The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. – Alvin Toffler

Here’s my take: The ignorant and dangerous of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who are not curious and skeptical enough to question what they read and watch before they retweet and share on Twitter and Facebook.

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It was a choppy day with some big swell. The kind of day when the sea is murky, and there’s a lot of water moving around. It’s disorientating when I can’t see the shoreline or pick a line in front of him. I usually can see the rocky outcrop up ahead, and I make a beeline for it. Today it was too choppy, it was feeling sharky, and I wasn’t hanging around. Instead, I picked someone swimming next to me and used her as my marker. If I stayed on her inside, then my thinking was that we would hit the point and then swing left towards the beach.

It was taking a little longer than I thought, so I stopped and quickly got my bearings. I realized that my marker was starting to veer away from the point and take us further out instead of moving closer to the turn. I immediately course-corrected and dig in hard on my left and headed closer in. I noticed that my marker veered left as well. I realized we had both been using each other as markers, and the problem was that neither one of us was triangulating our location.

The same thing happens in relationships, families, and teams at work. Make sure you do a sanity check and triangulate with something other than your chosen marker. You both be in the same bubble and unintentionally guiding each other off-course.

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‘When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you’ – Alice Hoffman.

This Alice Hoffman quote reminded me of both of my grandmothers. They were strong and independent women. Matriarchs who I looked up to and still do. Towards the end of their lives, everything became more simple. Their family and the stories of the past were the centers of their universe. Our joy brought them joy, and reminiscing would always make them laugh. At the end of their lives, I felt like we were letting them go to be with their memories and stories. They called out to the ghosts in their stories, and then they followed them.

This quote is from Alice Hoffman’s novel “The World That We Knew”

Retirees are in capital preservation mode. Their income earning years are behind them, and they are living off their savings or, hopefully, some fixed income like social security, dividends, interest income, or slowly eating into their savings. That’s all fine if it lines up with their burn rate etc.

Young people can take more risks because of their high-income future earnings. If they invest time and money into something that ends up being a dud, it’s okay. They can keep trucking.

Companies are the same. They can be in capital preservation mode or growth mode. Capital preservation mode means no more experiments, no bets, don’t rock the boat. Innovation slows down, and they slowly become irrelevant. They act like retirees who know they’ll die in 10 years and play it safe. The people who work there think and act like the company’s best years are in the rearview mirror.

Young companies are the opposite. Lots of experiments, lots of unknowns, lots of whiffs and hopefully some big wins. They have an experimentation culture, and the people who work there believe they can do better, but more importantly, believe in themselves and the product they are creating.

Ask yourself where you are in your career and what type of company or people you want to work for.

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I do most of my yoga at home. Over time I also develop my own good habits and mostly bad habits. When nobody is pushing me or coaching me, then my body and I look for the path of least resistance. My hip no longer drops as much; the knee starts to bend when it should be locked, and I don’t push myself. It always shocks me when I drop into a studio with an experienced teacher. I’m ready to walk out of the room halfway through the session. The poses are more extended, deeper, and more uncomfortable than I remember! I’ll be in a pose and then feel a gentle correcting nudge from the teacher. The small correction is like opening a door that’s been locked for a while. The cobwebs and ivy are brushed aside as the door is opened. I’m always stiff and tired for the next two days as my body recovers. It feels like my first yoga class all over again.

Bad habits are seductive and can creep into your daily routines. Everyone needs a guide, a coach – someone objective who can give you feedback and call out the little crutches that nestle into the poses we strike in daily life.

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In cycling or running, you are protected inside the pack. The leader is the windbreaker, and the slipstream pulls the pack along. Staying together conserves everyone’s energy

Open water swimming is a different story.

Water is very similar to airflow. When planes line up to land or take off they need a safe following distance, or they get caught up in the turbulence from the plane in front of them. The same thing happens in the water. If you get too close to someone in front of you, then it can get bumpy and confusing as you get caught in their wake.

It’s comforting to have other bodies around you, but it’s also pretty bumpy if you bunch up. There’s strength in numbers, but pack swimming slows you down, and you might get a foot shoved in your face.

