Month: July 2025

I play a game of soccer every weekend. It’s a fun game that’s just the right amount of competitive – enough that we care about scoring/winning and not so much that it ruins anyone’s mood or threatens a dangerous tackle.

One of the things I’ve observed is that my results are correlated with what I optimize for.

If I optimize for just having fun – defined by running as much as I can and spending more time up front – there’s a higher chance we’ll let easy goals through.

If I optimize for winning, I’ll be doing less of both running or spending time up front, but there’s a higher chance our defense will be better. Being a team player comes with trade-offs.

It’s just a game of weekend soccer. Even so, there’s a powerful lesson to be learnt in strategy and trade-offs.

There are learning opportunities everywhere we look.

Writing here is both a prompt for reflection as it is a prompt to dig deeper into studies and analysis about topics I believe are important.

My process for learning more about these topics – especially around the impact of exponential technologies like renewable energy and artificial intelligence – is to compile links to interesting presentations and articles over time with the goal of going through them over the weekend.

But those weekends show up rarely – if ever.

I tried something different recently – attempting to catch up on all this reading during a couple of the long flights I take during the year. Thanks to inflight wifi becoming more commonplace and reliable, this is possible.

On one such long flight couple weeks ago, I ended up catching up on three months worth of reading. So, if you suddenly see a series of summaries of charts and analysis during these weeks, you know why. :-)

I still love catching the occasional movie. But I appreciate being able to use flight time to geek out on fascinating data.