You cannot expect what you don't inspect. This is a quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the quality movement and lean manufacturing. Over the years I’ve often taken principles I’ve learned from working and applied them to my personal life. Like attempting to always arrive with common sense. Because not many people do. And then applying that common sense vigorously to the situation. Sometimes this still has to be at the conscious level because a problem is difficult to figure out, other times I would like to think that I just automatically apply these things. Deming is often quoted too as saying that you can’t inspect quality into things. I really like that because in my experience, that’s the very thing that a lot of auditors do and it’s also why people tend to dread audits. If you are looking to solve a problem or fix something, however, taking a closer look and considering it may just be exactly what you need.

The Closer You Look, the More There Is to Fix

This is not one of those posts where I wax lyrical about a small business who finally figured out why people were abandoning their carts. They caught an error that had been happening silently blah blah blah. Let’s not. Let’s go a bit simpler. I’ll tell you about a problem that I haven’t solved yet, even though I know the solution to it. A problem that I have consciously decided not to do anything about. Because when you see too much detail it can become overwhelming and a problem can suddenly become impossible looking. The mole hill becomes a mountain.

My car always looks dirty. Sure, there’s road grime that builds up. Brake dust coats the wheels. The rain dumps fine sand particles from the Sahara onto it from time to time. When I was a young man, I would watch my Dad get a bucket of water, a household sponge and some washing up liquid and wash his car. Three terrible ideas mixed into one. A single bucket means you’re “washing” with dirty water after a while, a household sponge is too coarse, and washing up liquid can damage paint. When I first started driving, I did the same. I quickly learned that is a great way to introduce swirls into the paintwork and ultimately damage your car over time. The alternative? Go full on detailer, foam cannon contactless washes, polish applications, spend more time on making a car look good for a couple of hours than you would tackling bigger problems in your life.

Surface Detail Lies to Us

Once You Start Looking, You Will See It Everywhere.

How To Look Closer Without Burning Out

The Piece You May Be Missing

Fast Is Built on Detail

On the Tuesday-est Tuesday of the year, you find yourself staring at your to-do list in frustration. Not sure what to work on next. Tired. Desperate for a break. You finally have to admit defeat. Defeated by a piece of paper, or a text file, or an app or whatever, you slump back in your chair staring a thousand yards past the prioritized items. Some of which have sat on the list as high priority for a couple of weeks in a row.

I’ve been there. So have you probably. Maybe you just took a break to scroll and escape your version of the undying to-do list and found this page.

When this happened to me the first time, I did something almost embarrassing to admit. I completed the task "reply to client email," crossed it off the list and called it a day. That evening, for the first time in weeks, I didn't feel guilty about not getting enough done. I had done something. Just one thing. And it turned out that was enough.

To-do lists are a double-edged sword. Keeping track of priorities, crossing off or deleting what's done, that's the easy part. Before I went digital, I crossed them off on the page itself. Whatever wasn’t done at the end of the day got rewritten on a fresh page the following day. New items were added below. When unrelated thoughts would surface mid-task, I'd jot them down and get back to work. Broken things, missing pieces, whatever I needed but couldn't get right away, all of it went on the list too. 

The to-do list became useful for knowing what to work on next. Useful for prioritising what I needed to get done. Really useful for helping me forget intrusive tasks and keep concentration but ultimately the to-do list always replenished itself. There was always more to do. As a colleague of mine used to say “Shane. Work is not a rabbit, it will not run away.”

Sometimes all you need is one win a day.

One Win Can Be Enough

This Is Far From An Original Thought

How To Do It

It’s Not About The Dopamine!

Take It One Tuesday At A Time

 Short and sweet: must happen will always beat should happen. 

Have you ever sat back and watched a friend talk about doing something for an extended period of time? Like launching their own studio for three straight years? Every conversation circled back to it: the market research they'd done, the logo concepts they loved, the spreadsheet of potential clients. Then one day the talk stopped. It wasn’t because they gave up. Turns out they were too busy running a studio. Sometimes talk is just that, idle chit chat, gossip, hot air, words that ultimately amount to nothing. But under the right circumstances, that idea suddenly actually needs to happen. A fun to think of “should,” becomes a mission, a must. Your friend stopped hoping and started treating it like it had to.

Most people live in "should." Should happen, it’d be nice, some day maybe. Hoping it happens isn’t manifestation and very few people ever flip that switch to something imperative. Making a thought into something that became critical to their being.

When something merely should happen, it competes for your attention along with everything else that should also happen: the gym, your hobbies, your inbox, the relationship you keep meaning to invest in. Should items get mentally filed away. It’s like that CV they’re keeping on file for future reference. The things that get done are the ones that shout loudest, are most urgent or most of the time just what are easy. Short term wins accumulate over whatever matters most long-term.

"Must," on the other hand, does not negotiate. When you genuinely believe something must happen, it stops being an option, much less an option among many. Must tasks function like a constraint you need to resolve. You don't sit there asking yourself "do I have time for this." You figure out "how do I make time for this." This unconsciously changes what you notice, who you talk to, and what you're willing to sacrifice to make it happen.

Most ambitious goals die on the drawing board, out of public view. Nobody announces they're giving up on the book they’ve always wanted to write or their funky business idea. They just let it slide. You may still dream of it from time to time but the idea is dead and you may as well bury it properly and move on.

