i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

– e.e. cummings ‘I carry your heart with me’

People devote weeks and pages to discussions on dissecting cap tables, getting through email efficiently and condensing investment strategies of the rich and famous into top-ten lists.

But no-one it seems, wants to write about love.

Partly, it’s because love has been hijacked by pop music. You can’t talk about love without invoking the cliches of Rihanna and Taylor Swift and Usher.

Partly, it’s because love has been hijacked by movies. You can’t talk about love without sounding like you’re quoting from The Notebook.

And partly, it’s because love appears to be all art and no science. It’s almost impossible to distill (though magazines try) into something pure and clear.

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

– Pablo Neruda ‘Here I Love You’

Love is probably the most important thing in the life of everyone you know.

Not just its existence, but its absence too. Love, and sometimes the lack of it, drives every person’s decisions more than any other factor.

And yet we lack a framework for understanding it. To most of us it appears in our minds like a mist. We know when we’re in it. We can see when others are too. But we can do nothing to draw it towards us. It descends on us or it doesn’t and as much as we try, our best approach is simply an honest wait.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left overwhen being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

- Louis de Berneres ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’

There must be something to love’s universality. There must be a shared experience which could allow us to find a better description of love’s role, love’s value and love’s roots.

I think about love a lot, like most people. For my closest friends, who’ve shared with me their feelings about it, there seems to be no common thread.

One friend told me when I asked him that he thinks of his partner as “my best friend, the person I’d most want to spend time with if given the choice”. Another friend shared with me his father’s description of his mother, “all my life, in a crowded room, she is the only woman I can see”.

Some friends undoubtedly believe they have it. Some aren’t sure. Some do not, but convince themselves they do.

The only thing that links us all is that we always have to work at it.

Love is not static.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

At funerals, you see love so clearly. You see the outline of the hole that’s left by loss. That outline defines love’s shape.

At weddings, you see love’s hope. You see every person suspend disbelief for a few moments and bask in the glory of love’s potential.

At airports you see love’s sparks. People run to greet each other and hold each other as if they were two pieces of a puzzle. People sob as they hug each other, saying goodbye. Red faces. Heavy chests.

But none of those experiences seem to resemble love in real time.

You love people more at weddings and funerals and airports.

But that love has to subside. And you have to find something else to nourish it.

That’s what I think love must be.

That’s where I think it must exist.

It peaks on holidays and picnics and over long dinners. It finds its trough in sickness, in impatience, in hunger and annoyance and accidental insult.

But somewhere on the curves between those two points, that’s where love becomes real.

If you can find someone who believes in you irrationally. Who wants you to succeed in the same way they wish success on themselves. Who has as much joy in your highs as they do despair in your lows, and yet maintains a distance enough to never believe too much in either.

When you’re not trying to be someone. When you’re alone, unaware you’re being watched. Being fully self-defined. If you find love with someone in those moments, then I think that’s all you can ask.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

- Viktor Frankl, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’

I live in musical heaven.

We all do.

In 1999, on the way home from school, sitting in the back of my Dad’s yellow Nissan Bluebird, a song came on Triple J.

I’m a sucker for autotune (I think Alvin & The Chipmunks might be to blame). So when I heard this song, I was hooked.

It took me days, literally days, of listening to the radio to hear it again and find out the song’s name. And when I did, I went to the local CD store and they ordered the CD in for me. It cost me 4 weeks pocket money. It took two weeks to arrive.

The album was Basement Jaxx ‘Remedy’. This was musical reality in 1999.

How far we’ve come.

Almost any song is now at my immediate disposal.

I remembered recently the experience of waking up from a fever dream, sick out of my mind from tonsilitis in the winter of 2003. All of a sudden, the secret track on Silverchair’s ‘After All These Years’ came over my speakers. In my delirium, I hallucinated that someone had brought a piano into my room and started playing.

When that memory hit me, I was seconds away from bringing it fully to life because I have Spotify by my side.

I remember hearing The Avalanches – ‘Electricity’ for the first time on a summer holiday in 2001. I revisited that album yesterday, for the first time in many years and so many moments, memories and songs from that time started flooding back to me.

Hearing Something For Kate’s ‘Monster’ for the first time during the Hottest 100 in 2002. Hearing ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ for the first time on the way to school just a few weeks before I graduated from high school. Leaning my head out the window, listening the Blink 182′s ‘Enema of the State’ in its entirety on the way home from a volleyball tournament in Brisbane.

