These watches were created under the brand name Tudor, and like their more expensive Rolex counterparts, they were well-built and highly functional.

In the early days, Tudor formed a partnership with the French Navy to produce watches that could be worn in the field and used as functional watches for diving.

Watches from this period with use cases like this have come to be known as tool watches. When these tool watches were first introduced to the world, they cost less than $100.

Many of these old tool watches are still kicking around today.

There’s just one small difference.

Suppose that in 1962 you wanted to buy a Tudor Submariner 7928 (the exact model), it would have cost you $83.95 (USD) before tax. That exact same model today, would cost you close to $20,000.

If you somehow managed to buy this model today, you likely would not use it as the tool it was designed to be.

What was once a tool, has now effectively become a treasure.

**

I recently finished reading a new biography of arguably the greatest baseball pitcher of all time, Nolan Ryan. Of the many outstanding things about Nolan, his longevity is probably top of the list.

As you might imagine, toward the end of Nolan’s career, he was paid a lot of money.

I got curious about this and so I asked ChatGPT to calculate the value of Nolan’s arm over time, based on how much he was paid. Here’s what it came back with:

In 1972, when he played for the LA Angels, he was making $95 per inning.

In 1992, when he played for the Texas Rangers, he was making $26,700 per inning.

His arm didn’t change.

Based on his workload in 1972 — when he was getting paid $95 per inning — you could easily argue that Nolan Ryan’s arm was a tool. A very effective one. A strikeout machine.

Over time, this tool grew exponentially in value and was, ironically, used far less.

You could even say that his arm went from being a tool in 1972, to becoming one of the most treasured things on his team in 1992.

**

There’s a line from Nolan’s biography, that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

The context around this line is that Nolan doesn’t quite like the fact that modern pitchers don’t get the chance to pitch as much as old pitchers (like him) did.

The following line is not Nolan’s, it’s Tim Brown’s (the biography’s author):

“Innings are limited to protect the arms, which seems wise. Then the arms are limited as a result, because they never saw the innings.”

Since reading this, I have come to interpret this line in the following way:

If something was once a tool and is now a treasure, it seems wise to keep it safe. The irony is that by treating a tool as a treasure, it becomes a less valuable tool.

Tool or treasure is a choice we get to make.

He was feeling nervous about a particular scene he was doing on The Office, when the showrunner, Greg Daniels, came up to him and asked if he was ok.

John said, “Oh no, this is my favourite joke in the script, I want to make sure I deliver it funny.” Greg replied, “You don’t deliver anything funny. You deliver it truthfully and it’s up to them out there in TV land if they think it’s funny or not.”

**

Twice a year, my wife and children perform on stage.

They each have their own shows, and their performances are part of Pop Nation Canada.

Each show is easily a highlight of my year. As a husband, a dad, and a fan.

Besides the singing (which is incredible) and dancing (which is equally incredible), there is one thing I get excited to see in every Pop Nation show.

Facial expressions.

There are often quite a range of facial expressions in a show.

Some performers might give you nothing. Deadpan, while singing Lady Gaga.

Some might have the same expression regardless of what they’re singing. Almost like a forced expression, because they feel they should express something.

My favourite performers to watch are the ones whose faces express the truth.

One of my favourite performances from last season, was Pop Nation’s version of Zombie by The Cranberries.

Zombie is quite a tragic song. It’s about bomb attacks that took place in the early 90s in Northern Ireland and specifically the child victims of those attacks.

To sing that song truthfully, your face would have to be full of angst.

The reason it was one of my favourite performances was because many of the performers delivered this angst truthfully. It looked viscerally painful for them to sing, which is exactly how it should be.

**

The truth can be easy to obscure and hard to face.

At the same time, it can also be piercingly revealing.

In her wonderful book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes:

“You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save, they just stand there shining.”

Like a lighthouse, the job of the truth is to wait. To be itself and wait.

Our job is to receive it, and whenever possible, have the courage to deliver it.

It’s rare, but it can happen.

If it were to happen, it would mean that the opposing team didn’t get a single hit.

In baseball terms, a perfect game is called a “no hitter,” or sometimes just a “no-no.”

On July 8, 2026, Dylan Cease of my beloved Toronto Blue Jays almost had a “no-no”.

After 117 pitches, he finally gave up a hit on his 118th.

What I found fascinating, was a question that he asked the on-field reporter, Hazel Mae, when she interviewed him after the Jays won that day.

Before I get to his question, another quick thing about pitching.

As a pitcher, having a high number of strikeouts in a game makes you a bit of a badass.

Especially when you get multiple against the same hitter. It means that the hitters just couldn’t figure you out that day.

Strikeouts get announced more loudly, they have flashy animations on TV, they have the coolest umpire reactions, and they’re usually part of a headline stat in the post-game conversation.

During his interview that day, Dylan Cease said the following to Hazel Mae:

“Uhh you know when you start seeing stuff like that, you’re like man, maybe it is my day today, so, I don’t know ... (then he pauses for a brief moment and asks) ... how many strikeouts did I have?”

Of all the questions Dylan may have been asking himself on the mound that day, “How many strikeouts do I have?” was not one of them.

**

David Chang knows a lot about cooking.

When he opened his first restaurant, Momofuku, he did so with minimal decor, backless chairs, no coffee, and no desserts.

As he explains in his memoir, Eat a Peach, it was simply because, “I couldn’t afford any of that shit.”

He goes on to say, “...but it was also because I wanted people to feel the energy of a fast-paced eatery. I wanted to turn tables quickly, without seeming like we were rushing diners out the door. It’s all about channeling the energy in the direction you want it to go. No amount of fancy decor can match the atmosphere of happy people eating.”

