Reflections from an injury

I recently injured myself and strained my MCL or medial collateral ligament. This is a simplified diagram explaining the various ligaments in our knee – P = posterior, A = anterior, L = lateral.

4 reflections from the injury:

(1) Don’t “scratch the wound.” In my first week after the injury, I found it tempting to keep checking on the strain. That doesn’t help.

I eventually went to see the doctor and got a knee brace. 3 days after wearing the brace, things were already feeling a lot better.

(2) Keep moving – to prevent undesirable side effects. Excessive rest, for example can cause more problems than it solves. It is important we keep our muscles moving.

Another example – wearing the brace for three days caused pain in other parts of the leg. I took it off eventually – I’d learnt my lesson on not scratching the wound.

(3) Take rehab exercises seriously. They helped gradually strengthen the muscles involved.

(4) Freak moments are often the cause of injury. As is often the case, the cause was a freak moment that resulted in an unexpected “split” that strained my MCL. A good reminder of the idea that we can always work on being safer – but if we engage in high intensity sports or exercise, such moments are an inevitability.

A good friend who I spoke to in the aftermath had a philosophical take – injuries are just a sign that we’ve pushed ourselves and lived… in the truest sense of the word.

(5) Exercise is the ultimate injury prevention tactic. The most important lesson on injury prevention was a realization I had immediately after the incident. I realized this could have been worse if I hadn’t been exercising my legs regularly. My flexibility has become markedly better in the past couple of years.

In essence, every hour we spend working out helps us prevent serious injuries.

Do the work. It matters.

v35

The past 365 days have taught me many lessons. As I reflect on the ones I hope to take forward into the next year, I thought I’d pull out the top three.

(1) Health and fitness: Health is always the starting point when I share what I’m grateful for. When health becomes a problem, everything stops. That’s why Peter Attia’s Outlive hit all the right notes. It explained why a consistent focus on health and fitness mattered and broke down how to work on it effectively. And it is advice I’ve been working on incorporating every day since.

(2) Memories: The most important lesson I’ve learnt on parenting is that “the days are long, but the years are short.” We’re now just over 7 years into this journey and that idea rings true. We’re also in that magical period where our kids think we’re cool and look forward to hanging out with us and our parents. I am very aware that won’t last long. So we’re doing our best to make the most of the time together by giving ourselves as many shots at making lasting memories. Intention is the strategy.

(3) Clarity of vision, relentless energy, and systems: I’ve begun to think about leadership as a combination of clarity of vision, relentless constructive energy, and the ability to build systems that enable our teams to deliver results. Every time I reflect on those ideas, I realize how much work I have to do. The size of the task also provides perspective. You never know if a good day is a good day.

Best to just keep plugging away and do our best to make it meaningful, make it count.

(past birthday notes/version updates :) – 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23).

Correspondingly huger mistakes

There’s a great Albus Dumbledore quote on mistakes – “I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being–forgive me–rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”

I’ve thought of this quote many many times over the years. Putting aside the subtle humor from the great (fictional) wizard, there’s a powerful truth in there. The size of mistakes grows with the amount of responsibility in our lives.

When I was a child, I made many mistakes. Most of those had no consequence beyond some short term pain.

As we grow older, we become risk averse as we attempt to reduce the number of mistakes we made. It is logical to do that because our mistakes cost us a lot more as adults.

Recovery from an injury takes longer. Things we lose tend to be more expensive. Opportunities we forego are often more consequential.

The same happens when we progress in our careers. As an individual contributor, getting the plan wrong can mess up a project. But a manager’s mistakes on strategy can led an entire team astray. So, when companies get senior hires wrong, the damage is significant and often long lasting.

This is one of those simple sounding ideas with many implications. I’ve reflected on two of these more than others –

(1) I make more expensive mistakes now relative to ten years ago. These mistakes hurt when they happen. For example, I lost a great pair of glasses recently. I used them every single day for four years and loved them. There’s no cheap replacement. It is an expensive mistake – as simple as that.

We made a mistake on a small piece of furniture we bought for our home recently too. Again, an expensive mistake relative to a decade ago when I owned no furniture.

Any mistake made that involves our family or the team I work with is more consequential than it was too. That’s part of life. It comes with more responsibility and accountability – generally good things.

