Lives Of Our Days

And so ended one of the best weekends in recent memory…

It started on Friday morning - breakfast by the beach with a friend in town from Switzerland. From there, I headed Down South, to my favourite part of WA: Gracetown.

Shared with a bunch of friends, we enjoyed cloudless days, afternoons of book-reading and whale-watching, three sensational sunsets, a bucketload of top-shelf booze and sensational feeds. Saturday’s dinner was a highlight: fresh squid, abalone and yabbies, snapper, dhufish and homemade salads. First class!

If ever you need a reminder that life isn’t meant to be complex, Gracetown is it.

As you can see, I’m heading Down South for the long weekend.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to arriving in my favourite sleepy little coastal town, where Optus doesn’t have coverage and the only way you can get internet is by hacking a nearby wireless connection… See you on Monday!

Breathe. Clean air. Relax.

Seth Godin shared a brilliant snippet on the different between management and leadership over the weekend:

Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper.

Leaders, on the other hand, know where they’d like to go, but understand that they can’t get there without their tribe, without giving those they lead the tools to make something happen.

Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.

We need both. But we have to be careful not to confuse them. And it helps to remember that leaders are scarce and thus more valuable.

“Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.” 

I love that line… In his inimitable style, Seth has distilled what is an incredibly complex subject into a six-word distinction.

Coincidentally, another of my favourite bloggers, Mark Suster, tackled a similar theme over the weekend (albeit with a somewhat different, shall I say, manner of speaking):

Lead, follow or get the fuck out of the way

Amen!

As silly as it sounds, I’ve noticed my brain working in different ways over the past few years. I feel like I’m getting better at quickly processing huge swathes of information, but worse at recalling the details.

In some ways that’s OK… Google helps me find answers; my mobile means I don’t need to remember phone numbers; and Facebook reminds me about birthdays.

But in some ways it’s not OK… And that scares me.

Switching off email and the internet for a day or two each week helps, but I want to do more. How do you cope with technology overload?