Originality Is Overrated

Turning "Should" Into "Must"

1. Make the cost of inaction concrete

Confidence Doesn’t Enter The Equation

Where This Leaves You

Why You Stall (It's Not Laziness)

Have you recently searched for a quick recipe for dinner or for a seasonal dish? Did you then have to read a convoluted tale about the author's favourite time of year, the colours of fall reminding them of the sprinkle of cinnamon spice or visions of snow at Christmas being associated with a delicious slice of the cake their grandmother used to make? (Recipe below, just scroll until you find it!). There are a bunch of reasons why popular recipe sites do this, Search Engine Optimization, copyright etc but realistically you just want the recipe and to find out how good it is before putting in the effort. Because in fairness, the worst case scenario is that you go buy a bunch of ingredients and spend time and effort making a dish and then nobody will eat it... Except maybe you, because you're willing to still eat the thing because of the sunk cost fallacy - it may not taste as great as you expected but by gum, you made it so you'll eat it...

Anyway. I found a bunch of written recipes that my grandmother used to make all of the time when I was younger. They were cluttering one of the shelves here. Information wants to be free, so I'm sharing them here. If you read them and attempt to make them, you might just find them delicious. If you don't at least the information is recorded somewhere available to more than just the paper sitting on the shelf.

The measurement units from the original recipes were a mix of imperial (Oz = Ounces, lb = pounds) but with Celsius for temperature, I've added the metric and Fahrenheit equivalents as accurately as I can for you. I've made all but one of these successfully in the past. If I can do it, I'd hazard a guess that anyone can. Anywhere that called for Margarine in the recipes I've swapped it for salted butter instead. The 1980s called and they want their horrible crap Margarine back. They can have it too. It may or may not  be better for you but the taste just isn't for me.

And there you have it, that's how a simple post with some recipes turns into a story completely unrelated to them... Sorry. Here's the recipes, I'll try improve the formatting later.

"Light" Christmas Cake

Make this in November and "feed" it with additional whiskey once a week. It'll store well until halfway through January if it hasn't been eaten by then. It's a heavy cake in my opinion.

Ingredients:

• 12oz / 340g Odlums Cream Flour (cream flour contains less raising agents than plain flour but I think either can be used here if you are in a pinch)
• 8oz / 225g butter (use Kerrygold)
• 8oz / 225g  brown sugar
• The Juice & Zest of 1 lemon (the original recipe calls the zest, "rind")
• Half a glass of whiskey (125ml / 4fl oz... ish. See note below in step 10)
• 6 eggs
• 1oz / 28g chopped almonds
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 8oz  / 225g Sultanas
• 8oz  / 225g Raisins
• 8oz  / 225g Currants
• 8oz  / 225g Cherries (I left these out, glace cherries can go live with Margarine)
• 1 tsp almond essence
• 1/2 tsp mixed spice
• A "pinch" of nutmeg
• Additional whiskey to "feed" the cake prior to consumption

Method:

Date Pudding

This is also known as Sticky Toffee Pudding if you add toffee sauce to it. I never knew this growing up. A good thirty years of ignorance! Delicious warmed up and served with custard or toffee sauce. An alternative to the traditional plum pudding.

Ingredients:

Method:

There's a piece of financial advice that gets repeated so often that it may as well have lost its meaning: diversify your portfolio. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And yet, there is one investment the majority of people never think to make, even those in the financial world, one that compounds more reliably than almost anything else available to them. The investment in themselves.

Who Believes in You?

Here is something most motivational content skips over, because it's not particularly comfortable to say. There will be stretches of your life, sometimes long ones, when nobody is lining up to invest in you. No mentor is seeking you out. No employer is fast-tracking your development. No institution is handing you a scholarship. No investor is backing your idea. No one is pulling you aside to say, "I see something in you."

The people that are there for you now, may not always be there. Opportunities pass. People change. Things happen.

One Friday afternoon in either late 2018 or early 2019 I was sitting at my desk, finishing up a few things, looking forward to the weekend. It was a bright day. I recall the sun shining through the window, a warming feeling even though the weather would have been cold for that time of year. My phone rang. The first line that came out of the small speaker by my ear, the reply to my greeting, caused my stomach to drop. Across the other side of the world, my manager and mentor had been let go. I got on incredibly well with him. He was knowledgeable, patient and invested in his staff. Was there for us. With that one sentence, that was now gone. I don’t know if he knew that it was coming or not but he had gone to work that morning, likely looking to round out the week. I’d hope they let him collect his things but maybe he never even made it past the front door. In the grand scheme of things, maybe not a biggie. Nobody died. Life went on. He found success elsewhere in time. But it goes to show, things change and not always how you would expect.

You might say that this is simply the nature of the world. Attention and resources follow existing signals of success, accumulating around people who are already compounding, people who have already made an investment in themselves.

If you are at the beginning, or starting over, operating without a network or coming from a background that didn't hand you connections and credentials, you need to be your own first investor. You may be your only investor for a while. Even more worryingly, if you’ve been written off by your peers, perhaps made a mistake that they are not willing to forget you’ll be travelling a redemption arc while being that solo investor. Grim, isn’t it?

However! However, this tragedy is actually an opportunity in disguise. One that most people miss because they're too busy waiting for someone else to go first. For someone to hand something to them. For Lady Luck to shine on them. Luck is not arbitrary. You have to place yourself in a position to be able to receive it.

What It Means to Invest in Yourself

It Compounds. All Of It.

When Nobody Else Will