Proof that the human race is not very adventurous

GrainsI’m currently reading Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind, which helps understand how our brain copes with all the information we take in and how to improve our brains.

Then I came across this quote:

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

This figure (originally quoted in Bill Bryson’s At Home: a short history of private life) just goes to show how narrow-minded we are as a race, and also how difficult we find it to break out of the norm.

As an example at the opposite end of the spectrum, research from Nielsen in 2014 showed that despite having – on average – 189 TV channels to choose from, Americans watch only 17.

What’s even more interesting is that this figure (17) hasn’t barely wavered in 5 years, despite a huge leap in the number of available channels.

We cannot cope with any more information!

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: why one-on-one meetings are so important

I’ve just finished Ben Horowitz’s brilliant book The Hard Thing About Hard Things – in which he shares his own widsom gleaned from being CEO of a start-up (Opsware) that was inches away from liquidation and ultimately went on to become very successful.

There’s no grandstanding in the book – Horowitz openly admits when he got things wrong, how he’d change things if he did them again and lifts the lid on some of the stuff most employees never give a second thought to when they do their regular hours.

Make sure you use those 1-2-1s effectively

Horowitz is particularly interesting on company culture, how important it is and why it’s way more than allowing people to play table tennis and use scooters to get around the office.

He talks very passionately about the regular catch-ups managers have with direct reports and why they’re so important for employees.

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting… During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.

Many managers treat catch-ups as a way of imparting information that they could easily deliver via email, or a casual conversation at a desk. Continue reading “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: why one-on-one meetings are so important”

Why kids make us smarter

We were walking down the high street yesterday when we passed a group of Free Palestine protestors. My daughter naturally asked what they were doing.

Perhaps foolishly this lead me to try and boil down the Palestine/Israel history into something that wouldn’t make my 8yo switch off within 30 seconds.

Shortly after sidestepping the Balfour declaration, I started to consider how great it is to have kids around to force you to confront your own beliefs and – quite often – ignorance.

When children ask questions about things we blithely take for granted – why is the sea blue, for example – it’s tough to admit you don’t know the answer.

Children aren’t scared of asking ‘why?’, a truly powerful question that, as we grow older, we tend to suppress using.

And it’s this lack of fear we should try to embrace to make sure we don’t accept the status quo, look for information and come up with our own answers.