The Birth of a Habit

It has been about 9 months since I read a book by Russell Davies called “Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share”. It was the prompt I needed to start sharing things again. I love this quote from Russell on why the habit of doing things on a regular basis gives you an advantage over others, it comes from a recent talk (about 13 mins in) “most people don’t do, so if you do then you have an advantage”. So have I given birth to a new habit?

My goal was to capture things for myself so more a personal memory of what was in my mind that week rather than trying to promote my work or research activity (which we do over here). This is the 35th post since starting again in 2023 so I am pretty happy that a habit is forming. A full list is over in the archive.

This week was also Interesting 2024 at the lovely Conway Hall. It started with a bit of karaoke to get everyone warmed up, 3 rules were introduced including one that stated it was our job to be interested. The first half talks were on the subject of Taps, Compost, Dust and Tea. My favourite was trying some Matcha tea made in the break by Gianfranco. I think the caffeine hit was a little strong for 9pm so the second half was a little fuzzier but I think we heard about kitchen sounds, advertising to gamers and fashion.

Watching Gianfranco making the tea and describing his tools (in Japanese) got me thinking about what I do that might be interesting. I think I started day dreaming about what it means to get good at something. I wondered how many things I have spent 10,000 hours on - what have I done for that length of time? Why does it take that long to get good at something?