While he didn’t write this, it’s probably safe to say that of all the questions David Chang was asking himself when he opened his first restaurant, “How can we make it look fancy?” was not one of them.

**

When you ask yourself a question, you’re opening a tab that your brain becomes increasingly desperate to close. In that way, questions channel our energy.

We should spend time asking ourselves the right ones.

In total, our travel time is about 22 hours. That’s made up of a five-ish hour flight from Toronto to Vancouver, a two-ish hour layover, and finally, a 15-ish hour flight from Vancouver to Brisbane.

You would think that a journey like that—across most of a very large country and the world’s largest ocean—would be exhausting for two adults and two kids under 12.

It’s not.

The exhausting part actually begins as soon as we land in Australia.

There are a total of seven flights landing within the hour of us landing, each carrying an average of 250-300 passengers.

All of these passengers have to be channeled through a single Duty Free shop into the customs area, then go from customs to baggage pick-up, from baggage pick-up to Australia’s uber strict biosecurity process, and finally ... the waiting line for a rental car (well, the last part was just a few of us, but still).

On average for our family, after that 22 hour journey, we have another 2-3 hours of waiting in lines.

Those 2-3 hours, are the last 10% of the journey.

**

On an average night at home, I start the getting-ready-for-dinner process around 5pm.

Cooking, eating, reminding kids to stay at the table, eating again, and trying to connect as a family, takes us until about 7pm.

Then there’s either a last-minute request for ice cream, the park, or some random video that we all enjoy, and finally there’s shower time and slowly but surely, bed.

It’s now about 8pm. The last three hours have been a journey.

At this point, my wife and I walk downstairs, and see the one thing that’s left.

Dishes.

Doing all of them, vacuuming the random Cheerio crumbs from breakfast earlier, and tidying up the droppings of clothes (including lone socks that are missing their partners), this will take about 15-ish minutes.

This is roughly the last 10% of the journey.

**

There’s a saying in software engineering, framed in the form of something called the ninety-ninety rule. It goes like this:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Of all the obstacles you encounter along a journey, the biggest one is often at the end.

You have to face it when your energy reserves are low (or empty), and when your desire to finish is at an all-time high.

If this is a first-time journey for you, encountering the last 10% can feel like facing an immovable obstacle.

If it’s a repeat journey, then the obstacle is a familiar, though somehow always surprising foe.

It’s perfectly normal for any momentum you’ve gathered up to this moment to come to a screeching halt, while you process the reality of what’s ahead.

Then, you have to somehow do what you’ve done this entire time.

Keep going.

Because you’re almost there.

I was working at a cafeteria in the University of Waterloo (I was in high school at the time), and on my first shift I was assigned to the sub station.

The subs we had there were 12 inches long (standard sub size), came in two different varieties (white and whole wheat), and were soft to the touch.

Once someone has chosen their desired variety of bread, the first step to making a sub, is to cut it.

Do you know what the key to cutting a sub is?

I didn’t.

A line started to form at the sub station, and it was my turn to start making subs.

I had someone beside me to teach me the ropes, and the first thing she instructed me to do was to cut the sub.

Surely, she must have thought to herself, I don’t need to show this young kid how to actually cut bread, right?

Wrong.

On my first few attempts, I absolutely butchered the bread.

I was using my right hand to cut, it was moving way too fast, and the pressure from my left hand was flattening the sub like a panini press.

The speed of my right hand and the pressure of my left, resulted in the fresh, soft sub turning into dust.

Crumbs everywhere, customers continuing to pile up, it was a disaster.

My issue was, I was using too much force.

**

A long time ago, I tried wakeboarding.

I wasn’t being pulled behind a boat, instead a few friends and I went to a wakeboarding park.

Picture a giant oval of water, with a pulley system hovering over it (also the shape of an oval), that has a series of wakeboards and wakeboard lines hooked into it. Almost like a wakeboard conveyor belt.

It was designed to be a great way for beginners to learn how to wakeboard.

You start by sitting in the water, wakeboard attached to your feet, and you get given a handlebar. The handlebar is then attached to the conveyor belt and when you feel the pull of it, you slowly stand up, and hold on for the ride.

On my first few attempts, I did manage to stand up.

Only to immediately fall over.

I was tensing my body so hard that the conveyor belt probably felt like it was trying to pull along a bamboo stick.

My issue was, I was using too much force.

**

Occasionally, I wait too long to shave my beard.

I get lazy.

When the day inevitably comes, my sink ends up with a large volume of tiny black hairs.

Gross, I know.

When I look down at the sink after I’m finished, my immediate desire is to turn on the tap at firehose-speed and blast all the hair down the drain.

Except this is not what happens.

Turning on the tap to full blast simply results in the hair being forced higher up the edges of the sink, where the surface beneath the hairs is quite dry, thereby allowing them to stick even tighter to the bowl.

So what started as a somewhat concentrated volume of hair in the center of the bowl, has now spread to a large rim of hair around the entire circumference of the bowl.

My issue was, I was using too much force.

**

The key to cutting a sub, and for probably cutting anything, is to let the knife do the work.

Think of your hands not as clamps (my original mistake), but as guardrails.

The key to getting up and staying up on a wakeboard (which I eventually found out), is to have a loose grip.

You have to let the force of the conveyor belt dissipate through your entire body, and it starts with the amount of tension in your grip.

