My “strengths finder” says I’m a “learner”. I usually don’t put much stock in such surveys, but this one is dead on. At any one time I have 10-12 podcasts going, at least one or two audiobooks, and then plenty of good ‘ole fashioned bound paper books. Don’t get me started on my Twitter rabbit-holes.
Here are five things I discovered or enjoyed this week.
What I’m Watching
Okay, gang, I’m starting off with “Ted Lasso” this week because it is, by far, the best thing I’ve watched in a long time. I’m a high school rugby coach, and so all my friends and even family have pressured me to watch TL since it started. I haven’t had access to Apple TV, and wasn’t willing to pay to watch one show. #2 son got tired of me ignoring his pleas and signed me in to his account as a family member.
So, so, good.
I know it’s just a show, but one thing I appreciate as both a man and a coach, is the masculine ideal Lasso gives us. The stereotype of the in-your-face, tough-guy, screaming, coach is based in fact, as all stereotypes are. And it’s my experience that teams inherit their coach’s personality. Intentionally or not, you see this in Jamie Tart who belittles his teammates and the women he comes in contact with, and Coach Armada who is replaced by Ted; they are two sides of the same toxic masculine coin. (BTW, I hate the term “toxic masculinity”, but it works here). Lasso, on the other hand, presents an image that is compassionate, but still masculine, competitive through excellence, who values women, subordinates, and fellow employees. He shows that you competition can be a joy in and of itself, not necessarily a zero-sum game where “the other” must be humiliated.
I’m probably reading too much into the show, but I have seen the negative extreme on and off the rugby pitch and (American) football field. It’s refreshing to see what might be an impossible ideal, but an ideal nonetheless.
Ted Lasso is a great show that will leave you hopeful, but also a bit emotional from time to time.
Gadget I Love
I’ve found myself bragging about this little clock several times in the last week, so I thought I’d share it with you, even though it’s not new to me. It’s my Lenovo Smart Clock. It’s a basic digital clock that runs Google Assistant (although a new Amazon Alexa powered unit has just been released). It’s a good clock. It has all the Google Assistant features: it’s voice-activated (although you can turn off the microphone), it will tell you the weather, play your Google Music playlists, etc. It has no camera (none of that in my bedroom, thank you). But the best thing about it, the reason I brag about it, and the reason I bought it? The “sunrise alarm”. When your morning alarm goes off, it does so slowly, over 30 minutes or so, by gently pumping up the screen’s brightness until it fully lights the room (not obnoxiously) by the time your alarm’s time is set. The alarm sound then also fades in gently, though – honestly – I’m almost always up before the alarm goes off, because of the intensifying light. It really is a great way to wake up, and takes away that jarring feeling you get when an audible alarm – even one that fades in – goes off.
For the record, I tried some other sunrise alarm clocks before this one, but this little guy did the trick for me. I’m a fan.
Read a review of Lenovo’s Smart Alarm Clock here.
Software I’m Using
I use Mint and have used it for several years now, but in the runup to tax season in the U.S., I end up spending a lot of time pulling my finances together using Mint.
My wife and I have a weekly “budget night” where we each sit down with our financial spreadsheet (in Google Docs) and a copy of our Mint database for personal finances (her) and the Mint database for my business (me). We have budget categories synchronized across Mint and our spreadsheets that make it a breeze to track our spending (“You should always be knowing where your money is going!”) and how we’re coming on our budgeting goals. It also makes tax time so much easier for us than it used to be.
Mint has both a web app and mobile app, but honestly, I never use the mobile app.
Mint is free. Give it a try.
Quote of the Week
I’m not an Elon Musk fan boy, but I heard a quote from him this week that – with a bit of tweaking – is something a lot of people need to hear:
Original
“The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist”
My Edit
“One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is to optimize for the wrong thing.”
- Don’t optimize for efficiency in relationships.
- Don’t optimize for price when creating something – anything.
- Don’t optimize for some cultural standard of appearance over health.
- Don’t optimize for influence over content.
- Don’t optimize for “success” over integrity.
To put it in religious language, Saint Paul says “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
At the end of the day, how you love people is the thing. Optimize for that.
Book I’m Listening To
I’m a technerd, specifically in the realm of cybersecurity, so maybe I’m late to the game on this book. But in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, and the cyber strikes launched in anticipation of that invasion (and many, many, more happening during this battle), I finally decided to read – or, listen to – “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon”. This book is about the first known state-sponsored cyber attack, targeting Iranian nuclear weapons processing facilities. The audiobook reader isn’t remarkable, but the story is good. It’s told almost as a “whodunnit”, and even though the subject matter is technical, author Kim Zetter does a good job breaking terms down into understandable bites (or should I say, bytes, lol).