A Learning a Day

“Things do not need to be perfect to be wonderful. Especially weddings.”

“To learn from your mistakes, first laugh at your mistakes.”

“Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.”

This was another compilation from Kevin Kelly’s book on the theme of mistakes. All three of these notes resonated deeply with me.

The first is an idea that I believe in. Few experiences – if any – feel perfect in the moment. We tend to feel we’re stumbling our way through. Great experiences feel great (often in retrospect) when we ignore what didn’t go as per plan and do the small things with thoughtfulness and love.

The next speaks to the purpose of this blog. To learn from my mistakes, I write about them. The act of writing brings a lightness to it that I wouldn’t have associated otherwise. And, in time, perspective from reflecting on the many mistakes I’ve made has made it a lot easier to keep a sense of humor even when things are not going my way. I think the ability to consistently keep a sense of humor is highly correlated to perspective.

And the final note on superheroes and saints struck a chord. I consider this my art. And it really does begin in what is broken.

One of my recurring frustrations is around water bills. We moved to our home two years ago. In the first year, I simply treated our bill as a baseline. Then, as we went into year 2, I began digging deeper into trends to better understand why our bills are higher than what I’d expect.

After a few leak detection adventures, we found one leak. But the trends still seemed stubbornly high. That led us to a second leak that we fixed a couple weeks ago – this one was a major one. I got my bill for the past 8 weeks today, and it is still hard to tell if we made a dent. I * think * we did as I compare y/y trends and see the decline in the past two weeks. But I’m not certain and it’ll take another billing cycle or two before I know for sure.

Considering we’re talking about a critical natural resource, this feels horribly inefficient and I really wish we had better infrastructure and more transparency into what is going on.

Contrast this to electricity. We have a Powerwall from Tesla and solar panels from Enphase. It all connects beautifully on Tesla’s app. Every day, I know exactly how much energy was generated, how much I saved via my Powerwall, and how much we consumed.

I can have per-minute precision here – I know exactly how much we’re consuming at this moment. Over time, this has helped me understand how much energy my dishwasher or dryer consumes when they run, and we’ve continued to optimize our use so it doesn’t coincide with peak times.

We aren’t mega optimizers – but we’re optimized enough to make significantly better decisions. And, if Tesla went a step further, they have enough data about my consumption and trends to make recommendations for how we could better optimize our use and spend.

Real-time reporting is a big gift. I’m hoping we’ll see more of it.

“You say ‘amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘Amateur’ comes from the Latin word ‘amare’, which means to love. To do things for the love of it.” | Mozart in the Jungle

I loved this quote from James Clear’s newsletter. Always fascinating to learn about the roots of words like this – they do such a great job painting the meaning.

Amare indeed.

A good friend shared a thank you note with someone who’d taught her a lot on a topic. She was now teaching the topic to a few others.

So, she wrote – “Thank you for teaching me so much that I have things to teach.”

It is such a beautiful sentiment. One that every aspiring teacher hopes to consistently emulate…

One way to take small steps to improve how we feel is to give to others what we’re lacking.

If you’re feeling a lack of appreciation, give some to a few people around you.

If it is a hug or some love, give some away.

If it is structure or clarity, make sure you’re doing your bit to provide it for people who might be looking to you for it.

Small steps don’t solve the underlying problem.

But they help us chip away at it.

And chipping away at problems over time can have a tremendous compounding effect.

“In his podcast, Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman points out that after about age twenty-five, the only ways to trigger neuroplasticity – changes in the brain’s wiring that shift our thought patterns – are when something really surprises us, when something very bad happens to us, or when we make mistakes. Errors prompt our brain to sit up and pay attention: Something new is happening here.” | The Performance Paradox by Eduardo Briceno’s

Learning happens when we’re surprised. If you’re trying to create a learning environment bereft of surprises/chaos or people making mistakes, it is not a learning environment.

Learning = behavior change.

My biggest observation post COVID for booking international flights is that it is now a minimum requirement to book 6 months in advance.

While I could get away with looking for a flight 3-4 months prior to booking a trip back to India pre-2020, the within-6-months penalty at the moment is wild* – especially during school holidays of any kind.

My guess is that it will take a year or two before the backlog is cleared. It is understandable – families are making up for 2 years apart. But, until (and if) that happens, if you know when and where you’re headed, book early. It is likely going to save you a lot of money.

*I had to book us on a bizarre 3 stop journey for our next trip with many hours of transit – while still paying a ludicrous price. Good luck to us. I’m focused on fixing forward for 2024…

Not everything that needs to be said needs to be said right now.

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.” | William Martin

This struck a chord.

Writing about Michelin stars the other day reminded me of the story of the Michelin guide. It is a goodie.

It started in a small French town in Clermont-Ferrand in 1889, when brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin founded their world-famous tire company, fueled by a grand vision for France’s automobile industry at a time when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in the country.

To help motorists develop their trips – thereby boosting car and tire sales and in turn – the Michelin brothers produced a small red guide filled with handy information for travelers, such as maps, information on how to change a tire, where to fill up with fuel, and for the traveler in search of respite from the adventures of the day.

For two decades, all that information came at no cost. Until a fateful encounter when Andre Michelin arrived at a tire shop to see his beloved guides being used to prop up a workbench. Based on the principle that “man only truly respects what he pays for”, a brand new Michelin Guide was launched in 1920 and sold for seven francs.

For the first time in the 1920s, it included a list of hotels in Paris, lists of restaurants according to specific categories, as well as the abandonment of paid-for advertisements in the guide.

Acknowledging the growing influence of the guide’s restaurant section, the Michelin brothers also recruited a team of mystery diners – or restaurant inspectors, as we better know them today – to visit and review restaurants anonymously.

In 1926, the guide began to award stars to fine dining establishments, initially marking them only with a single star. Five years later, a hierarchy of zero, one, two, and three stars was introduced, and in 1936, the criteria for the starred rankings were published.

And the rest, as they say, is history.