The key to getting a concentrated volume of hair out of the center of your sink, is to turn on the tap slowly. Doing so gently releases the hair off the surface, allowing it to be hugged by the flow of water, and head to its final resting place down the drain.

**

If something isn’t working as you think it should, you might be using too much force.

Try less.

By cost, I don’t mean the monetary cost. And by automation, I don’t just mean AI.

The cost I’m actually interested in is what we lose as individual human beings when we overly rely on automation—AI is a good current representation of automation.

To help me wrestle with this, I talked to my Dad about his time as a pilot.

**

In his 40+ year career, he experienced an automation revolution within the cockpit.

When he first sat in a cockpit, many things were done manually. Charts were printed out, data was manually interpreted, and buttons were manually pressed.

Over time, less buttons needed to be pressed, printouts became screens, and interpretations were simply delivered, not made.

One of the things he struggled with when working with junior pilots, was that he felt like they were being taught how to work a sophisticated computer as opposed to how to fly a plane.

I challenged him a little on this, because from the point-of-view of the passenger, what difference does it make whether the pilot is working a sophisticated computer or whether they are “flying a plane?” So long as I arrive at my destination safely, that’s all I really care about.

I’ll come back to this specific point later.

For the sake of simplicity, in the rest of this post I am going to refer to two pilots: One who grew up in the modern era, let’s call them automation-first, and one from an older generation, like my Dad, let’s call them manual-first.

The thing I really wanted to understand is what does a pilot lose (if anything) by being automation-first? So I asked my Dad to get specific and tell me how and when the difference of being automation-first vs. manual-first might matter in a flight.

**

He started by telling me that one of the things he was trained to do very early on, was to pay attention.

In situations of oncoming bad weather for example, there would be many indicators of that weather prior to it actually hitting. The thing was, those indicators didn’t just make themselves known to you. You had to pay attention to them, interpret them, and act on them accordingly. This was the manual-first approach.

The automation-first pilot doesn’t necessarily need to pay attention in this way, the computer pays attention to the indicators for them and then provides the interpretation.

The interesting thing my Dad told me was that even though a lot of this is automated, the old indicators are still there, and you can still pay attention to them.

Now we arrive at the heart of the issue: Since both methods (paying attention yourself or just letting the computer do it for you) achieve the same end (avoiding bad weather), what does the automation-first pilot lose by not learning to pay attention to the indicators?

After a lengthy conversation with my Dad about this, I believe the answer comes down to a single plural word:

Senses.

**

By necessity, the manual-first pilot was forced to learn how to use their senses in the cockpit. For example, they had to use their sense of sight to read certain indicators, and interpret them. They simply had no other option. Over time, this meant that their sense of sight became sharper.

The automation-first pilot on the other hand, can, if they so choose, outsource their senses.

The computer does the seeing for them.

But, like I asked earlier, if both the manual-first and automation-first pilot can get me to my destination safely, then why would having sharper senses matter?

This is actually the wrong question.

The right question is, when would having sharper senses matter?

**

Senses are like tools. They are tools we always carry with us. Like any tool, they can get blunt.

A computer is also a tool.

In flying, the large majority of the time, there will be no incident. No cause for concern. Most things will be routine. Flying is much safer than driving a car.

But what about in a crisis?

In a crisis, having the right tools matter a lot.

A computer, is just one tool.

Our senses, especially if they are sharp, are yet another—possibly invaluable—tool.

Sharper senses matter in a crisis.

**

The reality is, we’re not all pilots. Nor are we constantly facing crises.

And yet, each time we rely on automation, we are outsourcing our senses. We are dulling them.

This is what we lose. This is the cost of automation.

I say this as someone who uses automation a lot.

The large majority of the time, this won’t matter. When our lives feel routine, free from incident, and with no cause for concern.

But as you and I both know dear reader, there are certain moments in life that matter more than others.

Not all moments are equal.

These moments aren’t always crises, but they can be inflection points in our days or weeks.

The timing of these moments is hard to predict, but they will happen at some point.

My hope is that when these moments come, our senses will be sharp enough to face them.

I was not very good, but there was one thing I really enjoyed doing.

Working on my handles.

In non-basketball speak, handles are the different ways you dribble the ball.

I grew up in the era of Allen Iverson and AND1 mixtapes, so handles were all the rage.

Even though I don’t play basketball anymore, whenever I’m around a game or even a single person playing on their own, I can’t help but notice something.

I pay attention to their handles.

**

Henry “Hank” Aaron was one of the best hitters in baseball.

In one of the great biographies about him, there’s a small line that stood out to me about his hitting:

“In baseball, you could separate the good ones from the great with your eyes closed — literally, to the veteran baseball ear it was often that easy. Contact with the ball just sounded different — clearer, cleaner, sharper.”

**

In a conversation between two hall-of-fame tennis players, Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick talk about what it was like to face the backhand slice of a third hall-of-fame tennis player.

No doubt Andre and Andy have faced and delivered hundreds of thousands of backhand slices.

They both agreed, Roger Federer’s was just different.

Andre says, “Roger was the first guy I ever played against, where I could hit a ball exactly how I wanted and knew it, and I still didn’t feel safe.”

**

When on vacation with my family in Australia, I sign up for a month-long membership at a local boxing gym. I don’t box, but they have other things that I make use of.

The owner’s name is Dan. He’s a retired professional boxer, and he’s there every time I am.

The other day, on my way out, I decided to pound him. Pounding is the action of making a fist and simply touching the other person’s fist—a slightly cooler high-five.

Out of instinct (I think), Dan made a fist and lightly connected directly with my fist. Our knuckles made contact with each other.

