We also talked about the tension in a product career between running the team, the product, the department – and the need to go deep into the creative part of your skills to problem solve.

There are eight of us who meet in Peckham on a Saturday night in July. We wind our way through the hot streets to London Fields for 8pm. There are hundreds of cyclists milling around outside the pub, yelling their location into their phones, checking their tyres or checking out the bikes. Then we cycle out through East London, and as darkness falls on us around the Epping forest, now there are more than a thousand of us. Every time the road rises, a wall of little red lights flashes ahead of us. At a junction, a woman shouts, unable to hold her curiosity in any longer, “Where you all going? What are you lot doing?”

We don’t stop, we don’t have time. We want to be there by sunrise. “We’re going to the coast,” someone yells, as the lights go green. Where else would 1,000 or more cyclists be going on midsummer night in July? Where else but the tiny village of Dunwich and its beach in Suffolk, 112 dark miles from the start of the route of the Dunwich Dynamo.  

What makes the Dunwich Dynamo one of the most compelling challenges in British cycling? It has a great name, and a great concept. Get from London to the beach for sunrise! There’s the fact it’s a serious distance – over 100 miles – but it has a fast and fluid route with not much more climbing than club runs half the length. There’s the fact it’s officially unsupported – just turn up and ride – but from the moment you start, the hivemind and traditions mean you’re never lost, never that far from a cup of coffee, not often out of sight of another cyclist’s lights. It means you can get a coach ticket home pretty easily, too, making this a simple one way ride.   

More than that, the Dunwich Dynamo makes a deep sort of sense in a weird and quite British way. The whole thing is faintly anarchic and unreal; the feeling is different to big Sportives or rides like RideLondon – less pro Peloton and more Monty Python; there are tandems, Bromptons, fixies, and bikes wrapped in LEDs. It makes sense because we city dwellers often go to the coast when it is summer, when we want to cut loose, we are revellers who often hang out into the small hours, and when we want to go far, we often find strength in being carried along by a group. 

Our little team of eight moves like a dream through the little villages of Essex, faster than any of us expected; we’re driven on, dedicated to the route, all of us brought together for one night for the same miles, the same turns. Some of us have done it before, some haven’t. The route is the same as years gone by, but the rest stops shift around, and we swap tips about where the good coffee is, and whether the Fire Station will be raising money and selling BBQ. We stop often, sharing kit kats and pork pies, enjoying hot drinks in styrofoam cups, huge numbers of cyclists streaming into each stop just as we depart. A yellow gibbous moon watches eerily, and even as late as 1am, people sit in their front gardens, watching this weird unsleeping peloton roll through. They know: in the dark quiet of the dark night we are coming, following the scent of the dawn.

The sun starts early – I think it’s 3.30am when we see the first crack of sunlight, and an hour or so later the whole horizon has a light under it. Bats and moths and then all of a sudden, we don’t need our lights. Here we all are, tired, wired from the caffeine and energy gels, spinning through a gorgeous morning, no cars on the roads, the countryside yellow and green, half burnt, half verdant. The start of the day feels perfect, then hard, my legs are beginning to lose it, and the last 20 miles feel lumpy – and then “Dunwich 7” appears on the road signs – and we accelerate, and you can see sand at the edges of the road.

Then, the cafe and the beach, a steep pile of shingles and the cool swish of the sea. There are cyclists everywhere, some with sleeping bags and camping mats, others just curled up around their bikes. Some of them have got to the queue for the beers and fry-ups. Half the Peckham crew change into swimsuits and race for the sea (pro tip: bring a change of shoes, the beach is not kind to cleats). I just take off my shoes and dig my feet into the sand. We made it. We queue, a lot – for slots on the bus home, for carbs and drinks – and then we sit and laze around, looking at Strava, looking out to sea, amazed at what we just did.

It’s a three hour drive to London – I sleep half the way and wake up, somehow surprised and then proud that we came such a long way – and we hang around waiting for the bikes to be unloaded because we put ours in first, and they’re at the back of the lorry. We’re all exhausted, but you can’t help but still feel slightly elated. 

As they unload the bikes, the removal team hold up a big steel bike with white wall tyres. “Raspberry Red Pashley!” they call out, and the assembled cyclists cheer and clap as its rider reclaims her ride. We all made it and it made sense at the time. The Dynamo is a midsummer night’s dream, where it’s all the more powerful being inside a mystery, even when you don’t fully understand it.

Originally wrote this for Peckham Cycle Club.

One of the many things the pandemic dislocated is the start and the end of the year. What even were January and February 2020? A forgotten prelude, unconnected to the real 2020, which began when we went home from the office in March. When the shops and the schools closed shortly after. When the sun started shining. And when did it end and begin again? Not at Christmas, because straight afterwards, the schools and the shops closed again. Perhaps it ended a few weeks back, with my first vaccination, a moment of grace in the gloved hands of a nurse, followed by 24 hours of lethargy, jetlag head, and the dull ache of societal grief washing through my bones. 

Maybe the end is roundabout now, a year and a bit after we went home, a year after I wrote in an email:

The weather is cold, a sharp Spring cold. The schools have only been closed a week, somehow. I found spaghetti, rice and a small can of baking powder yesterday and it doesn’t feel odd to record that. How is it still March? All of life has been blown away. 

Early in the pandemic, after the banana bread and before the killing of George Floyd, it does seem like time is the problem. All the time I used to use on trains, on the tube, sat vacantly in Pret – it was all just gone. Gone where? All that time that used to be locked up, all it takes is a lock down to set it completely free, a balloon slipping from a child’s hand and into the sky. At first, even the roads are quiet: I can type whole sentences before a car goes past, especially at night. There is nowhere to go. Just the park, and the garden, the lilacs a heavy purple against the full blue sky.

The new day to day needs to be filled with new routines. Zoom. A walk around the neighbourhood. Queuing outside. The house, all of a sudden, does need to be a machine for living in. I cook, clean and we go from kitchen to lounge to garden, and then I take my sons to the park, with the little blue football. The older one goes in goal, the little one follows his own directions and then we climb trees and go see the ducks. We might do all of that in two hours, come home, eat, clean, and then we start again. Otherwise, what else is there to do? Early morning/middle/afternoon/dinnerbathbed, the day is like a symphony with four movements, each one a refinement of the last. In a big city you usually live with a sense that there is always some huge number of infinite things beyond which you could be doing. The zoo, a museum, a meal out. But right now there is not. 

Reading comes back. Anti-racism reading lists, and arguments for and against them. Arguments that you should be reading about the world you want, arguments that you should be reading about the world as it is, and eventually, a simple but necessary conclusion: reading about someone else, somewhere else, some time else, should be part of life. It is the local bookshop that really triggers my reading again. On Instagram, they are candid about how they’re figuring out what to do. What is a shop that’s closed? They throw up a Shopify page, and when you search you can’t find anything. I email them a list of books, PayPal the money, and get back the first few, wrapped in brown paper and string a week or so later. 

I’ve always found buying books to be therapeutic, an act of hope. As Warren Zevon put it:

“We love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.” 

Buy

Buy 

Buy

I read probably half the books I buy. I find I need to buy enough books to give me some options, but not too many.  

I spent almost the whole year in my own postcode, and it’s very much a typical Victorian suburb of London, a solid bedrock of buildings from the last 1800s with holes from the war filled in with 50s and 60s blocks. Maybe that was why I felt like going back to that period, to the moments before the war, the dread of tragedy coming, and the moments after, the way it ended not with riotous colours, but with something more drab and more questioning. 

I re-read Lust, Caution, which is set in Hong Kong and China as the war begins to tighten its noose; it is simply spectacular, an incredible machine of menace and sadness. It’s hard to believe something so short and concentrated can be so lucid, and at the end, can expand to take in such emptiness and desolation. 

