Career
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Love and Other Fairy Tales
→: Love and Other Fairy TalesIt’s weird being single again. When things weren’t great, when I wasn’t happy – when I didn’t think things would work out, I never thought ahead to this point. Saturday night with nothing to do. Putting a friend down as my emergency contact on a form. It’s good. I’m not down about it. I was…
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It’s Not a Disaster
→: It’s Not a DisasterTravel gives me a lot of time to think, the planes, the airports, the queues. And the jetlag – there’s no lonelier time than four in the morning, wherever you happen to be. Probably clear from my last post that I’ve had a lot to think about, lately. Still going to have to be enigmatic and elusive…
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Losing Anchors
→: Losing AnchorsWhen I get stressed travelling, I have this mantra that I repeat to myself: Passport, wallet, keys, cellphone. Everything else you can buy. It doesn’t mean that losing/forgetting something else might not be expensive, or a giant pain to fix. The point is, that only the loss of some things is a genuine crisis. I…
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I Cannot Die Washing a Teacup
→: I Cannot Die Washing a TeacupI wanted to see this since it came out, but I finally got round to watching The Iron Lady on the plane to Australia. At first I thought I was going to hate it, because it starts with Maggie really old, and clearly losing her grip on reality somewhat. Actually I spent almost the entire…
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Balancing, Integrating
→: Balancing, IntegratingI bought my laptop home with me for the long weekend. I was writing code at 9pm on Wednesday night. Last week, I worked Sunday night. Sounds like I have a work-life integration problem, right? I used to have these strict rules – laptop stays at the office. No work at the weekends. I drew…
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12 Angry Men
→: 12 Angry MenAs part of the course I’m taking, we watched 12 Angry Men. I don’t watch many movies in general, and I’ve barely seen any black-and-white ones so it was weird. The whole movie was set in one room, and they showed the heat by having the men sweat copiously (like, wet faces, one guys shirt…
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Stand Out
→: Stand OutOver the weekend, I finished reading Marcus Buckingham’s Stand Out (Amazon). Similar to StrengthsFinder (Amazon) – which I blogged about recently), only instead of highlighting what your strengths are, it focuses on how others see you. I found it pretty interesting, and if you’re also interested in how your team perceives you, it’s probably worth taking. StrengthsFinder…
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Trust and Team Dysfunction
→: Trust and Team DysfunctionI’m taking a leadership course at work at the moment, and this week we spent time discussing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon). I’d recently read Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon) so it was interesting to hear what other people thought of the concepts. There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results,…
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Excitement!
→: Excitement!About 3 weeks ago, I sat in San Francisco airport and waited, as the delay on my flight crept up and up. Some time around 5pm, when I’d been there since 10am, I felt like, I could cry right then. Just start sobbing. In public. The lounge had closed, and I was sitting by the…