In that very light touch with Dan’s fist, I felt like I was making contact with a concrete wall.

His pound was just different.

**

When paying attention to a basketball player’s handles, there’s just one thing to watch for.

Fluidity.

Once you become comfortable handling a basketball, your arms and the ball collectively take on the consistency of a single strand of well-cooked spaghetti.

Someone just learning to handle will have arms that look like uncooked spaghetti trying to swat the ball in a consistent spot.

If you’ve played enough ball, you can notice someone’s handles almost instantly. Even from a great distance.

Their handles just look different.

**

These signals of difference can be small—a touch, a sound, a sight.

And yet, in our noticing of them, we are instantly made aware of large stories they contain.

But it looks like one.

It doesn’t yield as much juice, it has a more complex taste, and it’s a slightly different shape.

A few weeks ago, there was a challenge involving yuzu on my favourite cooking show, MasterChef Australia.

The challenge was simple, not easy.

Contestants had to pick a single ingredient and build a complete dish out of it. The only other ingredients they were allowed to use in the dish were basic things like flour, sugar, salt, and milk (referred to as “under-bench staples” on the show).

Contestants were given four options for their core ingredient. One of which, was yuzu.

One contestant named Luke, decided to create a Yuzu Crepe Cake as his dish.

You don’t need to know anything about yuzu nor crepe cakes to make sense of what follows.

All you need to know, is that a key ingredient to Luke’s Crepe Cake was a custard, and in order to make that custard, he needed juice. Yuzu juice.

How did it go for Luke? You can watch this 2 minute and 40 second clip to find out: Luke’s Crepe Cake

Watching the clip isn’t a pre-requisite for what follows.

But you should watch the clip.

**

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled, The Area Under the Curve.

The basic idea is this: If you’re chasing some meaningful outcome, slowly increasing your effort over time will make it more likely for you to achieve that outcome.

This is different from: A. Giving up too early, B. Keeping your effort the same over time.

If you didn’t watch the clip of Luke’s Crepe Cake, I’m going to spoil it for you now.

He had a disastrous cook.

He treated the yuzu like a lemon, only to realize that it doesn’t yield the same amount of juice.

Despite this, he juiced roughly 10 yuzus to make his custard (a key part of his cake).

When it came to judging, one of the first questions that a judge asked him is whether he couldn’t get enough yuzus, because there were plenty available for the challenge.

Another judge goes on to say that there were in fact 50 yuzus available.

Luke stopped juicing after 10.

What if the magic number to help make his custard consistency better, therefore making his entire cake better, was 26 yuzus?

A little more effort and Luke might have got there.

**

Since you and I are not competing in a nationally televised Australian cooking competition (though, please inform me if you are), then we likely don’t need more literal yuzus to achieve that meaningful outcome we’re seeking.

We need more time.

Time is our yuzu.

Let’s take Luke’s lesson to heart. Let’s not give up too soon.

There’s more time available. Let’s use it.

I think about turbulence around this time of year because our family takes an annual trip that involves being in the sky for over 20 hours. One way.

Like I did a year ago, I’m going to continue talking about turbulence as a metaphor for things being out of control.

Usually, when things are out of control, it’s easy for us to feel like we have no choice in the matter. We just have to let it happen. We have to ride it out.

It turns out that when flying through turbulence at least, that’s not entirely true.

If it’s not true for turbulence, perhaps it’s not true for other times either.

**

Let’s get technical about turbulence.

Last year, I had the incredible privilege to sit in a cockpit during a flight. Two flights actually.

My Dad was the Captain, and it was his final set of flights before retiring from a 40+ year career in aviation.

When you sit in a cockpit, you get an entirely different perspective on turbulence.

You’re able to see what the pilots actually do during it.

I noticed three things, the first happens before you ever experience turbulence.

The cockpit has a radar, and the range on that radar can extend quite far.

This means that in some cases, pilots can see the turbulence coming.

Depending on their read of the severity of it, they may request a deviation. Meaning, they ask for clearance from air traffic control to deviate off their planned flight path by a few degrees or several, depending on what they see.

The second thing pilots might do is slow the plane down.

There’s something called turbulence penetration speed, and while that is unique to every aircraft, the actual number is something that pilots can go to if they have to.

The final thing, is height. Depending on when during the flight the turbulence happens, pilots might ascend or descend to get to calmer air.

**

The coolest thing about flying these days, is that you don’t have to sit in a cockpit to see everything I just described. You can see it from your seat.

Somewhere in your in-flight entertainment system, there will be a way to view the progress of your flight. In that area, there is a cockpit view option—this only becomes available once you’re higher than 10,000 feet.

If you happen to find that, then during turbulence you will be able to see exactly what the pilots are doing. That view will show you the speed, direction (referred to as “heading”), and the height of the aircraft. When the pilots make changes, you’ll see them as they happen.

I visit this screen each time the seatbelt sign comes on.

**

So what are our choices when things are out of control?

Let’s look at those three things that pilots do:

1. Change direction - We can choose to focus our attention elsewhere for a little while.

2. Slow down - While this is self-explanatory, don’t you find it fascinating that the lesson that’s true for us is also true for a giant metal object hurtling through the sky?

3. Change height - This feels like zooming out or zooming in. We can zero in on one part of what’s out of control and try to get that in control, or we can zoom out and get some perspective on how out of control this really is.

**

There have been a few times when I’ve switched over to the cockpit view during turbulence and noticed ... nothing.

No directional change, no speed change, and the aircraft staying at the same height.

In some cases, when things feel out of control, we do just have to let it happen.

We have to ride it out.