Sam Selvon’s terrific Lonely Londoners was the highlight of the 1950s stuff: I read it at the height of summer and it’s close to perfect, the way it rolls along, through the capers of its characters, and always in the background, the battle between hope and promise and racism and discrimination. It achieves that most wonderful thing for any novel: it feels completely true and real, that it’s just real life typed out and set on a page, yet it is a completely realised work of art and imagination.

Though I cannot think anyone else would link them, I had the same feeling about Circe, which is the one book from 2020 I’d recommend over all the others. Circe herself is an incredible creation – by turns bitter and close to self-loathing and yet curious and open-hearted to the end. She is always deeply compelling – and though it seems odd to say about an immortal witch who’s dad is the actual Sun, she is always so strangely real. Perhaps because she struggles so visibly and rejects so much of what she is given in order to remake it, just to be herself. It is in isolation that she finds herself, alone from society. 

I read Zadie Smith essays – her new slim one on the pandemic, and Feel Free, an older collection, which is marked by Brexit and a life divided between London and New York. I remember reading it while I was in a deserted hospital waiting room, while my son had his arm x-rayed. He had fallen out of a tree, a normal injury injected into the weird COVID timeline. The whole building was strange, wrapped in plastic and warning tape, and there we were, telling a kind of story about the kind of thing that always happens to six year olds. We waited for an hour or so, he took his ibuprofen, and the specialist looking at the X-rays said it was just sprained, and we went home for dinner and cartoons.  

I copy endless lines from her essays, like this one:

“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do… They are no substitute for love… love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through. That must be why it frightens so many of us and why we do often approach it indirectly.”

Like every family, we have our flat days, our days filled with not very much at all, and our days of falling out of trees and the like. We have some days that are filled with activities, and this picture at the top is one of them. It is from last year’s gorgeous Spring, when lockdown and COVID were new; we were drawn into the garden by the sun. I’d got some huge vats of poster paint from eBay as the normal sized pots were sold out, so I put out paintbrushes and old cardboard boxes and paper. Owen and I cut up some egg cartons to make a dragon, and then he painted some mountains and a ninja monastery to make a place for it to live. My wife and I sat on the grass and Owen told us the story of the dragon meeting a frog; as with a lot of stories children tell, it was both completely immersive and strangely meta, and I like the way the photo reaches for that: Owen is a clearly visible third character.

One of the delights of Smith’s essays is similar; everything is solid ground to her, whether she’s talking about the real world – gentrification, awkward interactions, banana bread – or the shadow world of imagination, feeling and art. There is simply no difference in her ability to grasp the truth there. Another line copied:

“Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do ‘something’ [in lockdown] that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, now what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”

And so she reconciles, truly, if only briefly, how reading, writing, social change, projects and flat days are all linked. Part of becoming middle aged has meant a desire to think differently about creativity. As I age, I realise entropy and re-creation is deeply important. Everything is collapsing all the time. You can’t preserve anything, you can only create, you can only rebuild. Many people think our institutions are permanent and so the challenge is just changing things a little, and making them “fit for future.” We want to preserve the present and haven’t realised the present is mostly already lost.

I am shaped by grief, and by the scientific, scaled up expression of such loss: entropy. Everything is ending and you can only create and make new stuff. You need to be optimistic and embrace that. I always want to be on the side of creation, not conservation. 

[Cross posted from Endless Close Attention, my COVID email / photo project]

A New Decade / The Radio Plays the Sounds we Made

I read more books than usual this year, the average quality level was higher and there are two or three that I would press in to your hand right now. It was altogether, the most enjoyable year in reading for a while. What I took from this is a good reminder that beneficial effects are often linked – more and better, faster and together, quality and quantity. This is frustrating when you’re focussed on change, because it’s easier (and more desirable) to be able to isolate single pieces of the system and operate on those, and it’s more pleasant to believe that operating on isolated parts of the system can drive holistic change – more pleasant because that’s clearly easier than the alternative, which is to accept that changing systems requires a look at the multiple interrelated pieces that comprise the whole.

How to read more books
Counter-intuitively though, it can sometimes be straightforward to jumpstart some level of change with a small, meaningful action. In this case, for me, it was just to really focus on reading over the summer, and to shorten the time between buying and reading a book. Over the last few years, I’ve bought books by building an order from end-of-year “best of” lists, and then buying a large number from Amazon, in order to have good choices of books on hand the moment I finish one. The difficulty is that culture goes cold, that is to say, something bought in December can look less interesting in March. Throughout last year, I consciously shortened the distance between buying and reading, which meant I got to Jia Tolentino’s excellent Trick Mirror, Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods and Max Porter’s Lanny quickly. All three are worth your time.

Trick Mirror is all killer, no filler. Jia Tolentino has an extremely solid grip on some very slippery topics: the problem with rebelling against power structures, the way choice on the internet reduces freedom, how hard it is to escape conformity – the list goes on. As well as being thought provoking, it has a propulsion and urgency to it – it’s very compelling.

Savage Gods is just one of those books that really got me; spookily insightful at the outset, I found myself underlining constantly in the first half. My path and the book’s diverged somewhere before the end, but not wildly, and the parting was not harsh.

Lanny is another strange, beautiful one from Max Porter. A bigger English weirdness seeps in than I felt in his previous book, Grief is a Thing With Feathers. The tension towards the end is incredible too – you want, so desperately, for Lanny to be found, to survive. All we want is to survive.

Life and how to survive it is the main topic Coal Black Mornings, Suede frontman Brett Anderson’s Lovely, fragile and clear memoir of the band’s early, early days. I read it in a day while sick on the couch. He’s a great writer and there’s a paint-stripper freshness to his focus on his relationship with his parents and past. Instead of name dropping you get the real feel of what it was like to be trying to become something when you started with so little.

Do you remember the first time? Or the tenth?
I read William Finnegan’s tough, ascetic memoir of a life chasing waves to surf and it really made me think about how you remember your life – if only because it like such a matchless example. Barbarian Days won a Pullitzer, and it’s a great example of muscular American prose, the written equivalent of a Silvertone photo, fundamentally metallic, a dirty chrome surface. The vagrancy of a life lived on beaches is there in complete detail and the specificity of his recall something really special:

“Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want drift and gaze, drinking if I’m, except maximum vigilance, a hyper alertness to what the ocean is doing, cannot be relaxed.”

I’ve been writing yearly recaps of what I read since 2006, and looking back at the lists from the some of those early years, I don’t recall books in the way he recalls waves. Some books I have entirely forgotten. I cannot picture the cover or even attempt a synopsis. But some I do hold on to, and I can still tell you the few which mattered.

I’m not sure the extent to which reading ought to be about stockpiling knowledge, though. In his Desert Island Discs interview, Daniel Kahneman makes the case plainly:

“we should think of living, not only of remembering.”

I spent more time with Daniel Kahneman this year thanks to Michael Lewis’ excellent Undoing Project, which is simply terrific and satisfying on every level. Clever sentences, beautifully drawn relationships and a writer who is able to take deeply profound ideas and render them as clearly as possible.

Probably the best writer I know on life and what it means to live it is the biographer Richard Holmes, given he’s made his career on understanding what that process really is. “Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love”, Coleridge is quoted as saying at the start of This Long Pursuit, a beautiful set of essays, sketches and miniature biographies. It’s familiar territory for Holmes – Romantic poets and the end of the fun when the Victorians show up – but here he adds some excellent insight into forgotten characters, many of them female, and it adds up to be a compelling meditation on memory itself:

“There is a goddess of memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.”

