Feb 24, 2019

Good Vibes in Pink City

By Clay Lowe • Issue #32 • View online

Last week I was in the ‘Pink City’(La Ville Rose). If you look it up, you’ll find it’s proper name is Toulouse. It’s France’s forth largest metropolitan area, just after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. I would show you all of the pretty pictures I took, but, well, there are none apart from this one, which is where I worked for 3 days and into the nights (no time for sight seeing).

I was there to work with a group of up and coming leaders at AirBus. Our focus was on customer centricity. How do you develop the mindset that puts the customer first in everything you do? That was our big question. We spent 3 days answering it!

It was a lot of fun working with the French, Germans, and Spanish all in one room (Airbus, of course, being a huge multi-national corporation).

I must admit, I’ve stopped and started this note several times over the last week. Busy got the best of me though, and then a strange freakin head cold put me down for the count on Friday.

My ritual for getting through these things fast is to eat loads so my body has enough fuel to fight. Sleep loads so my body can shut down all non essential systems and focus on fighting the foreign invaders. And lastly, some sauna time, to burn the little microbes up!

This little ritual works for me every time. Today I’m back in the game, not quite 100% but at least in the high 70s.

I wrote a journal style blogpost to cover off the distance between the last newsletter and this one.

Today's Learning

I’ve been a long time fan of visualisation. I use it a lot when preparing for presentation or delivering a new training session. I may give this ago i.e. making it a daily ritual and see what happens.

The No.1 Habit Billionaires Run Daily

The Two Great American Writers Who Met at War

Literary legends Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger met more than once in the middle of World War II.

He had struggled to find the time and the will to write during the early months of the war, but after meeting Hemingway he redoubled his efforts, writing in foxholes and whenever he had the opportunity. Salinger “used writing … to see him through as a sort of self-therapy…

www.ozy.com • Share

Jill Lepore On Why We Need a New American National Story

Jill Lepore argues that historians’ failure to tell a common American national story has ceded the field to charlatans offering their own twisted versions and allowed a dangerous strain of American nationalism to take hold.

www.foreignaffairs.com • Share

How the Ballpoint Pen Changed Handwriting

Thicker ink, fewer smudges, and more strained hands: an Object Lesson

The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.

www.theatlantic.com • Share

Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways

Read this and learn about the mental models that intelligent people, like Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, use for decision making.

jamesclear.com • Share

Is Matter Conscious?

The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will.

nautil.us • Share

Psychoterratica is the trauma caused by distance from nature

If you live in a city and are plagued by a malaise that you can’t explain, you may be suffering from psychoterratica.

Disconnection from nature can be bad for our mental health. But there was no name for this particular malaise until 2000, when Australian philosophy professor Glenn Albracht coined the term psychoterratica, creating the beginning of a vocabulary to discuss the relationship between mental health and environment.

qz.com • Share

From the Podcast