If I take care of it, there’s a good chance it will be my last glove too.

I was given a very interesting offer when I purchased the glove and I’d like to talk about what the offer was really offering, and why it was so easy for me to say yes.

**

Baseball gloves are made of leather and the good ones are usually quite stiff.

A glove feels best when it’s broken in, and I’ve heard an encyclopedia worth of tricks to try and break-in a glove, including running it over with a car.

When I went shopping for my first glove, I told the folks at the store that I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I just wanted to invest in something that I would have for a long time. When asked, I told them that the closest I intend to come to playing competitive baseball, is playing catch with our son on a paved road.

After explaining this, they helped me pick out an 11.75 inch Rawlings R9 Pro in baby blue with navy stitching. It’s a beauty.

When I went up to pay, the person at the counter asked if I had heard of their new “break-in” service. I said no, and he explained that for a fifth of the price of the glove, they would use this fancy machine to help break-in my glove in 45 minutes.

**

From the very little I’ve come to learn about baseball (I only became an ardent fan this year), everything about the game feels like a lesson in patience.

A hitter has to practice patience at the plate, trying not to swing at everything.

A team has to practice patience as they play through all nine innings of a single game, without ever knowing how long a single inning might take.

An organization has to practice patience as they make their way through 162 games in a regular season.

A baseball glove itself, is a lesson in patience.

Despite what the encyclopedia says, the real magic of breaking-in a glove comes from years of a sweaty hand trying to safely enclose a ball in a pocket.

**

I instantly said yes to the break-in service.

What it was offering me, is what we have an abundance of in our world: shortcuts.

When combined with our desire for immediate gratification, the result is virtually impossible to resist.

Did it work? Was it worth the price and the 45 minutes?

I guess so? But if I’m being honest, I don’t know.

Sure it was less stiff than it felt on the rack, but it was still pretty stiff.

**

A shortcut might make sense if you’re playing a short-term game.

But like properly breaking-in a baseball glove, most worthwhile games are long-term ones.

Let’s be patient enough to play them.

At the age of 14, he had bad pitch, bad tone, and was told that he wasn’t meant to be a singer.

Undeterred, at 17 he started practicing for two hours each night.

At 28 he started to like his voice, and finally at age 29, he’d done it.

**

The other day, a colleague of mine came to me with a problem.

She has been trying to help her team to understand certain procedural things that need to be done as part of their job, and they just can’t seem to do them correctly.

She told me all of the various ways she has tried to explain the procedures: in-person training, 1 on 1s, written checklists, and plenty of, “Do you have any questions or need to clarify anything?” Which was always met with, “No we’re all good, we get it.”

She and I sat together for almost two hours as she explained all the various things that she had tried, to no avail. She was looking to me for some perspective or perhaps a tactic she hadn’t thought of, and I came up with nothing.

As I write this sentence, it’s been three days since our conversation.

I think I finally have something to offer her.

It involves math, which is a shame, because I’m not very good at math.

**

Let’s start with a simple graph. Effort over time:

Now let’s imagine two scenarios.

One where effort stays steady over time:

And one where effort gradually increases over time:

Now let’s go back to our original graph, and imagine that an outcome we desire—the thing that we’re putting effort toward—exists for us at some point in the future.

For my colleague, this will be the day when most/all of her team are able to do the procedural things they need to do correctly. For Derek Sivers, this was the day when he became a singer.

You might start to see where this is going.

If our level of effort over time remains static, we may not reach the outcome we desire:

Even if that level is pretty high to begin with:

The magic happens when we slowly (because fast just isn’t realistic) increase our effort over time:

**

If there’s an outcome you’re seeking, that you’re just not finding, ask yourself two questions:

1. Is my level of effort slowly increasing?

2. Am I being patient enough?

If the answer to both is yes, then you probably need more patience.

The area under the curve will eventually catch up.

It’s a cooking competition, featuring mostly home cooks, four regular judges, and some celebrity guest judges.

50+ episode seasons, four new episodes per week, no drama, all food. If you love food, it’s the best.

Something I love studying each time we watch, is the way that contestants pair flavours together.

The other day a contestant was asked to hero tonka bean in their dish. Do you know what a tonka bean is? I’m guessing not. They hadn’t heard of it either. They smelled it, it smelled sweet, but then they tasted it, and it tasted bitter.

They ended up creating a tonka bean tart and pairing it with date, chocolate, caramel, and orange.

It blew the judges’ minds.

**

Flavour pairings serve as an interesting mental model to explore things beyond food.

Suppose you work on a small team, and further suppose that it’s a great team.

What happens if one team member leaves and is no longer part of the team?

Will there be a sense of loss? Surely. Can you ever replace that person exactly? Surely not.

If we adopt the mental model of food pairing here, if a single ingredient was no longer available to make a certain dish, you wouldn’t try to replace that single ingredient.

Instead you would ask, what does that ingredient represent? Sweetness? Acidity? Umami?

Once you understand this, a world of ingredients opens up.

Here’s a small mental exercise to try: Can you name what you represent to a team (or another person) that you care deeply about? If I forced you to narrow it down to just three specific sentences, could you?

I represent someone who ____________?

… is constantly learning new things and thinking of practical ways to apply them.

… makes the complicated feel simple.

… cares a ton about the quality of what we do.

To pair something well, we must first understand what it represents.

That goes for food, and people.

“...people think I have a style as a drummer. Part of me thinks that it’s because they don’t know all the influences I’m drawing on at any given moment. But part of me, just as quickly, wonders if there’s any difference.”

