A Learning a Day

I was booking some tickets recently and decided to check out ticket prices. As it happens sometimes, when I decided to get to booking it the next day, I saw a 6% price increase. What followed was fascinating.

I kept coming back to check ticket prices over the next couple of days without taking any follow up action.

A few such visits later, I asked myself a few questions:

(1) What are you expecting to happen?

(2) How long are you willing to wait to get the “right”/old price? Do you know if will?

(3) Are you in this to play the price arbitrage game and risk not booking on the flight you want?

(4) Is this worth it?

And my responses were

(1) Not sure.

(2) Not sure and I don’t.

(3) No.

(4) Probably not.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know that these were my answers – I think I did subconsciously. I knew I needed to get the bookings done. But asking those questions and verbalizing my responses gave me a lot of clarity.

When you find yourself spinning/taking consistent action without making progress, it nearly always is a result of a lack of clarity.

Take the time to pause and clarify it to yourself.

It is always worth the time.

The biggest change as I switch from version 32 to version 33 is the realization that most of my time is spent solving for upside.

That means I spend no time worrying about basic necessities, little time contemplating worst-case scenarios, and all of the rest attempting to make myself, the people and things around me a bit better. It means I get to choose the projects I get to spend time on, choose where I work from, and choose the kind of work I do.

It also means I get to see places I might never have dreamed of and spend money and time on things that I didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to experience growing up.

Admittedly, it does all feel a bit ridiculous at times. The scrawny kid from 20 years ago would look at the present me and scarcely believe his luck. And for good reason.

There have been three side-effects to this realization.

The first is gratitude. Lots of gratitude. To the combination of people and circumstances that have made all this possible and continue to do so today.

The second is perspective. This privilege means my regular problems are minor blips in the grand scheme of things. I’m not attempting to save our family from an invasion. We’re not stuck facing a pandemic without financial resources. We’re incredibly lucky. Remembering that privilege every day brings lots of perspective.

And the third is a sense of responsibility to make something of all this luck and privilege. It means making doubly sure I’m doing my best to work on problems that matter and giving them my best shot. The results I seek aren’t guaranteed – but the journey is one I can dedicate myself to.

These realizations have also helped me be more at peace with myself – with all my strengths and weaknesses. When I find that sense of responsibility getting overwhelming or when I feel myself falling short (and let’s face it – it happens often), I know I can count on the perspective to remind myself that things are fine, really. Mistakes and stumbles are expected, even essential. Failing isn’t falling down, its staying down.

Perhaps, most of all, listening to all this self-talk and attempting to improve it has helped me better appreciate the therapeutic power of writing every day. Every day, as I open up my WordPress editor, I realize it is a great opportunity to take stock.

Time to remind myself to summon that perspective and find the learning in those experiences.

Time to grow, hit refresh, simply begin again.

Thank you for joining me on the ride and for all the encouragement along the way.

It means more than I can express.

(Past birthday notes: 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23)

A tip I share with new hires is to pick collaborators with just as much rigor as they apply to picking a project.

A dynamic I’ve seen play out time and time again is that projects with collaborators who don’t work together under-perform expectations. Conversely, projects with collaborators who work well together have a way of exceeding expectations.

A great collaborator shouldn’t be the sole reason to pick a project. But once we’re at the stage where we find ourselves weighing projects with similar impact, making the final decision based on who we collaborate with is among the most important things we do.

A more expensive car costs more to insure than a cheaper car.

A 10-room mansion costs a lot more to maintain than a smaller home.

And the maintenance in both cases costs a lot more than just money. There’s a lot of mental investment that goes into their upkeep.

This might sound obvious. But I think it isn’t. That’s because we often focus on the “mo’ money” part without paying as much attention to more problems. That’s why it is human nature to think that the grass is greener on the other side – without necessarily paying attention to all the work and money that goes into maintaining the green grass.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt here about making mo’ money choices is that a combination of self-awareness and intentionality tends to serve us well.

There isn’t any good or bad judgment inherent in the choices we make. Some folks care deeply about owning a high-speed motorboat. If that gives them (or us) happiness, so be it. The key is understanding what we care about, spending our money on the things and experiences that give us the most happiness, and making peace with the costs.

So, it is true that mo’ money comes with mo’ problems. It is just on us to be self-aware of our willingness to deal with the problems and to be intentional about the kinds of problems we choose to solve.

Great managers (a) want to help and (b) can help.

When either element is missing, it can get problematic. Managers who want to help but cannot end up getting in the way in time. And managers who can help but don’t want to are not fun to work with.

But, between the two, I’d pick the former over the latter.

And either way, it pays to choose wisely.

The Financial Times team shared this visualization of how COVID has gradually become less lethal over the pandemic in the UK.

The TLDR: Thanks to immunity driven by vaccines and those who have had COVID, the Omicron wave is trending toward* being just as infectious as the flu in the UK.

There are so many layers of data in this one exquisite graph. A powerful reminder of the impact of thoughtful data visualization.

H/T: Dan Cullum for sharing this on his excellent daily blog.

*PS: I’m hopeful that trend will continue for the new BA2 variant as well.

“I’ll be happy when…” is a sentence that has all the makings of an elaborate trap we create for ourselves.

There’s always a trade-off between the now and the future. Saving money is an example of that trade-off, it is a hedge against uncertainty.

But if those trade-offs come at the cost of creating a sense of perpetual unhappiness and longing for a future that may or may not play out as we imagine (and let’s face it – does it ever?), they’re not worth it. Worse, it is a slippery slope.

“I’ll be happy when” is a trap best avoided. And the best way to avoid it is to pick trade-offs that we’re happy making now.

A misnomer about learning is that the best way to learn is by experience.

It is a misnomer because, while it is incredibly effective, experience is expensive.

The more we can teach ourselves to learn from others’ experience – either by spending time with them or reading something they wrote – the faster we’ll make progress on that learning curve.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The philosophy behind it is that breakage and repair as a key part of the history of an object. So, instead of attempting to hide breakage, Kintsugi draws attention to it.

It is a beautiful way to think about blemishes in pottery… and perhaps in other areas of our life too.

PS: Related – it reminded me of a recent reflection on blemishes and character

Writer Steven Johnson has been sharing a free newsletter over the past months called “The Adjacent Possible.” I’ve really enjoyed his books on innovation and his newsletter has delivered thought provoking insight too. 2 recent posts that spurred thought:

(1) We need a standard unit of measure for risk (article). This sounds so elementary and is yet so profound. We all think about risk in our daily lives. It is a key factor in all our decision making – especially in the past 2 years. And yet, we don’t have a standard measure.

He then shared an old unit proposed by a Stanford Professor in the 80s called the Micromort and asks a what if question to all of us – what if we used the Micromort to help communicate risks?

As an example, here’s a tweet by Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick putting risks in context.

A simple and powerful idea

(2) The Day Before (article). In yesterday’s article, Steven asks – are we discounting the threat of nuclear war given we’re dealing with an irrational actor? He draws from his experiences writing about pandemics and how few took the possibility of a global pandemic seriously.

He then shared how we’ve spent decades fighting the wrong kind of nuclear threat – turning our fury on nuclear energy despite it being among the safest sources of energy on the planet and not taking the prospect of nuclear power in the hands of dictators seriously enough.

Another thought-provoking post. Thanks Steven!