn’t guarantee you a place the top flight. In fact, most aspiring racers invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and spend most of their teens away from home, only to miss out on their dream to race in Formula 1.

Why all this backstory? Well, I’ve been following the junior career of Liam Lawson for the past 2 years. He’s a Kiwi, and is currently New Zealand’s best shot at having one of our own on the Formula 1 grid.

He has done everything right through the junior categories; a blend of consistency, good results, and luck. And until recently he was the reserve driver for Red Bull racing, available to race if one of their drivers was unable to.

Last month Australian driver, Daniel Ricciardo, broke his hand in a crash during practice, and Lawson got his call up. Lawson has now completed two races in Formula 1, and held his own with a respectable 13th and 11th place finishes.

With few expectations on him to perform, success was (1) not making fatal mistakes, (2) being more-or-less on the pace compared with other drivers. And he’s done both of those things.

There is a good chance that via his stint as an injury replacement, he’s made a great case for a permanent seat in 2024.

With the odds of making it to Formula 1 being so slim, I’m thrilled with how Lawson has performed, and I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that we get Kiwi on the grid next year.

Keep asking questions until people stop having answers.

At that point, you’ve likely found the edge.

Keeping probing around that edge, and like the cartographers of old, you’ll start to map the outline of a new land.

You’ll find the problem yet to be solved, the broken process where things fall apart, or the team culture that needs a reset.

The middle is known. The edge is full of opportunity.

Imagine what the world would look like if the global cumulative effort put into coming up with excuses was put into doing the work.

Excuses are like comfort food. They satisfy in the short term, but we know they’re the wrong fuel for the journey ahead.

My local park has a run club every Wednesday evening.

I’m not a member, but I often seem them doing their thing when I’m on my way back from touch rugby. They run a small circuit, so I often see the same people pass me multiple times as I make my way through the park.

The few vocal people in the group make me smile. They are keeping with the pace, but have also got the energy to shout encouraging phrases at the rest of the group.

“You’ve got this!”

“Nice work, Alan!”

“Keep it up!”

When a team is out of breath, tired, and struggling, sometimes all it takes is one person to muster the energy to throw out some positive energy.

From the smiles I saw on the faces of the other runners, it sure works.

Some of you may recall Maru and I recently repotted all the plants in our home.

Everything looked to have gone to plan until we found spider mites and fungus gnats on one of our larger plants.

We quickly sequestered him, and I began a neem oil treatment: a spray followed by a drench in the neem oil solution.

But the bugs wouldn’t abate.

Maru then googled what a proper neem oil drench is (I’m the eyeballer, she’s the googler), and my “drench” was a light sprinkling in comparison.

So yesterday we placed our plant in the bathtub, and we poured multiple litres of the neem oil solution into the pot, ensuring the treatment reached all parts of the plant’s soil.

I don’t want to celebrate prematurely, but it’s been 24 hours, and we’ve yet to encounter a bug.

Some problems need a good drench. A light watering won’t do.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Or big.

Or flashy.

Or even successful.

By beginning, we allow ourselves to learn something we wouldn’t have otherwise.

We can take that learning and channel it into bigger and better things.

Just start.

Maru and I are heading to Poland next weekend for a wedding. It’ll be the first time either of us will have visited the country, and we’re excited to explore around Krakow for a few days.

We’ll be staying in the Old Town, and I was recommended the restaurant Chlopskie Jadlo by one of my Polish colleagues. We plan to walk around the town and explore and get lost.

If any of you have been before, would love to hear your recommendations!

It’s great if people read and find value in these posts. But the real value in writing them is learning how and what I think about a topic.

Writing isn’t a means to an end, it’s an end in and of itself.

We have five closed terrariums in our home. I’ve posted about them before. They range in age from freshly planted to 4 years old.

A few of the older ones have dead plant matter and a small amount of mould growing inside them. So this week I bought a starter colony of springtails.

Springtails are tiny critters, about 1mm in length, that feed on mould and other decaying matter. They’re the perfect bioactive additions to a terrarium.

I need to figure out how to keep the culture alive first, let them breed a little, and then transfer them to their new homes.

Our terrariums to date have been an almost-microcosm of the larger ecosystems found in nature. However, with the addition of springtails, they’re soon to become bio-active habitats with their own little clean-up crews.

Most good things require consistent effort over a long period of time.

But in the toil of our day-to-day work, there is such a thing as healthy impatience.

It’s the do-it-today attitude.

It’s the “we must fix this problem for our customers” mindset.

It’s the conviction that work done today will make tomorrow easier.

Like any tool, though, we must learn when and how to use it effectively.

Sun Tzu is attributed the original idea that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”. I’m not one for using war-based analogies in the workplace, so I enjoyed learning of Steve Blanks’ modified saying that “no plan survives first contact with customers”.

It’s true. We can plan all we want, but what we first launch to market is unlikely to be what customers want. And when they share with us what they actually want, it’s up to us to either ignore them and stubbornly execute our original plan, or take heed of timeless advice and make changes to our product.

A little more patience.

A little more persistence.

And little more progress with each day that goes by.

It’ll add up.