Dan's Daily

In school, the teacher gave us questions, and we had to do our best to come up with the answers.

Nassim Taleb says that in real life, it’s the opposite.

Other people give us answers, and we need to come up with the best corresponding questions.

A job offer.

A reason why a project succeeded or failed.

A game plan to save and invest our money.

Isn’t it crazy that we’re trained for 20 years to answer, but then most future success depends on our ability to ask good questions.

It’s making me 1) think twice about how I’d like to raise my future children: encouraging and praising their questions more than their answers, and 2) invest more in forming the right questions rather than simply accepting the answers I’m given.

20 million years ago, the island of Fuerteventura emerged in the Atlantic Ocean due to volcanic activity.

Situated a few hundred kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara, the small collection of Canary Islands are lonely out here.

The landscape is unlikely anything I’ve seen before. It is barren, arid, and hella windy. It’s also likely the closest I’ll ever come to experiencing Mars.

Here’s a snap of Maru exploring.

Good morning from the Canary Islands!

I’m writing this post from a small cafe on the island of Fuerteventura, and it feels amazing to be travelling outside the UK for the first time in almost 18 months.

I’ve been particularly cautious with COVID precautions since the start of the pandemic, but the risk / reward ratio recently swung in favour of getting some sun and salt water.

Many of us have come to the realisation there will be no “normalisation” moment where, all of a sudden, life goes back to how it was.

And if there is no definitive moment, then it’s up to each of us to look at our situation and decide when, where, and how we’re willing to take a risk.

I’m taking a moment today to pause, acknowledge, and appreciate the ability to travel again. I don’t take it lightly.

Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.

This letter touches on a tough subject: the grief we experience when a close friend passes away.

This was the first letter where I disagreed with many of Seneca’s points. For example, Seneca advocates against an extended period of mourning following the death of a friend. This view is at odds with modern medicine and psychology which advocates for a process of healthy grieving. I think we can forgive Seneca for holding some of these views 2,000 years ago, as there is still a lot of timeless wisdom in this letter we can learn from.

1. Greedily enjoy your friends

None of know how long we’ll get with our friends.

Yet we live as though they’ll always be there.

When we spend time with them, we should acknowledge—even if it’s just in our own minds—that one day we’ll lose them.

And when we inevitably lose them, because our time with them was so rich, we’ll still feel like they’re with us.

2. Find the pleasant loss

If the pain of loss is too great, we’ll never revisit our memories of that friend.

Seneca encourages us to “see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.” Even if “the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; there is a pleasure even in this sting.”

3. Don’t let modern life and its troubles come before your friends

Our best friends can live close by, yet we can be too focused on our work to spend time with them. Or perhaps we move to live in a distant land and slowly lose touch.

It’s easy to be careless and frivolous with our friendships—to be scarcely aware we’ve lost time whilst those we love are still alive.

4. Time does heal, but it’s not the only way

Although I don’t completely agree, I feel I must touch on Seneca’s view point here. He acknowledges that time eventually heals, however, his advice is for us to “abandon grief, rather than have grief abandon you.”

This is in line with a the key Stoic principle: we don’t control what happens to us, but we control both how we perceive that event, and how we respond to it.

5. Don’t take today, and your friendships, for granted

I think this point is best summarised by Seneca himself:

“Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.”

Many problems in the workplace stem from either a lack of, or poor, communication.

So when in doubt, try overcommunicate.

The worst that can happen is your manager, team mate, or collaborator will say they already get the point.

The alternative, however, could result in hours or days spent in confusion and chaos.

Another good thing to remember is it’s unlikely that others know our problem space like we do. What may feel like overcommunication to us could be just the right amount of context for them to understand what’s going on.

An epithet is a phrase expressing an attribute regarded as characteristic of a person.

Marcus Aurelius, one of my favourite examples of wise and just leadership, used to have “epithets for the self”. These would be simple words that he could repeat to himself to prepare him for conversations or challenges ahead.

Aurelius’ were: upright, modest, straightforward, sane, and cooperative.

What kind of person do you want to be?

What will be your epithet?

I loved visiting the ancient city of Pompeii back in 2018. Located close to modern day Naples, Pompeii was buried in 4-6 metres of volcanic ash from a Mt. Vesuvius eruption almost 2,000 years ago. The city was largely preserved under the ash, so once excavated, it give us an amazing snapshot into what life was like in the ancient world.

Spoiler alert, it’s much the same! They lived in homes, had bakeries, schools, and gymnasiums. The mechanics of daily life have barely changed.

One of the things that stood out to me was a mosaic tiling in the one of the homes. It was an image of man’s best friend, with an accompanying message, “Beware of the Dog!”. Dogs were clearly an important part of the social fabric of families and society back then.

At the time, I said to my family, “Isn’t it amazing that we have the same relationships with dogs today as they did in the ancient world?”

I didn’t stop to think about how much further back this relationship actually started.

However, this week I came across a study where zoo archaeologists and evolutionary biologists teamed up to find that “sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape. Beside them ran wolflike creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp. These were the world’s first dogs.”

