No #171 | June 1, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

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

Last week, one of our guinea pigs, Maggie, passed away. While my wife/daughter have always been the primary caregivers of the guinea pigs, I’ve taken on that role when they’ve recently out of town at dance competitions, and it’s amazing how quickly you can grow attached. There’s something deeply meaningful, grounding and human about caring for animals.

Maggie will be missed. On behalf of our family, give all your pets an extra snuggle this week.🐹

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• ⌚It's About Time
• 🤔The Afterlife
• ✍Counter to Taking Notes
• 😁Flight Snacks
• 😎Cool Links

⌚It's About Time

I watched the Champions League final yesterday, and one of the things I love about European football is that if the game is scheduled to begin at 12 noon, the game actually begins at 12 noon.

Meanwhile, in North America, a listed start time is more of a gentle suggestion for when the festivities might eventually maybe possibly get going.🙄

For whatever reason, that got me thinking about time, and some of my favourite little anecdotes about time that I’ve collected over the years.

Here they are:

⏰ Early in my career, I was leading a meeting with a bunch of people, and a few folks were running late. I held off on starting the meeting to be polite and wait for them. A senior manager in the room saw me hesitating and said, “Don’t punish the punctual. Please start the meeting.” I’ve never forgotten that line.

🗻 My wife used to work for the Swiss Consulate in Vancouver, and the Consul General was hosting a party at his house. The invite said the party started at 7pm. We arrived at 6:55pm and noticed a bunch of other guests just sitting in their cars. I asked my wife, “Why aren’t we going in?” She explained that in Swiss culture, it’s considered rude to be either early or late, the expectation is to be exactly on time. Sure enough, when the clock struck 7:00, everyone got out of their cars at once and walked in together. It was like a synchronized entrance.

⌚ I was once on a committee where the Chair would start every meeting by taking off their watch and placing it next to their notes. I asked why she does this, and she said it was her symbolic way of showing that our time was important, and that it was her job to keep us on schedule. Bonus lesson: having your watch on the table lets you check the time without making it obvious or distracting.

📱 On the flip side, I was in a meeting once where someone had just gotten a new Apple Watch and kept checking it every few minutes. Afterward, someone pulled me aside and said, “Wow, that was rude, he kept looking at the time like he couldn’t wait for it to be over.” Of course, he was just getting notifications. But perception is everything.

🧻 And finally, it’s super cliché, but there’s a little saying I’ve always appreciated: Time is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.

Finally, I can't write about time and not mention my Grandpa John (G-Man) who was so afraid of being late that he would often arrive at events hours early and wait patiently in his car. Funny enough, I've inherited that same fear of tardiness (I get to airports absurdly early - just ask my wife), and now my own kids do the same. Our relationship with time seems to be written in our DNA!

🤔The Afterlife

A book that I often think about randomly, and I highly recommend reading, is Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman. The book consists of 40 fictional stores about what may happen in the afterlife.

Last week, I overhead someone jokingly say that when they come back in their next life they want to come back as a panda bear.

This triggered a memory I had of this book and how the author imagines that scenario.

Here's the passage. Very deep thoughts!

✍Counter to Taking Notes

I like to take a lot of notes. So it was interesting to read this counter-argument (source).

😁Flight Snacks

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😎Cool Links

🙋‍♂️In uncertain times, ask these questions before you make a decision. Saved you a click: What decisions today will still make sense a year from now? If a year from now this decision was used as an example of our leadership, what would it teach? What if this isn't the storm, what if it's the climate? What's the cost of waiting?

👩‍🌾Thanks to AI, Gen Z is replacing pitch decks with pitchforks. "Today’s youths are increasingly forgoing high-paying careers in fields like finance, tech, and consulting in favor of blue-collar and skilled trade work, like farming and construction."

🙂The U-Bend of Life: Why middle age people tend to be happier. When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

🤔Escaping the 'When-Then' Trap. "When something happens, then I'll finally be happy." This is the 'when-then' trap, and it's a common fallacy we have in our pursuit of finding happiness. Oftentimes after we achieve the 'when', we find out that we're still dissatisfied.

🎨Finally, I've watched this short video of mixing colors several times and I find it equals parts mysterious and soothing.

Have a great week everyone :)

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