Dogs must think we are crazy. We put clothes on to start with - then we pick up their poop. They must wonder what it is we are doing with it - collecting it? Sharing it? Eating it? Just a thought.
Values
Are they the same principles?
Reflection
Pain + reflection = growth
Taste
What does it mean when somebody says “you have great taste”. What does it really mean? To me, having listened/watched many who I feel “have great taste”, it seems to be a willingness to live life with eyes wide open, with endless curiousosity and a quiet confident in themselves. It’s an interesting thought. This is just mine.
Importance
We are not nearly as important as we think we are.
Watch List: The Mighty Leica V-Lux 5
I dropped into the new Leica store on Duke Street in London yesterday. I knew it was dangerous, I have had a soft spot for the brand for many years now. It was the “juicy” image quality that first hooked me and then the aesthetic of the M range, particularly the Monochrom - there is just so much to love. Seamlessly designed, function and elegant beyond measure. However yesterday was different, with a more tranditional look and feel, this V-Lux was a stealthy beast I never expected to fall for. It blew me away with its massive zoom, which covers nearly all distances and subject matter without a loss in quality..for a moment I visulised myself on the African savannah with it.
The new OLED viewfinder brings the scene to life with incredible brilliance, while the large sensor ensures vividly clear, high-resolution images. It may well be the perfect all-rounder and if you haven’t already, do get one in the hands - its a joy.
More info here.
What If Everyday Was Thanksgiving ...
It is no secret that Seth Godin’s daily newsletter inspired me. It’s brilliant on so many levels. I had to share this :
It’s my favourite holiday for a good reason: It doesn’t matter what country, what culture or what background you come from…
Gratitude works.
Gratitude scales.
Gratitude creates a positive cycle of more gratitude.
When in doubt, default to gratitude.
[And, for the fourth year in a row, we’re offering the free Thanksgiving Reader. You can print it out at home and have it ready for the holiday, wherever and whenever you choose to celebrate. It’s a modern tradition.] Seth Godin
My Moleskin
This beige Moleskin cost me £11.99. I’d pay double. It may just be the most important tool in my daily armoury.
Growing up I thought only teenage girls kept a diary. How wrong I was. I’m almost illiterate, but journaling daily for the past couple years has been cathartic beyond measure. I’d highly suggest it to anyone, day or night or anytime in-between. No need to have a plan, a structure - it is just a wonderful space to dispense of the mind.
Quite Possibly The Best Bread In The World
I haven’t been paid for this.
This post isn’t sponsored. But I felt compelled to share the fact that this Danish spelt sourdough with seeds and currants from Gails bakery is WILDY good. I mean OFF THE CHARTS GOOD …Promise me you’ll try it and report back.
Seth's Blog (Seth Godin)
Golf or surfing?
Every golf scorecard has a map of the course on the back. Moving the hole placement is a big deal, accompanied by meetings and oversight. A big shift is whether or not it rained last week.
On the other hand, every wave is the first and last of its kind. It has never happened before and will never happen again.
Golf is an endless asymptotic journey toward elusive perfection.
Surfing, on the other hand, is about wayfinding. A surf park with a repeated wave might be useful for training, but it’s not surfing.
Metaphor over, the question is: what’s your job like?
It gets a lot easier if you bring the appropriate mindset. It’s hard to surf with a putter.
A Small Change. A Big Win
I recently noticed I wasn’t fulfilling my morning routine. It was pissing me off rather than lifting me up each day.
I reduced the list, and now I’m nailing it and feeling great.
Where can you reduce or simplify ?
How Good Are You?
Truth is, only as good as your last piece of work. It’s an old adage, but especially true now, in a world of instant sharing. I don’t know how I feel about it - but I do believe it to be true.
Always Take That Shot
I was reading an article a month or so ago from a mate of mine who started his own company. There were many, many years of tough times (as any entrepreneur would expect), but ultimately it proved to be a tremendously successful venture on a number of levels.
In the article he explained the power of “always taking that shot”, as in basketball, shooting for the hoop. I liked the idea a lot. It spoke to me.
I contemplated this idea a few weeks back when deciding on whether to invest in a number of self funded projects or not - ultimately I decided to do it, and to “take that shot”. It may not always be wise - you will likely fail (as I will), but I would rather take that shot than not.
Budapest 11.19
What Jeff Bezos Said At Princeton
2010 Baccalaureate Remarks
by Staff
May 30, 2010 4:35 p.m.
“We are What We Choose”
Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010
Baccalaureate
May 30, 2010
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!
Best Made Axe
My god I appreciate companies that do one thing well. Best Made over in the states are one of these companies. They make a tremendous, hand made axe with locally sourced wood. It may not be something city dwellers like me will use on a day to day basic, but how i’d like it on the wall to allow me to dream.
Check them out here.
Saying No
It’s one thing I find incredibly hard to do. I have this overwhelming desire to please everyone, I have learnt it only leads to failure and disappointment for all. This was sent to me this morning by a pal. It resonated :
”Saying no to things that you really want to do is the telltale sign of a good planning process. Saying yes to too many things is the telltale sign of a poor planning process.”
My Bucket List
I have never been sure how to approach goals. No matter how much I think about, I can’t seem to get past the idea of simply having one simple list and attacking it. Here is mine currently :
Visit Japan
Build a cabin with outdoor shower
MSc Strategic Marketing @Imperial College London
Build and sell a company
Produce a documentary
Feature in a documentary
Publish a book
Build an outdoor gym
Take on a life defining physical challenge
Show my work at an exhibition
Capture every major city in the world on Leica
Solitude
“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say…. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing...the thing that might be worth saying.”
What A Way To Live
“Generosity, abundance and idiosyncrasy in service of craft and community”