Author: neil

The earthy red on the boat stands out – almost as much as the piers next to it.

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I’ve always wondered if everyone has a desire to be doing impactful or at least useful work. Over the course of many hundreds of conversations, I have come to believe that it is true, perhaps with my biased sample. It’s also becoming apparent to me in those conversations that the effort involved in such meaningful work throws some people off to the point where they much rather keep their “work” work separate from the impactful work they do, inspiring as it is.

Perhaps applicable only in my present context: What I’ve been learning from these conversations, particularly in the last couple of weeks, is that the people who are able to recognise and acknowledge the environment in which they find themselves in, seem more able to continue feeling excited and enthusiastic despite the challenges of their environment. Why might that be?

So this replaces our daily walk – moving a ton of soil across into the garden beds will let me sleep well tonight 🙂 My enterprising wife traded this for a 6-pack of beer for the lads who hauled it over to our driveway from some worksite.

Coincidentally, my friend LR shared a link to “One red paperclip” – a series of 14 trades by Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald to get himself a two-story farmhouse!

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Last night, I was transported into a blissful world listening to some great music so I totally forgot to do the vocal exercises. Woke up this morning, and got that out of the way for today. It was more useful doing the warm-up exercises for the speaking I did the rest of the day.

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A hard copy of James Clear’s book Atomic Habits arrived today. I’m looking forward to reading this and adapting my experiment where it makes sense now, and build a series of experiments for after.

Perfect end to the weekend walk. The pelicans flying right over the single mangrove (apparently a halophyte – salt resistant plant) just as I took this picture, were like us, heading home.

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I had watched Hannibal in early 2000’s, a few months after its release, and absolutely adored Anthony Hopkins’s terrifying portrayal of the cannibalistic serial killer. I discovered that my wife hadn’t actually seen, so we watched it again last night. She now knows my reference to “Hello, Clarice”.

By the way, the phrase has seemingly been associated with “the Silence of the Lambs”, but it was never actually used in it. It’s known as the Mandela Effect –  a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.

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I had learnt a few tricks in PowerPoint (this guy’s PPT YouTube channel has a ridiculously high value-to-time ratio) during a long overdue break a few months ago. I practiced those tricks to build my version of the Business Model You Canvas – a personal take on the Strategyzer Business Model Canvas. It was all high level bullet points, so it does not pass muster as a traditional resume.

Stacking skills is something I find compounds value, so today I tried to  use the Marcus Aurelius linguistic trick to think about my work self. I invested a lot of time today borrowing ideas, crafting my short summary, editing, rewriting…. and eventually giving up! The struggle tells me I need a lot of time on this, and very likely some help too. I don’t have a need immediately to have a resume ready, and therefore this is the best time to invest in creating one.