Month: January 2024

Failures are only stepping stones to eventual success when we reflect on them, understand what went wrong, accept our part in the process, and make the changes needed to avoid repeating them.

Absent the reflection, failures are just failures.

Tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than mountains. | Kevin Kelly

It resonated.

Arnold Schwarzenegger shared a neat story about going to a famous ballet teacher when he was training as a bodybuilder. Bodybuilding competitions involve striking various poses. The goal is for each of these to be photo moments that impress the judges.

He expected this ballet teacher to help him strike graceful poses. Instead, she spent a disproportionate time giving him feedback on how he was getting to the pose. When he asked her why, she explained that while he was focused on getting to that photo moment, the judges were watching his form as he transitioned poses. He spent more time in transitions vs. striking poses during his routine and she wanted him to get that right.

The insight has wonderful parallels in our lives too. We often spend a disproportionate amount of our bandwidth thinking about big moments – big decisions, big meetings, and so on.

But most of what matters happen between those events.

A big milestone in our ability to understand ourselves is when we learn to differentiate…

…the unease that we need to overcome by simply pushing ourselves out of our current comfort zone from…

…the unease that is a sign that what we’re contemplating isn’t the right thing to do at this time.

Let’s start with this – I abhor the concept of selling bottled water. I understand the business rationale – as people understand the negative effects of sweetened sodas, beverage companies need revenue streams that help them recapture spend. Ergo bottled water.

The sad truth is that the countries that are the biggest buyers of bottled water are the countries that need them the least because of the quality of their tap water. Bottled water makes for a good story – but it is a head fake. If you really are worried about water quality, just buy a filter and you’re still likely going to get better quality water anyway.

All this said, this was an argument that a good story – and the picture of a nice sounding “spring” somewhere – was winning.

Until now.

A new study found that a one-liter bottle of water has over 240,000 fragments of plastic – 90% of which are previously undetected “nanoplastics.” This builds on previous studies that showed more microplastics existed in bottled water than otherwise. The scale of these nanoplastics, however, is an order of magnitude higher than we’d have thought.

I thought the response from the International Bottled Water Association was particularly good – “There is no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles.”

Amazing.

I’m looking forward to more studies that build momentum around these findings and, of course, I’m eagerly looking forward to the IBWA’s responses to them.

There are 4 topics we don’t cover in school that I wish we did –

(1) Managing ourselves – from our mindset to our productivity

(2) Health and personal wellness

(3) Personal finance / managing our money

(4) Building better relationships

There are a slew of other useful topics that I’d have loved to learn at school. But I haven’t found any others that are more central to living a good life than these.

And while I used to loosely check in on these from time to time, I’ve started incorporating check-ins on each of these as part of my weekly check in.

We used to be really bad at raising indoor plants. We kept doing what we thought worked, blissfully ignored the signs, and then realized it was too late. The plant was dying (or dead) and there was no coming back.

Thanks to my wife’s diligence, we’ve gotten a lot better at raising indoor plants over the years. That happens because she consistently invests time and energy, ensures they get what they need, and gets ahead of problems.

One of my graduate school Professors used to tell stories about former students who used to come to him for help. They shared how they were always traveling for work and then dealing with fractured family relationships. What surprised him was that they nearly always expressed surprise.

To which he’d say – “I’m surprised you’re surprised”

It turns out relationships are a lot like raising plants. As with raising plants, there often are points of no return. We need to keep investing time, energy, and care – in ways that work for the others in the relationship. We need to read the signs and get ahead of problems. And, hopefully, we don’t get in our own way and cause problems that wreck a functioning relationship.

Of course, not all relationships need to be maintained. Sometimes, the most important thing we do is replace a plant that wasn’t working in our space with a new one.

But it matters that we are proactive and intentional in how we approach all this.

Being proactive and intentional doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. We’re dealing with humans after all. But, like all good processes, we put ourselves in situations where we’re most likely to have good outcomes in the long run.

In the final analysis, that’s all that matters.

“People don’t communicate to each other on social media, they perform for each other.” | Jonathan Haidt

Buyer beware.

An under appreciated part of living a good life is knowing when you have it good.

“The way you think about pain is the way your life will turn out. Success is at the apex of the pain.” | Eliud Kipchoge

I watched a documentary about the Eliud Kipchoge’s “Ineos 1:59 challenge” where he showed that it was possible to finish a marathon within 2 hours. His excellence advanced predictions about human capability to achieve that mark by at least a couple of decades.

There were many parts of the documentary that were fascinating. It was inspiring to see his mental strength and his insanely high pain threshold. Eliud Kipchoge’s trademark response to pain when running a marathon is to smile. He radiated zen.

That, in turn, brought to mind this story from the 2021 Olympics.

Eliud Kipchoge was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He and two other runners – Bashir Abdi from Belgium and Abdi Nageeye of the Netherlands – were waiting to receive their Olympic medals after the marathon race, which Kipchoge won for his second time.

Logistics of the awards ceremony meant the runners would have to wait for several hours in a cramped, dull, room with nothing to do but sit. Abdi and Negeeey later explained that they did what anyone else would do – they pulled out their cellphones, found a Wi-Fi network, and aimlessly scrolled social media.

Kipchoge didn’t.

Abdi and Negeeey said he just sat there, staring at the wall, in perfect silence and contentment.

For hours.

“He’s not human” – was Abdi’s assessment.

Well, he is. Just a very special one who developed focus and an incredibly high pain threshold by consistently doing things others weren’t/aren’t willing to do.