1. Exhalation – Ted Chiang
2. Trick Mirror – Jia Tolentino
3. The Ride of a Lifetime – Bob Iger
4. The Content Trap – Anand Bharat
5. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Live – William Finnegan
6. Coal Black Mornings – Brett Anderson
7. Lean Analytics – Alistair Croll
8. Lowborn – Kerry Hudson
9. One Giant Leap – Charles Fishman
10. Savage Gods – Paul Kingsnorth
11. This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer – Richard Holmes
12. Lanny – Max Porter
13. The Dry – Jane Harper
14. Normal People – Sally Rooney
15. Golden Hill – Francis Spufford
16. The Undoing Project – Michael Lewis
17. The Complete Maus – Art Spiegelman
18. Human Voices – Penelope Fitzgerald
19. In Persuasion Nation – George Saunders
20. The Book You Wish You Parents Had Read – Philippa Perry
21. On a Sunbeam – Tillie Walden
22. Amusing Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman
23. Wool Omnibus – Hugh Howey
24. Inspired (2^nd ed) – Marty Cagan
25. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – Jon McGregor
26. Principles: Life & Work – Ray Dalio
27. All Among The Barely – Melissa Harrison
28. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy – Roger Eatwell & Matthew Goodwin
29. Bad Vibes – Luke Haines

Previously: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, earlier…

That being the story — less an arc and more a downpour, less a journey and more an explosion, less a beginning/middle/end and more a big bang and black hole — the books ought to reflect things like faith and fatherhood, or grief and growth. There’s a little bit of that, because there’s a little bit of that in so many stories, but 2018’s reading was really just a jumble of fiction and non-fiction, and I am not sure there is any great lesson in it.

“Things just go on. Lot of life is like that. I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went… a man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands.” The wisest book was Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry. I found myself copying a lot of passages from it. It’s the story of a couple of American soldiers in the 1800s, fighting in the American Indian Wars and then the Civil War. It takes something you know happened, and moves it into the realms of great, foundational truth. It’s written in the first person, in a vernacular, close-to-speech way, and though the book is about two soldiers in love with each other, it often broadens out its scope to be about all soldiers:

“We’re strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars. We aint saying no laws in Washington. We aint walking on yon great lawns. Storms kill us, and battles, and the earth closes over and no one need say a word and I don’t believe we mind… But if God was trying to make an excuse for us He might point at that strange love between us. Like when you fumbling about in the darkness and you light a lamp and the light come up and rescue things. Objects in a room and the face of a man who seems a dug up treasure to you. John Cole. Seems a food. Bread of earth. The lamplight touching his eyes and another light answering.”

The inverse of Days Without End was Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. Just as Barry takes a specific experience and invests it with wise, general grace, Wilson grabs the two thousand year old world of Ancient Greece and brings it as close to today as is possible. You can almost feel its breath on your neck. The introductory essay is almost worth the price of admission alone, a masterclass in making a whole world feel present. This Odyssey itself is linguistically modern, clear and shorn of embellishments — and so what remains is incredibly elemental: blood, tears, beauty and the intense sadness of the passage of time. It feels so real, and so strange. At times you cannot believe people lived like that, and felt those things — Odysseus’ pitiless killing of the suitors is heart-rending — but at other times, it’s the paucity of 21st century life that seems thin and fictional, and Homer’s world which seems truly human. It’s you, the reader, who are an insubstantial creature of imagination, and Odysseus and Penelope who are really living and breathing.

I’ve written before about the Odyssey’s hold on me and it still has that. There is probably no finer moment in literature than Odysseus coming face to face with his mother in the underworld.

People talk about working through grief, about dealing with it and wrestling with it, but sometimes grief comes to you as just a single moment, like a storm that’s just one thunderclap — one great bang, in and out, over and done.

The Odyssey is a book about the aftermath of war, and so was Alan Hollinghurst’s newest one, The Sparsholt Affair. A series of love stories that span fifty or sixty years, moving from WW2 to the iPhone, and in particular, the total transformation in this period of how society and gay love see each other. In the background, there’s a scandal, and in the foreground, a son learning about himself and his father. Hollinghurst grants the characters the peaceful magic real life denies most of us: being able to see the skeins of your whole life and to reach back to all the people who ever mattered. It’s beautiful but too long and too lacking in a real core — there’s a drift instead of a drive and the feelings are often smoke not flame, faces in the mirror, not right in front of you.

I read two more volumes of Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa, a graphic novel autobiography of a life shaped by the author’s service in the Imperial Japanese Army in World War 2. Both Volume 2 and 3 are terrific, with a strong sense of drama, terror and beauty in the way the huge naval clashes are rendered, contrasting with the surreal melancholy of Ratman and the author’s own life as a foot soldier in the jungle.

I read another Raymond Chandler — The High Window — a classic that couldn’t be more sure of itself.You wonder why, when everything is as you expect — the chrome cars, the cigarettes, the dames, the wisecracking bartenders — it is still so compelling. The answer I suppose is that this is where it was all invented, or if not entirely invented, then perfected.

The non fiction books I read were mostly easier companions than the novels. I enjoyed Charlotte Higgins’ BBC history, This New Noise — written in the run up to the current license fee settlement in 2016, so on the present state of things it’s a little dated, but it’s excellent on the foundation of the BBC and the creation of its culture. Until I read it, I don’t think I realised how influential its first days still are. Some great quotes in there too: “the BBC is an idea. You either believe in it or you don’t.”

The full list:

• • Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris
  • Days without End — Sebastian Barry
  • The Argonauts — Maggie Nelson
  • Footsteps — Rich Bradwell
  • Less — Andrew Sean Greer
  • The Dark Forest — Liu Cixin
  • Hit Refresh — Satya Nadella
  • Laika — Nick Abadzis
  • The Driver — Alexander Roy
  • Showa 1944–1953 — Shigeru Mizuki
  • The Odyssey — Emily Wilson
  • Showa 1939–1944 — Shigeru Mizuki
  • Measure What Matters — John Doerr
  • Radical Candor — Kim Scott
  • Dawn of the New Everything — Jaron Lanier
  • Pachinko — Lee Min Jin
  • Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces — Michael Chabon
  • The Three Body Problem — Liu Cixin
  • Dept of Speculation — Jenny Offill
  • In Pursuit of Spring — Edward Thomas
  • Fall Out — Tim Shipman
  • Set the Boy Free — Johnny Marr
  • The Sparsholt Affair — Alan Hollinghurst
  • The High Window — Raymond Chandler
  • Radical Focus — Christina Wodtke
  • This New Noise — Charlotte Higgins
  • Behind the Beautiful Forevers — Katherine Boo

Previously: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, earlier…

But I’m not sure “Product Management” is really the thing I am good at. For starters, it’s not a specific, single thing, and for seconds, it’s such an early 21st century role that it may well disappear or certainly change radically over the next 20 years, to the point that it won’t make any sense to look back and say “I was good at that,” because that will not be there any more.

So what have I become good at over the course of working for nearly two decades? What skills have I developed?

A few things – I can work Powerpoint, and I’ve never ever hit “reply all” to an email addressed to a whole department – but my most valuable skill is that I’m good at noticing things, and it’s one I realise I’ve worked hard to develop.

By noticing, I mean both the ability to observe, in detail, and of having a way of description that crystallises and captures that observation.

There’s a line from William Morris, the 19th century designer and critic about home furnishing that describes what you get from noticing, perfectly: “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Noticing is both. In the purely useful sense, all good decisions about building digital products involve noticing things. In the beautiful sense, good, even great observations are what you need to think with if you want to think genuinely interesting, true and different things.

Empathy comes from noticing. Noticing a problem users have; noticing a drop off point in a flow or a place where people don’t comprehend what’s happening. I once had someone whoop with delight in a user testing session at an interaction we’d put in a prototype. Usually it’s less obvious than that; notice the small things about people, about users and customers – the body language of someone when they try and change their password on your site; the words they use as they narrate using your product. Where people buy your stuff, and when they decide to go elsewhere. Don’t just notice your own product. Notice everything apart from it – think of it as a silhouette. All the interesting stuff is in relief, around the edges.

