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Agency. The spice that makes everything anew. Agency is the cure for “stuck”. It’s the glue that makes organisations work. It’s like adding nitro to an otherwise “OK” engine. But it’s hard to screen for. High agency individuals don’t wear “Agent” badges. Agency doesn’t often show up in a job interview, and even when it seems to, it might not persist when the rubber hits road. Agency. The difference between giving up when the recipe didn’t work, and making a new, 10x better recipe....

I play a lot of Halo 5: Guardians at the moment, on Xbox. Most of the time in anonymous multiplayer, there’s a good amount of radio silence. Most people don’t have headsets, so there’s not a lot of team comms going on unless you manage to pre-organise a team. I’ve also been watching some streams on Twitch. The communication is epic. There’s a whole host of callouts the skilled players make to their team....

Range by David Epstein is a simple book, in many ways. Simple in its core message, simple in structure, and simple to remember. The core message could easily have been summed up in a 2-pager, but it wouldn’t be compelling without reading through all the argumentation and examples. When learning to solve problems in an unkind learning environment (that’s most of life) it’s preferable to have range across many fields rather than specialisation in one field....

Another lil’ sneaky by Simon Sinek. This book has value, but I was not ready to extract that value on my first pass-through. I will have to revisit the book at a more opportune time in my life to get the full juice out of it. The idea is simple, and I embrace it – we cannot win at life. We play the game to perpetuate the game. It’s a book that invites an existential crisis in many ways....

It’s easy for me to fall for the idea that once I find a perfect system, I’ll be done. I’ll have a recipe for life that just works. It’d be amazing to have a set of habits and routines that I practice until they’re baked in, and they’ll be all I need to be doing my absolute best for as long as I live. The problem is the territory is shifting....