New pencil case, freshly sharpened pencils, shiny new notebook.
Does the September back to school feeling ever leave us?
Even now, long after schooldays, autumn for me always brings that same invitation: reset.
Resets don’t happen by accident. All too easy for the days and weeks to accelerate and our fresh energy disappears in a haze of meetings, deadlines, and obligations.
This summer, I’ve been chasing bass along the Devon coastline.
Not just casting in the same spot with the same lure, but switching marks, different states of tide, trolling versus drifting, adjusting retrieve speeds, swapping colours and styles of lure.
Every change, whether it brought a hit or an empty line is a data point. The more loops I ran, the faster I learned what worked in that moment.
Have you ever had that thing where you do something, it works brilliantly… and then, over time, you forget to do it and it gradully slips out of your week?
Like going to the gym, journaling, flossing, setting aside proper time to think, or a host of other things?
It wasn’t an active decision to stop. It was as simple as life getting busy. Other things crowd in. And the habit that actually worked pretty well quietly disappears.
I had a reminder this week that at some point I mislaid along the way one of the most powerful routines I ever had…
The story of two 18 year olds using AI well to the tune of $2m a month, the risks of using AI badly and why it’s so damaging, a book to remind on the power of deep thinking and three experiments to play with.
All wrapped up in one pithy article and with a suggested musical accompaniment of Simple Minds and a reminder not to forget to use our brains!!
When was the last time you asked someone if they were ok, and you got back “I’m fine”?
On hearing those words, you knew that “I’m fine” was the last thing they were.
What about you?
Ever caught yourself saying those words or similar?
My bet is we’ve all been on both sides of that conversation.
The reason I raise this is that one of the most common patterns I see of people who are both successful AND fulfilled is that they work hard to create Alignment with those around them,
A pattern I see time and again working with world-class leaders all over the world.
It’s that the teams they are a part of work hard to create powerful leadership experiences that aren’t about individual brilliance. They’re about the impact of the whole.
At a slew of recent events focused on senior leadership teams, the feedback that really stood out hasn’t been about any one person or speaker . It’s been about the experience as a whole. The sense of shared clarity, of feeling a part of something much bigger.
Drives me mad when I hear language like this.
It’s lazy cliched thinking which happens all too often at work, around the dinner table and down the pub.
Worse, I think it does real damage to our culture as a society.
Don’t take my word for it. Last month, Intergenerational England published a report titled, A Divided Kingdom. To quote:
"The UK is facing a stark level of age segregation.…
At a recent conference, I ran a simple but powerful exercise: past, present, future. It’s one of the exercises I regularly do with teams.
Everyone in the room, some 400 people were invited to rate themselves from 1 to 100 in each of those three modes and to stand and point to the direction of where they faced in terms of time.
What’s an unpopular opinion you have?
I’m sure you do. We all do, right?
But, how often do you vocalise it?
I wonder if it’s because our online worlds have become increasingly polarised and social media sites stoke division and argument, that we become fearful of expressing opinions that run counter to “acceptable narratives”.