As these memories came back, I conjured the songs immediately.

That’s the musical heaven we live in.

You can travel as far and wide across musical history as you like. You can find a rich vein of sound and mine it as deeply as you please. Then you can pop out again.

You can spend the morning trawling Jeff Buckley’s acoustic B-Sides and the afternoon listening to Usher ‘Confessions’. You can listen to the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ vocal-only mixes and then shift to Swedish House Mafia’s MSG set.

When you combine musical curosity with Wikipedia, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud and Who Sampled, you have a lifetime’s worth of discovery at your fingertips.

The only musical limitation in our lives right now is our curiosity.

Taste is now a commodity. An algorithm. Go and read Pitchfork’s best albums list. Go to We Are Hunted. Go to Hype Machine. There’s your musical taste, updated every single hour. Which means we’re post-taste right now, musically speaking.

I think this is a good thing. Having ‘good taste’ is hard work. It’s much easier just to listen to what you love. Which means that provided you can find it, music is now pure hedonism.

“It’s not enough to have one hook anymore. You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge. People on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”

- Here.

We only have to listen to songs that explode our minds. And we have all of musical history to draw upon. Even if all you did with your time was find songs that exploded your mind, you’d run out of days before you ran out of songs.

The Musical Journey

Here’s what I’ve observed the typical human musical journey to be.

You start young, and you listen to music passively. What you hear at school, what your parents play, what’s on the car radio.

Then, you start taking in new influences – friends, siblings, other radio stations – and you realise there’s a difference in the available joy between a song you passively ingest and one you seek out, discover and learn to appreciate. You start to favour certain genres over others. Rock over pop. Rap over jazz.

Then you start becoming aware of music as existing in the context of movements. Madchester, Death Row, Seattle, Big-Beat, Trip-Hop, So-Cal Punk. So you start to favour certain sub-genres over others. Detroit house over Detroit techno.

Then, you become aware of how little you really know. And you begin a mad scramble to understand every kind of music you can. Every great record. Every landmark sound. The Stone Roses, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’, Kraftwerk, Can, ‘Harvest’, ‘Odelay’, ‘Some Kind of Blue’, ‘Closer’.

And as you become more and more aware, your scramble intensifies. Trying to stay on top of the Strokes in New York, The Libertines in London, MC Solaar in France. Every new movement, every new song.

And then eventually, just when it’s all about to become too much, you realise you can never keep up and you surrender.

But in that surrender, you break through to a new place. In this place, you realise you’ve heard so much music that you now know exactly what you like. You trust your ear has heard enough variations of sound to know the available spectrum of aural pleasure, and you realise the only thing that matters is what you like.

You don’t need to read anyone else’s opinion again, unless you want to. You don’t have to pretend to like LCD Soundsystem or Diplo or MIA or Missy Elliott or Girl Talk or Spoon. Finally, you can listen to music without anxiety, without the fear that there might be a better song elsewhere. A better band. A better new sub-genre or sound.

There are an infinite number of great songs in the world. And all you need to do is keep your great song cup full.

You know what you like. You know it feels good. And that’s enough.

“Emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.”

- Here.

When you find that place, 2012 becomes musical heaven.

Keeping The Cup Full

I keep a playlist of 50 songs, maximum. I call it my ‘radio’ playlist. That’s what I spend 70% of my time listening to. The other 30% of my time is spent replenishing that playlist as songs drop out.

That playlist contains only songs I love, right now. If they lose their shine, they’re banished to my archive playlist, for posterity’s sake.

As soon as I hear a song I love, it goes in.

I heard the Enya song the Fugees sampled at yoga the other day, it had to go in. I was on a great Tumblr called The Vandals this morning and this song came on.  It was immediately added.

I subscribed to all the Pitchfork ‘Top’ playlists to create one super playlist and shuffled through it for a day recently. Anything I loved, went straight to the list. I go to people’s ‘Top tracks’ on Spotify. I spent an hour moving through my friend Adrian Karvinen’s ‘Top tracks’ this morning and found 9 new songs. I went to Noah Kalina’s ‘Top tracks’ and found 3 more.

I subscribed to every Broke Mogul playlist and shuffled through it. That yielded about 15 songs.

I went through a year’s worth of posts on Affinity Music Group’s blog and found 6 more.

