Category: Family and Musings

Setting expectations

Every now and then you will run into conflict. At work, at home, or inside your head. These moments are normally due to expectations that have not been met. They’re best treated as an opportunity to set or reset expectations around the topic.

Almost any destructive behaviour I can think of is the result of expectations not being met. A missed deadline is a missed expectation. An angry spouse is likely a missed expectation. A compulsive obsession is a missed expectation.

Be clear about what you expect of yourself and others. It matters perhaps more than anything else.

 

Reading better

There is simply too much to read. The internet is endless and ever growing.

That’s why companies like Facebook and Twitter have done so well. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, if you’re bored or if you’re lonely, these companies will give you something to look at. It will link up with your social life, your browsing history and your location too, if you let it (yes, there is a choice). It will make you feel pleasure and excitement for a fleeting moment.

Calling the main page on Facebook and Twitter a “feed” is no coincidence. Like a baby screeching for mother’s milk, these companies recognize our thirst for connections and take the thought out of choosing what to read and what to consume.

But can we do better and can we read better? Any reading for a purpose is better than the default Facebook addiction. Managing what we expose ourselves to is a full time job but it’s worth it. Choose books and newsletters and RSS feeds. Choose active reading over passive consumption. Better yet, read something purely for the purpose of creating something.

Making it digestible

If you want to learn something, then it is not always the best idea to dive headlong into the most technical detail. It can be confusing for the uninitiated, can get boring and does not allow for playing around with concepts so easily.

Alternatively, find a summary that is in your language written for people like you. Whether it is a blog, or a friend who knows their stuff, or a book that is concisely written – Start in a place that makes sense and hints at the complexity underneath. If you are into it then you can always follow up on the theory afterwards.

Mixing business with pleasure

Business vs. Pleasure – Ideally one is the other, and vice versa. To that end, I will be posting a weekly update on my studying for CFA, Level 1. CFA will help me to be a better researcher, analyst and ESG integrator. I need to learn more and CFA will be a deep dive into investments.

My goal is to one day be able to finance responsible projects around Africa. Socially and Environmentally conscious capitalism are possible and are growing fields, but I need to understand the financial world better to get more involved in the movement.

This will mix with my creative pursuits on this blog. Business and pleasure all in one.

 

 

Ego

How many of your life’s decisions are chosen by your ego? For me personally, my ego gets in the way a lot. The ego wants things in a very particular way to satisfy its urges.

Often this only leads to a cycle of pleasuring the ego, while the greater goal rides off into the sunset.

If we can learn when to get out of the way and let a situation unfold without intervention, it is a lot less tiring that fighting tooth and nail to change the course of the tide.

What is your life’s map going to be?

For anyone interested in maps I would highly recommend this a16z podcast: link

Maps are diagrammatic representations of our world around us. Unknown areas are blank spaces, known areas are full of available detail.

As a species, we humans are becoming predominantly sensor carrying data creators. Not just our watches and our phones attached to our bodies, but our cars and our homes are causing tidal waves of information to flow and to be captured.

One of the consequences is a mapping of life as we know it. You are most likely creating a map of your life online and in ever more detail.

You also have a say in what it says about you.

Focus on the people

I had to catch the early flight to Johannesburg this morning for a bunch of meetings. It was dark and my kid was still asleep.

I’ll be in the big bad city all day and then arrive home late tonight after my child has gone to bed. Sometimes life is not creative bliss. 

However, I believe it is always fun to work and have meetings if you focus on the people. Today I will meet 2 new people and one who I have only met once before. The work side of things is important and I had to prepare for the meetings, but it flows easier if I focus on understanding and enjoying the different people. It makes it easier for me to leave home in the dark!

Also, the more exposure I have to different people and places, the more cannon fodder for writing and creativity.

Truth and confusion – reblog

Seth Godin’s latest blog post (link) is a great post about truth and confusion:

Selling confusion

Over the last few decades, there’s been a consistent campaign to sow confusion around evolution, vaccines and climate change.

In all three areas, we all have access to far more data, far more certainty and endless amounts of proof that the original theories have held up. The data is more accurate than it’s ever been. Evolution is the best way to explain and predict the origin and change of species. Vaccines are not the cause of autism and save millions of kids’ (and parents’) lives. And the world is, in fact, getting dangerously warmer.

And yet…

Poll after poll in many parts of the world show that people are equivocating or outright denying all three. Unlike the increasingly asymptotic consistency in scientific explanations, the deniers have an endless list of reasons for their confusion, many of which contradict each other. Confusion doesn’t need to be right to be confusing.

Worth noting that this response doesn’t happen around things that are far more complicated or scientifically controversial (like gravity and dark matter). It’s the combination of visceral impact and tribal cohesion that drives the desire to deny.

Cigarette companies were among the original denialists (they claimed that cigarettes were unrelated to lung cancer, but that didn’t work out very well for them), and much of their confusion playbook is being used on these new topics..

To what end? Confusion might help some industries or causes in the short run, but where does it lead? Working to turn facts into political issues doesn’t make them any less true.

If this growing cohort ‘wins’, what do they get? In a post-science world, where physics and testable facts are always open to the layman’s opinion in the moment, how are things better? How does one develop a new antibiotic without an understanding of speciation and disease resistance?

I know what the science p.o.v. gets us if it prevails, if evolution is taught in schools, if vaccines become ever safer and widespread, if governments and corporations begin to ameliorate and prepare for worldwide weather change.

What’s a mystery is what the anti-science confusors get if they prevail. What happens when we don’t raise the next generation of scientists, when vaccines become politically and economically untenable, when we close our eyes and simply rebuild houses on the floodplain again? Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it, neither does lung cancer.

Ask a confusor that the next time he offers a short term smoke screen. If this is a race to be the most uninformed, and the most passive, what if we win?

The process is the end goal

Creating, learning, enjoying, believing, trusting, trying, selling, achieving: I am focussed on verbs today. The doing words. Sounds boring but hear me out.

Verbs are interesting because they imply an ongoing process. For example, the act of creating something is often focussed on the end result. You might say, “I want to create a novel”… or “I want to start a company” or “I want to learn a language”. We have tangible examples of things we want to emulate or to have which get us excited and elicit emotional responses. However, when we make the end goal the focus, it can lead to disappointment when it is not achieved early on. Rather, it is the process and ongoing nature of the achievement that should be the focus. If you “do creative stuff” for long enough then something creative will pop out the other side. Similarly, if you “do language learning stuff” for long enough then you will learn a language. The important part is the doing. The process. There is some comfort in this.

It might be a matter of letting go of an end goal, or rather letting go of a strict preconception of success and end goals, and focussing more on the process letting it take you where it may.