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.

José was recently on the endlessly entertaining podcast, What Now? With Trevor Noah, and toward the end of the episode, Trevor asked him a powerful question.

The context here is that since founding World Central Kitchen in 2010, José has prepared and served food during some of the most devastating humanitarian crises across the world. He continues to do so at the time of this writing.

Trevor’s question to José was simply this, “How do you maintain your hope?“

José’s response:

“I believe there is more goodness than hate in the world. What happens is goodness, goodwill, and the common good it’s very humble and it’s very ... doesn’t have a big voice,” he continues, “It seems hate is what has a big voice and it screams and with very short sentences it’s able to rally everybody.”

**

When I was much younger, I used to play a lot of tennis.

At one point, when I was probably 12 or so, my mum found me a new coach. I think she had been referred to this guy from some other people I was working with at the time.

Apparently this new coach was a big deal.

There’s a quote I think about that’s often attributed to Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

To this I will add: People will also forget what you looked like.

As I type these words, I have no recollection at all about what this tennis coach looked like.

I only remember that he made me feel like crap.

In my memory of him, he would be wearing Wimbledon whites, sitting on the sidelines, and yelling directives at me, while his assistant made me move around the court trying to hit a series of progressively challenging shots.

He had a big voice. Sometimes he screamed. He would often use short sentences.

**

A few years ago I did some work trying to visualize my inner critic.

We all have one. What does yours look like? Do you know? Look and see next time they show up.

Mine? That tennis coach. Sitting in his Wimbledon whites. Yelling short sentences at me.

Just like our outer world, our inner world is a balance of good and bad too.

We should take José Andrés’ words to heart about ourselves. There is more goodness than bad in us.

The thing to be mindful of, is that goodness has a quiet voice.

In a world dominated by noise—ego, comparison, expectation, righteousness, entitlement—we have to be patient and willing to hear the whispers of goodness, then respond to them.

They are always there.

In a book of the same title, journalist Alfred Lansing does a masterful job of detailing the harrowing true story of what Shackleton and his team had to go through after that moment.

Toward the end of the story, after facing an endless amount of do or die decisions, Lansing describes a final obstacle that Shackleton had to face: Descending a very tall mountain.

“There was no need to explain the situation. Speaking rapidly, Shackleton said simply that they faced a clear-cut choice: If they stayed where they were, they would freeze—in an hour, maybe two, maybe more. They had to get lower—and with all possible haste. So he suggested they slide.”

We may have never heard of Sir Earnest Shackleton had he not chosen to slide down the side of a mountain.

**

I’m not a fan of uncertainty.

I can’t say that I’ve met many who claim to be fans, though I’ve certainly met many who are far more comfortable with it than I am. I am married to one such human.

There’s a line from a book I love, which makes me want to become more of an uncertainty fan. From Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

“You have a choice between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot - and thereby guaranteeing that it it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.”

Uncertainty is the comforting choice.

That’s the part that sticks with me. Yet, I so often fail to choose it.

**

We don’t always find ourselves stuck on top of a mountain with friends awaiting inevitable death.

But we face decisions fraught with uncertainty all the time.

How do we make the more uncertain choice in these moments? The apparently more comforting choice?

I don’t know. Like I said, I often fail to.

I think Rick Rubin can offer us a clue. From The Creative Act:

“Ultimately, your desire to create must be greater than your fear of it.”

Our desire must be greater than our fear.

Whatever lies on the other side of uncertainty, we have to want it.

**

Here’s a final take I’d like to offer to those of us seeking to become fans of uncertainty.

Regardless of its timing, death is certain.

Life is uncertain.

So perhaps, like Shackleton on that frozen peak, we need to make the the more comforting choice. Even if it means sliding down.

We must to choose to live.

References:

1. Endurance, Alfred Lansing

2. Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland

3. The Creative Act, Rick Rubin

Well, he had one a few years ago, then it found its way to the land of misplaced toys.