Just today, I got sick of The Milk Carton Kids, Flume, Outkast, Bronski Beat, Mobb Deep, Tracy Chapman and Fun and they got dumped into the archive. I think Paul Simon and Yuksek are going to be the next to go (I’m listening to them right now as I write, and they’re not spiking me like they did last week).

I was missing my brother last week, and my mind jumped to The Annuals’ ‘Brother’.

Me, and my Brother hiking.
Me, and my Brother might find a turtle.
We’ll just have some fun.

Me, and my Brother playing with our dog.
Two mighty men with a wolf, who drinks from the gulf.

Cool, calm water will bring back our voice to Mother.

I fell down in a creek bed.
Brother wept.
In his face I met fear; that I could die right there.
But I climbed right out.

Now I’ve grown bold, and lonely.
I should have stayed with dear Brother at home,
But we grew up old.

I used Spotify’s related artists feature to find similar artists to Annuals and found more songs for the playlist.

If the related artist is one I don’t know, I give their Top Hits a quick skip-through.

I only need to hear 20s of the song before I know if it’s going into the playlist. If it doesn’t hold up on a full listen, it’s cut, bypassing the archive.

I ask people on Twitter for their favourite songs, that’s how I found Milk Carton Kids and Jamie Woon. I check the We Are Hunted Spotify App every few days. Every few months I comb the Pitchfork archives, the Gorilla Vs. Bear mixtapes and the Neon Gold blogspot.

I’ve written before about descending into the musical rabbit hole. I still cherish doing that.

Whenever I feel my cup drop below full, I take a few minutes and fill it up again.

I’m the happiest I’ve ever been musically. I want more people to share that feeling.

Most of us have had a moment of clarity which resulted in a decision to exercise more.

Then we started thinking about the steps we’d take to do that, like:

1. I’m going to exercise every day.
2. I’m going to get a gym membership.
3. I’m going to get a personal trainer.
4. I’m going to buy a treadmill/exercise bike/<insert any piece of exercise equipment you can think of here>.

Over the last decade, most of us have experienced total failure with one or all of these things.

Today, we’re seeing the emergence of new tools to help people exercise more creating a new set of starting points for a more active life:

1. I’m going to get a Fitbit/Fuelband/UP.
2. I’m going to read the 4Hr Body and follow along with it.
3. I’m going to get 23&Me and learn all about my physiological tendencies.
4. I’m going to download a fitness app.

Every day we’re piling more and more tools into people’s lives. Never before has there been such an extraordinary diversity of activities for a person to choose from should they decide to live actively.

But here’s the problem: people are going to experience the same failures with the new tools they did with the old ones, further damaging their sense of competence when it comes to exercise.

The solution to exercising more lies elsewhere.

Regular exercise is a function of a simple set of behaviours.

If you do these behaviours, you’ll exercise.

If you don’t do these behaviours, no amount of Fuelbands, thigh-blasters, ab-rollers, gym memberships or genomic insights will help.

They’re not secret or magical. They’re simple.

If you can take the stairs, do.

Walk your dog every day.

Run, play tennis  or hike with a friend.

Orient your exercise to things that are social and playful.

Put exercise into your calendar every Sunday night for the week ahead.

Always exercise in the morning if you can.

Always start small. Never say you’re going to exercise every day (no-one does).

Walk as much as you can. During meetings. During phone calls. To and from work.

Don’t expect you’ll do more than 3 fixed exercise sessions in a given week.

Get 70% of your weekly activity requirements, which is 15 minutes/day, in the margins of your life (taking the stairs, walking on the phone, walking to the coffee shop).

Expect to lose a week every month to travel, sickness, injury, work or late nights but don’t let that stop you  always trying.

If you’re not enjoying something, stop. There are too many fun ways to be active to be miserable.

Never get mad at yourself when you fail.

There are maybe 20 more. And the biggest gap in human health right now is the ability to exhibit these behaviours on a regular basis.

So next time you have that moment of clarity, don’t think about the latest app, fad or craze. Think about the reasons you’re not exercising now, and make the simple changes needed to fix them.

The choice is yours.

This morning, I was reminded by Timehop of this Tweet from exactly a year ago.

Coincidentally, yesterday, I Tweeted this.

What a great example of the true time it takes to implement a change.

In response, I had a question from Clare Conroy.

