No #169 | May 18, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool newsletter.

☕Dad Happy Hour: Sunday morning, 7am, quiet house, everyone else still asleep, cup of coffee, English Premier League on TV.

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• 😨Final Destination
• 🤔Where Are You?
• 💪Do Hard Things
• 👴Getting Older
• 😎Cool Links

😨Final Destination

​Final Destination: Bloodlines just hit theaters this weekend (fun fact: I hate watching horror movies, but I love reading their plots on Wikipedia).

Final Destination: Bloodlines (FDB?) is the sixth movie in the Final Destination series, which originally debuted in 2000. The premise of these movies is pretty straightforward: a group of people narrowly escapes a catastrophic accident thanks to one person’s sudden premonition.

But here’s the catch: Death doesn’t like being cheated. One by one, the survivors meet their demise in increasingly bizarre and absurdly gruesome ways, as if the universe is determined to restore balance.

The core idea behind these movies is oddly compelling, the notion that our instincts might just be onto something. Sometimes, that uneasy feeling or sudden sense of danger can’t be logically explained, but we’ve all experienced it.

As Malcolm Gladwell puts it in his book Blink: "The truth about instincts is that they are neither magic nor irrational. They are quick judgments that rely on a complex web of information that our brains process without us even realizing."

In a way, the Final Destination series is a twisted tribute to the power of intuition. The characters who survive longest are the ones who follow their gut feelings, even when they can’t explain why they’re suddenly suspicious of something as ordinary as a busy highway (beware of clicking that link😲).

So, while I might not have the stomach to sit through a Final Destination movie, I can’t help but appreciate the strange lesson they teach: trust your gut.

🤔Where Are You?

In today's world, the question "Where are you?" is incredibly common, I text it to my teenage son quite often. It seems like a completely normal thing to ask, but for 99.99% of human history, this question would have made no sense at all before the advent of the mobile phone. (source)

Interesting to think what other questions we'll be asking in the future that we don't understand today.

💪Do Hard Things

This is advice I always give my kids.

This image is from Sahil Bloom's book.

👴Getting Older

🤣

😎Cool Links

💡What's the best leadership advice you've ever received? Some great food for thought here.

🤔Life is a picture, but you live in a pixel. Jack’s struggle isn’t unusual—it’s something most of us are going through in one way or another. Harvard professor Dan Gilbert describes what he calls The Impact Bias—our “tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events.” Humans have the ability to simulate future situations in our heads to predict what it’ll be like to experience them, but that simulator doesn’t always work so well and tends “to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.”

🧠After watching this, your brain will not be the same (TED Talk). Build the brain you want.

🤔The Secret Power of Siblings (podcast). Parents try everything to influence their children. But new research suggests that brothers and sisters have their own profound impact.

😋Finally, the world's largest Nanaimo bar.

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