I think he recently saw someone with a yo-yo on a show that he loves so it rekindled his desire for this thing.

So, we got him a new yo-yo.

A week or two later, it found its way to the land of misplaced toys.

Now he wants a basketball.

**

Have you ever found yourself thinking about something so much that it’s all you can think about, then a few days later, you can’t even remember what the thing was?

Conversely, have you also noticed that it’s been several years since something happened and it still finds its way into your thoughts from time to time? I’m not necessarily referring to grief or something overly powerful, I’m actually talking about something smaller. About the weight of a metaphorical yo-yo.

Different things resonate differently.

I’d like to explore two characteristics of resonance itself and suggest that of the two, one is more important than the other.

**

Imagine the sound of a gong.

There are two things I want you to pay particular attention to:

1. How loud was the sound you were imagining?

2. How long did the sound last?

These are the two characteristics of resonance that I’d like to explore. Volume and duration.

If you find your thoughts consumed by something on a given day, that thing is resonating for you at a high volume. It’s a loud gong. But, once you sleep on it, if you find that the volume has gotten quieter, then it’s likely that the duration is going to be short. Perhaps in a few days you would have forgotten about it entirely. This is a high volume short duration pattern of resonance.

This is our son’s yo-yo.

Then there’s the thing that enters your mind occasionally. It could be just days old or several years old, but it keeps coming up. Volume in this case may have been high or low, but the more important factor is duration. It’s long. When something has a long duration, it meets you at different points in your life, and colours those points accordingly.

Of the two characteristics that make up resonance, duration is the more important one. When you add up all the little moments of influence that something with long duration has, it will dwarf something that has a high volume.

**

So, we’ve answered the question of importance. If something resonates with us for a longer period of time—regardless of how loud it initially was—it’s more important than something that consumes our thoughts for a brief window of time.

The question we haven’t explored is why certain things have a longer duration of resonance.

I’d like to suggest a simple answer. One you can test for yourself.

If something has been resonating with you for some time, perhaps years, it’s because it’s teaching you something.

It may be a lesson that you need to keep remembering. It may be a lesson that you haven’t quite mastered yet and so the teacher keeps showing up at different points in your life in the hopes that you’ll keep making progress.

If school has taught us anything, in order to learn the lesson we have to do something. We have to show that we have learned.

So the question I will leave you with, dear reader, is this:

Of the things that are resonating in your life right now, what will you do about them?

p.s. This post pairs well with something I wrote about several years ago: Sympathetic Resonance.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age.

I first heard this quote on an episode of Dialectic, where Anjan Katta references this quote, with a slight twist. He says:

Einstein says, “What characterizes the modern age is optimization of means, yet confusion of goals.”

Both of these—the original quote and its variation—got me thinking about why I don’t like meetings. Most meetings anyway.

Meetings are a means.

In the world of work—I can only speak to knowledge work from personal experience—we seem to have perfected the art of defaulting to meetings.

We’re optimizing them even further now by asking AI to get involved and note take, compress, clarify, and suggest things to us.

In her excellent book, The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker talks about an ancient Japanese idea called Ichi-go ichi-e, which roughly translates to one time, one meeting.

The idea is that this moment, in this time and place, with these people, doing this thing, will never be repeated. As such, it should be treated with with a certain level of reverence.

I fear that in our pursuit to optimize and perfect meetings as means, we have lost the ability to treat them with reverence. As Einstein said so many years ago, we have become confused about why we meet in the first place.

If you ever find yourself questioning what a meeting is about, whether it’s the first of its kind or a routine meeting, it’s worth pausing. If you wish to treat a meeting with reverence, you must first be clear about its purpose.

Let’s stop meeting for the sake of meeting.

Let’s find reverence through purpose.

It was a throwaway line.

Specifically she said, “My infinite energy is to help people say more awesome stuff.”

She used that term—infinite energy—only once in 2 hours and 26 minutes.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since I heard her say it. I have so many questions.