Here’s the answer:

Better Social Dynamics

Walking and talking side by side lends itself to better conversation, less social pressure and less physical awkwardness. That’s why on a first date you should always sit at the bar and not at a table.

Walking allows you to ‘eat at the bar’ while you meet. The focus can then be solely on the conversation and not on the am-I-staring-too-much-or-too-little-do-I-have-stuff-on-my-face-are-they-yawning-cos-they’re-bored anxieties.

Just walk and talk.

Blood flow to the brain.

The blood flow to the brain and stimulated nervous system that results from walking also improves the conversation and energy.

Exercising without exercising.

Physical activity adds up. Fitness isn’t just for gym junkies. It can be for normal people too. And walking meetings are a way to steal activity back from a sedentary time block.

We’re seeing lots of people moving to standup desks, treadmill desks and all manner of workstation styles. Walking meetings are the natural continuation of this trend.

Less shite food, less coffee.

Every ‘coffee meeting’ you end up buying something. There’s only so much coffee you can drink in a day before you start ordering food (muffins, cakes, scones) or drinks (soda, iced-coffee).

In a busy life, most healthy behaviour happens in the margins.

Swapping walking meetings for coffee meetings means less shite food, unnecessary coffee and forced drink purchases.

How I’ve Been Doing It

When I meet someone, I ask them if they’d mind if we walked and talked, explaining it’s one of my New Year’s resolutions. Most people are fine with it.

I’ve figured out that it has to be walking. Lifting weights, playing basketball, even table tennis are too engaged. Walking is the key.

As well, at Sessions, we do a walking meeting (10 minutes) every morning to cover what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today and what roadblocks we’re encountering.

It’s the smallest change, but multiplied over a lifetime, it’s going to have the biggest impact.

The Future of Blogging

For a long time, blogging was either about keeping a public journal or sharing tips and insights.

Collectively, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest have replaced the public journal.

The ‘sharing tips and insights’ style blog post has been overdone. No-one needs another half-successful person spouting general tips on half-problems.

One of the most popular posts I’ve ever done was my Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep post, which became a TED talk. But as much as that post worked, I don’t want to write in that way again.

I like the idea of moving to paid newsletters, but the absurdity of paying as much for a subscription to a single monthly email as you would for a New Yorker subscription renders that idea void.

Also, that approach reduces your opportunity for digital serendipity, of which I’ve been the recipient so many times.

Speaking to other people, they talk about a golden age of engagement 2-3 years ago, when people’s comments and feedback was of a much deeper and higher quality and the rush of instant connection with multiple people around the world was as addictive as the web could be.

People are replacing that rush with Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram likes now and as communications shorten, the depth and quality of engagement through comment threads seems to be on the decline.

There’s also the overload issue which seems much more pronounced now than it was 2 years ago. People just don’t want to read longer posts as much as they used to.

Interestingly, they do read really long posts. You see that in the power of Instapaper and Read Later. Gawker’s moving there too, focussing on mixing shorter posts with longer, in-depth writing. This weekend’s Betaworks shareholder letter is another great example.

There’s just a sprawl of ignored middle-ground blog posts that’s shifting into obscurity.

When I think about writing, my test is really just – would an exact replica of me want to read what I am about to write.

My friend Spencer often chastises me for not posting at times when people are actually paying attention (I tend to write and post at times when no-one’s online).

But I’ve felt the power of being Hacker News’d. I had 30,000 views in a day after this post went to the top of HN. But it was a TechCrunch spike. People flooded in, stayed briefly and then things went back to normal. And I feel the same about that 30,000 view post as I do about my 250 view rabbit-hole posts.

Over breakfast this morning, Ross Hill (who recently stopped blogging) said the best blogs are autobiographical – which fits with my preference for writing about stuff that interests me.

Ultimately, you just have to please yourself. I think that means I’ll keep intermittently writing about things that I care about, to a small group of people who might read what I write.

I don’t understand the Internet any more.

When MegaUpload went down, I got an email from my 19 year old sister asking if I knew where she could get the latest series of Louie. She has no TV. MegaUpload is her TV. When it went down, she didn’t know what to do. I don’t think she would know if it was illegal or not – it’s just there and it’s the easiest way to watch stuff so I think she assumes it’s fine.

On Instagram yesterday I accidentally hit Popular. Having never been there before, I decided to see what ‘Popular’ meant. Instagram for me is a way to keep up to date with friend’s photos. I thought that’s what it was for everyone.