Design is noticing. It’s easy to mock Jonny Ive and his diamond chamfered edges and laser welded edges, but if you watch him explain a unibody design for the Macbook or the way the corners of a new iPhone sit just so, you’ll see every approach begins with him noticing some kind of blemish, imperfection, or just a strangeness in what came before. There has to be an edge between two surfaces. Why then, is it unpolished? What kind of qualities should it have instead?

Problem solving – and its big cousin, strategy – is noticing. Paul Graham has a great essay on how to find startup ideas: essentially, it’s to go looking for problems to solve. What do you find annoying? What will be true in five years time, ten years time? What will be different – and what won’t be? As Jeff Bezos puts it, customers will never want higher prices, slower delivery and less selection.

This is the foundation of noticing. It’s the obvious part, where the value exchange is clear. Notice things and fix things = make metrics move, get paid. Unlike PG, I’ll make the case there’s a value in a type of looking that is far less opinionated, and that is more raw and less directed, free of opinions, and free of input from the eye. This is where noticing becomes more than just useful; where it can become sublime and surprising.

Mastery is built on noticing. Little children know this instinctively. My son, like many other four year olds, loves dinosaurs. He knows how to tell the difference between a parasaurolophus and a corythosaurus, thanks to looking intently at his books and models and museum exhibits. There’s a lot to be said about why children become obsessed with dinosaurs, about the power of knowing a domain, of learning all you can learn, but the biggest thing I’ve realised is how unopinionated his learning is. When you become an adult, and particularly when you’re a manager you’re often asked for your opinion and your ideas. You’re asked to analyse and to actively process information. That can black out the power of studying more blankly, of waiting to respond. Spend more time gathering and less time trying to be a part of it.

Deep accuracy is in noticing. It’s easy to say something true, particularly if you’re using a data point, and especially easy if it’s data from analytics or a survey. ‘1,000 people did this’ and ‘10 million people voted for that’ could both be accurate, but are they going to strike your listener as deeply true? Are they so accurate that they’re going to change their minds? Do they already know it? The kind of deep accuracy you need to be really convincing – especially if you want to make a change – tends to come from noticing a lot about not just the people and situations you’re observing, but the people and situations you’re living in and reporting into.

The real power is in truthfully capturing what you’ve noticed. When I was 17, I studied Sylvia Plath’s poem “Morning Song” in my literature class. It’s a poem she wrote just after the birth of her first daughter Frieda, in 1961. It is to the rest of Plath’s poetry what “Friday I’m in Love” is to the Cure’s discography: something kind of perfect and polished, not entirely uncomplicated, but disarming, bright and even lovely.

When I read it at 17 it made no sense. It seemed completely foreign. It was about babies, and midwives and it wasn’t half as brutal as Daddy, or as thick with malice as Full Fathom Five. And I didn’t even really like Plath. But it is the one that comes to me now, twenty years later, in the dawn that follows so soon after the small hours, because my wife and I have just had a new baby. I didn’t remember the poem, just the rightness of its phrasing. I looked it up, and there it was, still perfect after all these years.

In one line, she says of her newborn, “your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.” She watches the light move, and she hears the baby cry:

And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Ah. Yes. Just so.

Like so many new parents, I have spent hours looking as closely as I can at my children, and the sheer rightness of Morning Song still takes my breath away. Poetry is pure noticing, really. I am in awe of something so right that it can travel across that much time, and bridge so many worlds.

Originally written for, and posted on, The Pastry Box.

Itis fairly common in England to see small plaques set into the front of older houses with chiselled numbers saying when they were built. 1906, 1871, 1832. In Cartmel, a little village at the southern tip of the Lake District, home of a couple of very good restaurants, there’s a little whitewashed stone cottage, and in black paint above the door, the date of its construction: 1776.

At the same time as the Declaration of Independence was being signed in North America, under the cloudy skies of Northern England, somebody built this small house, putting stone after stone on top of each other to fashion solid, rough walls with their backs to the rising hills.

People still argue over America’s founding ideals; they wonder if those ideals make sense still. The white house in Cartmel still makes perfect sense today. It is lived in, wired up for power, water and wifi and worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. So it functions just as you’d expect any brand new house to function: as a home, as an asset and as a node on the network.

For some reason, I have no photos of this house, even though I can picture it exactly. I remember having this thought, too — about it being built at such an interesting point in history — as we walked past, and I didn’t tweet it. My little interaction with it is gone, but no matter. The next person to go past doesn’t need any written clues from me. They know what the little house is for.

On the same trip, we drove through the Lakes to visit the stone circle at Castlerigg, a set of standing stones from nearly 5,000 years ago. There are rows of stones, jutting out of the ground like a mouth of old teeth, gappy and knobbly, chipped and jagged. Even under clouds they shine slightly, as if they have been buffed. My wife is from North America, and she has a deep affection for stone circles. Whenever we are driving outside of London, if there’s one nearby, we’ll barrel down the sideroads to find it.

There are over a thousand in the UK, all built thousands of years ago. The famous ones — Stonehenge, Avebury — have car parks and signposts, but we’ve also climbed farmer’s fences and squeezed down muddy tracks, to find more fragmentary evidence… of what? Even in the multi-room, million pound visitor centre for Stonehenge, the central mystery is unmissable. Nobody knows why it was built. No-one can explain anything about it. People can only guess.

At Castlerigg and at Stonehenge, I have the feeling after a few minutes of being observed, or more accurately, the sense of being in a conscious place again: there is a definite sense that here is a place in a way that ten minutes down the road is not. A road leads here: this place was chosen and it was designed.

And we know how they were built. We can trace the stones, find the quarries where they were dug from — in the case of Stonehenge, from Wales, more than a hundred miles away — and we can know with reasonable certainty how the stones were dragged through raw effort, rolled on logs, dragged through the mud, and hauled into a very specific design of concentric circles, in specific places and a certain angles, for reason no-one will ever know now.

But other than these ghost emotions, there is no discernible logic to these places, and so you’re left admiring something more raw: the fucking effort. The rocks are huge, cold lumps of a planet, hacked out of the earth with hands and nails and primitive tools. And then people — people like you and I, with the same muscles and the same set of limbs — dragged these things through the rain and the wind, for days and days, for weeks.

We don’t build things like these days, you might think, assuming we only build things with diggers and power tools. But of course, we do make things like this — most of the software on your computer is built exactly like this. They’re built with raw effort, code, line by line placed like bricks in a wall. Each commit is sent, each commit is checked. Yes, deep in the bowels of Google, there are algorithms, picking over inumerable terabytes of data like spiders in the dark — but the menu bar above this document in Google Docs was laid out by hand. The explanations around what will happen when I press the share button, or the File button, all typed out into a system, read back by a developer, transformed into code on a cold morning in San Francisco, tested by a remote team in Mumbai, clicking, clicking, clicking through the requirements, to see if it matches up.

The next time the design team are explaining an interaction to the dev team, or as a Product Manager, you’re asking how many sprints for a feature, think about Stonehenge, and some mad druid raising her arms to sky and asking for a lintel stone to be hauled into the sky and placed atop another two.

From a construction point of view, Stonehenge is absurdly primitive. You could make a copy of it in a day with all the tools we have. So it will be years in the future for software; so it should be now, really. Think of all the time you spend wanting to make simple changes and how long those changes will take. Computers still move so slowly compared to how fast we can draw, or speak or think.

We build websites like they built stone circles — lots of manual labour and a thin level of understanding of the forces involved. Just as we now look at Stonehenge and ask, “why on earth did they build that?” People will one day look at Facebook and ask the same question. If, a thousand years from now, a tourist in the ruins of Menlo Park turns to his daughter and says, “so that people could share things,” will that make any more sense than if he said “the truth is, nobody knows what it was for.”

