Category: life
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Shipped in 2025
For the last 12 years (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) I’ve written an end of year retrospective. This is, as I say every year, less about pushing my achievements and more about taking a step back to look at the shape of what I’ve done over the past year. I get the sense that many of my peers…
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Why systems beat goals
When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context with things that I’d like to achieve or change in my life. There’s…
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How to be interested (Part Two)
In Part One of How to be Interested I wrote about the value of intellectual curiosity and humility in an increasingly algorithmically curated and AI-mediated world. It was a call to be more deliberate about optimising our signal to noise ratio in a world where a cacophony of AI-content is at risk of drowning out the pearls…
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In praise of working at the edge
Over a decade ago Oliver Burkeman wrote what I think is one of my favourite short op ed pieces of all time on the topic of how ‘everyone is totally just winging it, all the time’. The piece was well-shared at the time, in large part I think down to the fact that it touched…
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How to be interested (Part One)
I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on the value of intellectual humility and curiosity in this post-truth, algorithmically-driven, AI-everywhere world. When I got started on the draft I ended up going down lots of rabbit holes, which left me with too much to write about in one post. So I’m going…
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Should we learn like an athlete?
‘Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.” To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from the way top athletes train. They are clear in their objectives and deliberate…
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On career and life plateaus
I really like this George Leonard quote (via Shane Parrish) from a 1987 Esquire Magazine piece, talking about how mastery is a series of plateaus interspersed by brief spurts of progress: “The most important lessons here — especially for young people — is that even if you’re shooting for the stars, you’re going to spend…
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Five observations about how we perceive time
As we come to the end of another year that seems to have whistled by it seems an apt moment to pause and reflect on how we, as humans, perceive time passing. I did a bunch of reading on this a few years back but it’s always struck me as a fascinating topic, not least…
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Shipped in 2024
It’s the time of year when we all look back/forwards/sideways at the things that we’ve done/will do/didn’t want to do, and the time when I indulge my perennial habit of looking at all the things that have comprised my work year (previous years: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023). I do this as a way to look…
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On Climbing the Wrong Hill
This week, after first reading it several years ago, I was prompted to return to Chris Dixon’s wonderful post about climbing the wrong hill. The term comes originally from computer science, but to illustrate it he uses the example of a young, smart graduate who works on Wall Street and is considering staying despite hating…