Anyway, that’s not the case. Within Instagram’s walled garden – Andrew Barat – a teenage kid who posts photos of himself alongside semi-poetic, mangled lines of dreamarama gets thousands of comments from ache-hearted teenage girls. For example – every photo and comment is a variation on this:

And every comment stream is a variation on this:

Really? This is the world we live in?

Finally, Pinterest. The astronomically exploding Tumblr for Internet Explorer normals. While we’re all building niche-y products for each other, there’s millions of people pinning photos of babies, cats, ice-cream, cheesy garlic bread and flowers with millions more repinning them again. I don’t feel the need to use it, but it’s ubiquity means I must be in the minority.

Some Interesting UI/UX Things

It seems that part of the secret to creating ubiquitous products is to get as close to the border of shady as you can without crossing it.

Skype is an example. On install, it defaults to opening at login. If you right click on it in your dock, you can stop it opening it log in, but all that does is stop it opening – it will still sign you in. To stop it signing you in, you have to open System Preferences, open Users & Groups, select your account, click on Login Items, find Skype, select it, then click on the subtraction symbol beneath the scrollable list.

No way Internet Explorer normals are savvy enough to do that. So every normal person with Skype logs-in every time their computer turns on.

Spotify’s auto-sharing to Facebook is another example of push-the-boundaries-of-user-comfort-UX.

Interestingly, I just noticed that my connected accounts to Facebook (Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Runkeeper) were all defaulting to to show ‘Only Me’.

Clearly, the push here is to greater privacy and the utilisation of Facebook as a private diary.

The human need to keep a diary hasn’t changed. The tools for doing it seem to be.

The end.

There are four available responses to the healthcare crisis arising from increasing rates of obesity, diabetes and lifestyle related disease.

1. More efficient hospitals or primary healthcare facilities. This would mean patients would come in and out of the healthcare system faster, return less often.
2. New drugs. For example, to increase metabolism or reduce desire (for food or cigarettes).
3. More readily available surgeries. It’s possible that something like lap-band surgery will become routine, like an appendectomy or colonoscopy.
4. Individuals change their behaviour. Primarily, this would involve eating less and more nutritious food and increasing the amount of physical activity they do.

If we are to divert from our current trajectory (of most of us getting fat and dying from lifestyle related disease) then a mixture of all four will likely occur.

On improving the healthcare system, there will no doubt be improvement in the long-term. Short-term however, it’s not likely there will be a systemic improvement to greatly improve things. Given the majority of a person’s healthcare costs come in the final years of their lives and the baby-boomer generation is about to enter that phase, we can expect the system to become less and not more efficient in the next few decades.

On drugs and surgeries, there’s no doubt these will proliferate – humans will always take the path of least resistance when it comes to change, and the ‘insta’ nature of such options makes them attractive. But such options aren’t yet widely or readily available.

Which leaves us with individual behaviour change. It’s free, immediately accessible and there’s sufficient available resources to solve the problem.

Yet, while it’s the most accessible option, it also requires a tidal shift. Normal people don’t want to eat less pizza, don’t want to say no to a glass of wine, and don’t love waking up an hour earlier to walk or run or ride before their day begins.

But I’m most excited by the fourth option.

Lifestyle change is a tide that rises all boats. Whatever you are – boss, father, sister, employee, lover, partner, friend, artist, thinker or process worker – lifestyle change (eating less, sleeping more and being more active) will make you a better version of it.

I can’t stop listening to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert.

My Dad listened to it in the 70s. My brother got obsessed with it in high-school and I finally fell into it last year.

The record has an amazing story. I’d assumed it was just an obscure thing that I’d lucked into. Turns out, it’s the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best selling piano album of all time.

It was recorded at a concert organised by a 17-year-old German concert promoter.

The piano it was recorded on was “in poor condition“, “tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, and the pedals did not work properly” forcing Jarrett to focus on playing in the middle of the keyboard.

The show almost didn’t happen due to a number of mishaps and started unusually late at 11.30pm.

Within all these constraints, Jarrett created a lasting, timeless, transcendent piece of music.

It still sells well today. And still makes sense to my ears, with no context, no press, no promo or momentum.

I have been thinking about timelessness a lot lately.

I’m reading Paul Kelly’s memoir ‘How To Make Gravy‘. Few artists make me feel the way Kelly’s music does. I can’t listen to the song ‘How To Make Gravy’ without welling up.