- From Creative Quest by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson

We are the sum of our influences.

Do you believe that, dear reader?

Let’s try something.

Pick any domain in your life that you care about being good in.

It could be a specific skill, like wanting to be a good cook, a good writer, a good musician, or even something broader like a good parent, a good partner, a good leader, or a good friend.

Now, once you’ve chosen your domain, I want you to imagine a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles.

On each circle, I want you to imagine a single source that is influencing the way you think or behave within your chosen domain.

With three circles in your Venn diagram, I’m asking you to imagine three distinct sources of influence.

Let’s call this the three circles question.

Can you name your circles easily? Are you ok with them? In other words, are you aware of them and can you accept them?

If I had to name my circles as a writer (at the time of writing this sentence), I think they would be made up of the following people:

1. Brian Dean - The founder of a niche marketing blog called Backlinko that I used to read religiously over a decade ago. I haven’t read his work in years, yet it was his style of short sentences with line breaks that really drew me in as a reader. He makes large topics feel small.

2. Billy Oppenheimer - The way that Billy weaves connections between disparate stories is something I both admire and attempt to copy. I only discovered his work relatively recently, and am fairly certain that I’ll be a lifelong fan.

3. Malcolm Gladwell - He has a gift of truly making anything interesting. When I think of the saying, to be interesting, be interested, I think of Malcolm.

It’s funny, even as I list these for you now, I’m aware of them, and yet I’m not sure that I can fully accept them.

I’m asking myself a few questions: Why aren’t there any fiction writers? Why are they all male?

I’m sure that if I kept adding circles, I could comfort myself with answers to those questions, but that’s cheating. The entire point of this exercise was to choose only three circles.

You can repeat this exercise in any domain of your life.

If you look hard enough, you can even use it to understand the domains of people you admire. If you’re not into hard work, I guess you could just ask them how they would answer the three circles question.

Going back to the top: We are the sum of our influences.

If you really believe that, then the three circles question matters a lot.

If you want to change the way you think, act, or both, consider changing a circle.

Or perhaps all three.

I wish I had taken a picture of her “self-portrait,” from her JK class. It was priceless. All I remember is that her eyes were highly disproportionate to each other and made up roughly 80% of her face. And I remember her body being mostly just … face.

When she was first drawing things, she would just draw anything.

All of her drawings had intricate stories behind them, regardless of how identical they looked.

As she got older, I began to notice an interesting behaviour.

She would start a drawing, then crumple it up and throw it away.

If the drawing had slightly “higher” stakes, like drawing a card for someone, the odds of crumpling would go way up.

**

I recently came across a term in Questlove’s incredible book, Creative Quest.

The good-taste governor.

I’ve written about taste before, and what struck me about this term, The good-taste governor, is how it reveals the dark side of developing taste.

When we start doing or experiencing a lot of something, we develop taste in that thing.

The good-taste governor shows up somewhere along our taste journey, and their primary source of power is judgement.

They essentially help us decide what’s good and what’s bad, according to our taste.

A question I’ve been wrestling with is: Why does the governor show up in the first place?

The answer led me back to my least-loved friend, comparison.

**

The reason our daughter started crumpling her drawings, was because her good-taste governor told her they weren’t good.

She has been drawing since a young age, she has seen a lot of drawings—both her own and many others. She has things to compare to.

We both develop and refine our taste through comparison, and it is comparison that gives birth to our good-taste governor.

The danger is, when it comes to creating things, the more powerful our governor is, the higher the rate of crumpling.

Key word: allowing.

Sometimes you have to say, “Relax, good-taste governor. Just let me draw stuff.”

My son got a baseball glove for Christmas last year, and now on every nice (or nice-ish) day, we go outside for a catch.

Until recently, we had been playing catch across the width of our street. Sidewalk to sidewalk. Occasionally, we’d go the length of the street and throw some longer balls to each other.

The other day, we decided to see what the Major League players do. So we got some measuring tape and chalk, and decided to mark out 60 feet and six inches on the street. The exact distance from the pitching mound to home plate.

**

Stephen Ango is the CEO of a software company called Obsidian.

He also likes to bake cookies.

During his interview on The Other Stuff (a Toronto-based podcast), one of the show’s team members—Alex—attempts to make Stephen’s Deluxe Chocolate Chip Cookie, using Stephen’s own recipe.

Stephen’s recipe has 14 ingredients, including one ice cube.

During the show, Alex says to Stephen, “I definitely learned a lot about you while making it. I did a lot of research on you leading up to this, and I think if I just made the cookie I would have got the same amount of information.”

**

Since 2015, John Mayer (musician, soundtrack to my late high school and early university years) joined the Grateful Dead’s offshoot band, Dead & Company.

When talking to Rick Rubin about how he studies the Grateful Dead’s former lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, John says this:

“If you listen to a guitar player playing long enough, you’ll understand them. Especially as a guitar player. You can sort of reverse engineer who someone must be, based on hundreds of thousands of choices. If you take all those choices that he’s making, a lot of times he’s making the sensitive choice. Not the pelvic, not the sort of histrionic, incendiary, he’s making the sensitive choice. That’s changed my guitar playing.”

**

The first thing you realize after measuring 60 feet and six inches is that the distance between the pitching mound and home plate is far.

Like, really far.

After a few (mostly failed) throws to my son from this distance, I instantly gained an entirely new appreciation for the game that I’ve fallen deeply in love with.

Henry “Hank” Aaron (Baseball Hall of Fame, 2nd most home runs of all time at the time of this writing), has this line in his autobiography:

“All I had to go on was the scouting report, but a scouting report doesn’t compare to a career of face-to-face confrontations. That’s the only way to really get to know a pitcher.”

