HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 51: ICYMI – THE REPRISE

For this penultimate edition of Half Time Thoughts, I decided to look back over my almost-one-year spent writing them.

In case you missed any, here’s a complete list of the previous 50 posts, sorted by general theme, each with a one-sentence precis.

The articles weren’t written with anyone particular in mind, so any of them might resonate with you. I’ve marked some of my favorites with a heart icon in case that’s helpful—not that there’s anything wrong with the rest!

The 50 posts total just over 76 thousand words and, according to LinkedIn, about 6 hours of reading—the equivalent of a healthy book.

Next week, I’ll be writing my sign-off post, reflecting more on the process and what I have learned, and explaining where my writing is heading next.

If you’ve read a few (or even a lot) of my previous articles, thanks for your loyalty.

If this is your first time, you’ve flicked straight to the index, so enjoy dipping into some of the earlier chapters…

Life, Lifestyle, Life Goals

• 💖 Episode 01, “Turning 50” - The article that started it all, triggered by my milestone birthday and starting a new chapter in life.
• Episode 12, “International Travel, 2021 Style” - Reflections on my first overseas trip since COVID restrictions were implemented, and the joy of reestablishing human connection.
• Episode 13, “Life on Paper – The Beauty of Letters and Photos” - A nostalgic discussion of paper artifacts and speculation on what the equivalent experience might be for future generations.
• 💖 Episode 15, “My Life Goal is Less Fire, More Filling” - Discussing the FIRE movement and proposing a new acronym, FILLING, that I find more relatable from a life-planning point of view.
• Episode 25, “My Life and Moore’s Law” - Exploring the ways electronics are encroaching into day-to-day life.
• 💖 Episode 28, “New Year Solutions” - Rejecting the conventional, doomed-to-fail resolutions, and proposing an acronym-based set of solutions to prior years’ struggles and disappointments.
• Episode 29, “Opportunities for the Taking” - Building on New Year Solutions (E28), this article explores eight types of opportunity that I’m hoping to seek out.
• Episode 31, “Investing in Yourself – The Stop-to-Start Paradox” - In New Year Solutions (E28), I expressed a desire to invest more in myself. Here’s a discussion on avoiding acts of sacrifice and schedule overload.
• Episode 41, “Attention, Please – Breaking News is Broken” - Learning how to wield the power of choice to become better informed amid the attention economy.
• Episode 46, “Life-Long Learning – The Future of College Education?” - Inspired by a VIP visit from my alma mater, Imperial College, discussing a life-long learning journey and personalized curricula.

Decision Making, Choices, Optionality

• Episode 2, “When Making Less is More” - The complexities of buying wine and why the estates that produce less are actually producing more.
• Episode 6, “A Point of View” - Why it’s important to have a point of view, and how it impacts your writing—especially writing for your business.
• 💖 Episode 11, “Why is Seeing the Bigger Picture So Important?” - Why we struggle to comprehend things on different scales—both large and small—and why we should become more aware of the biases we develop.
• Episode 22, “Bigger, Better or Bad” - Exploring the fallacy of automatically choosing the biggest and how to choose finesse over excess.
• Episode 24, “Recency and the Last Straw” - Exploring two cognitive biases: the recency effect and misattribution.
• Episode 30, “What’s Important Now” - Building on New Year Solutions (E28), this article explores figuring out what’s important and getting stuff done.
• Episode 32, “Control What You Can Control” - In New Year Solutions (E28), I called for reducing the time wasted on things we cannot control. Here are some thoughts on how to do that.
• 💖 Episode 40, “The Most Helpful Flavor of Feedback” - Introducing four flavors of feedback and how to find feedback umami.
• Episode 43, “A Measure of Measures” - Accuracy, precision, satisfaction, risk, and why I’m choosing a combination of informed skepticism and satisficiency.
• Episode 49, “Short- and Long-Term Tradeoffs” - Inspired by a famous CEO’s article on the energy transition, collective leadership, and conviction in science.

