Skiing in Austria
First of all, I apologize this email is a day late. I just got back from vacation and was pressed to catch up on work stuff.
Last week I was skiing in Bad Hofgastein, Austria. We put our older son in all-day ski lessons for three days and he came out afterward a skier. Truly. And I couldn’t be more proud!
After the three days of lessons, my wife and I spent the following day skiing with him, letting him lead the way from top of the mountain down the winding trail all the way to the bottom. Before this trip he could turn but not control his speed; now he’s slowing down, speeding up, and slowing down again. Just a matter of time before he’s a daring shredder like his Dad and his Papa (my dad).
Endurance
On a ski tour recently – that’s where you strap on special skis with a skin on the bottom that allows the ski to slide forward but grips so it doesn’t slide backwards, allowing you to “ski” uphill – I had a small epiphany:
Be lazy in your steps but strong in your journey.
Ski touring uphill is all about conserving energy – knowing when to take big or small strides, keeping the skis on the ground so you don’t waste energy lifting it, etc. And it occurred to me that it’s a metaphor for life. Each small integral part of our day, be that a task, a conversation, or something else, we should conserve energy, find the easiest way to accomplish it. But with the journey, the day, the relationship, the customer account, the job, the journey, we should be relentless, never giving up, with absolute infinite energy.
That’s life. That’s the stuff that makes you strong and resilient and capable. Stay with it. Be lazy in your steps but strong in your journey.
A worthy cause
I listened to Lex Fridman’s interview with Paul Rosalie, a filmmaker and author whose life mission is to save the Amazon from deforestation, urbanization/roads, and narcos (Jungle Keepers). It seems like a worthy cause. There aren’t two Amazon Rivers; there’s just one, and when it’s gone it’s gone.
One of the great and truly wonderful things about the United States is our National Parks, whose preservation is due in large part to Teddy Roosevelt. I always recommend visiting our parks to foreign guests who would otherwise just visit Manhattan, or LA, or Chicago or Miami and use that as their sole basis for evaluating American life. And that’s simply not congruent with the way things are here. This I suppose is just the nature of traveling. I visited Belgrade, Serbia, a couple of times and I’d probably be way off if I tried to describe the average Serbian’s life. So I recommend people to visit our parks. They’re awesome, and breathtaking.
Jungle Keepers seems similar in its mission of conservation, and it appears the donations go to a good cause, like educating those in the Amazon lumber trade to work instead as a park ranger, for example. There is a direct cost for this activity and it produces an immediate double benefit of replacing the bad activity (tree felling) with a good one (monitoring the jungle).
Other stuff I’m working on
Over Thanksgiving, I started a newsletter covering all the important topics in Tech and Ai news. It was getting overwhelming and I didn’t want to scroll social media to get the news. And I wanted to read it all quickly, in one place.
So I built TechTech.Ai email newsletter, which sent me an email once per day with everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. All the news, in one easy-to-scan email.
More recently, and for those in the greater Stamford-CT area, I launched the Ai Tribe newsletter to track all local, in-person Ai and Automation events from New Haven to Westchester, NY. If you’re in the area, make sure you get on this list to keep up with local events. Get the Ai Tribe Newsletter here.