A Learning a Day

Some days you’re the pigeon. Some days you’re the statue.

I remembered this one at the end of a recent statue day. As I’ve learned over and over, the best thing to do on those days is head to bed.

And try again tomorrow.

Bill Perkins, in his book Die with Zero, has a different take on the ant and the grasshopper.

In the original tale, the ant spends all summer storing food for winter while the grasshopper plays. When winter comes, the grasshopper has to crawl back to the ant, who takes him in. The lesson is usually about the importance of frugality and foresight.

Perkins pushes back on that. We overemphasize saving and forget that the entire point of saving is to eventually enjoy what you saved. The ant had a point. But so did the grasshopper.

The answer isn’t either extreme. It’s finding the middle, where you save enough and still spend it on being alive while you’re alive.

“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

The simplicity of this one made me smile.

One lesson I keep coming back to: a light dinner, something closer to 60% full than 80%, with fewer carbs where I can manage it, followed by a mile or mile-and-a-half walk, wrapped up at least two hours before bed.

It just feels so much better than any alternative.

One downside of AI being everywhere is the sheer volume of AI-generated crap now flooding feeds and workplaces alike.

I don’t spend much time on social feeds, but I hear about the challenges of keeping AI slop out. But I definitely have seen it in the workplace.

And here’s the thing: past a certain point, it’s easy to spot. There are patterns. Even at their best, models lack judgment and context.

The lesson for me is that AI is a power tool, and like any power tool, it takes skill to use well. You cannot outsource your thinking to it, and you cannot expect it to have good judgment when you’re solving intricate problems (at least not yet).

Where it shines: getting you past the blank page with a rough first draft, acting as a thought partner when you give it real context, brainstorming, analyzing data quickly, and editing through iterations of your own work.

Where it fails you: the moment you think you can hand something off and skip the thinking yourself.

Don’t outsource your thinking to AI.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that’s all there is.”
— Mr. Carson, Downton Abbey

I’ve never watched the show, but I thought this was beautiful.

Strip away everything else we chase, careers, money, recognition, and what’s actually left at the end is what we remember and who we remember it with.

Maybe that’s the only scoreboard worth keeping.

(H/T: Die with Zero by Bill Perkins)

In February 2020, a vet and wildlife conservationist named Sean McCormack met Elliot Newton, co-founder of Citizen Zoo, at a talk on beaver reintroduction.

Beavers had been extinct in Britain for roughly four hundred years. Over the next three years, McCormack, Newton, and a coalition of wildlife groups worked to bring five of them back to Paradise Fields, an old golf course in Ealing, West London, right next to a tube station that flooded every time it rained hard. The Ealing Beaver Project was born.

In October 2023, the beavers arrived, relocated from a wild population in Scotland.

Two and a half years later, Greenford station hasn’t flooded once. The beavers’ dams have turned the site into a wetland that now supports insects, fish, and birds that weren’t there before.

Nobody engineered a drainage solution. They released five rodents and let them do what beavers have always done.

Sometimes the best fix isn’t a new system. It’s restoring the one that used to work before we removed the part that was doing the job. That’s often the case with nature at the very least.

(H/T: The Daily Difference newsletter)

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

I’ve found this to be so true in my experience. It is easy to say there is light at the end of the tunnel. And there is.

But it isn’t always easy to see it.

Money is a global scoreboard. There’s a globally recognized list of the richest people, and an absolutely minuscule slice of the population could ever compete on it. For everyone else, money is relative. It’s local. A small amount goes a long way in some places and barely stretches in others.

Trying to land on any global list, richest, most followed, most anything, rarely adds up to much. Very little any of us does will be significant across generations. That’s just true, and it’s fine.

But that doesn’t mean nothing we do matters. Significance is a local concept. It lives in the people and living beings within range of your life, the ones you can actually touch. For most of us, that range holds far more weight than we tend to give it credit for.

Chasing likes, followers, or any metric everyone can measure and compare puts us on a global scoreboard built for envy. The real scoreboards, the ones worth keeping score on, are local.

Ed Sheeran had a wonderful note about writes music when he feels extreme emotion. On an ordinary day, the songs are fine, but they don’t carry the same depth. It’s when he’s exceptionally sad, or happy, or in love, or heartbroken that the good ones show up.

I’m no Ed Sheeran of course. But over the years, I’ve come to realize the same is true of writing.

When I write about something I feel indifferent about, the words don’t flow, even when the lesson underneath is a good one. They come out feeling… flat.

When I’m feeling something strongly, a memory of a moment in a national park, or sitting with the disappointment of a failure, the writing just hits better.

Embrace those extreme emotions, we must.