Today a child taught me there is hope. Our global environmental situation is a scary one. It’s easy to feel hopeless. For the last month since returning to the US from Asia, I have felt hopeless. There are so many changes needed and anything I do has so little effect. At least that’s how it feels. Today I saw a young boy teaching another young child how to recycle. He stopped the child from throwing away a recyclable and took the child over to the recycle bin instead.
“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works… We’re all biased to our own personal history.” - Morgan Housel A huge challenge working in teams is overcoming bias. No matter who we are or what our background we have some bias. It’s hard to make good decisions when bias gets in the way. How can we recognize our own bias?
This is a pretty niche thing to do. I wear an Apple Watch for the convenience, but I’m also very concerned with how terrible Bluetooth is from a security perspective. Leaving Bluetooth on all the time on your phone is a terrible idea. (This is well documented). I went off in search of information on if it’s possible to use an Apple Watch without iPhone’s Bluetooth turned on (TL;DR Yes!) and whether it’s worth by time to do so (TL;DR more complicated by still Yes!
I read in interesting article that got me thinking about communication. Ray Birdwhistell wrote in “Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication” that words carry no more than 30-35% of a conversation or interaction. This isn’t to say that words aren’t important, but the non-verbal aspects of interactions carry a lot of weight.1 In a world where more and more of our interaction happens digitally, we are missing out on a lot of context.
I had a friend years ago who’s father owned an exercise equipment company. His father gave an interview that always stuck with me. His favorite line was “work hard, play hard, sleep well.” Recently we went through some technical issues at work and customers contact us to complain. That’s always uncomfortable, but more so when you are genuinely trying to be forthcoming and honest. We know what goes on in our own mind and what our intentions are.
Recently my family went together to a KC Royals baseball game, only my second live game of the season. Usually at the park I’m on my phone between innings (along with nearly everyone else!) but I decided it would be a pen and paper only game. I wasn’t interested in journaling during the game and the Royals have once again not give us much to be grateful for this season, so instead I decided I would learn how to score the game.
Holding back is an easy thing to do. There are times when it’s smart to hold back, watch a situation unfold, and be conservative in your approach. That’s an important skill to develop, but I think the opposite skill is just as important and much harder to learn. Here’s an example from a member of my team. He has a background in sales and moved into directing our partnership efforts. This was new territory for us; I didn’t have much background in this and he didn’t either.
I’ve been struggling a bit with my journal. For the past couple of months I’ve been using the Bullet Journal method. I like it, but it is restrictive. Sometimes I find myself just not writing because I don’t want to decide how to categorize or add something to my index. I appreciate some aspects of the system, but not all are for me. I am coming to the end of a notebook and I wanted to make an adjustment so I can make better use of the new one.
We all need to be a bit more invisible on the internet. I’m in marketing and I can tell you that the number of ways you are tracked around the web are as scary as they are creative. Luckily there are some simple things we can do to avoid most of the tracking (and speed up your browsing at the same time). Step 1: Block trackers and ads Install a tracker blocker on your browser.
In the last six months my wife and I have been going through boxes of old books and papers from years past. You see, we have made some major moves in our 16 years together, including two international moves that basically forced us to start over from zero. the one place we were able to keep some mementos was in my parents’ basement. This spring my Mom, who allowed us to keep the stuff there for years longer than it should have been (Thanks Mom!