Category: Everything else

Every short term move you make to close a sale will come back to bite you.

It’s obvious enough when the sale is a product or service – an over-promise, a nudge of pressure at the end to get the contract signed. The buyer notices. And with a smart buyer in a long-term relationship, the cost always shows up later.

But it’s just as true for the sales we don’t always label as such. Hiring a candidate is a sale. Selling a candidate on a role is a sale. Convincing a teammate to take on a project is a sale.

In each, the temptation to nudge things across the line – a stretched promise, an extra squeeze of pressure – is always there. And in each, the cost shows up in the months that follow.

There will always be a short term extenuating circumstance. Something that makes this deal, this hire, this conversation feel like the exception.

In long term games, the best way to play is to stay focused on the long term – even at the cost of the short term. Even when it is painful.

Especially when it is painful.

Play the long game, always.

Looking back over the past few months, every time I postponed my weekday morning for “later in the day”, it never happened.

Life or work always gets in the way. If the workout doesn’t happen before 6:30am, it doesn’t happen.

I’ve changed this to a simple rule now – rain or shine, get the workout done by 6:30.

If I miss that window, just try again tomorrow. No point fooling myself with “it’ll happen later.”

Ultimately, that’s also the truest test of prioritization. If it matters, it needs to get done first.

I had a chance recently to learn from a friend who has become an expert at getting things done with Claude Code. The agency he’s unlocked with the tool is remarkable.

The most important thing he shared was an analogy, attributed to the creator of OpenClaw. Using these tools for the first time is like picking up a guitar. It doesn’t sound right when you do so. It’s a bit painful.

But, if you keep at it every day, you’ll be twice as good the next week. And twice as good the week after. It compounds.

Watching him in action was the reminder I needed.

Pick up the guitar. And then keep picking it up.

On a warm night last August, a 12-year-old boy named Shawn Dunkley took a family friend’s electric scooter out for a spin near his home in London, Ontario. It was a powerful machine, ordered from the Chinese online retailer Alibaba. Dunkley was barrelling—helmetless, despite his mother’s pleas—along the paths of his family’s suburban neighbourhood, only a two-minute walk from his house. He glanced at the scooter’s speed display: 69 km/h. Suddenly, everything stopped.

Two passersby found him five minutes later, lying unresponsive a few metres from the pathway. His eyes were open, his expression vacant, his hair streaked with blood. A dead raccoon lay nearby. The best anyone can figure is that it darted in front of the scooter. The passersby called 911 and, within minutes, Dunkley was being rushed to London’s Children’s Hospital. He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture and spinal bleeding.

He was transferred to pediatric critical care in a medically induced coma. A tube helped him breathe, and two catheters snaked out of his fractured skull to monitor his cranial pressure and drain his pooling cerebrospinal fluid. His doctors weren’t sure if he’d live or, if he did, whether he’d walk or talk again. At her son’s bedside, Crystal Dunkley anxiously awaited the 72-hour mark: doctors had told her that if Shawn lived for three days, his long-term odds would shoot up. She hadn’t understood how dangerous e-scooters could be, or how fast they could go. “I thought they were toys,” she says.

Twelve days after Dunkley’s accident, doctors started bringing him out of his coma. First, he gave a thumbs-up. Then, a toe wiggle, which was a tremendous relief—no spinal injury. Then he nodded and shook his head. Finally, his breathing tube came out.

Dunkley’s injury was no anomaly. At Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, e-scooter–related admissions jumped 600 per cent from 2020 to 2024. Pediatric trauma centres have been particularly besieged: SickKids hospital, also in Toronto, treated 46 e-scooter injuries in 2024, up from only one in 2020. At the Montreal Children’s Hospital Trauma Centre, the number of cases multiplied tenfold in only a year, between 2023 and 2024. When I asked one ER physician what could be done to make them safer, he quipped: “Turn them into bikes?”

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Caitlin Walsh Miller’s article on e-scooters and e-bikes in Canada is worth reading. She makes 3 simple points –

(1) The adoption of e-bikes and e-scooters has been much faster than regulation has been able to keep up. Very few understand what is legal and what is not.

(2) These vehicles can go very fast. Coupled with the lack of clear rules, they are especially dangerous.

(3) e-scooters, in particular, can be easy to knock off balance – increasing risk to injury.

While her notes are primarily about city streets, we see this in our suburbs too and it scares me every time I see a group of teenagers zoom on the wrong side of the road alternating between the bike lane and the sidewalk.

I don’t understand how or why parents would want to enable this – especially because it reduces the amount of exercise and outdoors time kids get. It feels like a lose-lose-lose.

It always gets me reflecting about the hidden cost of chasing convenience.

