Month: June 2023

Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations where we’re debating whether or not to carry something with us. Should we take a cap or that extra bottle of water when it doesn’t feel like it’ll be needed?

If you’re debating whether to take something with you and the cost of carrying it is low, the optimal decision is to simply take it with you.

If you don’t end up needing it, the cost was low anyway.

And if you do, you can now feel great about your decision making and skip cursing yourself for not acting on an impulse.

One of my favorite delight features on the iPhone is the ability to easily share wifi passwords. This could happen when a guest asks for your wifi at home or when you’re traveling to a new place. Trying to relay an alphanumeric password is a high friction experience.

But not anymore.

Once you have the wifi working on your device, all the other person has to do is to go to settings and click the network. You’re immediately asked if you want to share the password. And then you’re presented with this lovely confirmation.

Repeat as many times as needed.

I’m sure this little feature competed with many other small nits/requests on the product team’s backlog. I’m so glad they prioritized and shipped it.

The simplest way to delight a user is to reduce friction.

There’s a lot we learn about ourselves when we simply put ourselves outside our comfort zone.

It is one thing to play good football in training and in home conditions. It is quite another thing to do so in difficult away conditions, in difficult weather, and when we’re a goal down.

This is a reconstructed org chart of the Papal offices from the 1300s. It describes all the key officers and their respective organizations for a staff of 500+ people.

I smiled as I saw this because I’ve read books predicting the death of the org chart as a management tool.

But, given the Lindy effect – the longer something survives, the longer it’s life expectancy is likely to be, it looks likely the org chart will outlast said books and predictions.

“Don’t you know? The more you take, the less you have.” | Master Oogway

Master Oogway is the Kung Fu Panda series’ Master Yoda.

Today presents yet another opportunity to move one step closer to the person we want to become.

Becoming > Being.

The biggest difference between time at work and time off in my book is the rate at which I take in information.

Any work day means a high info diet – whether it is documents and slides at meetings, processing in-person or on video responses from people I speak to, and the continuous stream of emails and messages. That’s aside from news, personal email, and such.

I’m away from work for the next 2 weeks and I’m excited about embracing a slow info diet. Slower intake, slower processing, and slower everything.

We often have to go slow to go fast. Here’s to that.

Every time I reflect on a representative stretch of time – a week, month, a quarter, or a year – I always see a mixed bag.

I see the wins. I see the failures, mistakes, and embarrassments – those tend to loom large. I see the people whose support and partnership made it happen. I see other relationships that didn’t work out or went sour.

In aggregate, assuming I was intentional about what I wanted to achieve, I tend to see progress. But it is never linear. It is full of squiggly lines, troughs, and unexpected turns.

There’s no such thing as a perfect stretch of time. Some stretches are better than others – or at least feel that way. But it is always a mixed bag.

We get to choose where to focus and how to move forward.

I start the day by taking a quick look at the latest version of my commitments to self. This is a reminder of 5 synthesized notes from my detour into the world of stoicism (notes) and the virtues I commit to uphold.

I’ve been engaging in this practice for two years now and it’s helped me develop more equanimity by reminding me – every weekday morning – to keep perspective. As these notes are a collection of ideas, I expect to just think deeply about one of them every day as I skim them.

For example, the one that I thought about today was on discomfort.

Welcome minor discomforts – cold, hunger, and the pain that comes from stretching mentally or physically. Reach for those discomforts everyday by spending time in depth, exercising, reading, listening, and eating right.

I think of this note often. Aside from being a reminder to reach for these discomforts in an attempt to operate better, they’re a regular reminder of just how much I take for granted.

Some of these discomforts – effectively when we need to do things we may not want to do or consciously make a short-term trade-off – may loom large on a daily basis. But, in the grand scheme of things, they’re drops in the bucket. And, in some cases, the fact that we get to make these trade-offs often are an indicator of the presence of massive privilege.

This is a nudge to make sure I keep that perspective.

After all, it isn’t climbing the mountain that wears us out. It is the pebbles we carry with us in our shoe.

And those pebbles are often mental blocks around “minor discomforts” that go away when we make a slight shift to our perspective.

Every once a while, good process and reasonable decision making will lead to suboptimal outcomes. Our hit rate will never be 100%.

Understand what caused the mistake, use the pain to reflect on the lesson, and move forward.

The key in these cases is to not over correct.