Author: alearningaday

I carry a water bottle everywhere I go. I recently gifted my favorite bottle – the 18 oz YETI Rambler – and chuckled when I read the sticker.

“Over-engineered” – because it is:

• Dishwasher safe
• Durable kitchen-grade stainless steel
• Double-wall vacuum insulated
• A no-sweat design
• A DuraCoat finish that won’t peel or crack

Over-engineering usually has a negative connotation. Better to cut scope and simplify usually.

But this note from the YETI team said – “We thought about this more than we needed to. On purpose.“

It is a good reminder – when something is meant to be used constantly, trusted, and lived with, over-engineering isn’t wasteful. It’s a sign of respect for the user and a commitment to quality.

The opposite of a good idea is often a good idea.

A lake can be a stunning blue or an ordinary gray depending on the clouds and the sun and the atmospheric conditions.

People work in similar ways.

A person’s behavior in a social setting or performance in a work environment can change dramatically based on the environment and culture.

A good reminder that the environments we create – at work, at home, in our communities – influence the behaviors we see within them.

I had the opportunity to see a planetarium show the other day. It zoomed us out from the earth to our solar system. To our galaxy. To all the galaxies that we can see – up to 13.4 billion light years away.

And then asked us to imagine the many we couldn’t see.

At the end of this fascinating presentation, the narrator said: “I hope you’re feeling small.”

That captured how I was feeling.

I find it helpful to ponder our own insignificance from time to time. It is a reminder to not take life too seriously and to do the best with what we have, where we are.

In the final analysis, very little is really going to matter. The things we worry about, stress about, waste time being envious about – they don’t register on a cosmic scale.

We get to choose what matters.

Maybe we can choose more wisely when we remember how small we really are.

When European settlers arrived in New Zealand in the 1800s, some decided to bring rabbits to enable hunting.

That brought with it a second order consequence – rabbits multiply. Really quickly. Soon, they became pests in the fields.

To fix this, a few came up with the bright idea of bringing stoats to hunt rabbits.

And this is where the second order consequences become really sad.

New Zealand evolved without predatory mammals. So as a result, the birds developed mammalian tendencies, and many birds just stopped flying. They found plenty of food on the ground and flying is energy intensive. So unless you really need to fly, why bother?

As a result, many of them stayed on the ground with a typical tendency to either be curious about anything that approaches them. Or to freeze when they are scared (since their predators were in the sky).

This sadly meant that they were easy prey for stoats – who ended up hunting many, many more native birds than they did rabbits.

This has resulted in multiple mass extinction events of native birds in New Zealand.

Over the past 100 years, there have been many attempts at reducing the stoat population. The New Zealand government even has a goal of removing all stoats and non-native predators by 2050 to save the remaining native birds whose populations have been decimated.

Attempts at progress right now include setting up stoat traps all over the place that aim to instantly kill stoats as soon as they are trapped.

But there’s no end in sight – especially because there is a similar story with Possums from Australia. More innovative solutions are going to be needed.

It is worth noting here that the stoats (and possums) are not at fault. They’re just trying to survive in this place that they have come to regard as home too. However, they were brought by human settlers who didn’t think through the second and third order consequences of their actions.

And now both of these are decimating native birds who play a critical role in the circle of life and the ecosystems in New Zealand.

This story is a reminder that there’s so little we understand about nature and ecosystems.

If there’s any hope, it is that we are capable of learning from our thoughtless mistakes (of which there are many).

Hopefully we’ll be able to do that in New Zealand and beyond.

Eighteen months ago, a colleague and I were on opposite sides of a pretty significant disagreement. And it left a mark – the kind where you walk away thinking you’ll never want to have any relationship with said colleague.

It so happened that we were put in a situation immediately after that required us to work together as partners. And, having accumulated scar tissue from our previous experience, we decided we didn’t want to go after incremental change and bet the house on rebuilding our job search and recommendation systems with LLM-powered “semantic search”.

Somewhere along the way, we chose to give each other a real shot. And the deeper we went into the trenches, the more commonality we found in what we were solving for and how we wanted to get there.

The year turned out to be a breakthrough year for us and for the team. After years of struggling with point improvements on search and recommendations for job seekers, we finally had a system that was a step-change better. And, while it will never be perfect, there’s a clear path to continuous improvement.

Through it all, this colleague became the person I communicated with most outside of my wife.

If you’d told me that would happen eighteen months ago, I’d have laughed. It is a turnaround story that drove home a simple, but difficult, lesson – give people the benefit of the doubt.