2.

AtCastlerigg and Stonehenge, we take photos, and ping them to Instagram. It seems unlikely the photo will last the next 1,000 years, whereas the stones of course, will. It is tempting, particularly in places like these, to be filled with regret, and to think digital things are uniquely impermanent; that they fade almost as soon as the monitor sleeps. But of course, stone circles are a freakish exception. Most things don’t last — and if they do, they are not remembered. They take up space at the back of drawers, sit in boxes and basements, removed from shelves and settling into the dust, far from view.

The world has no use for artefacts, really. It is mostly full already. Permanence is not the aim of real art; the aim is movement. The aim is to build a thing in a way that moves people onwards, and that alters their ideas of what can come next. This is true of even the most permanent things you can think of; a great building is not built to last for thousands of years. Was Castlerigg built to last 5,000 years? Even if it was, the builders would have wanted its purpose to survive as well, not this unmoored mystery. It was built so that there are two moments in time for everyone who sees it, and thus, two sets of possibilities: the moment before, and the moment after, when expectations are replaced by possibilities. After Castlerigg was done, everyone on this island knew stones could be raised to the sun like this, just as after Brunelleschi built the dome in Florence, no church could ever look the same.

The job that I do right now — called product management — it is all about wanting; and you spend your life in it wanting things to happen. Like all desire, the wanting is a question, not an answer: to what extent are you making your own perfect object? To what extent do you just want to hold the world and listen?

This, I think, is why I’ve always liked asking that question: what does good look like? Because the first instinct is to just answer it, and the second instinct is to know there is another answer, out of sight, that exists on the other side of the creative process. And this is why it is worth doing anything at all: so those who see it know it can be done. What about these words — which will not last 5,000 years, nor be seen by whole islands of people? They are just something of me, for you.

Originally written for, and published on The Pastry Box.

So I’ve only got the list I made to tell me what I read, and it strikes me as completely all over the place. If anything the list itself is an output – a trial of four ways of discovering things to read:

1. Podcasts & social media recommendations.
2. Big new releases, often reviewed or talked about in traditional media.
3. Things about current trends.
4. Stuff that “found me” – presents and books I’d bought months or years previously and that sat around until some moment caused me to start them.

Each of them generated one really good recommendation and lots of duds. The good ones were good in different ways; the bad ones, too.

1. Podcasts & social

How were the good recommendations good? Creative, beautiful, different.
How were the bad recommendations bad? B-sides that aren’t anywhere near as good as the single.

From a podcast, the hit was the lovely As Kingfishers Catch Fire. Ever since Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries, publishers have created a stream of lovingly produced books that set knowledge to a symphonic sense of time. Here, each chapter mixes authorial autobiography, literary criticism and bird biography to give you the story of both a specific bird as a part of nature and as a piece of culture. The writing is clear and compelling and the presentation is stellar – from the endpapers to the bespoke paintings of birds that introduce each chapter – the book is physically a really great artefact. Granted, you’re not going to take it on the tube, but there’s no getting away from the fact there just ought to be more books like this.

2. Big New Releases

How were the good recommendations good? Brilliant, resonant.
How were the bad recommendations bad? Uninteresting, under-inflated once the hype had disipated.

I really did think Lincoln in the Bardo was as good as everyone said. It is a book about an afterlife with a lot of opaque rules and remarkably little regard for conventional structure (hard) – but it is also a book about the divide between the dead and the living, and the tenderness that causes us to hope that one day that gap might close (enveloping). If that tenderness connects – and as someone with a young child, it most definitely did – there is something lovely in its sustained fragility, and the grace of showing a president trying to reach across the void. All the more so for the gap with reality.

3. Current Trends

How were the good recommendations good? Like being able to rewind and re-watch real life in HD, with a smart voice over.
How were the bad recommendations bad? Lacking in urgency.

The more you read about how the world is right now, the more fractal things feel, as if we are living the precise opposite of those conspiracy theories: everything is unconnected, history is random. So reading super-contemporary history to understand the world right is a tenuous bet, but if not understanding then you can at least get clarity. Tim Shipman, Sunday Times Political Editor has two books that are essentially long – very long – newspaper articles retelling what happened in the last few months. All Out War is Stellar stuff on the year of chaos that was 2016 and the Brexit referendum. The sources, particularly on the Tory side, are exceptional and allow for a forensic telling of the campaign from all angles. If you spend a lot of time online then Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle is all killer, no filler. A journey from the edges of online culture to the rotten parts of its core that at times leaving you wanting to wash your eyeballs clean. It brings admirable clarity to a lot of very contemporary debates – meme culture, 4chan, the alt-right, digital fascism, outrage, free speech, no platforming – it is a book that tells you new things about what it is like to live online right now.

4. Things that found me
How were the good recommendations good? Intensely right in the manner of a round block in a round hole.
How were the bad recommendations bad? There aren’t any, just not enough good ones.

Many years ago, a manager had a copy of a James Ellroy novel on his desk, well thumbed – and then one cold day a few years forward from then, but still a few years back from now, on a winter day out in a cathedral city, there was a shed selling second hand books and I bought a huge brick of paper that combined The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz into intense story, that of crime in LA in the 50s. This year I finally read it. The world in it is at once totally monochrome (everyone is compromised, there are no good relationships) and yet on that inch of ivory, there’s all the richness of the whole human heart. Morals, motives and emotions are both primal and deeply nuanced.

It is heavy though; a lot more fun is News of the World by Paulette Jiles. It’s a Western full of great American archetypes (road trip, the frontier, freedom of speech, the way the old shackle the young, excellent descriptions of desert fauna) – but somehow the story of a grizzled Civil War vet taking on one one last job, taking a 10 year old girl recently freed from a year with the Kiowa, and returning her to her white parents – isn’t fake. At it’s heart, it’s real.

And as for poetry, there was Falling Awake, Alice Oswald – I started the year with it – and take this, about dawn, sleeplessness and longing:

4:22 the village is lost in its veils
a few dreams lean over the lanes like
nettles
here come cascades of earliness in
which everything is asked is it light
is it light is it light
the horizon making only muffled
answers but moisture on leaves is
quick to throw glances
and bodiless black lace woods in
which one to another a songbird asks
is it light is it light

not quite

It is so good, and now I really wish I could find it.

