🤵 A whole new level of luxury
Ep 51: A return from vacation, memories of New York City, and a healthy dose of miscellanea.
Well, I’m back! I’m slowly disengaging from vacation mode and shifting back into work mode. It’s a tough adjustment! So tough, in fact, that the first day back to the office I inconveniently forgot my desktop password. No idea. It took a long phone call with tech support to finally jog my memory, just before needing to go through the rigamarole of resetting the password.
I’ll start off with a quote Tim Ferriss shared in his newsletter. It’s a great way to frame events when they turn for the worse, or for the better. Look to them as a resource, as a tool to facilitate learning or inspiration.
“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
And now, as Tim says, “On with the show!”
A Tip for the Modern Worker
Try to be unambiguous when you communicate. You can head off potential communication issues by trying to be proactive and identify them before they arise. If you can interpret something in more than one way, it's likely that it will be. Read and re-read things when you write them. Make them as clear and concise as possible. If you're addressing someone for whom English is not a primary language, use words that are clear and common. Nobody should need to use a dictionary to find out what you mean.
This tip is one of 365 in my Handbook for the Modern Worker. I love this tip because it applies to any industry, in any geography, in any role. Efficient, effective work hinges on stellar communication.
#365DayDraw
I drew this and wrote the accompanying annotation as part of my #365DayDraw project 7 years ago today.
The geometry of the top of @OneWTC is elegant, simple and beautiful
Part of the fun of this project is looking back at the context of the picture. August 2016 was filled with memories: the Cayuga Lake Triathlon, a family trip to Disney World, and a trip to New York. We took a tour of Radio City Music Hall, saw Wicked on Broadway, walked the High Line and the Brooklyn Bridge, and enjoyed dinner at Clinton Hall. As we walked the streets of lower Manhattan, One World Trade Center – the tallest building in the United States – had just marked two years of being officially open.
Commentary
When I experience something transformative, I write about it. Usually, it’s a race, hike, or another test of physical endurance, but this time it’s a vacation experience. A cruise. I’ve teased this in past editions of Wanderfull but now that I’m back on land with a week full of memories, I am pleased to share thoughts, photos, and videos!
The experience was a 6-night cruise on Explora Journeys’ Explora I. We departed Copenhagen under sunny skies on August 15 and enjoyed stops in Gothenburg, Oslo, and Stavanger.
We’ve never been on a cruise. We really looked at this experience with fresh eyes. Anyone we talked to who’s knowledgeable about the cruise industry told us what we’d inferred only after hours aboard: Explora is a whole new level of luxury on the open sea. Maybe a little too luxurious, for I fear our experience has ruined any kind of cruising outside of the luxury realm.
We are not travel agents (a good portion of whom we saw on our cruise or read postings from their prior itineraries), so we’re writing about this from our unique perspective as first-time cruisers. Travel + Leisure wrote about this cruise (the week we were on, actually) but I delve into far more detail on one particular aspect. You see, we went on this particular cruise for a very good reason, so check out the entertainment section for that story.
Miscellanea
🧑💻️ TidBits wrote about a cool plug-in you can use to copy tabular data from web pages. Moving data from A to B is a significant portion of my job, so this is useful to have in my bag of tricks.
📖 I enjoyed reading Mr. Money Mustache’s post about the Comfort Crisis. Particularly, this quote: “In other words, even when our lives are virtually problem free, instead of appreciating our good fortune we just start making up shit that we can complain about instead.” The Comfort Crisis by
is now on my to-read list.🎲
wrote a provocative article about selecting leaders by lottery. It’s not a serious proposal but rather intended to provoke thought about what could be, which is how we innovate, after all. what would you do if you were selected in that kind of lottery?