A Learning a Day

A simple way to think about appreciating the people around us – be the kind of person that doesn’t need a person to be absent to realize their value.

On projects that matter, the right question is not – “will our plans change?”

It is – “When will we need to change our plans? And how will we respond to it?”

Change is the only constant.

I was about to write out a post sharing an observation about something someone did that wasn’t helpful.

Until I realized I did something similar in another context.

It is very easy to give advice.

Living it is a completely different matter.

When we’re young, we tend to think of life as a series of exams. At every step, the questions get harder and the feeling of achievement of making it to the other side feels correspondingly larger.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that doing the laundry/dishes or cleaning our home is a better analogy for life.

Regardless of how well you do it today, you’ll never conquer laundry or doing the dishes. More will always be waiting at the other end – whether you like it or not.

You can learn just as much as you decide to learn.

And you can find just as much joy as you want to find.

Similar to one metric that matters (OMTM), there’s often just one thing that matters on our priority list for our day to be productive/successful.

It is the thing we delay getting started on, the one we try to put away for as long as possible.

The secret to being consistently productive is to recognize the “one thing that matters” and tackle it first thing.

We watched King Richard recently – the story of Richard Williams on his quest to make Venus Williams and Serena Williams world champions. The movie was well done – the story arc was nice, and every actor did a great job.

Seeing the Williams sister in a grand slam final or semi-final was one of the defining tennis memories of my teenage years. That and marveling at Roger Federer’s grace. So, it was lovely to see the “founding story.”

The Williams sisters were a by-product of their father’s drive and determination to get out of a life with limited means. And the movie did a great job portraying the many sides of Richard Williams. He was stubborn, smart, emotional, bossy, supportive, encouraging, attention seeking, and driven all at once. He led the family to phenomenal results all things considered.

But it reminded me of the Polgar family – where the fate of the sisters was decided before they were born. As a parent myself, I found myself wondering about the nature of excellence and our parenting style.

We aren’t in the game of pushing our kids toward a particular destination – sport or otherwise. I’m hopeful there’ll be other ways to inspire a similar work ethic in our kids so they pursue mastery no matter which field they choose. Maybe I could channel my inner Richard Williams once they decide to commit to a path?

Or maybe I’m too privileged or naive or both.

Time will tell.

I saw a great story in James Clear’s “3-2-1” today.

Lillian Moore shares a quick story that reveals what really motivates people:

“A few months after my husband and I moved to a small Massachusetts town I grumbled to a resident about the poor service at the library, hoping she would repeat my complaints to the librarian. The next time I went to the library, the librarian had set aside two bestsellers for me and a new biography for my husband. What’s more, she appeared to be genuinely glad to see me.

Later I reported the miraculous change to my friend. “I suppose you told her how poor we thought the service was?” I asked.

“No,” she confessed. “In fact—I hope you don’t mind—I told her your husband was amazed at the way she had built up this small town library, and that you thought she showed unusually good taste in the new books she ordered.”

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This reminded me of the parable of the wind and the sun. It is an idea I don’t implement often enough.

I’ve noticed a common theme among emails that are scams and/or phishing. They often have an obvious typo somewhere – it could be in the body of the email or the URL. Either way, there’s a fairly obvious tell.

I’ve wondered why that is. The default explanation is that it is either (a) written by a native English speaker or (b) useful to get past spam filters. Both are plausible.

Another theory – on that I subscribe to – is that it is done to filter out people who pay careful attention to these details and, thus, are less likely to be scammed. Scamming people takes time and optimizing the funnel to make sure scammers are only spending time on people most likely to fall for the trap is a powerful strategy.

It is why we are trained to take care of the little details on a presentation or document we write. A typo here or there can raise questions about our ability to pay attention to the details.

And details matter.

PS: I write my posts the previous night and realized I scheduled yesterday’s post for today by mistake. 2 posts today as a result!

There’s a longstanding tradition in our household involving toothpaste. As a tube of toothpaste becomes empty, my wife and I try to not be the person who needs to replace it.

It isn’t because the replacement is located far away – it is just to test who manages to continue squeezing out toothpaste from the tube after the other thinks it is impossible and “admits defeat.” :-)

It is one of those traditions that always inspires a chuckle. But as I was reflecting on it recently, I realized that another side effect of this “practice” is that we end up using the tube significantly longer than we otherwise might have. Our latest run has extended its life by more than a week.

It got me asking – what other experiences in life would benefit from similar diligence?

There are probably many – particularly experiences I learn a lot from. There’s probably more learning to be squeezed out of such experiences than I realize.

A colleague shared that the word crisis in Chinese is 危机. It represents “Danger + Opportunities.”

Crises can represent challenging crucible moments. But they almost always present great opportunities. The quote – “Never waste a good crisis” – reminds us of exactly that.

Crisis = “Danger + Opportunities.”

It resonated.