If true, the earliest known domestication of dogs was 23,000 years ago! To put this in perspective, we only started farming 11,000 years ago, and were completely nomadic before this.

Maru and I are dog people, and we can’t wait to one day have a dog of our own. And there may just be 23,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to explain why!

I came across a great study published in April this year that proved a positive relationship between listening to natural sounds and physical and mental health.

“Of the three types of natural sounds (birds, water, and mixed), we found that water sounds had the largest mean effect size for health… and bird sounds had the largest mean effect size for stress and annoyance.”

This information is great, but it’s only useful if we do something with it.

Will this change your sound track for tomorrow?

Why not try this.

I try to keep a structured set of bookmarks to store the articles and pages I find on the web. But no matter how hard I try, I end up with an unwieldy collection of bookmark folders, sub-folders, and lists of webpages that are hard to manage.

A couple months ago, my friend Andrew told me about Pinboard, a simple, online bookmarking product. The mechanics that stood out to me were: 1) whenever you add a bookmark, you also take 2 seconds to add a few ‘tags’ that describe the contents of the page, and 2) you use search to quickly find the relevant tags / bookmarks.

There are people who have tens of thousands of bookmarks on Pinboard, and they love the product.

So I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m finding it great so far for $22 a year. Now, $22 a year may seem like a lot for a bookmarking service, but now we get to the real reason why Andrew told me about Pinboard.

Pinboard is built and maintained by one-man operation, Maciej Cegłowski. Via Pinboard, he’s making a point: that you don’t need VC money or a scale-at-all-costs approach to have a successful tech company.

He has users who love his product, he is contactable by email or on twitter for any of his customers to ask questions or suggest product ideas.

He’s built a different type of tech company. And I like it for both the service, and for what it stands for.

In particularly stressful periods, I’ve found a specific journaling habit to be a cathartic salve.

Sit down with pen and paper—or your preferred writing app—and hold no expectations. There’s no word count. There’s no grammar book. There’s no expected structure or form.

All you need to do is write.

As wide-ranging or as random as each sentence may seem, write it down. Let your subconscious out.

And continue writing.

And continue.

Until there is nothing left.

You’ll feel a weight lifted when the last sentence is finished.

Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.

This letter is a short one with a couple of sound ideas to ponder over.

1. Spend time with the eminent dead

Seneca says, “I spend my time in the company of all the best; no matter in what lands they may have lived, or in what age, I let my thoughts fly to them.”

We have instant access to the wisest humans in history. Each time we pick up one of their books, it’s an opportunity to listen, converse, disagree, and debate with the ideas that have stood the test of time.

By absorbing the best lessons of the eminent dead, it’s a shortcut—a cheat code of sorts—to help us live a better life. There’s no need for us to learn these lessons through personal experience when we can learn vicariously from the best.

2. We control our own hours. No excuses.

Many people hide behind the excuse that they’re busy. They can’t get fit, eat well, start that business, or spend more time with friends and family, because of one reason or another.

Seneca criticises this point of view. He says, “I do not surrender myself to my affairs, but loan myself to them, and I do not hunt out excuses for wasting my time.”

We’d be furious if someone stole our possessions, so why do we let others steal our time without any protest?

There really are no excuses for how we spend our time.

Think about the people you love most.

Imagine them in your mind’s eye.

Do you regret any time spent with them?

No one regrets spending more time with the people they love.

That’s a recipe for no regrets.

I had my first personal training session in 2+ years today.

I’ve been trying to reach some new health and fitness goals this year, and I’ve hit a ceiling. My diet, strength training, and cardio programmes haven’t changed, my progress has flat-lined, and now I’m worried about regression.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is… you know it!

So I’m changing the inputs.

I’m getting a personal trainer who knows more, has more experience, and can help chart a course to break through barriers that I can’t seem to do alone.

When progress stalls, think about changing the inputs.

An Amazon Fresh store opened close to home today.

The store uses Amazon Go technology, which partially automates the supermarket experience by allowing you to purchase products without being checked out by a cashier. You simply put items in your bag, walk out, and receive an email a few hours later with your receipt.

Ever since the concept was announced in 2018, I’ve been eager to try it. And considering it only took Amazon 3 years to open one of these stores within 5 mins walk from our home, it’s an impressive example of Amazon’s speed and scale.

As a product manager, part of my job is trying to break my own products—to make sure they work—before releasing them to the public. So when other companies bring new products to market, I often find myself deliberately trying to break them.

I put lots of items in my basket, walked around the store, added more items, and then went back and put half of the items back on the shelves.

When I left the store, the receipt was with me in a few hours and was 100% accurate.

Not having to wait in line, no scanning or re-bagging, and simply walking out with my shopping was a surreal experience, and one that made the supermarket experience much better.

Our families, teams, companies, and societies only get better when people—like you and I—look at how things are today and feel unsatisfied.

Never being satisfied is the first step to seeing the possibility of what our world could be.

Never being satisfied is a habit for how we should be thinking about and approaching these problems.

Never being satisfied is necessary for progress.