Many times, we think we understand things because we’ve read a scouting report.

True understanding comes from face-to-face confrontations.

p.s. If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this one from a few years ago, “The Map is not the Territory.”

Here’s one from Rapscallion in Hamilton, Ontario:

One from the Drake Devonshire in Wellington, Ontario:

This one isn’t a washroom sign and I didn’t take a picture of it, but I did write it down. It’s from Public in Kitchener, Ontario:

**

I was at another restaurant (Willibald in Ayr, Ontario) recently and the topic of conversation at our table was centered around the word intention.

I left the conversation briefly to go to the washroom and ended up taking two pictures while there.

Here’s one:

and here’s the other:

Let’s break these down.

With the first image, the fact that it’s laminated and branded leads me to believe that this sign was posted in every washroom at the restaurant (I did not verify this, but I believe it’s a decent guess).

The last sentence on that sign tells me a lot. It was typed with intention. “We’re on a septic :(," is almost like a short story, isn’t it? To me it’s saying, “Hey, we’re out here on a farm doing our best. We may not have the most modern amenities, and we’re hoping that you can empathize with our plight.” It’s the emoticon at the end that really does it for me. Someone chose the sad face.

The second image shows a sign that I am almost certain only applied to the particular washroom that I chose (again, I didn’t verify). It’s the lack of lamination and branding, and the presence of two lines of blue tape that gave it away.

Again, so much intention here. My favourite word choices here are tricky and jiggle. Also, the placement of the sign itself is exactly where it would be most useful—I know, from experience.

Both of these signs clearly hold a lot of intention.

And yet, do they feel different to you?

For instance, does one feel more real than the other? More vulnerable?

We can do a lot of things with a similar level of intention, and yet the impact of our actions can be felt very differently.

There’s something about the hand-written sign on the blue masking tape that I loved.

In fact, I preferred it to the laminated and branded one (Yes, I understand they were communicating different things).

The sign reminded me of a line from The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Pg. 281):

My own note next to this line is: Mistakes are a point of universal connection.

The blue sign doesn’t necessarily have a mistake, but it contained a higher likelihood of one. When you choose to write something by hand, you leave behind the comfort of autocorrect. You are choosing to inject vulnerability into your words, regardless of what those words say.

In our quest to do things with more intention, we must choose to bring vulnerability along for the ride.

It will make our pursuit feel more human.

What I’m usually doing is curating or creating content for a workshop that I need to facilitate.

I try to stay true to a simple rule: Make it clear and engaging.

Sometimes, in the process of building a workshop, I get stuck.

I’m not sure if the particular activity I’m working on will be engaging enough, or whether the content I’ve curated or created will land clearly enough.

It’s really hard to anticipate how someone in a workshop might respond to a given element, regardless of how well I know the audience.

What usually gets me unstuck, is narrowing down the audience.

Down to just one person.

**

“One of my main goals starting out was that I wanted to be the artist that I would want to be a fan of. “ - Billie Eilish, Musician

“I do everything because I like, if I don’t like, then I don’t do.” - Dani DaOrtiz, Magician

“Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” - Charlie Munger, Investor

“We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves.” - Rick Rubin, Producer

**

The audience that really matters, is an audience of one.

You.

Design the activity that you want to participate in.

Cook the food that you want to eat.

Curate the playlist that you enjoy listening to.

Write the book that you want to read.

Look for what you find interesting, and follow that.

In addition to getting unstuck, another benefit I’ve found when applying this filter in practice, is that it’s much easier to know when you’re done.

When you’re trying to please an audience of more, you run the risk of endless tinkering. You think that if you tweak just a little more, then it will be a little more appealing. It won’t. It’s a bottomless chase.

Each time we try to please an audience of more, we’re entering the realm of guessing.

To stay within the realm of truth, focus on an audience of one.

You.

Back in school, we occasionally had guest speakers in some of our classes.

My most recent memory of one was from university, but if I’m being honest, I can’t remember who they were and what they talked about. I only remember the class they came to. My 4th year Integrated Marketing Communications class.

Since graduating many years ago, I’ve had the honour of being a guest speaker in a few classes. Including Integrated Marketing Communications.

I recall being so excited to be a speaker. I felt as though I had gained some perspective since my days as a student and I was eager to share that. Especially to students in their last year of school (4th year). That was a particularly anxiety-ridden time for me, and I wanted so badly to share the type of thing that would have helped an older version of me to feel less anxious.

I was given a few different opportunities to speak, and each time, the perspective that I so wished to pass on, didn’t really make it across the channel. How do I know? Well, in the way that you just know things when you’ve done them.

Like the guest speakers I don’t remember as a student, I added my own face to the list.

The puzzle I was left with for years, was this: Can perspective truly be delivered by a giver or is it something that has to be earned by the receiver?

**

Andy Hearnden is one of my favourite chefs. His YouTube channel Andy Cooks, is something I’m watching on a daily basis these days.

Andy has over 20 years of professional cooking experience. Sometimes, he cooks with ingredients and techniques that are far beyond my reach. For example, he uses wagyu beef a lot.

I’ve never eaten wagyu beef, nor am I in a position to frequently afford wagyu beef to cook with at home. Andy has probably eaten a lot of wagyu beef, and so he knows how good it is. Naturally, that’s why he uses it and talks about it. He has a perspective that I simply don’t have, yet.

The thing about perspective, is that once you have it, you see everything with it. It becomes easy to talk about. It gives you a new language. It’s easy to forget what life was like when you didn’t have it.

