In 1858, the Great Stink happened in London. Everywhere you went, it stank.

The pits were filling with human faeces and we couldn’t clear them fast enough.

For years, it smelled. When you were eating a croissant, visiting the doctors, sleeping in your room.

Not that you did, but if you ever tried sleeping inside a yet-to-clean festival toilet, you’d know how is.

It is not until Joseph Bazalgette, commissioned by the city, came to fix the problem.

He designed 1,600km of brick sewer pipes in large oval shapes. Using gravity and downward slopes to ensure sewage flowed in the right direction (pun intended). For places it couldn’t, steam-powered pumps lifted the pipes. Beautiful ornate house were built to blend them into the neighbourhood.

They had to dig up the road, build the sewer and rebuild the road without machinery or computer modelling, in one of the world’s busiest cities. The digging, carrying and bricklaying was all done by hand and horse for six years.

150 years later, most of the pipes are still in use today.

Today, we have added a few more steps. Separating rainwater from sewage, treating it, and turning it into fertilisers and energy.

The night soil man who collected our poo has moved on. We are not in constant fear of cockroaches and snakes when we are in the toilet. And we can, by and large, take a breath of air without choking.

Can you imagine that?

As attention get fractured, book sales dipped and sharing insight has changed fundamentally.

We saw it before.

The record business was perfect until the internet and Spotify came along. The artists who saw it early gave their music away and pivot to live performances and merchandises.

Now, as the economic environment and climate changes, careers gets upended. It pays dividend to think hard about what to do next.

A career is simply a made up idea. Pastors, farmers and entrepreneurs don’t have careers. They have seasons, projects, ideas and jobs.

What to invest (or learn) that would reap rewards for the next ten years?

What are you good at?

What do you enjoy?

What does the world need?

Just like COVID can be an opportunity to kick start the life you wanted all along, or it can buried us in.

This is an opportunity to learn how you can adapt and cast in a vote into resilience.

The advice, be so good that they can’t ignore you, is missing a second part. Make sure what you choose to be good at is something scarce that you can exchange money for, in years to come.

You don’t need to throw everything away, but you need to pay attention and start placing bets.

You have agency.

“It’s chill” can mean I’m flexible, I can accommodate you. I can work with you.

It can also mean it’s a chill place. We like it that way and a lot of work has gone into keeping it that way.

It can also mean I don’t care, do what you want.

Or perhaps I’ve not thought through my preference, so I will leave it later and hope its the right kind of chill for both of us.

Being clear takes effort. A chill place takes effort. Knowing, and standing up for what you want, takes effort.

“It’s chill,” is cheap now and expensive later.

When a new technology comes along that could change everything, it’s easy to think that it will.

If we think about the iPhone, internet or cars. How much did your life change? Did you lose your job or find yourself in a new job? Were you worried?

With AI today, I’m not sure how much our grandma, the nurse, or a pastor’s lives would change.

The question we have to ask is… what do we do? How would this technology would change it?

Is this like the camera to painters, the engine to horses, or the aeroplane to ferries?

For the last few years, AI has been getting good at many specific tasks. Now, it can feel like there’s so much to catch up on because of the varied ways of using it.

In life, there are always 3 options. You can change it, ignore it or accept it. What is not a good option is wishing you could change it, and not changing it.

This phrase has been on repeat lately and brought me surprisingly delight each time.

I am more fearless, happier and weirdly, more effective.

I read an interview with Colu Henry where she was facing challenges writing her manuscript. Her therapist told her “to write from love, not for love” and just like that.

I’ve since used it to find a life mentor, request time from busy friends, confess my attraction, compliment strangers, give rejection and discern when I need a nap.

It gave me an orientation. A different way to bring the most goodness to a bad situation. It gave me courage to be vulnerable.

I thought about sharing the specifics of what I did different after the phrase but I shall resist. I believe that the magic is in you using it.

The phrase reminded me of why I started this blog, my wedding planning days and the best parts of who I am.

I hope this mantra can bring that out in you too.

“…from love, not for love.”

A bow to Colu’s therapist and Mymind for the interview.

I’ve been testing a new app, Mesh, to be more thoughtful with my relationships.

It does so by consolidating all the interactions from emails, calendars, phone calls, apps, and social media, then rates the strength of each relationship. Not the content of the messages, just the frequency of contact.

Then, I can set recurring reminders, get notified when someone changes their Twitter or LinkedIn headline or have it choose a few people each day for me to connect with.

A few days of cleaning up contacts, my behavior changed. I started adding emails to calendar events (for tracking). I started texting people I wanted to move from medium relationship to strong relationship.

As Camille pointed out, this is a fool’s errand. Frequency of contact is not a complete indicator of the strength of a relationship. It misses the chemistry, depth, care, and shared experiences.

But who doesn’t want to be thoughtful in their relationship?

Being one of 200 people to congratulate someone on a new job on LinkedIn is not the same as sharing the joy with them at dinner. Worse, it can backfire if it is received as performative. It reminds us of the eager salesman wanting to hit their sales target while losing touch with our humanity.

Alas, a consolidated and updated database of contact information can be useful. If I am visiting a new city, I look up friends who have moved over. If I’m thinking of a new garage workshop, I can find the friend who used to be a builder in his past job and ask for advice. Now, with the additional help of Claude, I can save their previous professional experience and look for people with weird hobbies for my new project.

Modern tools, especially those that quantify and notify, has an invisible force. If we are not careful, it can lead us down a wrong path. As these tool gets cheaper and fancier, I constantly comes back to, what’s it for? Is this worth the money, time, and energy to learn and maintain?

And as David puts in, what’s the point of AI if you end up working more?

A few days ago I met a new connection in the business world. Excited, I brought a few gifts to share my appreciation of his time and generosity.

Our meeting was quick, lunch and out. He too, brought gifts, books that he’d written.

Later in conversations, I learned that the books were a way of making him stand out, be remembered and call for future business.

Immediately, the generosity that I hope, was displaced.

A gift is a cultural artefact. It can curry favours or help you stand out. There are tribes that employ aggressive gifting to show power.

How and why you decide to gift is up to you.

Maybe I would call him for future business, but have nothing to do with the gifts he gave.

It’s entirely possible there is a job that pays you to do what you love. It’s also entirely possible that a new technology comes along and that job is gone.

Bands of poets never were were able to make a grand living. Some became singer songwriters.

Portrait painters lost their job when the camera came along. Picasso did alright.

The record industry was perfect until the internet. Singers got back to performance.

The marketplace pays for souvenirs. They’re paying for stories. They’re paying for things that feel scarce in the moment. They’re paying for a different sort of connection.

There are generations of ______ who are more hard working and talented than you and I. Who do you think you are to steal their job, their patrons and their dreams?

So, no. You are not entitled to make a living doing what you love.

We start there because it makes us better humans. We ought to get paid for it, but even if we don’t, we ought to do it.

It’s possible.