Just Reflections Podcast

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”. It really clearly articulates many things that I’ve learnt and practised in my professional life. I have written about many of them in the past year, but I’ll admit that it was all mostly haphazard. So today I will pull all of that together, summarise the little I’ve read of the book and give you a quick...

Before we start, a bit of housekeeping for those of you who might not make it to the end. If you’re listening to the newsletter, you’ll be surprised to hear that I have an AI reading for me today. I have been struggling with reading out loud that I spent a bunch of hours on Friday and today building a little app that uses Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Text-to-speech models to turn your articles i...

People love to impress each other. We dress to impress; we show off our material wealth, our connections, our bodies, our intelligence and yes, even our morals. Like many others who spend a fair amount of their time on social media, I have seen my fair share of virtue signalling. But what is virtue signaling? It refers to when someone attempts to show that they are a morally impressive or virtuous...

It’s July, which means it’s the middle of the year, which means it’s time to review how the year is going. Be warned, this is going to sound like an excuse for not meeting my goals, but stay with me, there’s a good point to it. Give yourself a theme Did you set any new year’s resolutions this year? How’s that going? If I had to bet on the status of your resolutions, I’d say they’re probably not fl...

Last week I wrote about one of Dr John Gottman’s books, “Why Marriages Succeed Or Fail And How You Can Make Yours Last.” That book lays out most of his foundational ideas about marriage, including the four horsemen of the apocalypse; Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling. And the different kinds of stable couples. If you’re hearing about all this for the first time, it’s probably wor...

There are many traits that can lead to the collapse of a relationship; poor communication, conflicts about money or in-laws, a dispassionate sex life and a lack of emotional intimacy, to name a few. But if I asked you to give only one that’s sure to lead to the collapse of any relationship invariably, what would it be? Well, Dr John Gottman has the answer. If you could only take relationship advic...

There are many books out there about how to be happy. But happiness is quite elusive. So what if you had a different goal. What if, instead of being happy, you wanted to maximise your misery. Surely, pursuing misery must be much simpler, right? Well, if that's what you think then you're completely correct. It turns out the road to misery is the smoother one. No crazy curves, no thorns, no uphill a...