Author: alearningaday

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 6

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The next stop in our African National Park journey takes us to Ngorongoro. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a Unesco World Heritage Centre. This area includes the Olduvai Gorge (Oldupai is the actual name – the name was misspelled as Olduvai) – also known as the cradle of humanity. Excavations in this gorge unearthed the remains of Homo Habilis from 1.9 million years ago and helped us understand the kinds of tools we evolved to be able to use.

I didn’t take a good picture while I was there. This picture (source) of the gorge shows the various colors of the rocks from millions of years.

The small museum at the gorge features a beautiful exhibition showcasing our evolution from our chimp cousins to humans – featuring tools and skeletons unearthed at the gorge.

This area is known for the famous Ngorongoro crater. It is the world’s largest inactive, inactive, and unfilled volcanic caldera or cauldron. You descend via a steep one-way route and reach the covering roughly 100 square miles. This is half-way into the descent.

Once you get down, the crater is teeming with wildlife.

The setting is surreal. Over to a few pictures.

This is the elusive caracal – one of the smallest African cats.

The static water is alkaline – contributing to the pink colors of these Flamingos.

A gazelle close-up – the bigger ones are Grant gazelles and the smaller ones are Thompson gazelles.

The superb starling has stunning colors.

A hyena eating the remains of a buffalo. The Ngorongoro crater is home to one of the longest running hyena studies. As the crater is flat, hyena packs have, over the years, become so dominant that they’ve chased the Cheetahs out of the crater. The only cats that can keep their prey from them once they kill are lions.

Lions spend their days resting and hunt at night.

This was a family of lions with 3 eager youngsters who were getting a lesson in patience from their mother.

The Ngorongoro crater is typically the first stop on a route featuring two iconic National Parks – The Serengeti and The Maasai Mara. While it is only a day trip for most people enroute to the Serengeti, it makes for an awe-inspiring setting – a reminder of just how amazing our planet is.

One of the things you learn to do as a leader is to let fires burn. Every problem can’t be dealt with immediately.

The challenge here, however, isn’t in understanding you have to let fires burn.

It is in improving our judgment on which fires we need to let burn and which fires we need to tend to.

One way to view work is to frame it as a multiplayer game. Every year, we work our way up to the next level.

The difficulty goes up as we make our way up these levels – linearly at first, then exponentially.

As a result, we never ever feel completely comfortable. Just as we get comfortable in one level, it is time for the next one. We just have to embrace that constant discomfort – it is where learning and growth happens.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun while we’re at it. We have fun when three things happen.

First, we need to pick the right game. It starts here.

Next, we need to learn to fall in love with that process of learning and growth.

And finally, we need to find the right crew to play with.

If all three of these are in place in the game we’re playing, best to savor it… and make it count.

There’s a great story from Google X’s Astro Teller about a maxim they use.

Let’s say you’re trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal?

The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal. But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update — and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.

Tackle the monkey first is a beautiful way of visualizing the idea of testing the riskiest assumptions first.

Tackle the monkey first.

“Happiness is our quality of life – envy. “ | Jimmy Carr

This made me chuckle… and think.

One of the truths in life is that we’re better off always assuming two things at once – we’ve made it and not made it.

Assuming we’ve made it means we don’t worry about having to prove something to someone all the time. We show up ready to take swings we believe in, be plainspoken and say what we think, and back ourselves to learn from the many inevitable mistakes we make. It gives rise to the confidence that enables us to say – this might not work, and that’s okay.

Assuming we’ve not made it on the other hand reminds us that we cannot rest on our laurels. At any given point, it is how we perform at the project at hand and the next one ahead of us that matters. That’s how we guard against any sense of complacency – the day we stop looking around corners and anticipating where things might go wrong is the day we sow the seeds for dysfunction in the future. We’re never “set” – there’s always work to be done.

These sound like contradictory ideas. But the opposite of a good idea is often a good idea. And accepting and embracing these contradictory ideas helps us make progress.

A small operating principle I’ve picked up over 2024 is to explicitly check if we’re at a decision point before debating a discussion.

The reason for this check is that it is easy to speculate and waste time discussing something that doesn’t need to be decided. Worse, it is easy to waste time worrying about something that doesn’t need to be the object of worry. And worse still, it can be tempting to spend time mitigating a problem that isn’t real yet.

There is no point optimizing something that shouldn’t have been done in the first place.

Make it a habit to check for decision points. They’re a massive time saver.

I’ve been going for a run nearly most weekday mornings over the past year (thanks to Peter Attia). When I started doing these runs around this time last year, it was winter and the thought of stepping out at near freezing temperatures wasn’t appetizing.

But, of course, every time I did it, I came back feeling great.

So, over time, every time the resistance within asked the question – “Do you really want to step out in the cold?”, I ignored my current self and made the decision as my future self.

It is a simple way to get over the resistance – make more decisions as our future selves. In time, these repeated decisions will become worthwhile habits that our future selves will be grateful for.

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 5

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Over the summer, we had the ridiculous good fortune to visit four National Parks in Tanzania and Kenya. As a mega fan of all things David Attenborough and nature shows, this was a dream come true.

Tarangire National Park was the first National parks we visited. At 1100 sq. miles/2800 sq kilometers, it is comparable to the size of Yosemite national park or twice the size of a London or Los Angeles. There’s a lot to say about these parks. I thought I’d share a collection of my favorite photos instead.

The park is memorable thanks to its amazing population of Baobab trees. They are instantly recognizable to those who’ve watched The Lion King as Rafiki’s home.

We went during the winter – even with no leaves, these trees captured my heart. They stand out in the landscape. Their massive circumference lends them a special majesty.

Here’s a BaoBab with a giraffe eating near it (for scale).

That’s “Zazu” for the Lion King fans.

A gorgeous long crested eagle..

Here was a young Simba after a Zebra meal.

Tarangire is famous for its elephant herds. Understandably so. These tuskers have impressive tusks.

A couple of friends on my team gave me an earful when I shared that I planned to go on this trip camera-less. I am so grateful for that earful. All of these (and more) were from just a day at Tarangire National Park.

One of the many changes inspired by Casey Means’ Good Energy is to optimize for 10,000 steps every day. A simple tactic to achieve this on days I go to work is to park far away from the building where I work.

Funnily, prior to optimizing for more steps, I used to feel a shred of annoyance when I didn’t find a parking spot right next to the building where I worked.

I now willingly opt in to taking the scenic route instead.

Same outcome, different emotions.

A good reminder that so much just depends on what we’re optimizing for.