A good personal finance hygiene habit is to do a recurring check on all recurring payments/subscriptions.
Thanks to the recurring nature of these payments, there are often optimization opportunities that add up to significant savings over the long run.
And, every once a while, these checks help us evaluate if we’re still getting the value we signed up for. No point optimizing something that shouldn’t be part of the mix in the first place.
A biker recently vandalized my left rearview mirror recently and sped away. I’d initially thought it was a case of hit and run. But, no, the video showed him drive close and punch the mirror before he sped away.
The video also confirmed he’d turned his plates around so he couldn’t be identified. He knew what he was doing.
This brings some unnecessary hassle with it. The covering and a few of the wires are gone and will need to be fixed.
But I came away feeling lucky. The mirror didn’t break – so I’m still able to drive the car while I schedule a fix.
It could have been worse.
This is also when my very useful bigger accident superstition kicks in to reframe this random incident as a gift that prevented something worse from happening.
A good reminder that we don’t usually control what happens to us… but we can control how we respond. And, sometimes, a bit of reframing goes a long way to ensure we’re responding from wholeness vs. our wounds.
As we march toward a world where energy is both abundant and sustainable, we’re still in the early days of identifying win-win methods of deployment. One such method is “Agri-PV.” Here’s the problem statement – land is typically used exclusively for crops or for solar panels.
However, it is possible to merge the two with solar panel shaded agriculture. It can provide temperature regulation and optimize water usage while providing electricity for the farmer.
This, of course, works differently based on the type of crop. So, the type of Agri-PV system depends on how much shade/sunlight the crop needs.
As you can see from this study in Central Europe, it works better for berries and fruits (which yield more with more shade) while also providing the additional benefits of solar power.
I think of these kinds of systems every time I drive past the California central valley. When I look at the uncovered canals bathed in sunlight, I think of the amount of water that is lost in the system to evaporation. Covering these canals with solar PVs (a.k.a. “Project Nexus“) would reduce the water loss for farmers while providing electricity for the same communities at scale.
Agri-PV and Project Nexus are great examples of the experimentation needed as we make this energy transition. I’m excited for all that lies ahead.
“Wanting positive experience is a negative experience. Accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”
I thought this was well put.
H/T: Mark Manson
“The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I’m not sure it’ll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.” – from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 film
This made me chuckle. It is why self-awareness is hard.
Often, the only difference between a problem being perceived as painful or powerful is whether we feel we chose it.
With great responsibility comes great power.
H/T – Mark Manson
We can’t want the reward without also wanting the struggle.
“Hope clouds observation.” — Frank Herbert in Dune.
One of the harder things in this life is to see things as they are instead of as we want them to be.
Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary former CEO, famously wrote a book called “Only the paranoid survive.” The line that summarized his approach was – Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. In sum, he advised us all to not believe our own hype.
The contrast between Andy Grove’s advice and Intel’s recent troubles thanks to poor decisions in the past couple decades is telling. Intel’s management focused on the short-term growth in their stock price in the 2010s and sadly ignored strategic options that required hard decisions that would set them up for the next decade.
They believed their own hype.
It can easily happen to all of us. It is a very natural and normal thing – the default option if you will. We acquire competence at something, then get lots of compliments for it and likely experience an increase in our status and wealth and the hype around us, and then start falling for that story.
It happens on a small scale all around us. I’ve met so many people over the years who couldn’t stop thinking about and talking about themselves as the best things since sliced bread. They had done well in a job or two at a “big brand” company. And, in their version of the story, they were instrumental to its success. Some of those stories might well be true. But it was evident they had begun believing in their own hype.
It happens on a large scale too. Elon Musk will likely go down in history as a legendary entrepreneur. But there’s a visible difference between the Tesla and SpaceX version of the early 2010s and the Twitter/X version in the early 2020s. In some ways, I guess it was admirable that he resisted believing in his own hype for so long.
And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read about a high potential teenage “wonderkid” in <insert your favorite sport or field> – to then never hear of them ever again.
All our actions have consequences (i.e., “Karma”). And the simple truth is that our actions when we believe in our own hype aren’t optimal. They don’t represent our best judgment. And Karma has a way of catching up with all of us in time. It just doesn’t happen in a predictable timescale.
Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful poem “If” has a collection of lines that drive home this idea.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
They all get at the same idea. Things are neither as great or as bad as they seem. If we’re experiencing a great run, wonderful. If we aren’t, that’s fine too. In reality, we rarely control outcomes. We just get to pick a direction and focus on the process. Assuming we’ve picked a reasonable direction and are open to change, a good process will lead to good outcomes in the long run.
When we do that, we’ll realize it was never about the outcomes anyway… and that we did our best work when we learned to stay grounded by refusing to believe in our own hype.
Getting better at communicating is an exercise in focusing on outcomes (did the intended person(s) understand?) vs. outputs (the specific document or artifact you use to make your point).
If the output isn’t leading to the outcome you want, it needs to be changed.
The key is to not get attached to how you’re communicating. Just focus on what it’ll take to get your point across.
A Learning a Day 