(2) As painful as they are, it is important to keep some mental allowance for mistakes. When – and not if – they happen, it is helpful to spend time to understand how we could have avoided it. The best reflections involve fixes to our systems. They ensure we are more organized, build in buffers/redundancies, and be more in the present.

But outside of that, there’s no point beating ourselves up too much.

There’s no point fearing or over reacting to mistakes – they come with the territory.

Just be kind to ourselves and focus on a creative, constructive, and corrective response.

Arm circles backward

Arm circles backward is a simple workout to warm up the shoulders. The instructions are simple – you rotate your arms and keep at it for the allotted period of time.

This exercise always make me chuckle because it starts off easy, begins feeling challenging quickly, and becomes excruciating before you know it.

It works just like the many other simple things in this life – going out for a run or eating well or prioritizing sleep. Doing them once is easy.

Doing them consistently, however, is another matter.

The biggest problem solving challenge

The biggest challenge in the process of problem solving is the problem finding.

The problem that first appears is rarely the problem worth solving. It takes a lot of work to check our biases, to resist the urge to make immediate progress, and to stay with it long enough to understand the root causes.

It is why problem solving is a relatively straightforward skill to develop.

Problem finding, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.

Downward bumps

One of the fascinating things about two-lane highways that mandate trucks to use the slow lane is that the slow lane always has noticeable tire-shaped downward bumps. These downward bumps are a result of the wear and tear from hundreds of thousands of trucks traversing the highway each year.

These bumps aren’t caused by any one truck. That would be impossible.

Instead, they are a result of sustained pressure over years – caused one truck at a time.

Sustained pressure over time – it is how we change the nature of hard things.

Noah highlights – others, doomscrolling, climate, and toward a shallower future

I’ve shared Noah Smith’s work a few times in the past couple of years. His newsletter is one of my favorites. I thought I’d share a few excerpts from a few of his past editions that resonated. The first three are in no particular order – I saved the best one for the end.

(1) Noah shared this cartoon from 1971 that features a huge number of negative stereotypes about the Irish — as terrorists, as drunkards, as criminals, and as seeking to dominate American culture.

Of course, all of this change in time. And the “other” group has shifted over time. His post makes the argument that Hispanics are the new Irish. The meta point was deep – it is a tale as old as time.

(2) Doomscrolling is hazardous to our mental health. In his recent post featuring five interesting things, he shared a powerful study about doomscrolling on Twitter.

“There is no shortage of studies correlating social media use with poor mental health. But this one, by de Mello, Cheung, and Inzlicht, really hits home for me:

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes. Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes.

In other words, Twitter is exactly the outrage machine people think it is. It’s the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984, except it lasts exactly as many minutes as you’re willing to give it. And no matter how fun you think it is to be outraged at stuff, it’s not good for your emotional well-being.

I have to be on Twitter for my job. Hopefully, you don’t.”

(3) This summary on climate change was both simple and insightful.

The change in climate got a lot more severe in 2023.

This is expensive – the US saw a record number of $1B+ disasters.

Fossil fuel emissions have more or less been constant since 2015.

With most of the Coal power coming from China

China is also a massive contributor to the renewable boom as the leading producer of batteries. Renewable energy trajectory is exponential.

Residential adoption continues to grow all over the world along with growth in electric vehicles.

And all of this is increasingly enabled by solar – which is efficient and cheap.

And just awesome.

(4) My favorite post from the last quarter is titled “Toward a shallower future.” The post is an answer to a question I find myself asking from time to time – how should I think about how much adversity my kids have in their life? They have it so much easier than I did – is that okay?

I know I’m not alone in asking this question.

His grandfather, a bombardier in World War 2, once said to him – “I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.” Or in the words of John Adams – “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Then he goes onto make this point

“And they must at least try to understand that in a more general sense, happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth. The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.

Looking back on my own life so far, I remember the happy child I was, before clinical depression changed me. Depression is horrible, but it added a richness and depth to the person I am today, and I appreciate the value of those changes. But if that happy child had gotten a chance to grow up without depression, I think he would have been changed in different ways, and under the tutelage of gentler teachers, would have become no less worthwhile and interesting of a person.

So it must be with humanity. The modern world of push-button marvels has lost something, but it has gained more than it has lost. By celebrating it, we honor the countless millennia of heroes who worked in some small way to bring it about, even as we dedicate ourselves to continuing their great enterprise. Our legacy is to fill the Universe with children who laugh more than we were allowed to.“

It was a perspective changer. Thanks Noah.