Russell Davies

Doubting without being a curmudgeon

This bit of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy struck me yesterday:

"Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do."

Not really about strategy but definitely important. And things I find hard. Which further reminded me of one of the best strategy / interview questions:

"What can you do really well, that it also really hard?"

Watch Help

Holbrook 19.9.21

It's 8:30AM. I've had a bit of a lie-in. I'm sitting in an East Midlands garden. We've been lucky enough to come here a lot during lock-down, once the initial 'STAY IN YOUR HOMES' passed.

I particularly love it at this time - first thing Sunday. The sounds of a suburb. Birdsong, paper rounds, the corner shop opening up.

We've been especially obliged in the last couple of years to reflect on how lucky and privileged we are. We've been largely untouched by coronavirus and, as someone who rarely goes out, and has been able to work from home successfully, it's not changed my life a lot.

If you've not watched Help with Jodie Comer & Stephen Graham you should. It tells the other side of the stony incredibly well.

And subtly, it seems to have found an entirely new way of filming people. Close to the face, like a phone, but not cloying or exploitative. Flat but shifting focus. Stark and sharp. Or something. Film people will explain it better.

And as ever, I always enjoy it when people capture some aspect of modern life that we've all lived with but which I haven't noticed in ART, like the constant background murmur/whine of a repeating IVR message.

Anyway. Watch Help.

From coffee to internet

Bar Italia 18.9.21

Since lockdown I've been getting up early most days and doing writing. First at home, before the rest of the house stirred, then sitting outside cafes and sitting scribbling in in my Alwych ALL WEATHER notebooks. I'm now very familiar with what time Central London cafes open.

I started off with something a bit like Morning Pages - just unfiltered random noodling, not intended to be read. That was incredibly satisfying for a long time and it undoubtedly helped to keep me a little bit saner. But after about a year it started seeming a little bit sterile and samey. I find it hard to write for myself. There's less pressure to find the right words, to make the right effort. I don't really care what I think. I care what you think. Even if I don't want you to tell me. So it was less satisfying.

Then I tried to make it more like a diary. Maybe the audience can be Future Me. But that didn't really work either. I care even less about Future Me. what's he ever done to me?

So, I thought, maybe my daily writing can be blogging. That's what I really like. Random (mostly) unfiltered noodling but with some vague sense of an audience*.

But, I further thought, I don't want to take a typing device to coffee. I have also enjoyed the manual pleasures of scribbling in a notebook. So, I have surrendered to the instagram advertising algos and bought myself a Remarkable 2.

I am currently scribbling on that. Testing the limits of its handwriting recognition.

And that will be the plan. I guess this is Day Zero. I will be writing inane thoughts and sending them from coffee to internet. Though probably with some filtering in between to correct mis-recognition and to add pictures and footnotes if necessary.

For the record: it's 8:05 AM. I'm at Bar Italia in Soho, London. There is opera in the background and the smells of waste and autumn mingling in the air. Ronnie Scott's are taking a delivery of vegetables. Outside Caffe Nero a man attempting to connect to a Lime bike and swearing at his phone.

*As Clive Thompson says: “Even if I was publishing it to no one, it’s just the threat of an audience.” and "I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of ten people (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from ten people to a million people."