Or as that old proverb goes, “walk a mile in their shoes.”

When you get the chance to really go into the trenches with someone, to move past surface interactions and see how they show up when it matters, you might be surprised.

And who knows? You might walk away with a best friend you never thought you’d have.

We don’t need to wait for New Year’s day to begin something worthwhile. We definitely don’t need to wait for New Year’s day to cut a habit we’ve been wanting to cut.

But the wonderful thing about New Year’s day to me is that it serves as a powerful reminder that no matter what our efforts are, we get this chance to hit reset and begin again.

Because it’s likely that what we’re attempting to change today, we’ve attempted in various ways to change before.

So this is less about the beginning, and more about the reminder to begin again.

And again.

As many times as we need to till we make the change we want to make.

Happy New Year.

As I reflect on what I want to take with me from 2025, the single biggest change I’ve made this year has been around movement.

I’ve been writing about wanting to be fitter and move more for probably 15 of the 17 years I’ve been writing this blog – ever since I graduated from college. And it’s been so bloody hard to make meaningful progress.

But a combination of 3 books – Outlive, Good Energy, and Built to Move – have inspired real progress over the past two years.

Two stats from my Health app bring this to life:

(a) Exercise: In 2023, I averaged 39 minutes of exercise per day. This year, that number doubled to 78 minutes.

(b) Movement: Last year, I hit 8,266 steps per day. This year, that number moved up about ~60% to ~13,200.

The first bit of progress came from regular weekday workouts and soccer on the weekend. The step change in movement came from a lot of intentional walking – especially post meals.

I’ve definitely made significant changes to my diet. However, I think the biggest changes have been around movement and I’d love to take this with me to build on in 2026.

This is also a change that has brought me a lot of joy and day-to-day happiness. It reinforces the idea that we are, indeed, built to move.

It is also a reminder of just how hard it is to make this sort of change. It’s one thing to write about it for so many years. It’s quite another thing to actually do it.

And we can increase the odds of making that happen by stacking one small habit at a time.

A few weeks ago, I was reflecting on my own behavior at home. And I realized that if I stack ranked my level of patience, I was most patient at work. Probably just as patient – or maybe a little less patient – with my kids.

And the person who had to deal with me when all of my reserves were seemingly gone was my wife.

So in many ways, she consistently sees the worst of me. The most impatient side.

It’s never fun realizing something like this about yourself – when you realize that the person you care about the most is the one you show the shittiest side of yourself to.

The question that followed is – what stopped me from doing better? From, say, being upfront when I was really low on patience. Or simply being more patient.

The answer is ego.

It’s easier to pretend like nothing is wrong than to admit I’m behaving poorly. Even saying that would be a good first step on some days.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on improving this – with some encouraging progress. Of course, it’s going to be a journey.

But the first step is simply leaving that pattern of behavior behind by holding a much higher bar for myself. That starts by being a lot more patient… also being proactive about saying when I’m not at my best.

I’m hoping to do a lot better in 2026.

There’s a great story about Sir Peter Jackson on the Hobbiton set of The Lord of the Rings. When they found the location for Hobbiton in Matamata, New Zealand, the central area near the Shire had a couple of apple and pear trees.

However, Tolkien’s Shire had plum trees.

So, Peter Jackson had his crew buy and wire plums onto the trees.

The scene with those trees lasted less than six seconds. There was no way anyone would notice the plums even. And even if they did, it’s unclear if they would have cared.

But Peter Jackson did. He wanted it to be true to Tolkien’s vision. And he cared enough to sweat the details.

So much of leadership is setting a high and clear bar. That bar, then, becomes the culture because “this is how we do things here.”

This was Peter Jackson setting that bar for the Lord of the Rings crew.

Brian shared this post recently on his (new + daily) blog. Philosopher Tyson said it well – it resonated.

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A year ago I watched this video of Mike Tyson, asked by a 13 year old about the legacy he wants to leave (source). I’m just going to leave his response here. It says it all.

“I don’t believe in the word legacy. I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. That’s just some word everybody grabbed on to. Someone said that word and everyone grabbed on the word, so now it’s used every five seconds. It means absolutely nothing to me.

I’m just passing through. I’m going to die and it’s going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that? What a big ego. I’m going to die, I want people to think that I’m this, I’m that. No, we’re nothing. We’re dead. We’re dust, we’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.

Can you really imagine somebody saying, I want my legacy to be this way when I’m dead. You think they might want to think about you? You think I want people to think about me when I’m gone? Who the fuck cares about me when I’m gone? My kids maybe, my grandkids.”