In ‘How To Make Gravy’ (the book), Kelly talks about The Triffids’ ‘Born Sandy Devotional’ as a “cathedral” of a record.

I bought it to find that ‘cathedral’ but it doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t hear whatever Kelly’s hearing. And yet, I’ve been listening a lot lately to the Paul Kelly record ‘Comedy‘ which came out a few years after ‘Born Sandy Devotional’ and it sounds incredible.

I was moved by the recent Pearl Jam ‘Twenty’ documentary. My musical ears awakened around the same time ‘Ten’ was released (incidentally, the same year ‘Comedy’ was released).

‘Ten’ has now sold almost 10 million copies. Most of its songs were written as demos by the band in order to try and find a singer. When Vedder was given the demos by the drummer from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, he wrote lyrics to them.

Those lyrics and demos became ‘Alive’, ‘Once’ and ‘Black’. From there, the rest of the album took less than a month to complete.

Pearl Jam followed ‘Ten’ with ‘Vs’ and ‘Vitalogy’. In the last 20 years, I’m convinced this is the best debut, sophomore and third album stretch from any band.

But Pearl Jam’s best work, both culturally and commercially, came in those first few weeks. A band whose legacy stretches 20 years, created its best work as strangers, in its infancy. And now, looking back, the band cringes at the way the record was mixed.

Like Jarrett, Pearl Jam looks at its most successful work with a tinge of dismay. And yet, you could argue that a best-of record from ‘No Code’, ‘Yield’, ‘Binaural’, ‘Riot Act’, ‘Pearl Jam’ and ‘Backspacer’ wouldn’t come close to touching the greatness of ‘Ten’.

I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’, Woody Allen’s latest film, and got to thinking – which writers, artists and musicians will we still be talking about and discovering in 20 and 30 years?

You think of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Man Ray, Picasso, T.S. Elliot, Degas, Rembrandt, Dali and Tolouse Le Trec from the era depicted in ‘Midnight In Paris’ – who are their modern day equivalents?

So much of what we consume now is timely, and not timeless.

You think of Drake or The Weeknd or Two Door Cinema Club. Much as I like each of them, you can’t imagine that they’ll stand the test of time. No-one’s going to be listening to ‘Underground Kings’ 20 years from now.

My favourite release of 2011, was definitely Bon Iver’s self-titled album and ‘Beth/Rest’ was my favourite song of the year.

This is how it was described by Justin Vernon:

“I … feel really good about the “Beth/Rest” lyrics, because they come from this 14-year-old, innocent place where I’m not trying to say something super complicated. I allow myself to say certain things that mean a lot to me …

I love that song. I cried while working on that song. I know what that means, where that comes from, and why you cry for music. It isn’t for ironic reasons. It’s for either sad or joyful reasons. And that song is joyous to me. I don’t think it’s going to end up being the biggest statement of my career because I have so much more to learn and grow. But I love it as the last song on this record. It feels so good.”

In it, he sings:

“our love is a star
sure some hazardry
for the light before and after most indefinitely”

On Christmas day, we listened to Ella Fitzgerald records.

“A-tisket A-tasket
I lost my yellow basket
Won’t someone help me find my basket
And make me happy again? again

(Was it green?)
No, no, no, no
(Was it red?)
No, no, no, no
(Was it blue?)
No, no, no, no

Just a little yellow basket
A little yellow basket”

I’d like to see a return to that kind of simplicity in songwriting.

As a representation of everything sport can be, American football is as good as it gets.

Every NFL teams is, in fact, 3 teams. Offense. Defense. Special Teams. Each of these has its own strategies. It’s like playing chess on three boards with three sets of different pieces. But unlike chess, where you react after a move has been made, each NFL team is balancing a proactive strategy (like, sack the quarterback) with a reactive one (like, shut down the wide receiver) in real-time. You react as, and not after, things happen.

Balanced against planned strategy, is what happens amidst the chaos. With so many moving pieces, mistakes are made, people slip, balls are fumbled – in which case, the strategy is replaced by instinct. This means that every play has value. There are no lost downs.

Strategically, it’s a little like spin bowling in cricket. You build pressure and tempo through successive overs and successive spin types which often leads to a wicket. But sometimes you also get an unplanned ball landing on the edge of a crack or a taking a top edge for 4. And you have to be equally prepared for both.

