Dan's Daily

I was a too ambitious earlier this week.

In trying to hit a personal best in the gym, my mind was so focused on the lift that I forgot to breathe. My head quickly went into a spin, and my vision was mildly blurry for the next 10 minutes as I waited for the headache to subside.

In order to grow we need to embrace new stresses, but it’s also easy to push ourselves too far—to go beyond what we’re capable of.

Knowing our limits, but still maintaining some margin for error, is a hard balance to achieve, but one that’s necessary for proper growth.

I first came across ‘United Breaks Guitars’ about 10 years ago.

It’s a song and music video from a disgruntled passenger who had his guitar broken by United. After 9 months of stonewalling from the airline, he took things into his own hands by writing a country song about his frustrations.

It’s always been a fun and funny ditty that I’ve enjoyed coming back to over the years. However, earlier this week Maru shared a case study with me that analysed the impact the song had on the company, and it was astounding.

Apparently, United lost $180m in value, or 10% of its market capitalisation, following the viral spread of the video. The cost of the broken guitar? $3,500. The cost of the song and music video? $150.

Music and comedy—both great tools for keeping companies and organisations honest.

I love love love this prank by art collective, MSCHF.

They bought an original Andy Warhol sketch for $20,000, and mixed it randomly into a stack of 999 exact forgeries of the original sketch. For $250, buyers could purchase one of the 1,000 artworks for sale.

“By burying a needle in a needle stack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications.”

I love this prank because it wrestles with so many ideas and themes in one project: value, destruction, quality, aesthetics, probability, fraud, ownership, and many more.

For example, if no one knows who actually has the original, would it be fair to say there are now 1,000 owners of the Warhol sketch?

Is this forgery spectacle an admirable, progressive form of art, or is it simply disrespectful to Warhol?

I’m a big fan.

I’m trying to get into the habit of organising more things on Friday evenings.

After a long week at work, I usually feel pretty tired once Friday rolls round.

But whenever I make plans—whether its just Maru and I, or with friends—I wake up on a Saturday morning feeling like I’ve already had a weekend evening.

Of course the weekend isn’t actually any longer, it just feels longer.

And sometimes, we may not need a change in reality, but rather a change in our perception of that reality, to improve our quality of life.

That being said, I’d also accept a 4-day work week 😉

I like how daily writing gives me a chance to discover, externalise, and give structure to a nebulous thought that’s been floating around in my mind.

Another benefit is the habit of disagreeing with myself.

As the words move from my head and onto paper, my subconscious begins a sense check: do I really agree with what I’m writing?

Sometimes I’ll be halfway through a post when I realise I either disagree, or don’t believe as strongly, in what I’m writing as I first thought I did.

Richard Feynman once said, “You must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Daily writing can be a helpful tool to realise and recognise the gaps in our thinking.

Daniel Kahneman is attributed with the saying, “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

I think this phrase can often be interpreted as an ‘either/or’, rather than an ‘and’ statement.

Numbers hold truth; story adds emotion and believability.

On our recent trip to Greece, Maru and I revisited Paros—an island we travelled to back in 2013.

We had a few cherished photos from our first trip that we thought would be fun to re-create 8 years later.

It was also fun remembering the spots and trying to find them again (we didn’t tag, rate, or review things on Google Maps back then!).

Here are a few of our favourites!

I’m really enjoying making my way through the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

I’m listening to everything from heavy metal, to 50s jazz, to 90s grunge, and I’ve been lucky to already hit a lot of albums from my favourite musical decade: the 70s.

One of the things I like to do is read the wikipedia page on the album before I listen to it. It’s always helpful to put the album in context.

One of the albums I listened to this month was Steve Winwood’s ‘Arc of a Diver’. The thing that stood out to me was Steve “played all the instruments, wrote all the music, and produced and engineered it himself.”

Steve has the credits for: lead and backing vocals, pianos, synthesizers, organ, acoustic guitar, electric guitars, mandolin, bass, drums, percussion, drum machine, production, engineering, mixing.

And when I listened to the opening track, While You See A Chance, I was floored that a single person in 1980 could produce the entire thing solo.

There’s a reason why musicians often write songs together—it’s much easier to write a song when you can build on each other’s ideas and energy. So I’m super impressed when a musician has the vision and perspective to pull something off by themselves.

Hope you enjoy listening to the tune as much as I did!

I chuckled at work today when I found this.

I like how whoever put it there just wanted to make someone laugh.

Nothing more, nothing less.

There’s a space between email and chat, and I’d like to find it.