Unlike the wagyu beef videos, the videos of Andy’s that I love most, are the ones where he applies 20+ years of experience to something that costs less than $1.

Like instant noodles.

Here’s his 10-minute video on how to take simple instant noodles to a whole different level — well, five different levels actually, including a wagyu beef option.

Instant noodles are something I can understand. I speak the language of instant noodles because I buy them and cook with them all the time.

When Andy makes a 10-minute video on how to up your instant noodle game, he is delivering perspective in the right vehicle for me. Instant noodles are my vehicle. Wagyu beef is not.

All those guest speakers and I, we were wagyu-beefing it. I wonder if we should’ve been instant-noodling it instead.

That’s the puzzle my friend helped me solve.

He said that the onus for delivering perspective, is completely on the giver, not the receiver.

As the giver, you have to find the right vehicle for delivery.

He was the co-director of a documentary called, “Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music,“ which showcases the best musical performances from Saturday Night Live over the last 50 years. At the time of this writing, I haven’t seen the documentary, but I have listened to Questlove talking about what he went through to make it.

In an interview on Score (a podcast), Questlove says that over the course of two years, he watched all 1000+ episodes of SNL. He watched over 1500 hours of a show, to help create a 2 hour and 8 minute documentary.

**

Before designing the Daylight DC-1 (the world’s first human-friendly computer), Anjan Katta (the founder) did his homework. In an interview on Dialectic (another podcast), he says this:

He would read every review of every handheld gadget that came out. Including all the comments on YouTube reviews. Imagine how many hours that took.

**

Both of these examples make me think of a question I heard once, that echoes in my head often:

When we go very deep on a thing, or we experience a lot of a thing, we’re building our taste in that thing. This works with things we literally taste, and also with things we hear, touch, see, or smell.

The reason Tamara’s question echoes in my head so often is because of the word deploy. She’s challenging us to act on the things we consume or experience.

This question is particularly potent if you consume or experience a lot of a given thing.

The longer I’ve sat with this question, the more intrigued I’ve become about how people deploy their taste.

**

Our friends Greg and Whitney are huge fans of The Tragically Hip. Greg practically knows every song on every album, and can even recall the year that particular album came out. Until recently, I could barely name one song by the band.

A few weeks ago, Greg and Whitney took my wife and I to see a musical that featured songs from The Tragically Hip, and on the drive we asked Greg to tell us about the band.

We essentially asked him to distill over 30 years of consumption, 30 years of building his taste, into an hour-long drive. What he told us ended up being a gift because of how we were able to then experience the musical that we were going to see.

Greg deployed his taste in the form of a story, which ended up being a gift.

**

My friend Will is super into pencils.

We were part of a gift exchange a few Christmases ago, and his contribution was a set of his favourite pencils: The 9850 HB Wood-Case Pencil by Mitsu-Bishi Pencil Co.

I ended up being the lucky recipient of his gift.

As you might imagine, his gift wasn’t just a set of pencils, he obviously had a story about why those particular pencils. Being the thoughtful human that he is, Will typed this story (in a very unique style of font and paper) and attached it to the set of pencils. Here’s a line from it:

Will deployed his taste in the form of a literal gift.

**

How will you deploy your taste?

The entire floor was lined with tables and papers, and proctors circled around like the human equivalent of CCTV cameras.

I was in a fairly large program in my university, which meant that when I wrote an exam, so did several hundred other students. Hence, the gym.

The thing I remember more than any of the exams themselves, was the waiting room. The small and very cramped hallway facing the series of closed doors that led to the gym.

The space before the exam.

Every time we had an exam in the gym, hundreds of us attempted to fit into this hallway.

The behaviour of students in this hallway was patterned.

Some were lying down, buried in notes, almost trying to bathe themselves in last-minute knowledge.

Some would stand around stoically waiting, with one of those endless stares.

The worst ones, in my opinion, would be the ones talking out loud about all the concepts on the exam, which would should send a shockwave of nerves around to those listening, making them question their own knowledge of the concepts being discussed.

Some, like me, would be wearing headphones, just making simple eye-contact, with maybe the occasional fist bump.

**

In professional tennis, the space before the match is the tunnel.

In all grand slam events, this tunnel is truly an experience. It might be lined with names, dates, and pictures of previous grand slam winners, or it might have an iconic quote like this:

When players enter the tunnel, their teams who have been with them up to this moment, leave to their their seats in the players’ respective boxes. The players are left to be alone, with each other.

Most players are silent here. Headphones on, hoodies up, endless stare out to the court. Rafael Nadal was famous for sprinting and running around, as shown in this clip (This was taken at the French Open, a tournament he won 14 times, which earned him the title, “The King of Clay.”).

**

If you look at your own life, you will always find a space before a big moment.

Perhaps not even that big. Maybe you’ve got a lot to do today, so the space before may simply be your own bed, where you lie awake in the morning waiting for the spark of courage that will magically move your feet to the floor.

What happens for you, when you enter the space before?

In this space, I often face a giant mirror. Not a trick mirror, or a broken mirror, a simple mirror.

Of all the obstacles I’ve had to overcome while preparing for this particular moment, the mirror presents me with the final, and often the biggest one.

Self-doubt.

So in the space before, when I’m staring at the mirror, how I will I respond?

Will I flip my hood up and look down? Will I lie down and try to bathe myself in last-minute comforts? Will I stare endlessly ahead? Will I run around like a caged animal?

The answer to the question that meets us in the space before, will dictate how we show up in the moment after.