What does it tell us if we can find our infinite energy and what does it tell us if we can’t?

If we find it, to what extent should we pursue it?

Of course we can’t spend infinite energy on something, because we don’t have that, so what does it even mean to have infinite energy?

**

While I reflect on an example of something that comes to mind when I think of my own infinite energy, I would love for you to think of your own example too, dear reader.

Steve is one of my best friends. He and I have known each other for over 20 years.

One of the things we are known for is the conversations that begin at our goodbyes.

I can’t think of the amount of times we’ve come to the end of a night together and we’re standing (almost always standing) by a car (usually mine) ready to say goodbye, then one of us says something.

That something is often totally random.

A personal favourite example was a question that was something like this:

If something crazy happened and we were all of a sudden the only two people left in this city, how would we find each other? With no phones or internet obviously.

That exact conversation lasted for well over two hours. It was insanely detailed for an incredibly fictional situation.

One of my infinite energies is for conversations like that, with Steve.

**

I’d like to use this example to share some characteristics of things we might have infinite energy for.

If you’ve found your thing, I’d love to know how these characteristics line up, and if you haven’t, perhaps these characteristics will help.

I’ve thought of three characteristics and I’ll frame them as questions.

1. Is this something you want to do? - A good clue that you’ve found your infinite energy is it’s the thing you want to do, after having done all the things you need to do. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes all the things you need to do so frustrating because you want to do this other thing so badly.

2. Is this something that feels endless (in a good way)? - By endless, what I mean is that your only real constraint is time. In my example with Steve, the topics (or sometimes singular topic) we discuss could keep going and going, but at some point we come to our senses and realize that we should probably go home.

3. Is this something that has the potential to surprise and delight you? - Those particular feelings matter a lot. They point to the discovery of something new. Imagine I created a retail store full of things you’ve never seen that have been curated just to suit you. The feeling I’m getting at is what it would be like to walk through that store.

So, what’s your infinite energy?

To him though, writing a book is easy compared to what he was doing before.

R.L. Stein had many jobs before he wrote Goosebumps. One of them was working as an Editor at Junior Scholastic Magazine, where was always working on four magazines at a time.

At any given time, he was: Proofing one magazine, editing another magazine, writing yet another magazine, and planning a different magazine. Four different magazines, all at once.

Going from all of this to writing a single book felt so much easier and faster for him.

**

If you’re doing a workout that involves lifting weights, a de-load set is one where you intentionally lift a lighter weight at the very end of your workout.

The funny thing about de-loading is that it can make things that at one point seemed very challenging to you, suddenly feel ridiculously easy.

Let me explain this using some simple numbers applied to an imaginary workout.

Suppose in this workout, I had to lift the following weights: 10lbs, 25lbs, 40lbs, 50lbs, and 60lbs. In that exact progression.

Perhaps the 10lbs and 25lbs might be easy for me at first, but when I hit that jump to 40lbs that might be tough. At least initially. Then I make it all the way to 60lbs. Suppose this is my upper end.

Now it’s time to de-load.

For my last set, I drop from 60lbs back to 40lbs. This time, that 40lbs will feel very light compared to how it felt earlier in the same workout.

De-loading is intentionally easy. It’s a way for your body to take a step down from a tall ladder versus just jumping off the ladder.

**

If we want to make progress on something we’re challenged by, one way to do it would be to try something more challenging. Even for a short time. This is how we can use de-loading to our advantage.

De-loading can also trick us. Specifically, it can trick us into lowering our guard.

Back to the exercise example, when I de-loaded to 40lbs and it felt easy, you can imagine that because it felt easy I might be tempted to over extend myself.

Even though it felt relatively light because it was a de-load, I can’t lose sight of the fact that it’s still 40lbs.

In the early 80s, he won 34 out of the 35 freestyle contests that he entered.

Despite this, Rodney does not define success by trophies.

