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“Strategic” networking is never about getting a series of gold nuggets out of peers. Other people don’t have answers that will map 1:1 into your world – at least exceedingly rarely. Situations are different. Instead, it’s the little ideas. Tiny seedlings that grow into something beautiful only with careful processing and gene-splicing with other lil’ idea-seeds. That changes how to approach a networking conversation. Don’t go in to get “insights”. Go in to get surprised, taken aback, confused, or worried....

You can only really exert a sprint-effort at anything if you come from a place of rest. A boxer is completely relaxed before striking. Brilliant ideas don’t come from extended periods of mild focus, but rather all at once in a burst, typically from a relaxed state. Type II muscle fibers (fast twitch) can only sustain a short burst of energy all at once, and to deliver 100% of that burst they have to start fully relaxed....

It’s common for people to consider the option to invest vs spend when it comes to money. Should you save it up, invest in some kind of value-store, or spend it on necessities and feel-good things? Choices like this are made often, especially monthly around the time the payslip comes along. It’s almost never considered for time. The same rules don’t quite apply, but the same consideration is definitely worth making....

I went to a seminar about fashion trends. It was focused on colours, textures and lifestyle themes. It predicted the rise of “A Brown Age”, which sounds ominous indeed, but essentially boils down to brown replacing black as the base colour. The actual content is not important. The important things from that seminar were 4 things. 3 quotes that severely impact the credibility of anything the speaker had to impart on the audience, and 1 answer to a question I was privileged enough to get an answer to in the Q&A after the talk....

In phase 2 of Project Ashtray a microscopic change occurred in the world. The tenants of 3 sets of flats started not dumping their cigarette butts on the pavement. Weighed against the impact of forest fires in Australia, the CO2 emissions of the fashion industry, or the plastic destroying the oceans, the change means nothing. And yet, in the microcosm that is my street, it’sf huge. It’s a massive % reduction in total direct pollution for the street....