Words, Wordplay, Etymology, Symbols

• Episode 5, “What is Content?” - Exploring the content marketing phenomenon and how to climb the content mountain.
• 💖 Episode 14, “Randomness, Quotes, and Inspiration” - Twelve inspiring quotes, generated randomly from Famous Quotes and Authors, with my thoughts on why they lit up my neurons.
• Episode 20, “The Not So Bad, Not So Good, More or Less Piece” - The impact of vague responses and how to embrace direct communication.
• Episode 27, “Twenty-Two” - The significance of the number 22, and some notable years and birthdays that include it.
• 💖 Episode 39, “For the Love of Pi” - Dedicated to the origin and virtues of Pi and pie.
• Episode 48, “Syncretism – The Possibility of And” - The power of using the word “and” instead of “but”, opening ourselves to new possibilities and ways of blending others’ ideas into our own.
• Episode 50, “What the El…?” - In appreciation of the popular ways the letter L is used as a symbol or abbreviation.

Society, Social Phenomena, Human Behavior

• Episode 8, “Back to School” - Whether parenting a kid back to school—or off to college—or welcoming a team member or client back from vacation, it's only fair to give them space to do it their way.
• Episode 16, “The Change-and-Stay-the-Same Conundrum” - Discussing why some people want things to be the same as they were before COVID and simultaneously for things to change.
• 💖 Episode 18, “Discussing Our Dependencies – The Things We Can’t Live Without” - Examining our relationship with essential and non-essential goods and services, and how to extricate ourselves from the worst of them.
• Episode 23, “Happy Treat-or-Treat, Thanks-Receiving, and Capital-Mas” - Lamenting the hyper-commercialization of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
• Episode 26, “Land of the Free?” - An opinion piece on life in the United States.
• Episode 33, “When Did Transparency and Candor Become Radical?” - In New Year Solutions (E28), I sought more radical candor and radical transparency. This article explores why neither should be radical in the first place.
• Episode 35, “The Boundary Between Explanation and Excuses” - Why businesses are hiding behind COVID-related excuses when something doesn’t go as promised.
• Episode 37, “War and Perspective” - Observations on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Episode 38, “Will In-Person Business Events Really Come Back?” - Why in-person events won’t return to their pre-pandemic state.
• Episode 44, “Time to Move On” - Prompted by people and businesses blaming fixable issues on challenges that either don’t apply, can be avoided, or never existed.
• 💖 Episode 47, “Grocery Cart Rage” - Discussing three social trends that are leading to conflict in the supermarket aisle.

Leadership, Business Thinking, Ways of Working

• Episode 3, “Back to Away” - Why the phrase “return to work” makes very little sense to large swaths of the population and how the “new normal” is great for some but not everyone.
• Episode 4, “Angel Investing for Everyone?” - Disentangling different types of early-stage investment and who should and shouldn’t be getting involved.
• Episode 7, “Shifting Customers from Neutral into First” - Discussing the challenge of persuading potential buyers that it's worth investing their time and effort to do something different and that the benefits will outweigh the consequences of inaction.
• Episode 9, “Never Enough Time” - Exploring why focusing on tasks that deliver more value on whatever scale you’ve chosen—while eliminating or delegating the ones that don’t—is a path worth pursuing.
• Episode 10, “Why Early Adopters Aren’t Enough” - You quickly run out of friendly faces to turn into customers. It doesn’t scale. Selling to strangers is the only way to build a viable business.
• 💖 Episode 17, “Who Are You Building It For?” - The more tightly we define a minimum viable audience and build the solution to meet that group’s need, the easier it becomes to confirm product-market fit and gain market traction.
• Episode 19, “The Importance of Layers” - How to establish a high level of trust where underlying issues can be surface, understood, and harnessed in pursuit of superior performance.
• 💖 Episode 21, “Which Clone Are You?” - Using an analogy to winemaking to explore why the teams we build should include a diversity of talent to benefit from their ideas and different approaches to the work.
• Episode 34, “The ‘Me and X’ Alert – Should Grammar Impact Your Choice of Service Provider?” - Grammatical errors abound. How much importance should we attach to them when choosing our supporting cast?
• Episode 36, “Return on my Writing Investments” - What I learned over the first eight months of writing Half Time Thoughts and the value I derived from the process.
• Episode 42, “The Unseen Skills” - The importance of unseen and undervalued skills that are all around us.
• Episode 45, “Homework and Groundwork are the Real Work” - The business leader’s challenge of finding a balance between instant gratification and the prudence required to achieve longer-term gains.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash