The parallels to current events are not hard to see.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – George Santayana
To some in this world today, that quote isn’t a warning, but a playbook.
After years of blogging and writing newsletters just to share things I’ve been learning, I’ve decided to dip my toes in the paid-newsletter world.
What do I think is so valuable that I would ask you to pay for it? For the last few years, I’ve been working and diving deep into the Microsoft 365 platform, from the perspective of an eDiscovery professional.
Don’t get me wrong. I would have still spent some time reviewing the document before the meeting, making notes, and mapping out plans after the other meeting. But because these were not in the middle of back-to-back meetings, I could do them and keep the flow through the process. I wasn’t filing it away in my brain and hoping I could fully recall it later. It was fresh.
It was better.
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of being invited to chat about backup strategies for consumers and small businesses with the hosts of the Every Day Cyber podcast
The bottom line? – Some backup is better than none. Multiple copies in various locations and states of being connected to the internet are better.
I think this is something that many of us have been realizing to some degree in the past couple of years. We are more than our work, and there are things in life that are more important than our work. I enjoyed the questions and challenges Arthur lays out as well, so you should go read the article and consider those. As I read through them I had one thought, over and over again.
How many of my friends don’t even care about what I do for a living?
I feel very lucky to have those folks. The people who’ve remained friends regardless of my current career status, The ones who might not even really understand what I do for a living. Because they ground me, and remind me that in actuality, what I do during my workday isn’t really that big of a deal. It’s all well and good to be great at my job, but the important people in my life are there because of the relationship we have, not because I’m good at legal tech, and I want them in my life because of who they are, not what their job is.
That’s a big deal.
But notice what is missing from all of this advice? Any actual science. Or, for that matter, any interviews with the thousands of people who actually do the same thing, and aren’t nearly as successful. Sure, maybe Jeff Bezos gets up every day at 5 AM, goes for a run, then schedules some deep-think time, all before he even checks email. Do you really think it you or I did that, that would make us as successful as Jeff Bezos? I guarantee you, his sleep schedule and morning routine is similar to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the world, who do not have lives that we would want to emulate. But we don’t read those stories, because no one cares.
On the other hand, in order for a lot of these productivity hacks to have ant scientific fact behind them, we would have to look at those people and see how maybe it’s not the morning routine that makes Bezos worth a gazillion dollars, it was something else entirely.
But then, those articles are much harder to write and would involve a lot more work, and even admit that you can’t hack your way to a billion dollars in success. We wouldn’t want to do anything like that, would we?