Communications of the ACM had a fascinating post about how NASA built Artemis II’s fault tolerant computer. 3 fascinating excerpts.

(1) Eight modules with several back up scenarios: “Orion utilizes two Vehicle Management Computers, each containing two Flight Control Modules, for a total of four FCMs. But the redundancy goes even deeper: each FCM consists of a self-checking pair of processors.

Effectively, eight CPUs run the flight software in parallel. The engineering philosophy hinges on a “fail-silent” design. The self-checking pairs ensure that if a CPU performs an erroneous calculation due to a radiation event, the error is detected immediately and the system responds.

“We can lose three FCMs in 22 seconds and still ride through safely on the last FCM,” said Uitenbroek. A silenced FCM doesn’t become dead weight, however; the system is designed to reset, re-synchronize its state with the operating modules, and re-join the group mid-flight.

(2) Multiple redundancies with deterministic error-checking: “This architecture ensures that each FCM sees the same inputs, runs the same application code, and produces the same outputs,” said Uitenbroek. Every second, the drift of any individual FCM is measured and its local clock is recalibrated to the network’s ‘true’ time. If an application fails to meet its strict deadline, the module is automatically silenced, reset, and re-synchronized.

The hardware itself is also reinforced. The system employs triple-modular-redundant memory that self-corrects single-bit errors on every read. Even the network interface cards utilize two lanes of traffic that are constantly compared, ensuring that a bit flip in the communication fabric results in a fail-silent event rather than a corrupted command. The network itself is triple redundant with three separate planes, and all network switches employ self-checking strategies.

(3) Dissimilar redundancies: While the four-FCM primary system is robust, NASA must still account for common mode failures—software bugs or catastrophic events that could theoretically impact all primary channels simultaneously.

To mitigate this, Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.

Even in a total power loss scenario—called a “dead bus”—Orion is designed to survive. If power is restored, the spacecraft enters a safe mode, in which the vehicle first stabilizes itself and then points its solar arrays at the Sun to recover power. Then, it orients its tail toward the Sun for thermal stability before attempting to re-establish communication with Earth. During such a failure, the crew can also take manual action to configure life support systems or don space suits.

Of course, it costs a lot to get this sort of redundancy planning in technical architecture. Those costs make sense on a space mission.

But, that said, there’s a lot we can learn on ensuring we’re making space for redundancy planning that is appropriate to our use-cases.

There’s a line from Game of Thrones that has stayed with me over the years. Ned Stark said “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

A brutal image. But an important lesson nonetheless.

Ned made sure that if he condemned someone to their death, he was the one who carried it out. He didn’t outsource the hard part.

I think about this whenever I see leaders disconnected from the impact of their own decisions. It happens at every level – a country that wages a war the leader won’t fight, a large organization that hands down a mandate it won’t implement, and another where a leader makes a difficult call affecting real people by firing off someone else’s shoulders.

Sometimes, the test of a decision maker isn’t just about the calls they make.

It’s whether they are willing to be on the front line when it lands.

“Don’t burn bridges” is conventional wisdom for professionals. Keep every connection intact, especially on the way out of a place.

I think there’s nuance here.

Some bridges are worth burning. Not every relationship is one worth maintaining. Some are toxic. Some just ran their course. In those cases, it’s okay to let the bridge go – or at least not work very hard to keep it strong.

Burning a bridge deliberately, on rare occasions, is thus fine. However, it is when emotion takes the wheel – when your reactions rather than your choices drive the decision – that it comes back to bite you.

As with most things in life, it is best done with intention.

Much of the challenge with being productive in the long term is consistently carving out time for what’s important but not urgent.

Steven Covey fans will recognize this as “Quadrant Two” – the place where the most meaningful long-term work lives.

It is also the place that consistently gets squeezed out by whatever is loudest that day.

Easy to talk about. So bloody hard to do.

“You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” | Charlie Munger

Simple and powerful. It resonated.

When an executive asks a seemingly simple question about data in a large organization, here’s what often happens –

• A couple of junior analysts put together a draft.
• Senior folks review it and edit.
• Stakeholders across the business align.
• And eventually, a response gets sent.

The cost to ask the question was low. The cost to answer it was enormous.

The problem isn’t the process. The problem is the executive who hasn’t been in the shoes of everyone else in a long time – and hasn’t stopped to think through the consequences of asking.

When you externalize the cost of a question, it’s easy to keep asking them. And suddenly a whole organization is disrupted and randomized, all because of something that felt casual from the top.

It gets worse with mandates. Policies handed down from executives disconnected from the detail create churn that is difficult to overstate. The more removed you are, the less visible the ripple – and the larger it actually is.

The takeaway for anyone in a senior seat: think about who bears the cost before you ask. The larger the organization, the more that question is worth sitting with.