Home grown strawberries this week

I've been ill most of this week (kids' birthday parties 🤦) so there isn't a huge amount to report.

• I read Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan, which I've been meaning to since it came out five years ago. Despite that, and despite the fact that lots of the ideas in it are decades old, it still feels quite fresh. I think that tells you something about the pace of change in the workplace. The third section is a really, really good how-to on change with countless lessons born from experience.
• Related, I read this lengthy article on Zombie Leadership (from The Mighty Minds Club Newsletter) Zombie Leadership are the pernicious, cultural ideas we have about great leadership that are in fact false (i.e. disproven in research) but persist and so continue to confuse us and trip us up. I like this framing a lot and will steal it liberally.
• I learned about commonplace books. I hate the name, but like the concept, which is to keep a book or a document (a sparkfile perhaps), full of interesting ideas, phrases, quotes etc. I do this (at least partly) with Obsidian, but I like the idea of having something specific for capturing great writing. This reminded me of this interview with James Clear where he talks about "compressing ideas" by writing them in the same way as great sentences. Familiar + new twist = stickiness.

Here’s a good example: a key point in the first chapter of Atomic Habits is, ‘You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems’. That’s actually a play off of a quote from the Greek philosopher Archilochus—‘We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.’ I just took the rough structure of what he said, and played around with plugging words into it to see how I could make it fit with what I was trying to write.