What makes a series of downs more interesting than an over of cricket though, is that you know that everything is building to a third down. Much like a full count in baseball, the 3rd down is unmissable, because that’s where games swing.

Which makes for another great thing. The NFL has a predictable rhythm, but highly unpredictable outcomes.

This is enhanced by the tension between the proximity and difficulty of making scoring plays. Much like in soccer, where a team can be cruising and dominant at 2-0 and then a momentary lapse can bring the score back to a tension filled 2-1, NFL games are filled with that same tension.

It’s incredibly difficult to score a touchdown, but one lapse by the defence and a seam can open up for the opposition to score. 7 points. And they’re back in the game.

Each down provides an opportunity for opposing players to do battle. So while the teams are executing an overall strategy, on most plays, two individuals will be competing at maximum capacity and this makes for compelling viewing.

Many sports offer the thrill of one-on-one competition, but generally the intensity of that competition peaks near the ball. The NFL’s one-on-one competitions have a standard intensity across the field, regardless of where the ball lies.

You want to know if Darrelle Revis is going to shut down his opponent. You have to know who’s going to stop Clay Matthews.

In an athletic sense, the NFL allows for incredible diversity – the 325 pound tackle and the 160 pound running back, going head to head. QB’s aside, so long as you have speed, there’s a place for you in an NFL team.

The fact that NFL players wear equipment adds a super human element to the battle, allowing players to test the limits of human physicality with car-like collisions. I don’t know why, but the anticipation of a collision is one of the NFL’s most compelling features.

AND

Within the intricacy of the broader strategy lies intense personal battles. These are made all the more interesting by character players – TO, Ray Lewis and Ochocinco for example.

Outside of the player to play battles, the city to city battles add a further layer of intrigue. You have to watch the Eagles play the Giants this season because of their epic battle last season. You have to watch the Jets play the Pats. You have to watch the Ravens play the Steelers.

And then finally, amidst this context and complexity and competition and collision, you have the quarterback, the game in his hands for just a few seconds, compressing extraordinary sensory complexity into a single tunnel of vision.

Imagine a free kick in soccer. Now imagine the kicker. That’s the quarterback. His team’s role is to protect him while he kicks. The opposing team’s role is to do whatever they can to physically attack him as he’s attempting to kick. And rather than kicking to a goal, he’s kicking into a series of moving windows that contract and expand to one square meter in surface area roughly every half second. Now imagine the kicker has, on average, 3 seconds to decide which window to kick into. That’s the NFL. Every play.

It makes for unmissable viewing, compelling sporting narratives, incredible competition and athletic excellence, intelligence, strategy, planning and instinctive reaction.

It’s not my favourite sport. But as a sports-fan, I can appreciate that it’s the best.

I finished this book last night. It’s good. You should read it. So much has already been written about the book, but there is some stuff in it that just amazed me.

• Jobs spent years eating at a restaurant his biological father ran. He didn’t know that the man whose restaurant he was eating in was his father and his father didn’t know the Jobs was his son. They even shook hands at one point.
• Right up to taking Apple back over, Jobs made about about $3B worth of mistakes (his ouster from Apple, Next’s limited success, and Pixar losing money for so long). This was, in effect, $3B worth of business lessons, knowledge and training that set him up for Apple’s resurgence in the 90s. Through it all, he maintained a maniacal belief in himself.
• Before he died, he had a long conversation with Larry Page about focus. Lots of Google products have since been chopped.
• He asked Aaron Sorkin to help him with his Stanford commencement speech. Sorkin never got back to him.
• When John Mayer was 27, Jobs used to have him round for dinner regularly and considered him the best guitarist in the world.

“John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time … I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”

• Through the Jobs lens, all companies, regardless of size, reflect their founders. Actually, this is one of the best parts of the book. Seeing Gates and Murdoch and Iger and Eisner and Ellison through Jobs’ prism of reference.
• Apple’s design team worked on an ‘Applefied’ version of The Daily at the same time the News Corp team did. Jobs preferred the News Corp version.
• On the night of his greatest success, the launch of the iPad, Jobs was depressed:

“As we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone. I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.”

The book is filled with so many amazing insights – Jobs’ two hour chat with Dylan, Jobs’ frequent crying, Jobs’ insufferable personality in his 20s, Jobs’ chats with Clinton and Obama, his relationship with Joan Baez and his unwillingness to soften or cede ground, even at his weakest.