1. Falling Awake, Alice Oswald. It really is very beautiful poetry, and useful too, in that its new ways of looking are right there for the taking.
2. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell. Adultery, a murder and suicide – but all three are really just the background to a subtly evoked moment when the narrator finds himself a stranger to his own actions. As an older man he looks back at his teenage self, and a friendship that takes place against a quintessentially tragic backdrop and finds himself wondering – why didn’t I say something different? Poignant, brief, and just the right side of taciturn.
3. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber. The kind of book that actually blows your mind – it’s terrific at telling the story of debt, credit and capitalism – but it’s even better at gradually showing how deeply enmeshed in the very language of markets your thinking is. Come for the history of how money came to be, and how it is indivisible from the history of war, taxation, slavery, theft (all in this telling, to some extent, sides of the same coin) and stay for what it tells you about how things are valued. It isn’t perfect – there’s a pretty rushed attempt to write off the medical and technical progress that has come with late capitalism – but it is actual, proper thinking that will make you realise how often economics asks completely the wrong questions, with the wrong language, looking for the wrong answers.
4. Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance. Elegy is a strange choice of title for a book – it implies a certain ghostly type of sadness, a floaty, wistful melancholy – whereas Hillbilly Elegy is energetic, direct and does not fuck around. It is explicit about the questions it asks, and the answers it wants. It explicitly wrestles with the role of individual responsibility, the power of structural economic changes and government policy, and ultimately why people the author knows have made such destructive choices. The final chapters explicitly place the story into a political context and the author has given some compelling interviews further unpacking this. The book has been quite narrowly pegged to current events (“a great insight into Trump and Brexit” says the cover) but it asks broader questions than that.
5. All That Man Is, David Szalay. Honestly, I don’t find being a man, in and of itself, a particularly interesting thing. But here we are with a Booker nominated look at modern masculinity told via nine interlinked short stories – a favourite format of mine. Not enough is made of the links between the stories (it’s no Ghostwritten) and most of the book is dominated by a kind of stoned Mitteleuropean Crap Towns vibe, only with no redeeming jokes about roundabouts or takeaways in Hull. I was glad I stuck around for the final story, because even if the message was trite (old man finds redemption in his kids), it was nicely done. But all in all: skippable.
6. Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi. Debut novel that tracks the way slavery shudders and shivers down a family tree from the late 1700s to the present day. The good parts are great – there’s a righteous anger and returning for the story generation after generation you get a good sense of the colossal injustices of history. The strict structure imposes big narrative penalties though – no long lived characters to bond to, and each new chapter starts afresh and needs to telegraph its place in time (and there are some “as you know, it’s 1964 now so we’re doing heroin” parts). Where it’s perhaps most subtly successful is in showing how people live with so little knowledge of the huge weight of history that is only very recently behind them.
7. Novel on Yellow Paper, Stevie Smith. Written in the mid 1930s – many years before she became the famous, much anthologised poet – this sees Stevie Smith’s alter ego Pompey recording her thoughts as she wanders through the London suburbs and Berlin. It feels not unlike several rather brilliant poems wrapped in a longer free-form, unstructured prose piece that felt flat to me.
8. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders. Basically as good as everyone says it is. Does a brilliant job with riding the dividing lines between a US president as a symbol, a historical actor and a human being, and all the tensions and toughness inherent in that. It’s also thoroughly propulsive despite being quite weird and with little in the way of a direct through line, and deeply tender and full of feeling. Reminds me very much of a Neutral Milk Hotel lyric: “how strange it is / to be anything at all.”
9. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick. Finished this a month ago and still don’t quite know what to think. It’s very good history-of-thought for the most part and contains the clearest description of entropy and thermodynamics I’ve ever read but it doesn’t feel like it’s about information as I know it. Perhaps that reflects the way that once something is known, it can’t be unknown – and to get back to how people thought before that is really very difficult indeed. The past being a different country, and all that.
10. The Dudley Smith Trio (The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz), James Ellroy. Brutal, intense and compelling trio of LA crime conspiracies that imagines a world that is at once totally monochrome and simultaneously full of different tones – morals, motives and emotions are both primal and deeply nuanced. Reading all three in a row you also see a real virtuoso technician at work with the prose too. A star. A dark star.
11. Ibid
12. Ibid
13. Product Leadership, Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw. The mark of a successful career advice/strategy book is how many pages I’ve folded the corner of to come back to later and there’s lots in this volume on running Digital Product teams. Wide range of interviews and examples, my only criticism would be (and this based on personal need) wanting more on working enterprise/traditional orgs.
14. The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg. A quick read – it’s by a NY Times reporter, so it feels like a few long features – but the stories are well told and it explains the way habits form and work clearly. Poses some interesting questions too – around personal responsibility (as per Kahnemann, the author shows we believe we have more agency than we really do) and around how habits can help shape big societal changes such as Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement.
15. News of the World, Paulette Jiles. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyd, 72, an itinerant reader of the news to the illiterate frontier population takes on one last job: escorting Johanna, a 10 year old girl, recently freed from a year with the Kiowa and returning her to her white parents. There’s so many great American archetypes here: the road trip, the frontier, freedom of speech, the way the old shackle the young – but they’re all sketched with a tough, poetic brevity. Like a lot of the best Westerns, the people are tough and terse, the landscape beautiful and strange and full of possibilities.
16. As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books, Alex Preston. There ought to be more books like this. It’s beautifully designed, a compelling mix of genres and suffused with care and attention. Each chapter takes a specific bird and mixes autobiography, literary criticism and bird biography – essentially, rather like listening to a fascinating lecture – and gives you the story of both the bird as a piece of nature and the bird as cultural metaphor. The writing is clear and compelling and the presentation is stellar – from the endpapers to the bespoke paintings of birds that introduce each chapter – the book is physically a really great artefact.
17. Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman. Rather brilliantly done, this is a history of perhaps the last great traditional rock band – The Strokes – and the Downtown NYC scene that was their genesis. It then pairs this story with that of DFA records, in particular, the success LCD sound system had with their hybrid dance/punk music. The author has interviews with everyone from the doormen at the clubs to the one hit wonders, might-have-beens and never-weres (Fischerspooner, The Rapture). It’s all beautifully woven together so while there’s no authorial voice you get a great sense of narrative and a circling of the big themes: what is it to be ambitious and talented? What do you do with that, and what counts as success and what as throwing it away?
18. The Pike: Gabriele D;Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, Lucy Hughes-Hallett. At one level, this is the bonkers biography of an early 20th century Italian poet, writer, lover, fighter plane pilot and nationalist. On another, it is the story of someone who laid the groundwork for the aesthetics of Fascism and actually lead a dictatorial commune that occupied the city of Fiume. It’s also a brilliant evocation of the way history is not just a set of events – it is a symphony of currents and tides and a great many ideas are always working, forming and reforming before the surface, long before they hit the shore.
19. Autumn, Karol Ove Kanusgård. It’s about autumn and it’s currently autumn! His wife is expecting a child and so is mine! Everyone goes on about him! What could go wrong? Well actually it’s a decent, quick read with plenty of thought provoking lines of inquiry and some tough, robust writing. It’s basically a bit like what I imagine it would be to go to NCT with a smart, slightly solipsistic and intense Scandinavian.
20. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Angela Nagle. All killer, no filler. A journey from the edges of Online culture to the rotten parts of its core that at times leaving you wanting to wash your eyeballs clean. It brings admirable clarity to a lot of very contemporary debates – meme culture, 4chan, the alt-right, digital fascism, outrage, free speech, no platforming – and does a great job balancing a longer view that’s not hyperlinked to the latest Twitter storm, without being blunted by lack of immediacy. It feels like a book that tells you new things about what it is like to use social media right now.
21. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry. Struggled with this. The set-up is clear: man of god, woman of science, a Victorian England with one foot in it’s pagan, pastoral past and another in the modern world of open heart surgery and a structured, quantified approach to knowledge. The disappointment is that the characters are flat vessels for these ideals, prone to dialogue that’s little more sophisticated than “I’m a woman of science”, navigating a dull plot that’s basically just a series of portentous happenings.
22. The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, Laurence Scott. Felt like this passed me by, really. Here and there a paragraph stood out but mostly it zipped by like motorway scenery. Didn’t feel anything like urgent enough; it was written in the days before Gamergate and the Russian elections. A gentler book from a gentler time, not fitted to the days we find ourselves in.
23. Fourth of July Creek, Smith Henderson. A social worker in 1980s Montana starts tracking a survivalist and his family – at the same time as his own life and family is falling apart. Tough, focussed and full of interesting themes (money, markets, freedom), this is a pretty successful modern western. It turns a lot of frontier conventions inside out, with plenty to say about family ties and the role of the state.
24. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson. A genial and readable account of deeply unpleasant online behaviour around social media shaming. The first hand research and interviews are excellent and build a convincingly thorough picture of what it’s like to have a digital mob destroy you for a momentary action. Ronson is a compelling and fair narrator, alive to the complexity of what he’s describing and in general he’s good at taking the time to let the story unfold.
25. Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, David Sedaris. The funny parts are very, very funny. Dangerously so if one is reading in public transport – but the first half, indeed the first fifteen years are a bit of a slog. Arguably this makes a change from most memoirs in which the journey to the top is the best bit. Here it’s shorn of context and explanation and reduced to the nub of it; being poor and scraping by. The second half, when Sedaris moves to France and becomes a published writer just takes off – it’s hilarious, weird and precise – all the situations spring exactly to life. The end palls, too; the repetition of the start creeps back in, with coffee in the IHOP replaces by conversations on planes.
26. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone. Absolutely fascinating. Bezos is a clearly a unique creation and this book brings his excesses and intellectual drive to life. Better than the Jobs book and so probably the closest you can get to one of the people shaping the world right now.
27. All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class, Tim Shipman. Stellar stuff on the year of chaos that was 2016 and the Brexit referendum. The sources, particularly on the Tory side, are exceptional and allow for a forensic telling of the campaign from all angles: political, personal, policy, moral, press… feels like history being written in real time.