Some activities like cycling or yoga are about finding a rhythm, controlling your breathing, and getting into the zone. A crowded open water swim can sometimes be the opposite. It’s chaotic – you find a good pace and settle in, then suddenly you are getting squeezed in by two swimmers on either side of you, or you need to power past through a gap or slam on anchors because the only way through is to wait for a gap. The release and relaxation I feel after a swim is because of that chaos. It sounds like a contradiction, but as they say, there are many different paths to the same well.

Don’t run through the motions when you exercise. Each pose in yoga has a beginning and an end. The pose begins before you even move, and it ends when you are back in a resting stance. If you rush from stretch to another, then it becomes a jumbled mess. You lose the appreciation of how your body feels after a move and instead all you can think about is what’s next.

The same goes for a conversation. Pause, speak and then pause. Listen for a bit after you have stopped, take a breath. What does everyone else have to say? Resist the urge to think about your next question or statement. When you are ready then speak.

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I have a close friend who has a successful business that has benefited from the growth in the economy over the last 12 years. He’s gone from strength to strength, hired a bigger team, and now has multiple revenue lines. Back in 2006, his original core business was tough. He carried a lot of inventory, with thin margins, and lots of face time. He had a fire in his belly and never stopped thinking about his customers, his business, his craft, and his growing family at home.

In 2007 things were getting frothy and a little nutty with all the money flying around. Easy credit, adjustable-rate mortgages…we all remember the deal. A lot of competitors started showing up. They were b-players and low quality, but there was a lot of work to around so everyone was feeding from the same trough. Everyone was surviving, but over time everyone’s margins got even thinner. Then the credit crunch hit in 2008 and things slowed down very quickly. The market softened and everyone was left carrying a lot of inventory with no buyers. In 2009 and 2010 the competitors closed shop, left town or just quietly walked away.

In booms times, things margins and A+ customer service didn’t matter, but when things got tight it was a different story. His company weathered the recession and survived because he delivered a high-quality product and was match fit when the real test arrived. Once the dust had settled and things slowly started to show signs up life again he was there to clean up. He hired the best people, consolidated some of the survivors and continued to build.

It’s weird to think that the recession was the launching pad.

Stay match fit and run scared.

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My brother sent me a picture of a cloud the other day. The towering formation in the image looked familiar to me. I’d seen it before, but where? I’d never been to the place where the picture was taken, but it felt like I had.

In this picture, it’s the type of cloud that forms in tropics. Hot mornings, high energy, bright sun, and feeling that the sky is pregnant. An afternoon thunderstorm will come and go. I could feel the humidity, the Kikuyu grass under my feet, and hear the birds and the wind.

It’s incredible to me how a picture of clouds has the same effect as smell or listening to an old song. Memories were triggered as my brain dug deep and took me on a magical journey, all while looking at my phone.

p.s. I wrote this post with a couple of people in mind. I hope you are smiling and nodding as you read this.

The thing that never ceases to delight me about Twitter or Instagram is when I discover someone with a meager follower count who is creating or retweeting fantastic and original content. But it’s not easy to find these people because Twitter and Instagram amplify popular content over high-quality original content. Sometimes popular content is also high quality, but I’d posit that most of the time popular content is the same only unoriginal, salacious stuff that gets repackaged and shipped over and over again.

I know from my own experience that blogging or tweeting can feel like screaming into a pillow. You can shout all you want, most of the time people won’t hear you. It’s lonely out there.

There isn’t a product right now filtering and amplifying quality content that’s tailored to someone’s individual taste. A product that bubbles up stuff that you’ll love but don’t know it yet. StumbleUpon was the closest product to getting this right, and it may still get it right down the line as some other incarnation. It’s also why daily digest emails have seen a resurgence in popularity – people like to get customized, curated and packaged reading lists.

Right now, you’ve got to scratch and peck for these hidden diamonds. Discovering magical content that hasn’t been noticed or amplified, reminds of me of a verse from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard where he writes about a flower blooming unseen and wasting is sweetness on the desert air.

I hope someone invents a product where quality bests popularity.

Here’s the extract from the poem:

“Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

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