If you read his autobiography, it’s obvious that Rodney sees skateboarding as an art with infinite possibilities.

When you see the world that way, it’s not zero-sum. It’s not about winning and losing.

Winning and losing is a finite concept.

Rodney sees skateboarding as positive-sum, where when one person pushes into the unknown and creates a new known, everybody wins.

The purpose of playing the game at all is to push into the unknowns.

**

In an interview with Andy Roddick, Andre Agassi said the following about those who make it to No.1 in the world at tennis:

He then goes on to explain that once the rest of the world has seen that, they have to adjust to it.

Viewed on an individual level, it may look like one person (The No.1 in the world) is ahead of the pack for a little while. But viewed on a collective level over time, that one person shifts the entire field of players forward.

By bringing something new to the game, they made a contribution.

**

What I love most about this concept of contribution is that it can take us out of a scarcity view of the world, and shift us into an abundant one.

In many ways contribution is the opposite of competition, yet in a somewhat poetic paradox, competition can also fuel contribution.

There’s a quote I read once that explains why being measured by contribution is a powerful way to think in a world driven by ideas:

Let’s be contributors. We’ll all be better for it.

The first iterations of it weren’t very impressive, but now, it’s mind-blowing.

If you’re a fan of 90s Rap/Hip-Hop, listen to this (p.s. I can’t promise that the link will stay active forever, from my experience these songs don’t always stick around).

I have listened to many, many hours of AI-generated music. They are all covers.

Some versions are so good that I like them slightly better than the originals.

A strange thing started happening to me once I listened past a certain number of hours.

I started to notice that the music sounded ... perfect.

Too perfect.

More specifically, it was the vocals that put me over the edge.

There were some lines from some songs that were sung in such a way that I knew only a machine can do that.

This made me realize something that I had been taking for granted in all my years of loving music.

Human vocals are imperfect, because human beings are imperfect.

I love that about us. Don’t you?

**

Lee Sedol is a South Korean former professional Go player, and is one of the main characters of the 2017 documentary, AlphaGo.

The documentary is available for free on YouTube and it is entirely worth an hour and a half of your time. I have watched it several times.

It’s about a machine versus a human in an ancient game. The machine is a computer program developed by Google DeepMind, the human is Lee Sedol, and the game is Go.

The dramatic showdown between these two takes place over five games. I am not going to spoil the outcome for you, but I am going to mention one particular point that happens in game 4 (If you want to jump to the start of game 4, it’s at 1:03:55 in the documentary).

In game 4, Lee Sedol plays a move that data scientists later calculate to be a 1 in 10,000 move. The people in the documentary literally call it a “God move.”

In that one move, you could argue that Lee Sedol, a human being, was perfect.

Again, without trying to give away too much, the aftermath of that move had people in tears. Me included.

It felt like we were crying because Lee Sedol showed us that, with all our imperfections, human beings can also be perfect.

I love that about us too. Don’t you?

They essentially perform adult glee, and their shows are simply outstanding.

I learned early on that when tickets come out for the four shows that they have over a weekend, I must buy tickets for at least two of them.

The shows usually take place on a Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and Sunday night.

My wife and others who are part of the community have given me (and fellow fans) the advice to skip the first show, and try to get tickets for Saturday night (show three - most energy) or Sunday night (final show - most emotion).

This past season, I got tickets for Saturday afternoon and Saturday night. This meant I should have been seeing shows two and three.

Then there was a snowstorm. A big one.

This forced a schedule change and they had to move the Friday night show. This meant, I would now be seeing shows one and two, on the same day, just a few hours apart.

Show one was great... but show two was something else.

There was a level of cohesion and magic that emerged. Given that I had just seen the same show a few hours prior, with the exact same humans performing, I couldn’t even understand how show two was that much better.

The thing is, I needed to see show one in order to appreciate show two as much as I did.

**

A friend and I were talking about video games the other day.

