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.
#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.
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.
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.
We were driving on an unpaved road the other day when a car appeared from the opposite direction. As it passed, we all exclaimed at the cloud of dust it threw up.
And then I stole a glance behind us. Sure enough, we were kicking up an enormous trail of dust of our own.
We notice the noise and inconvenience someone else creates so quickly and so clearly — while often staying completely blind to the identical mess trailing behind us.
When we point a finger at someone else, there are three that point right back at us.
I get a small sense of dread at a group dinner when the waiter takes everyone’s order and rushes off without repeating a word of it back. It’s remarkable how often that ends in a wrong plate arriving at the table.
There’s research on this. A well-known study found that waiters who repeated the order back to customers — word for word — earned close to 70% more in tips. One simple move that both saves heartache while boosting pay.
But the principle runs well beyond a dinner table. Replaying the key takeaways at the end of a conversation. Confirming the next steps before everyone leaves a meeting. Making sure the room is actually on the same page before moving on.
All of these are almost embarrassingly basic — which is exactly why they get skipped.
Sometimes excellence is just the ability to do the simple things consistently.
We stayed at a place recently that didn’t have Wi-Fi in the rooms. If you wanted to get online, you had to walk out to the common area.
Which meant no internet first thing in the morning.
There was something quietly wonderful about waking up with no way to reach for the inbound from the world before the day had properly begun.
It got me thinking about how easily the phone hands my morning over to someone else. Open the internet the moment you wake, and you step straight into other people’s agendas — their news, their requests, their urgency — before you’ve had a single thought of your own.
That small bit of friction, the walk to the common area, gave the morning back to me. A little space to start the day on my own terms.
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve come back and I’m working to hold onto that. The friction is gone, so the intention has to come from me. More to follow…
A teammate shared a lesson this week that a former CEO used to talk about: don’t pave the cow path.
It’s a beautiful warning against taking an inefficient, accidental process and simply making it faster or more permanent.
The image behind it is perfect. Cow paths are meandering trails worn into the ground by cattle wandering more or less at random. When towns grew up around them, people often just paved right over those crooked trails — locking in routes that no one would ever have designed on purpose.
It has no shortage of applications today. We inherit a clunky workflow and reach straight for automation, never pausing to ask whether the workflow should exist in the first place. Speed up a broken process and all you’ve got is a faster broken process — a nicely paved cow path.
So before automating, it’s worth the time to figure out whether you’re automating the right thing at all.
#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 23 | 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.
It’s hard to visit Jasper and not reckon with the wildfire of 2024. The evidence goes on for miles — hillside after hillside of blackened, branchless trunks. It feels like walking through a forest graveyard.
It was fascinating to understand the why. For thousands of years, the Indigenous people who lived here understood fire as part of a healthy forest — regular, small burns that cleared out dead wood and made room for new growth. They regularly left their campfires burning because the campfire itself told them something about the forest’s health: in a healthy forest it would burn out on its own. In a sick one, thick with deadfall, it would burn and burn.
When the parks were established, that knowledge was pushed out along with the people who held it. Officials suppressed fire for the better part of a century, and the dead wood kept piling up. Jasper, like many National Parks, has since embraced prescribed burning — but it’s playing catch-up against a hundred years of accumulated fuel.
The second amazing thing about the park was the wildlife. For all its remoteness and wildness, Jasper teems with life. Barely a drive along Maligne Lake Road or up to Miette Hot Springs passed without some encounter — an animal at the roadside, a herd in the trees.
My last memory came on the boat across Maligne Lake, out to Spirit Island — one of the canonical images of the Canadian Rockies. High treelines, still water, and trees without end. It has everything that makes these majestic Rockies what they are.
On that same boat, a park ranger said something that’s stayed with me. Home, for most of us, is a place — an address, four walls. For the Indigenous people of this land, she said, home is wherever the sun touches your skin.
It’s a far more expansive way to think about the word. And it leaves a question worth carrying long after you leave: what would the world feel like if we treated every place the way we treat home?
A Learning a Day 