Category: Everything else

One of the most useful pieces of advice we can give ourselves when we find ourselves feeling mentally out-of-sorts is – focus on what you control.

Calm resides in our circle of influence.

There’s a fascinating video about kids who were told they would win a Hoverboard prize if they didn’t move for five rounds of distractions.

Each round had mounting pressure on the kids – thanks to distractions like letting in some cute dogs, a bouncy house, and an ice cream truck.

One kid would succumb at every round. But one girl managed to survive the test by convincing herself that she was only interested in the Hoverboard.

However, at the very end, when she got the hoverboard, she didn’t seem very happy.

When they asked her why, she said – “I don’t know how to ride a hoverboard.”

“Are you regretting winning?”

“Kind of.”

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A good reminder to make sure we’re playing games we actually want to win.

Unexpected situations/twists and turns can bring us a lot of joy… if we’re willing to find joy in the unexpected.

The more consequential the decision, the more material the trade-offs involved.

The trade-offs don’t get easier, we just learn to deal with them better.

“The geography of where we are born and where we get to live defines so much. Not smarter or better. Just luckier.”

I saw this tweet from a friend and it resonated.

I’m still processing the Russian invasion on Ukraine and have had a collection of thoughts swirling through my mind in the past 2 days.

In the meanwhile, though, this note on The Atlantic – “A Prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky” resonated deeply. The courage of the Ukranian people and their President has been incredible to see.

“Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.” | Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Beautiful and true.

“There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”

My thoughts are with the Ukrainian people today.

I have followed the English Premier League closely for the best part of two decades as a Manchester United fan. There were years when I used to catch every Manchester United game – that hasn’t been the case since our kids arrived. But I still catch highlights as often as possible and follow the news closely. I’ve learnt three lessons along the way:

(1) Don’t read too much into early excitement/narratives without proof. This is the most enduring lesson I’ve learnt. It is so easy to get excited about the new thing. New manager or player comes in. Everyone gets excited. The first three games go great. More excitement – the new person can do no wrong. Then reality hits. Before you know it, the narrative flips. Everyone moves onto the next thing.

This has happened so often that I’ve learnt to completely ignore early narratives without proof.

(2) Consistency in the long run is the only thing that matters. The quote I think of is – people come for the magic and stay for the math. In the long run, it is the consistency in delivering numbers (goals, saves, points) that counts. The rest is gravy.

(3) Most things look cooler from the outside. In my years following the Premier League from Asia, I used to envy supporters who got to watch matches live. You can imagine how excited I was about an early career opportunity to live in London. It felt like a dream come true.

I watched some really exciting games during my time in the UK. It was a great experience. But as I got close to the culture around watching games live, I realized it wasn’t for me. There’s a lot of identity wrapped around being a fan that does funny things to people. For example, I had a friend send some fairly hostile messages during a game where we were on opposing sides.

Then there was another incident where a player got hurt and I heard the opposition fans chant “Let him die.” Turns out that is far from the worst chant you might hear in high-profile games.

I’d still love to watch a game or two live in the coming years. But that’s about as close as I’d want to get to being a live supporter. It isn’t for me. And it has been a great reminder of the idea that most things look cooler from the outside.

A lesson – like the other two – that applies well beyond football.

Behind well-written documents lie hours of messy discussions and multiple rewrites.

The mess is a necessary part of the process. The rewrites are necessary to help us reframe what we wrote to make it more digestible.

Expect these obstacles. They show us the way.

At some point in the past couple of years, the number of daily spam calls I received went up noticeably. All of a sudden, I was dealing with multiple spam calls every day.

While some of these were recognizable (they had the same area code as the place where I first got a sim card – which is different from the area I lived in), others weren’t.

Enter Truecaller. I re-discovered Truecaller and, right after installation, it changed the game. I still get ~2 spam calls every day (I think Truecaller blocks the rest) but they’re marked as “Spam Risk” or “Telemarketer.”

Every time I see a Truecaller tagged number, I am reminded of how a “simple” service – a working spam filter – can be magical when it just works.