Category: Everything else

The French Football team started the Euro 2021 tournament with an incredible reputation. They were so strong that there were jokes that a team made of French players omitted from the squad could be strong enough to win it.

The reputation was well deserved. The squad seemed to have only grown stronger since their triumph in the 2018 world cup. They also started off with an easy 2-0 victory over Germany. Defeating a German football team in any tournament can rarely be described as “easy.”

There were some signs that things could go wrong in their remaining Group stage games. But, they still reached the Round of 16 with relative ease. They were now leading the Swiss team 3-1 with 10 minutes to go – the quarterfinal place was all but sealed.

Until it wasn’t.

The Swiss came back to tie the game in the next 10 minutes and won on penalties.

There’s a saying that reputations don’t count much in sport. You are only as good as your last game.

Of course, that saying is just as true beyond sport. It works the same way in our careers and lives too.

We are what we repeatedly do.

As I was getting ready to graduate from university, I attempted a “no news” information diet for a few months. The motivation for that diet was a lack of interest in fueling the traditional hype-driven news cycle with my clicks.

That turned out to be challenging as I started on my first job. I didn’t, for example, know there was an Arab spring while on a project in the Middle East. That situation was untenable. :-)

The next step was to bring back the news – but, to do so with a diet that focused on simplicity. After multiple experiments with aggregators like “The Skimm” and “The Economist Espresso,” I settled on the free Quartz newsletter as my only source of news in 2015. And, while I’ve occasionally tried out an aggregator or two in the ensuing years, my news diet has hardly ever exceeded the 3-4 daily minutes I spend on the Quartz newsletter*.

The Quartz newsletter is good about linking to various sources – beyond their own reporting. And, thanks to their excellent 2-3 line summaries, I have rarely felt the need to click in and find out more.

As a result of the space this creates, I get to spend reading time on blogs I love or newsletters that aggregate interesting content or share interesting analysis about tech or the future – e.g., Stratechery, Exponential View, Insight, and Noahpinion. And, most importantly, it helps me direct any time I’d like to spend obsessing about the climate crisis or, in the past year, the Coronavirus pandemic by working through sources like “Our World in Data.”

When I picked this low news diet, I was clear about the benefit of simplicity. But, I wasn’t sure what the trade-offs would be. For example, would I feel less informed on topics that matter?

10 years in, I can confidently say that I’ve not experienced any cons that I know of. If anything, I’ve experienced benefits I didn’t know to expect – e.g. avoiding filter bubbles – or realized I underestimated the benefits of simplicity.

This sort of diet isn’t for everyone. It also took me some time to get used to. But, I’ve loved the first 10 years. And, I’m looking forward to the next 10.

*Note: Football365.com and ESPNFC.com for football/soccer news is exempt from this – my guilty pleasure.

We visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently. It was an awe inspiring experience.

As we were walking out, I realized that the aquarium was made possible thanks to the generosity and involvement of David and Lucile Packard (from “Hewlett Packard” or HP). Both David and Lucile were personally involved in designing many of the exhibits.

That led to three reflections.

First, it got me thinking about the power of a great second act. After building HP, David and Lucile went on to create their foundation aiming to improve the lives of children, enable creative pursuit of science, advance reproductive health, and conserve and restore earth’s natural systems.

They made a lot of progress on these goals when they were alive. And, thanks to phenomenal investments like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, their legacy lives on.

Second, it was lovely to see their partnership shine through. In an age where gender equality was far from the norm, they clearly made it a point to ensure Lucile Packard’s contributions were highlighted. The Stanford Children’s hospital they funded still bears her name.

Finally, it reminded me of an idea Twitter cofounder Biz Stone shared about wealth. He said wealth, like power, amplifies who you are. If you are a jerk, wealth will make a bigger jerk out of you. And, if you are a charitable person of good character, wealth will amplify that too.

As I read about the Packard story, that learning rung true.

We heard our first Maynard Moose story recently and fell in love with his “Moose speech.” A recent favorite was his narration of “The Uglified Ducky.” Below is the ending – applicable in so many aspects of our lives.

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“So, if you ever feel you’re a giraffe being raised by a family of gerbils. Or a ladybug raised by a family of elephants. Remember – that does not mean you are uglified.

No no no – that is a common misdeception. Just means you have not found out what you really are yet. So demember, everybody is a beautiful something or other.

Especially you.”

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Powerful, beautiful, poignant.

There was a fire on the Gulf of Mexico yesterday after an issue with a natural gas pipeline. This is what it looked like.

This happened just as the Pacific Northwest recorded a once in a millennium heatwave that burnt down, among other things, an entire Canadian town.

It is often hard to find a silver lining from such stories. And, there wouldn’t be if we were residents of that town, for example. But, zooming out, there’s a change in how the scientific community is approaching the analysis of these events.