We grew up in the 90’s, so the first system we both remember playing was a Nintendo—the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

At the time, this device felt like magic. The games we played on it were like nothing we experienced anywhere else. Despite this, we still knew it was a game because the graphics were quite cartoonish.

My friend now owns a PlayStation 5.

The graphics for games on PlayStation 5 feel just a few hairs below real life.

Sometimes when we’re together, we won’t even play a game, we’ll just observe the graphics in awe.

The thing is, we needed to play a Nintendo in order to appreciate a PlayStation 5 as much as we do.

**

When we experience the evolution of something, we appreciate it more.

Why?

I think it’s because it touches on a truth we all believe about ourselves.

We can evolve too.

The topics were a bit too abstract and the speed of the conversation was a bit too fast.

After a few minutes of listening, I gave up and decided to switch to a different episode from the same podcast.

Instantly, I understood everything that was being discussed.

If you listen to someone speak about a topic you have absolutely no clue about, then immediately follow that with listening to someone from your field, you will have the same experience I had.

The experience itself is quite mundane.

Because my experience happened in such short succession and within the same podcast (not the same episode), it got me thinking about something.

I started thinking about how easy or difficult things are to interface with, and what that ease or difficulty does.

**

Let’s talk about wayfinding signs.

If you don’t know what these are, take a look at this blog post, which has some seriously hilarious examples of poor wayfinding.

When the signage that’s specifically meant to help you navigate a place is confusing, you not only have a higher chance of becoming lost, you may also lose your desire to explore. You’re just too frustrated.

Interfacing comes down to energy.

The more energy required to understand something, the harder it is to interface with.

If something is hard to interface with, you’re less likely to explore it further than you already have.

**

When I read a book, I think my single favourite format is a hardcover book (with the dust jacket removed).

The issue is, most of the hardcover books that I read don’t fit into my pockets. I guess I could permanently switch to cargo pants if I really cared that much.

The reason I love my Kobo, is because it’s portable. It does fit into my pocket.

The easier something is to interface with—this is especially true for an idea—the more portable it becomes.

The more portable something is, the more widely it can be used. I can read my Kobo in the dark and can’t say the same for my beloved hardcover book.

**

The more deeply we interface with something, the greater the connection we form to that thing.

Let’s make that easy.

“I know people shaped by pain as well as by love, and if it was more pain than love ... watch out.”

*

Andre Agassi (8-time Men’s Singles Grand Slam Champion) has openly talked and written about hating tennis.

In an incredible interview he did with Andy Roddick, he says this:

“You can be motivated through two things in your life, fear or love, and it was fear that was driving me.”

*

What these quotes are pointing to is a state that we all find ourselves oscillating between.

My favourite phrasing of this is dark force and light force motivation.

Pain, fear, greed, envy, and their equivalents are all dark forces.

The light forces are things like love, creativity, joy, and interest.

Being driven by these forces feels different and our bodies give us clear signals about which force is driving us at any given time.

Dark forces have a tight grip. They add tension to our minds and bodies. They make us see the world through a lens of scarcity.

A light force loosens our grip. It helps us to see the abundance and to see with abundance.

*

Both of these forces can drive us far in life, but there’s one key difference between them.

I said it earlier. Dark forces add tension. Light forces remove tension.

All things being equal, if two people end up at the same place, the person driven by light forces will be lighter when they arrive.

The beauty of these forces is how they scale in shaping our decisions.

In a given day, we may be motivated by one or the other multiple times, and we also may have an overarching force guiding our entire year.

If you want a simple test to know which of the two is driving you right now, just ask yourself this question:

Are you moving toward something or away from something?

Toward is light. Away from is dark.

The concept is very simple, it starts with each player being dealt a series of cards with nouns on them. We play the kids version so these nouns are words like toothbrush, a dollar, girlfriends, rollercoasters, and hospitals.

