Three months into 2022 already, wow.
What an immense honour and privilege to be in the very blessed position to offer support for a Kenyan student to pursue her goals, dreams, and ambitions. She wrote me a letter with incredible diligence, care, and thoughtfulness that exemplifies the purpose and intentionality in her approach to work, relationships, and visualising the future.
Its effect was profound in offering a reminder of an aphorism that often eludes me, but becomes sacrosanct after the circumspection that meaningful interactions like this elicits. I’m not sure who said it but the idea is that “the way you do something is the way you do everything”. Being truly very dedicated to bettering herself everyday, giving back to her community, and achieving the very best possible is as much as you can hope to contribute to the world. Having just wanted the biopic of Venus and Serena Williams - King Richard - it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The other factor that comes so very significantly into play is luck, perhaps better framed as good fortune (a blessing) for those so inclined to ascribe such a phenomenon to a form of benevolence.
I just finished writing a piece, for my Fond of the Pod series, on how integral a role luck has in the outcomes anyone reading this has undoubtedly enjoyed. The How I Built This podcast, hosted by Guy Raz, finishes every interview attempting to ascertain what measure of the success earned can be self-evaluated as luck. What’s interesting in the spectrum of answers he receives is rooted in a series of bias’ we are prone to, for instance Experience Bias. This holds that we assume our own versions of reality are the objective truth. We can be fooled by our experience which distorts our perceptions. Focusing too much on one issue (or metric for success e.g. wealth), means inevitably missing unexpected opportunities according to psychologist Richard Wiseman (The Luck Factor) and making trade-offs: in our relationships for instance. The best people at getting away from that seem to integrate external agencies to reframe situations with, compare & contrast perspectives, plus deconstruct their thinking.
There’s also Random Reinforcement where pure chance is at play but we attribute an outcome to our own skill (or lack of it), so we make assumptions about what we can (or cannot do) in a given situation when in fact we might be dead wrong. Bad decisions can be rewarded with good outcomes and vice versa, so humility and repeatability really come into play when determining any long term advantage (or disadvantage). This is closely related to the Self Serving Bias where we blame losses on external factors but frame wins as being as a result of our own character or actions. Hard to tell how much agency we actually have.
On a personal note I've been involved with a few different projects through March, one of which is Songcamp - a wild online collaborative musical experiment between about 80 people working towards releasing a bunch of art, songs and innovative infrastructure to progress the space. There was a fantastic drumming experience with Rachel as well this month alongside dinners hosted by Paddy and Katie Kennard; tennis and spa in Finchley with Danny P; sunday footy and plenty of squash. Work has been more based at the office, tutoring is flying along with exams coming up in May, and playing music at the Gina and Henry wedding went well! Was lucky enough to go to Moulin Rouge with my mother, what a show! Amazing to spend time together and soak up some of that work ethic + appreciation for culture. The apple is trying to fall closer to the tree!