“Five years of hard work,” he replied. “And 25 years of hangin’ around.”

Now Charlie Watts put the slink into Sympathy for the Devil and the pop into Satisfaction, so you can forgive a man a lot of hanging around when that’s what happens when he’s working. But if, in your next monthly catch up with your manager you announced you’d replicated this productivity ratio in the office – five days of hard work, 25 spent “hangin’ around” – you would likely be facing some tough questions. For all that digital leaders talk about outcomes not output, there is an invisible standard, a sort of “I know it when I see it” quality to what counts as being productive.

Most of us have internalised the fact there is no time for hanging around. Most productivity methods – Agile, Getting Things Done, Bullet Journals – have their things to say about “value” and “focus”, but the answers, the process, and the meat of what they’re about is basically throughput.

Make a list. Process it in some way, into categories. Get through it. Put a lot of ticks next to a lot of things.

I think back a lot to the responsive redesign of Telegraph.co.uk, a big news website, which I worked on in the lead Product role. 110 people ploughed through a couple of thousand JIRA tickets over 14 months – a lot of things were crossed off the list. Many were painful and pointless. We spent six perfectly good sprints on a perfectly fine picture gallery while reading at lunchtime about how the media is dying and the future is aggregation theory. The world did not need another picture gallery, not remotely. But it was the most productive period of my life. We built a team, a culture, a shared set of values and an approach that moved the organisation faster than it had moved for five years previously. We built some products and features with real value; some were ones you could see in the data and feel in your bones from a mile off, others I took my time to reconcile to (during the process I had a particular dislike for the way we’d prioritised drop caps over many considerably more practical features like, say, the video player – but a couple of years later, the styling has aged well.)

This answer is dissatisfying, because it feels like I’m saying that the reason you need to accelerate through the list is to get through the chaff, and get to the valuable stuff hidden there. This doesn’t feel true, though – have you ever looked at your old to-do lists? Do you feel victorious at the stuff that got crossed off? I moved house recently, and there was a box of old notebooks, pretty colours and shapes, tatty corners. Inside they’re all covered in black inky handwriting – but none of those stars and underlines, arrows and re-writes make any sense now. They feel great to complete – I am nothing if not a compulsive underliner, boxer and crosser outer – but in the end I can only feel bleak about them because seen from this vantage point, of course it’s clear getting through the work does not, in itself, matter. Lists are empty calories, so the dictum “focus on what matters” is not very good advice. None of it matters – it’s very, very rare that any single thing that can be reduced to a bulleted item is worth anything very much at all.

What is hard with any future-facing list of things is to judge the value. With retrospective lists, it is much easier. Early on at the Telegraph, when the digital product team was more like 5 or 10 people, not 110, one thing we did was at the end of the week, hold a meeting called “The Victory Lap.” We stood in the tatty meeting room we’d commandeered and went round the group, one by one, calling out something decent, true and data driven that we’d done that week. Now at BBC News, I keep another list: just a Trello board of “stuff the team has done.” Sometime it’s features we’ve shipped, sometimes it’s things we’ve learned, roles we’ve opened or hired, thing we’ve realised.

This is the list that feels productive; the one that comes not from charging through the list itself, but from the hanging around, from looking backwards as well as forwards. From the before, the after, and from the sides. Perhaps that is what the hanging around is best thought of as: some kind of space for thinking about the work. You can spend your time trying to get through the list quickly, or making the list shorter (or even longer), but none of these really changes the value of the list – because the value lies outside of it. As Kierkegaard put it, “it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” The value is not the thing itself, but in playing around with it. I will leave Charlie with the last word, talking about how the Stones goes to Sympathy itself:

“It was one of those sort of songs where we tried everything… We had a go at loads of different ways of playing it; in the end I just played a jazz Latin feel in the style of Kenny Clarke… not the actual rhythm he played, but the same styling.”

Just as “we love to buy books because we believe we’re buying time to read them” (Warren Zevon), we love to make lists because it implies there is a simple, foreseeable way that you can get to good, with positive attributes such as focus and tenacity. You can do less (focus) and you can go faster (speed through it). But the thing you need is neither. The thing you need are delays, false starts and anything else that happens when you’re just hanging around.

https://youtu.be/IEtzHz9J1k4

Originally published on SuperYesMore, a website from Alex Duloz, creator of The Pastry Box.

Early in the summer last year, we went on holiday to the south of France. The lanes around the house smelled of lavender and olives. We ate outside on the veranda, looking out over wooded hills, the day’s dry heat like smoke in the air.

There was a swimming pool, a neat Topaz jewel, the same bright blue colour as the sky. Sadly my toddler son decided to hate it – he would sit on the edge and kick his little pink legs to paddle but if he got in deeper than his waist he would scream and cry in rage.

A few weeks later, at the end of the summer, in a hotel in Scotland, the same boy was very different. Again and again, he sat on the lip of the edge of the pool, grinning and bouncing, before pushing himself to fall toward, into the water and into my arms. Something had changed, and he was ready for the world. Now we try and go swimming every other weekend to the local pool. The first time we went, as we got changed, I took off my watch  and my shoes and my socks and I remembered how when my father took my brother and I swimming as kids, he used to push his watch into one of the shoes before putting them into the locker. The carefulness of that action came back so strongly, even though I never knew I remembered it.

This year’s best books weren’t about character, but about the context of the past.

All of the above is to say, my world is widening. My son left babyhood behind and I took a new job that is laced with complexity, helping build digital products in 27 languages that are global, regional and local. I find myself thinking about big systems and deep forces, and was drawn increasingly to books that peel back those layers. On Empire, Mary Beard’s SPQR is excellent at telling both the history of Rome and the story of the history – how it came to be, and what remains unknown. I finished Amitav Ghosh’s trilogy about Opium and the East India Company. The second volume (see 2015) was dominated by the complex and flawed character of the Opium traders; in the third book, Flood of Fire, the focus moves from these individuals to the forces of history itself. The ideas of trade, justice and profit all have far greater emotional heft than any individual’s story. “How was it possible,” someone wonders, that in a battle:

“…a small number of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come?”  

It is the British army who triumph, and the book ends with the birth of Hong Kong and a particular phase of the Empire. Alexandra Fuller’s excellent Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight fast forwards to the drink sodden hungover end. Combining clarity and grandeur, she charts a chaotic childhood amid civil war and Southern African independence in the 60s and 70s.

It was the best year in reading for a long time.
Part of that was down to strong recommendations (especially the Unbound podcast), but part also came from reading books that were newer, and part of current conversations. I read books from the current Booker list, and more than a few which ended up on year end lists. I read a few more books than I usually get through too, though in part that was due to a restful holiday on a remote Scottish island. The Outrun was both year-end-list terrific and set on a remote Scottish island, a memoir of an Orkney island woman who goes to London and discovers depression and alcoholism instead of dreams and success, and who returns to the wild kindness of the islands to fix herself. Lovely twinning of personality and coastline, and some very good stuff on the spectral nature of the internet, the ghost landscape linking the city and the island.

