Month: July 2024

From 6PM on Friday to 6PM on Sunday, I consumed only water as part of a 48 hour fast. I opted for 48 hours instead of 72 (or more) to preserve my sleep, but that is still enough time to give the effects I wanted from the fast. Fasting like this is something I do 2-3 times per year. It helps me reset and recalibrate my eating habits and going through it reminds me that I can do mentally challenging things.

To accelerate some of the benefits, I spent most of Saturday walking. I walked on parts of Duke’s campus I’d never visited, including the chapel that is the icon of the campus, and discovered a new dim sum/boba tea restaurant that just opened and I will visit soon. I also made some real progress on an audiobook I’ve been listening to and managed to get a little sunburned after the clouds parted early on during my jaunt. Sunday afternoon was a bit of a drag. I was not as productive as normal during my Sunday afternoon admin session prepping for the upcoming week. I expected this, but it was still annoying as it made Monday morning a little more chaotic before my Monday meetings began.

Now for the bit of irony from the weekend. I watched Hunger on Netflix. Yes, that is the real title. Yes, I was thinking about food even more than usual this weekend. The movie is a taut thriller that had been on my watch list for a while. It is in Thai so for the full experience you need to be willing to read subtitles, but it is worth the extra effort. The show is about a young female cook working in her family’s noodle restaurant in Bangkok who is noticed by a junior sous chef of a famous chef who only cooks at elite private events. I won’t spoil the plot, but it is a cinematic ride with plenty of twists and turns and one that made me reflect on the costs associated with pursuing a singular greatness. It also made me even hungrier by the time I broke my fast on Sunday with some bacon and brisket.

I continue to grab new experiences when possible as a means to expand my horizons and perspective. A few weeks ago, this meant traveling across the Atlantic to attend a European business event. This weekend, it meant going to my very first professional cricket match, a T20 match between the Washington Freedom and the LA Knight Riders.

T20 is a version of cricket that lasts about as long as a major league baseball game, and if you are familiar with baseball you can watch a few explainer videos on YouTube and be ready to watch a cricket match even if you’ll still have a few questions. The action of T20 cricket is at a more regular cadence than a baseball game—six balls per over, about a minute between overs, twenty overs of batting per team, and a thirty minute break in between.

There is a T20 league in the United States that is in its second season. The league splits its games between Dallas-Fort Worth and here in the Triangle, both areas with large South Asian diasporas. The epicenter of T20 cricket is in India, home to the Indian Premier League. The weather on Sunday felt like I could have been in certain parts of India. It was over 100 degrees and humid when the first ball was bowled. I huddled under an umbrella for some shade as I sat in my foldable camp chair watching the action. Almost everyone in attendance knew the rules, but there were a few brave souls who sat there in the heat needing explanations of what they were watching. Ample respect for them.

I had wanted to go to Friday’s match to see a few stars that I’ve watched in various highlight reels, but the weather had other plans and that match was rained out. I therefore went to the weekend’s other match instead. There were still plenty of international players on display. In addition to Americans, there were players from the Caribbean, England, New Zealand, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Australia on the pitch. The crowd shared a similar level of diversity.

I sat with a side-on view, the equivalent of sitting down the baseline at a baseball stadium instead of behind the plate, which made it a little challenging to tell how the ball was moving. It certainly seemed like the ball was moving faster than it does when I’ve watched cricket on a screen. I was also zero for two on my assessments of whether challenges to the umpire’s decisions would be successful, so there were a couple of different forms of humble pie that were served to me as I sat there.

The match itself was not very competitive. Washington’s bowlers blew away LA’s batters leaving them with a below par score. Yes, the teams supposedly represent different cities even though the matches are only played here and in Texas; no, there isn’t a team name affiliated with North Carolina. Washington’s opening batsmen, both Australians, then made light work of the chase and the outcome was never in doubt. That was secondary to the overall viewing experience. The crowd was maybe 2000-2500 people. There were food trucks offering concessions. It was too hot for me to want a curry, but a mango lassi might have been a great option if I’d seen it before I was walking towards the exit.

I’m continually trying to improve my work processes. As part of that, I am almost always reading at least one business-related book at any given time. Currently, that book is The Effective Executive, which may seem an odd choice for a small business owner. Regardless, it is the exemplar of the Lindy effect in business management books and so I decided that now was the time. I’m not quite halfway through it as I’m focusing on content output, but the second key concept of the book (the first is that effectiveness can be learned) is that to be in control of your time, you have to know how your time is spent. This seems obvious, but it is something I haven’t done in the last five years.

I learned to hate time tracking when I worked at a big law firm. I had to record every task I completed in six minute increments. It was a task that I frequently neglected, leading to a regular scramble at the end of each month to record all of my time. I was not alone. The problem was so widespread that there were several policy changes about inputting time during my stay at the firm. A lingering dislike for the tedium of time tracking is a secondary reason why we use flat-rate billing for our client work.

Anyway, it’s time for an experiment. For the next four weeks, I’m tracking all of my working time. I want to know totals and breakdowns, but also I hope that I’ll find dead spots that can be reallocated and that I’ll be more able to reflect on how different tasks at different times affect my energy levels. I’ll write about my conclusions whether anyone else finds them interesting or not when the analysis wraps up. I hope that I’ll be able to make some educated changes to how I handle my schedule by mid-August.

Next on the business book list is going to be re-reading $100 Million Leads as one of my upcoming content projects is to create targeted lead magnets. If anyone has other recommendations for resources in creating lead magnets, I’m happy to include them in that effort as well.

I’m about halfway through the third season of Clarkson’s Farm. For those who haven’t seen the show, the premise is straightforward. Jeremy Clarkson, longtime host of Top Gear and an individual who is banned from many countries for having insulted them over the years, moved to his countryside estate in the Cotswolds and began farming full time just before the global pandemic. To paraphrase the man himself, he is the world’s worst farmer. And there is a film crew with him to record the lunacy. And it’s hilarious to watch. This is especially true when he gets lectured by Caleb Cooper, his young farmhand who is in many ways the show’s real protagonist, for his latest ridiculous idea.

This season is framed as a competition of sorts between Jeremy farming all of the non-arable land on the farm and Caleb farming the arable land to see who will have the best balance sheet at the end of the year. Jeremy tries all sorts of things—pig farming, mushroom cultivating, berry harvesting, planting mustard, and selling (well, trying to sell) nettle soup to name a few so far in the season—and Caleb takes a few risks of his own to save on costs. Caleb has a lifetime’s knowledge of how to farm, though, so that is a major advantage over Jeremey who spent much of his life in London.

Beyond the hilarity of it, the show does a very good job documenting how difficult it is to make a living as a farmer and has received a great deal of recognition among the farming community in the UK for that reason. That sets it apart from other shows that lean hard into voyeurism but lack any redeeming value (e.g. reality television). Since it is grounded in reality and peppered with a bit of cowboy bristling at government overreach, the show is worth a watch if you are in need of escapist entertainment this summer.