No #197 | November 30, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

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

Follow-up on last week's wedding attendance: Dancing with a group of friends to the song Home for a Rest by Spirt of the West is pure chicken soup for the soul😁.

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• 🎵Good Times
• 👻Stranger Things
• 🤣Everything is "Experience"
• 😎Cool Links

🎵Good Times

The other day a song came on the radio that I hadn’t heard in a long time:

“Good Times” by Tom Cochrane.

Side note: in my humble, honest opinion, Tom Cochrane, from Lynn Lake, Manitoba, is on the Mount Rushmore of Canadian musicians. Happy to grab a beer over the holidays and debate (argue) with anyone who disagrees.

One of the magical parts about music is that songs take on new meaning as your age and experience changes.

A lyric you shrugged off in your twenties suddenly hits like a brick in your forties. Here’s one lyric that stopped me mid-drive:

There’s something beautifully simple here: the way nostalgia edits our memories.

We sand off the rough edges. We turn awkward moments into inside jokes. All the drama we swore would define our lives shrinks into a footnote.

It’s easy to forget that the “big” things of today will probably someday fade into the same small blur. Not because they weren’t real, or difficult, but because time zooms the camera out.

And the things that we remember? The good times.

👻Stranger Things

When the last season of Stranger Things was released in (checks notes) 2022, I wrote an article about it. Here it is.

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One of the reasons I enjoy Stranger Things is because the characters are constantly re-inventing themselves.

The writers seem to follow this mantra: You are under no obligation to be the same person you were a year, month or even 15 minutes ago. You have the right to grow. No apologies.

Perhaps the best example of this is Steve Harrington in season one.

When we first meet Steve, he's the quintessential 1980s jock/bully who is the king of his high school. For most of the season he plays a self-centered asshole who inflates his own ego by putting down others. He's the perfect teen villain and is easy to hate.

But in the season finale he makes a decision that counters everything we expect of him. Steve stumbles upon two other characters (Nancy and Jonathan) as they're in the fight for their lives against the monster (the Demogorgon) that is causing mayhem in their town. Steve, after seeing his "friends" in trouble, predictably turns and runs away, putting his own self-interests ahead of others.

But just as he's about to hop in his car to escape, he looks back at the house and has a moment of reflection.

As the monster is about to "eat" Nancy and Jonathan, Steve turns heel and suddenly appears from behind with his spiked baseball bat and helps the others disable the monster.

It's a shock for the audience, because we weren't expecting him to make such a heroic and self-less choice. We thought Steve would never change.

​Julianne Kerver summarizes Steve's character arc perfectly:

Steve was under no obligation to stay the same person. So he changed for the better and he's now one of the most likeable heroes in the series.

So if you find yourself in a situation like Steve and you're battling demons from another dimension, just remember that you're under no obligation to stay the same person.

🤣Everything is "Experience"

A great reminder that anything you do can be reframed as work experience on LinkedIn🤣.

😎Cool Links

🤔Why Making Your Employees Happier Pays Off. Interesting insights in this article. To save you a click, here's the three strategies: 1) Look for new ways to solve a nagging problem; 2) Tell your employee that thing you've been avoiding; 3) Schedule a team lunch...and don't go to it.

📈Inside the Deal That Made Polymarket's Founder One of the Youngest Billionaires on Earth. If you haven't heard of Polymarket yet, then I encourage you to spend a few moments today checking it out. The Polymarket model has the potential to disrupt (if it hasn't already) the financial markets, sports gambling and journalism industries.

😲No backup plan for Olympic ice hockey arena as construction goes down to the wire. What could possibly go wrong?

⚽The FIFA World Cup draw is next Friday. Buckle up!

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