Goal achieved!!! Now, please have a Newsletter

If my calculations are correct (and they may very well be incorrect….I blame COVID if that’s the case) but if they’re correct – I have actually done 34 posts in a row on this blog. 34!!!! You may remember (link) I was going for 30. I did it a few days ago without actually realising. Either way I am happy!

Fireworks. Champagne. Singing. Chanting. Mass celebrations lining the streets.

In all seriousness, I am very happy. I have achieved a goal stated in public and with a track record to prove it. And to celebrate, I want to start a newsletter which will come out once a week.

Inspired by this guy: Ben Evans and this guy: Tim Ferris I will try and include in the newsletter everything that I find helpful or interesting from the web. It will be weekly (out on Wednesdays) and it will include links to external stuff, and a few of my own thoughts. This will primarily be an archive for myself, but if others find it interesting too, then all the better.

If you want to subscribe, click on the menu button (top right of this blog) and click the appropriate button.

If not, then don’t 🙂

Here’s to continuous creating.

Happy Tuesday chimps.

Podcast ambitions

Today I am starting to work on a new series of podcasts for the blog.

This is a misleading statement because as yet I don’t know what it’ll be about, who will be on it or how many I will do.

Perhaps more accurate would be to say I am starting to think about starting to work on the podcast!

One idea is to use the blog itself as a resource, looking back over the most popular posts I have written and use them as a guide for podcast topics.

But like I say – still early days. So watch this space, and prime your ears in the meantime 🙂

Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods has completed a comeback for the ages, winning his 80th (!!) PGA tournament after huge public meltdowns, divorce, multiple surgeries, and all the uncertainty that goes with it. I am a big fan. I think this comeback is a great thing.

Why is this great? I saw on Twitter a person questioning why so many people are interested and are applauding Tiger when he has clearly shown his faults and vices to us over the years. The basic gist was that he’s a nasty man not worth celebrating. He’s a womaniser and a snob. A drunken philanderer. A thug Alpha Male. But this simplistic assessment misses the point.

So what is the point then? The point is that we see ourselves in Tiger. We see a microcosm of all our talents, our possibilities, all our failures and all our potential for redemption. His is a complete comeback story with a near-perfect arc in terms of drama and recovery. To write off such a story as immoral and uninteresting is to misunderstand what being a human is. We humans relate best to stories. To archetypes. Tiger’s story has everything required for an amazing spectacle. He has been through hell and come out the other side with a new back and a changed personality. And my God, he plays nice golf!

Judging celebrities is easy. What’s rare is a celebrity who can offer us such a journey to the top, the bottom and back up to the top again. Enjoy the drama as it unfolds in real-time. I’m backing him to win another major soon.

Ranking wine

What is the best song ever written? The best movie? The best wine? There isn’t one of course. Art is subjective, and yet we always want to package it, rank it, market it. Put it into a little box so that we all know where we stand.

If your wine scores highly in a snooty ranking system (link) does is mean anything? It’s comforting but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Sure, sales will rise and brand value may go up. But there is a problem with forcing a ranking on a product so varied and subjective as wine.

You may want wine for fish or for pizza or for a camping trip. You may want cooking wine or sweet wine or boxed wine for a million different reasons.

With wine, as with all art, it’s not a linear race. The very concept of a single winner is forced.