Not long ago, the burden of proof would have been on a researcher to link these heat waves to climate change. Now, the null hypothesis/starting point has flipped. The consensus view is clear.

Looking at this from a 10-20 year perspective, that shift in global consensus is important as there’s a lag between consensus in the scientific community and the mainstream. Climate isn’t a local problem. It will require more global coordination than we’ve ever managed. And, such coordination can only be made possible once we align on the same set of facts.

That alignment will also make it harder for big oil companies to fund climate denial. Despite the obviously lucrative nature of these studies, fewer scientists will risk trading-off their credibility. This means fewer subsidies, lesser government support, lesser public sympathy and shareholder exuberance – all of this will make it harder and harder to maintain profitability as non-fossil fuel sources of energy become cheaper rapidly.

British Petroleum has already seen that writing on the wall and shared a net zero commitment by 2050. Others will follow and/or become irrelevant if they attempt to continue what they’re doing today.

Fossil fuels have fueled incredible improvements in our lifestyles in the past 100 years. They have also contributed heavily to a crisis that will, in time, threaten our existence on the planet. So, it is time for them to go.

I’m hoping this is going to be one of those transitions where the end happens significantly sooner than we can predict.

A leading indicator of personality – obsessing about saying the right things.

A leading indicator of character – obsessing about making sure what we say shows up in what we do.

Learning how to build good strategy is important. Defining where we want to play and how we win helps us make the right trade-offs and execute.

But, an underappreciated part of executing strategically is being flexible enough to change plans as we see changes in the environment around us. A lot can change as we execute – our competitors can make unexpected moves, regulators can change the rules, and, most likely, we might learn a thing or two about the feasibility of our original plans.

This ability to change flows from a culture that celebrates agility just as much as it celebrates the creation of thoughtful strategy.

It is why culture is strategy in the long run.

Nearly every Euro or World cup football tournament has a news feature about a psychic animal that predicts a country’s results. It was no different a few days ago when news showed up about a psychic elephant that was predicting a German victory against England.

These pieces of news are always interesting as they’re accompanied by a video of this soothsaying animal. They likely provide some comfort to those placing big bets.

They’re also a fantastic example of how we can get fooled by anecdotes into believing something that isn’t true. The reason for this ability to be fooled is the inherent difficulty in understanding probabilities/ratios.

In this case, this elephant made the news because she predicted the results 3 games in a row. How hard is that?

As a game can have 3 outcomes (Win, Lose, Draw), the probability of getting the first result right is 1/3 or 33%. Repeating that in the second game brings us to 11%. Doing it in the third game brings us to 3.7% or 1/27.

3.7% of 1/27 may not mean much. Consider this – during such tournaments, there are hundreds – maybe even thousands – of animals who are encouraged by their owners to indulge in these kinds of games. If one of them does well enough, they could become a celebrity. And, with random chance, 1 out of every 27 of these animals would get it right.

To predict the round of 16, 1 out of every 54 (only 2 possible outcomes – win and lose – at this stage) of these would get it right. Quarterfinals would take us to 1 out of every 108, semi finals would be 1 out of every 216, and the finals would be 1 out of every 432.

So, if 500 random animals around the world did this, one of them would be “psychic” as they’d predict every result right. And, the chances of 500 random animals being asked to do this by owners (across horses, elephants, and even octopuses :-)) is high.

Soft skills are hard, hard skills are easy.

The folks who called skills like communication “soft skills” clearly never grappled with them enough to appreciate their difficulty.

Prof Katherine Hayhoe, the Director of the Climate Science Center at the Texas Tech University, shared a fantastic Twitter thread last week in response to a recently leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 5 notes:

(1) The leaked IPCC report was damning (summary). The speed at which our ice caps are melting suggest we’re going to hit irreversible tipping points faster than we anticipated.

(2) Prof Katherine Hayhoe, in her thread, gave us more color. She started by explaining that the report was just a synthesis report of data that is already published. So, no climate scientist was surprised at the report.

(3) She put our current situation into perspective with powerful analogy – “Our entire civilization is built on the assumption that climate varies within bounds that can be predicted based on the past. It’s as if we’ve been driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror: but now we’ve hit a dangerous curve & our wheels are teetering on the edge.” She then explained that climate scientists defaulted to sharing the facts without explaining the devastating full picture. This has been termed “ESLD” or erring on the least side of drama.

(4) She goes onto explain the importance of the bluntness in the IPCC report. In the past 30 years, the playing field hasn’t been level thanks to the fossil fuel industry pouring huge amounts of money to manufacture science denial. But, there’s much needed growing awareness about the gravity of the situation.

It is a great thread. I ended up reading more about Prof Hayhoe’s great work and also pre-ordered her book. I look forward to learning more from her.