When play begins, one player called the judge draws a “description” card. Words like smelly, valuable, shy, and energetic appear on these description cards. All players except the judge then choose one of their noun cards that they feel best matches the judge’s description card and they place that noun card (face down) in front of the judge.

Once all the players’ chosen noun cards are in, the judge reads out the various noun cards and then selects one that they feel best matches the description card. For example if the description card was valuable, and I had the noun card toothbrush, I may choose to play that card in the hopes that it gets selected by the judge. Once the judge selects their preferred noun card, that player wins the round and then a new player becomes the judge.

The crux of this game is that it all comes down to the judge’s choice. They may be fairly literal and choose the best logical match with description and noun, or they may choose the noun card that feels funniest to them (as I often like to do). As author and adman Rory Sutherland would say, this game isn’t about logic, so much as it is about psycho-logic.

***

Why did I just spend four paragraphs telling you about how a peculiar board game works?

Because I think it can teach us everything we need to know about applying for a job.

The thing about playing Apples to Apples is, sometimes when a certain description card comes up and you know a lot about the psychology of the judge, you can easily think that you have the best noun card to match. You often feel really good about throwing that noun card into the pile. You are almost certain that you will win the round.

Then you hear the other noun cards being read out loud, and you instantly know you’re going to lose.

There’s just a better noun card in the pile, and you are certain that the judge is going to choose it over your own.

Importantly, this had nothing to do with your choice. You played the best card from the ones you were dealt. Someone else just happened to have the right card for that judge in that turn.

When applying for a job, there is so much within your control except two important things:

1. The other candidates.

2. The employer’s final choice.

If you keep playing long enough, in one turn you will have the right card.

He works for magicians, and surrounds himself almost exclusively with magicians.

When Dani was very young, he got to see another legendary magician, Juan Tamariz, perform live. After the performance, Juan had a ritual of sticking around until the early hours of the morning just to perform for other magicians. From the time he was a young kid, Dani was one of those who stuck around with Juan until the early hours. To Dani, this is just what magicians did.

Now, more than 40 years later, Dani has built a house in his hometown of Estepona (Spain), exclusively for magicians to live in while they practice their craft alongside him.

Surrounding himself with magicians from a young age, was simply the water Dani swam in. He still does.

***

I’ve mentioned my recent and growing fascination with Anjan Katta before. He is the CEO of a new computing company called Daylight.

In a profile I read about him recently, he mentions that Daylight isn’t a company focused on product design, it’s focused on environment design. He wants to be a part of creating the environments that enable you to be the best version of yourself.

According to the profile, Anjan’s home has no overhead lights.

He likes to wrap himself in blankets at nighttime because they put his nervous system into a calmer place. He has a projector that casts grainy constellations of stars across his ceiling. He is designing the type of environment that he wants to imbue in his company’s products.

Environment design is the water than Anjan swims in.

***

I often find myself falling into the comparison trap. It’s awfully magnetic for some reason.

When I was growing up in Sri Lanka, I can’t recall exactly at what grade this started, but for as long as I can remember, each person in our class was ranked. Out loud.

What this meant was, a few times each year after an exam period, students in the class would be ranked according to the grades they received. There would be a single ranking order, we weren’t ranked according to each subject—at least that’s what I remember. These rankings were then read out loud to the entire class, from first to last.

I was never top of the class and I have been thinking back to that time recently for several reasons. I may write about a few of them some other time, but for the purpose of this post, I’ve realized that being compared to others was part of the water I swam in for a long time.

***

What’s your water?

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head ever since hearing it a few weeks ago.

Anjan Katta is the CEO of a new computing company called Daylight, and I just love the way he thinks about the world.

What Anjan is pointing to here, is a universal truth about the way big ideas develop.

In John Gardner’s potent book Self-Renewal, he states it this way on page 29:

How many of us can really recognize in the vast clutter of modern life the seedlings of new ideas and new ways that will shape the future? The new thing rarely comes on with a flourish of trumpets. The historic innovation looks exciting in the history books, but if one could question those who lived at the time, the typical response would be neither, “I opposed it” nor “I welcomed it,” but “I didn’t know it was happening.”

