A Learning a Day

Yesterday I wrote about how Ed Sheeran stopped using his phone back in 2015. There’s a second half to that story he told at the concert.

A few years ago, Ed was sued over “Thinking Out Loud.” The family of Marvin Gaye’s co-writer accused him of copying the feel of an old hit – “Let’s Get It On.” He talked about what it’s like to live through something like that said something true about court cases. You lose when you lose, and you also lose when you win, because of everything the fight takes out of you along the way. His ran for the better part of a decade.

He decided to fight it because the claim was that he’d copied a chord progression. And you cannot own a chord progression. They’re the building blocks of songs, used in hundreds of them, free for everyone to reach for. It mattered so much to him that he said he’d have walked away from music for good if he’d lost. And, to make his point, he played many songs before and after “Let’s Get It On” that all use the same chord to the grand jury (and won).

Here’s where the phone story comes full circle. As part of the case, he had to dig out that 2015 phone and switch it back on for discovery. Waiting inside were messages from a friend who has since died, arguments with an ex, conversations with family he’s no longer close to. A lot of old baggage that him all at once.

Out of that came a song, “Old Phone.” Writing it was how he closed the chapter, and then he put the phone away again.

He ended the story with a beautiful note about making music about a bad memory. When you go through something hard, creating a song about the experience means you’re able to walk away with gratitude.

This applies well beyond making music of course.

We don’t choose bad situations. But if we find the learning in it, we’ve made the best of it.

I found my old phone today
So full of love, yet so full of hate
I put it back inside there from whence it came
Nothing good will come from regretting

Conversations with my dead friends
Messages from all my exes
I kinda think that this was best left
There in the past, where it belongs
I feel an overwhelming sadness
Of all the friends I do not have left
Seeing how my family has fractured
Growin’ up and movin’ on

Ed Sheeran hasn’t used a phone since 2015.

He’d kept the same number since he was a teenager, and by the time he was famous, he was receiving thousands of texts a day. It got in the way of being present, so he cut it. Now he has an iPad, spends about an hour a week replying to email, and that’s it.

He’s often shared an example of how this has changed his life. He’s at dinner with his wife, and she gets up to go to the bathroom. Anyone in his position would reach for the phone and start scrolling. Ed just sits there. And it’s in that quiet, doing nothing, that his best lyrics and melodies tend to arrive.

What I love about this is how clear he is on what actually matters. Being a social media sensation does nothing for him if he isn’t making great music. And if the music is the point, then the job is to build a life with the conditions for it.

For Ed, that means doing the one thing few, if any, celebrities, will do. He turns off the phone.

It never ceases to amaze me how consistently I underestimate the effect tiredness has on my demeanour and mindset.

When I’m running on low battery, everything tilts to the wrong end. The small annoyance becomes a grievance. The neutral comment sounds like a dig. The manageable problem feels immovable. And the whole time, I’m convinced I’m seeing the world as it is — not noticing the lens itself is messed up.

Tiredness is sneaky precisely because it hides its tracks. It doesn’t show up as tiredness; it disguises itself as a bad day, a difficult person, a real problem.

So when everything suddenly feels heavier, the first question isn’t what’s wrong. It’s whether I’m tired.

With the people we play long-term games with — family, close friends, anyone we’re in it with for the long haul — one thing is easy to forget: some days, our energies simply won’t match.

You could call these moods, but moods feel more momentary. Energy feels like a better term.

For example, one of you wakes up restless, wanting to get things done in a hurry; the other is happy to move slowly and relax. One is buzzing, the other is flat.

In close relationships especially, it’s easy to let that mismatch curdle into an argument — to read meaning into it, to treat it as a sign of something bigger.

But most of the time, the whole solution is just to be aware of it.

This one hit me recently because I’ve been guilty of the opposite — reading too much into a passing mismatch and letting it spoil a perfectly good day, when I could have simply shrugged and said: today isn’t quite working. We’ll try again tomorrow.

“You must never give in to despair. Allow yourself to slip down that road and you surrender to your lowest instincts. In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

Our inner strength = our ability to summon hope.

Beautiful.

One of the harder truths to internalize is that there’s very little correlation between a problem being difficult and a problem being valuable.

It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming the two travel together. If something is taking all our effort and ingenuity, surely it must matter — and we take the struggle itself as proof we’re doing important work.

But difficulty and value sit on separate axes. Plenty of brutally hard problems are worth little once solved. And some of the most valuable ones are relatively simple — but executing them well is worth a lot.

So, as you attempt to build your career and find yourself drawn to hard problems, make sure they’re also valuable ones to solve.

Before you go on a grueling ten-mile hike, try a three-miler.

Before you run a marathon, it helps to have a few ten-mile runs in your legs.

Before you ship a risky change, ship something smaller and safer first.

And before you transfer a massive amount of money, do the ten-dollar test.

It doesn’t matter what we’re attempting. A trial run goes a long way toward surfacing the kinks in the process before the real launch.

Make space for the trial run.

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 24 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it.

I think that’s what awe really is. We reach for the word “awesome” in the moments something helps us see our own insignificance — and windows into nature do that for me every time. So this is my small way of sharing it, and passing it along.

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Some places are named after people or rivers. Yoho is named after a feeling. The word comes from a Cree expression of “awe.” It’s rare for a place to promise wonder in its name, and rarer still for it to deliver.

Emerald Lake alone earns it. We stayed by the water and canoed out onto it, and the whole thing felt faintly unreal — glacial meltwater in a shade of green that looks invented, ringed by close peaks, snow, and dark treeline. A quintessential scene in the Rockies.

The waterfalls carry the theme in their names. Takakkaw, the second-tallest in Canada, comes from a Cree word meaning roughly “it is magnificent.” The place keeps naming its own feelings.

There’s history threaded through it too. Kicking Horse Pass, which runs through the park, was the route the Canadian Pacific Railway chose through the Rockies — the corridor that finally linked British Columbia to the rest of the country by rail in 1885.

If that wasn’t enough, high in these mountains sits the Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil sites on Earth. It holds soft-bodied sea creatures more than 500 million years old — a near-perfect record of the moment complex animal life first flourished. The creatures are marine, yet they rest near a mountaintop, because this entire range was once the floor of an ancient sea, later pushed toward the sky.

It is amazing to think that you climb a mountain in British Columbia and arrive at the bottom of a vanished ocean from the dawn of animal life.

Yoho is deserving of “awe.”

I wrote about hiking yesterday and mentioned “switchbacks.” On a steep hike, the trail almost never goes straight up. It zigzags — long diagonal legs cutting back and forth across the slope, taking you what feels like sideways when all you want is up. These are switchbacks, and there are two good reasons for them.

The obvious one is that they make the climb bearable. Straight up a steep face is brutal on the legs and lungs; angling across the slope softens the grade to something a body can actually sustain.

The second reason is erosion. Water runs fast down a straight line. A trail cut straight up a hillside becomes a channel — the rain hollows it out, carries the soil away, and in a few seasons the path is a gully. A switchback holds the trail at a gentle, even grade, so the water slows and the hillside stays intact.

So, while it might feel inefficient in short bursts, the winding design solves for efficiency over the long run.

We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life.

When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one.

Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that almost no one’s in competition. They’re on their path, you’re on yours, and there’s a quiet warmth in the nods you exchange.

The steep hikes usually save a viewpoint for the top — a lake or a valley opening up beneath you. Those views never come easy, much like most things worth having.

And you never reach them in a straight line. You climb switchbacks, you take the winding route, you stumble here and there.

One step at a time, up a winding path, with the occasional misstep.

Much like life.