Whatever you make of him personally, it was a truly amazing life.

Networked Society On The Brink.

With respect to healthcare, the next decade holds four inevitabilities:

1. People, on average, wil get unhealthier and we will see increased rates of obesity, diabetes and death through lifestyle-related disease.
2. The healthcare system will become less efficient as the boomers start to use up a greater proportion of healthcare resources. In the US, 25% of all Medicare spending is for the 5% of patients who are in their final year of life so as our parents’s generation starts moving into that phase of their lives, there will be an unprecedented drain on healthcare resources.
3. Governments will not be able to repair this inefficiency meaning the onus will shift back on to the individual to manage and improve their own health.
4. As the onus shifts back on to the individual, digital tools will become the primary means of individual healthcare management.

Within that context, many new business are emerging to provide digital health solutions.

Companies like Redbrick Health, Bloom Health, Limeade and others are engaging employees in health programs. One of my favourite products in the space, Runkeeper is building a Health Graph to aggregate all this new data in one place. Buster and Jen are building Health Month and bud.ge to help people change their behaviour for the better. Before he went and built Facebook’s new timeline, Nicholas Felton was helping people to beautify their data with Daytum. Massive Health just released The Eatery to get people eating healthier. Daily Feats are inspiring healthy behaviour through rewards and community support. Withings, Fitbit and Zeo have been leading the charge for #quantifiedselfers for a couple of years now.

And last week UP was released by the Jawbone team, allowing you to track all your data, all day in style.

The video above is a promo-piece from Ericsson, and it includes comments by Wired UK’s editor David Rowan identifying the power of sensors to change people’s health. With Wired Magazine fully bought in, this is a trend that is likely to take off in the mainstream media.

However, there’s some fundamental things that the hype is going to miss.

In a vacuum, your health data doesn’t change anything.

Data is just knowledge, which is a weak lever for behaviour change. If you have decided to make a change to your health, data will help, but it is just one helpful option among many.

Data doesn’t change your environment. It doesn’t give you a genuine social driver for change. It doesn’t strengthen your willpower. It doesn’t create a meaningful stick to make the change. And it doesn’t give you a clear path to achieve your goal.

My friend, let’s call him Johnny, had his first child recently. Johnny was 15kg overweight at the time but realised immediately he needed to protect his daughter’s future by taking better care of himself. And so, he set himself an end of year goal to lose the weight. Using meticulous data-tracking, he did and as a result, he’s a cheerleader for this new movement. However, a year later, after returning to life-as normal (or as normal as it can be with a baby daughter), he put the weight back on.

Occasionally he steps on to his Withings scale, but he knows he’s overweight, he doesn’t need to be auto-Tweeting it. He wants to start tracking his meals again, but he’s done that already and it doesn’t hold the same novelty it once did.

Data’s value decreases over time.

The same datapoint, whether it’s weight or sleep or stress, sent to you over and over eventually just piles up until it’s as meaningless as an inbox with 497 unread emails or a Google Reader with 1397 unread articles.

I have a friend who is bipolar. He meticulously tracks his mood so as to be aware of signals that he may be entering a high or low swing. This strategy was recommended to him by his doctor. The issue is, at the very point he most needs to input the data, just as his mood is plummeting or sky-rocketing, it’s already too late.

Just as taking photos of your food or counting your steps or measuring your heart rate may have some novelty value at first, at the very point you most need data it will desert you.

Because data is you. It relies on you for its value. And when you’re doing the wrong thing, you know it without needing the data point to back you up. In Mint’s early days, the biggest challenge they faced wasn’t getting people to trust them, it was getting people to log in when they knew their account balances weren’t going to tell a happy story.

This is data’s great challenge. Becoming something more than just an unread email. Becoming useful at the point it’s most needed.

When I walk around my neighbourhood on weekends, there’s often stoop sales happening. Almost without fail, in the pile of unsold items lies a fitness relic of some sort – Tae-bo videos, thighmasters, ab-crunchers. None of the people selling these relics look as though they ever gave them much use.

Health data is one crucial piece of the puzzle. But if we’re pinning all our hopes on it, then we’re likely to be disappointed. Healthy behaviour changes is a mixture of many elements, data being just one. If we miss this point, then health-data tools could end up like the stoop sale relics. Unused, still-new and full of false promise.