Of the new books, The North Water was the most fun, a gory tale of a murderer on a whaling vessel, and a doctor returned from the colonies in disgrace. The writing is electric, precise and thrilling, and the plot works like an absolute machine, a combination of Tarantino and Conrad that was thoroughly capable of wrestling my phone from my hand Grief is the Thing With Feathers – in which a crow comes to live with a recently bereaved Husband and his two sons – was not as strange as it sounds, but far sadder. Written to sit in the space between poetry and prose there’s a bare beauty to many of the lines. It manages to be direct and pure but that belies the strength of understanding that’s there too.

The best book came first, or last.
In our little family, we’ve started a Christmas Eve tradition – borrowed from Scandinavia, my wife tells me – of giving each other books. This year mine was The Underground Railroad, about a runaway slave escaping a plantation, making her way through a nightmarish and slightly fantastical pre Civil War America. It’s not just angry, righteous and sad – though it is all of those things – it is also startlingly easy to climb inside and be one with. It describes awful times and awful things, but there you are as a reader, right in them, as much as a reader can be. It is bright and clear, and shines such a crisp light on so many of the awful angles of slavery: the grinding economic structures, the coarse brutality, the way it lobotomises so much that is good and right in communities and families.

So that was either the year’s best or, perhaps, it was the book I started with: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the story of WW2 POWs building the railway in Burma. It really is magnificent, rendering time as a tidal force, coming in and out throughout one’s life. “It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible,” the narrator says at one point. “It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.”

In full, this year’s reading:

1. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan. It really is magnificent. Loved the interweaving structure, the way it enables time to be tidal, coming in and out. Beautifully judged and totally compelling.
2. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway. It is what it is, which is a classic. It’s only at the end that I realised it’s nowhere near as hard or as lean or as done with the world as it gives off. It’s much more complex and all of that was there all along, which is the great sadness of these things.
3. Creativity Inc, Ed Catmull. Insightful view of the emotional complexities of creating good work and a good place to do that work. Some brilliant counterintuitive lessons – about divorcing fear from failure, about the perils of optimising for control – and great stories to back it up, too.
4. Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter. A crow comes to live with a recently bereaved Husband and his two sons. Not as strange as it sounds, but far sadder. Written to sit in the space between poetry and prose there’s a bare beauty to many of the lines. It manages to be direct and pure but that belies the strength of understanding that’s there too.
5. The Hunters, James Salter. Efficiently captures the loneliness of fighter pilots; particularly smart on the way people grade themselves and their achievements.
6. Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller. Mad, sad and bad, they said about Byron’s life – and there’s more than an element of that to this memoir of growing up amid a civil war and the changes of Southern African independence. A lot of the elements seem familiar from many family memoirs – drunken parents, moving houses, the accumulation of quiet tragedies – but Fuller writes beautifully and with a sense of both grandeur and unflappable clarity.
7. SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard. Terrific thematic history of Rome, with lots of detail about the time, and lots of thoughtful tangents on the nature of what can’t be known about the past.
8. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James [DNF]. Great language, but it’s a lot of talking about very little.
9. Last Orders, Graham Swift. It’s hard to explain why some novels which swirl their voices together and let the truth come gradually feel like bar room bores and some are totally compelling. This is the latter; a drive to the coast to spread a friend’s ashes and along the way, the people in the car try to explain just how it is they came to be there. The decision, reactions, unasked questions and aches of the past are beautifully revealed as each character speaks about the way simple decisions hide complex emotional truths.
10. Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama. Intricate police thriller that’s as much about the structure and pressures of work inside a large organisation as it is going inside the mind of a criminal. Great twist at the end.
11. Sapiens – A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Noah Harari. Spectacular opening – the grand sweep of pre Homo Sapiens history – and a really interesting perspective on the agricultural revolution (eg: from a Darwinian perspective, did we domesticate wheat, or did it enslave humanity on its way to becoming such a successful plant?) Less and less good as it goes on though – some of the stuff on money and capitalism rings true, but there’s a lot of certainty and not quite as much insight.
12. The North Water, Ian Macguire. A gory tale of a murderer on a whaling vessel, and a doctor returned from the colonies in disgrace. The writing is electric, precise and thrilling, and the plot works like a machine. At its best, a page turning combination of Tarantino and Conrad.
13. Consuming Pleasures – Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, Jennifer Hayward. Interesting overview of three different phases of the serial form – Dickens and the novel, mid 20th c. cartoons and then late 20th c. Soap opera.
14. Latecomers, Anita Brookner.
15. Double Indemnity, James Cain. Contains one of the great Noir lines – “I had killed a man for money and a woman, and now I didn’t have the money or the woman” – but it’s not quite as tightly wound as The Postman Always Rings Twice.
16. Legends of the Tour, Jan Clejine. Atmospheric, stylish history of the Tour told in bite sized chapters.
17. A Life Discarded – 148 Diaries Found in a Skip, Alexander Masters. Weird and compulsive, and with some funny twists to the narrative – though it seems somewhat slight, even tangential. So much happens at the edges of the narrative but is only sketched in; the overall effect is as if the heart of the matter has been missed.
18. The City of Mirrors, Justin Cronin. Excellent confusion to the trilogy – far stronger than book 2 (“The Twelve”) – though if there is one flaw, it is that Amy is strangely passive for much of the book. It’s on very strong ground when it comes to the passage of time though, and the campus novella that shows up in the middle to explain the backstory of the main bad guy is quite affecting too.
19. The Outrun, Amy Liptrot. Simply terrific, and I don’t say that just because I’ve recently returned from a remote Scottish island rather in love with the idea of the edge of the country. But this is the story of someone from an island off the edge of the country (Orkney) who goes to London and discovers depression and alcoholism instead of dreams and success, and who returns to the wild kindness of the islands to fix herself. Lovely twinning of personality and coastline, and some very good stuff on the spectral nature of the internet, the ghost landscape linking the city and the island.
20. The Stranger, Albert Camus. I was too old for the book, and it was too old for me.
21. The Mersault Investigation, Kamel Daoud [DNF]. Exactly the kind of one trick pony that the précis promises.
22. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. Pretty much as good as everyone says it is; far funnier than most literary fiction, just self aware enough to feel knowing and sad but not too far gone that it isn’t also true and tender.
23. Rain – Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison. A short meditation on wet weather, perfect for the armchair walker.
24. Us Conductors, Sean Michaels. Fictionalised biography of Soviet scientist and Theremin inventor, Lev Termen. The first half, set in the Jazz age in New York feels very flat – which makes for a strange contrast with the second half, where Termen is sent to the gulag. All of a sudden the book is learn, urgent and involving.
25. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein. Decidedly non-narrative story from the Sleater-Kinney guitarist that’s still a compelling tale of a working life building a compelling and crucial band.
26. Flood of Fire, Amitav Ghosh. Decent conclusion to the trilogy, and in the widowed Shireen and the Indian soldier Kesri there are two interesting new central characters. Both have strong ties back to the first and second books and help conclude longer running stories, but the endings aren’t as satisfying as I’d have liked. Something about them doesn’t quite land, and it’s almost as if the focus at the end moves from these individuals to look at history itself: the description of the battles and the treaties, of the ideas of trade, justice and profit all have far greater emotional heft than any individual’s story here.
27. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. It’s not just angry, righteous and sad – though it is all of those things – it is also startlingly easy to climb inside and be one with. It describes awful times and awful things, but there you are as a reader, right in them, as much as a reader can be. It is bright and clear, and shines such a crisp light on so many of the awful angles of slavery: the grinding economic structures, the coarse brutality, the way it lobotomises so much that is good and right in communities and families.