The new thing rarely comes on with a flourish of trumpets. That’s worth keeping on a Post-It.

This got me thinking about two things related to progress.

1. We need to try things that may not work.

2. We need to pay attention to the small things.

***

One thing I’ve learned about the winter after having lived in Canada for 23 years: Light snow is scarier than heavy snow.

I think this holds for rain too. When the rain is torrential, it likely won’t last long. The same goes for snow.

The light, slow, slightly pretty, and eerily quiet snow is what ends up causing a snow day. We had one of these the other day, where we went from being able to see the pavement one day, to every school in our Province being shut down the next morning.

The light snow is easy to ignore, because it’s small. It being able to cause a system-wide school closure feels uninevitable. It’s not going to arrive with a flourish of trumpets.

***

I can see an easy counter-argument to the idea of paying attention to the small things.

Our attention is scarce, so of the many small things, how do we know what to invest our attention in?

And how long do we keep investing before we give up?

Luckily, I think the answer to both of these is the same and it connects to both of the points I made earlier about progress:

Try things you’re interested in and pay attention to things you find interesting for as long as you still find them interesting.

In short: To make progress, follow your interests.

It’s uninevitable where they may lead.

Cooking of course, is the final stage of the journey. Before getting there, there’s meal planning, grocery shopping, grocery unpacking (which I despise), and then cooking.

The other night, I was cooking a chicken stir fry. Usually this meal—which I’ve prepared many times before—would take me about an hour from start to finish.

One of the steps in the prep of the chicken is to use a little baking soda to tenderize the chicken. It’s a trick I first learned from this video, and I’ve used it ever since.

On this particular night, when I was dumping out the baking soda onto the chicken, it came out in clumps. Perhaps a few too many clumps. I broke up some of the clumps with my fingers and carried on with the prep of the chicken.

If you take nothing else out of this post, just know this: Too much baking soda makes something taste like metal. Especially chicken.

When we eventually sat down to eat, all that chicken that I had meal prepped for, bought at the store, unpacked, and then spent an hour prepping, tasted like a plate of hot garbage. Hot metallic garbage.

***

A sunk cost is something you’ve spent that can’t be recovered.

In the most basic sense, you can think of a sunk cost as monetary, like the cost of the chicken in my story. But of course, sunk costs are not just monetary.

Our attention for example, is a perpetual sunk cost—which is why I’m so grateful that you choose to spend some of it here.

Effort is another one.

One of my favourite views on sunk costs, comes from Seth Godin. In a blog post from 2021, he writes the following:

“Ignore sunk costs” is the critical lesson of useful decision making.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

A sunk cost is a gift from your former self to your future self, and your future self can choose whether or not to accept that gift. I just love that.

So in my chicken story, what exactly was the gift that I was giving my future self?

***

Interestingly, I thought a lot about this in the moment when it happened.

I think the answer can be found in my behaviour immediately after realizing that the chicken tasted like metallic garbage.

I was frustrated. Internally and externally. Externally, my behaviour looked like throwing the chicken in the garbage as quickly as possible and then cooking some fried eggs to make up for it.

Internally, I was so angry with myself. I was in no way kind to myself. My sole focus was to fix my “mistake,” though a better word for how I was feeling at the time would be “failure.”

Do you see now what the gift was?

It was an opportunity to practice self-compassion.

But I wasn’t ready to accept it.

***

In the time since my metallic chicken moment, I have come to be grateful to my former self for providing that gift, even though I wasn’t ready to accept it.

Self-compassion is something each one of us can use lots more of.

I was inspired to reflect on this moment with gratitude to my former self, by this hauntingly beautiful post by Henrik Karlsson: The Third Chair. It is fully worth spending your attention on it.

Your future self will thank you.