The majority of companies rely on email for scaled communication, but there are so many problems with email:

• It’s “non-persistent”. Only the people who receive the email can search or access its contents at a future date.
• It discourages healthy debate. The sender holds a lot of power, and there are significant barriers to reader participation (i.e., it can be daunting to Reply All).
• It’s disconnected. You can’t link to an email, nor can you reference it in a more efficient way than, “As per the email sent by X on the 15th of October…”

Many start-ups, however, have moved the majority of their communication to chat (e.g., Slack). Again, there are so many problems with chat:

• It’s noisy. Chat lowers the bar for communication quality, meaning people put less effort into chat messages than email. The increase in message volume, and the decrease in quality of those messages, is a dangerous combination.
• It results in decisions getting lost. If a decision is made in chat, it’s 1) hard to find, and 2) hard to prove to anyone that wasn’t in the chat.
• It’s a distraction from the most important work. We rarely need to respond to chat messages right away, but it’s easier to write a chat message to a colleague than it is to sit down with a pen and paper and solve the hardest problem on our plates.

Unfortunately, I think the “golden place” between these two requires a massive shift in a company’s communication culture. It requires individuals and teams to commit to writing and publishing their work in a public space. For example, every team posts about their progress, everyone employee posts about what they’re working on, and the leadership team posts about upcoming changes or announcements. And underpinning it all is amazing search, navigation, sorting, and filtering functionality—allowing anyone to access any post or document.

I think P2 from WordPress is the closest thing I can find. Notion is another possibility, but I think it’s more text editor than team organiser. Additionally, since I’ve been at Facebook, I’ve found Workplace to be a powerful tool for public accountability between teams.

But I don’t think any of these completely crushes it.

And so I’m keen to hear from you. How does your company communicate? Email? Chat? A mixture of both? Would you say your company does a good job of scaled communication, or do they suffer from the above challenges?

I loved this song created only from the sounds of 45 years’ worth of Apple software and products.

Each sound—both electronic and tactile—transported me back to one of my own Apple memories: turning on my first Macbook, spinning the click wheel on my first iPod, or the instantaneous pairing of my AirPods.

The song provides another way to appreciate Apple’s attention to detail across their vast range of products.

“It’s the one game you can expense at Shopify,” says its CEO, Tobi Lütke.

Factorio is a real-time strategy game that follows an engineer who crash-lands on an alien planet and must harvest resources and create industry to build a rocket to escape.

The reason why Lütke allows Shopify employees to expense the game—and is a big advocate of video games in general—is because it simulates business decision making in a low pressure environment. Players have to employ systems thinking and constantly trade off between short and long term outcomes.

Unlike in the business world where people only get to make a few bets per year, strategy video games allow players to make many bets, many mistakes, and allows for many iterations in a short amount of time.

Video games can help players develop an intuitive feeling for strategic decisions, which then leaves more mental energy for solving complex, human challenges in the real world (i.e., if we know what the right strategic choice is, how do we convince and influence others to buy into that vision?).

Video games can be good!

H/T: Aaron Edelheit’s article on video gaming and it’s benefits for business and investing.

I must make an admission: I’m a big Formula 1 fan.

I’ve been a fan for more than a year now, but I didn’t really want to admit it.

You see, I’ve never closely followed a sports team (save for maybe the All Blacks, but that’s an issue of national pride rather than of genuine sporting interest). Additionally, I previously thought Formula 1 just “a bunch of cars going round in circles.”

But one evening last year, in the middle of lockdown, I stumbled upon Netflix’s ‘Drive to Survive’, and it changed everything.

Through the documentary series covering the 2018-2020 seasons, I discovered the personalities, the politics, the science, the speed, the technology, the strategy, and the drama… and I got hooked.

So I thought I’d dip my toes in the water by watching one race. When I didn’t get bored, I watched another. And then I started listening to podcasts where pundits would debate each race, and then I went into YouTube rabbit holes on race strategy, and then I started reading up on car aerodynamics, and then one day, I admitted to myself: I’m a fan.

Given this blog is a big part of my life, it felt a little weird not mentioning this new-found passion. But don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a motorsports blog. I just wanted to share, and see if any readers also followed!

And if you don’t yet, I hope you enjoy Drive to Survive 😉

Some think Coldplay are over the hill; that after 20 years of chart domination, there isn’t much exploration left for the band to do.

Despite the critics, I’ve enjoyed playing their new album, Music of the Spheres, over the last few days.

In particular, I’ve been enjoying ‘Let Somebody Go’ and ‘❤️’. The latter being a collaboration with Jacob Collier, a musician who I’ve raved about in an earlier post.

Sometimes an artist won’t push the boundaries, or maybe they release something that sounds a lot like their previous work, but it strikes a chord, and we still enjoy listening to it.

Let that be enough.

I try and make my team environment the safest place for dissenting opinions.

Everyone agreeing is a recipe for average products, services, and businesses.

We only get to the best answer when we’re allowed to ask the toughest questions, and then debate the possible answers in a collaborative, open, and fair way.

So next time when someone shares a dissenting opinion, try and make point of thanking them publicly, encourage others to do the same, and then let me know if you found it helpful!