No #187 | September 21, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

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

I participated in my work golf tournament this past week. There's nothing that builds your confidence faster than shanking a ball in front of all of your colleagues (Fore!) 🤣.

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• 🏃‍➡️Terry Fox
• 💡Learning Something New
• 🤣Rain!
• 😎Cool Links

🏃‍➡️Terry Fox

In 2004, CBC ran a series called The Greatest Canadian.

The premise was simple (and borrowed from the BBC). Canadians got to vote on who they believed was the single greatest Canadian of all time (The GCOAT?). The eventual winner was Tommy Douglas, the architect of Canada's health care system.

Below is a summary of the top 10 "finalists" of the competition:

1. Tommy Douglas
2. Terry Fox
3. Pierre Elliott Trudeau
4. Sir Frederick Banting
5. David Suzuki
6. Lester B. Pearson
7. Don Cherry
8. Sir John A. Macdonald
9. Alexander Graham Bell
10. Wayne Gretzky

Now, a few things have changed in the twenty years since that show aired.

If we ran the competition again in 2025, the list would almost certainly shift (where is Celine Dion?!?!). Our heroes have a tendency to evolve as our world changes and the issues we value most shift with the times.

But there’s one name that, I believe, would never move from that list.

Terry Fox.

​Terry Fox was just 18 when he was diagnosed with bone cancer and had his right leg amputated. Out of that moment of hardship came a vision that would inspire millions: to run across Canada and raise money for cancer research.

In 1980, with one leg and a prosthetic, he dipped his artificial limb into the Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland and began the Marathon of Hope. For 143 days, Terry ran the equivalent of a marathon every single day. By the time his run ended outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario, he had covered more than 5,300 kilometers.

Terry didn’t finish his run because the cancer returned. But what he did finish was something much greater: he sparked a movement. Today, the Terry Fox Run is the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research, held in over 60 countries and raising more than $850 million to date.

Terry embodied the Canadian spirit of rolling up your sleeves and getting to work. He didn’t wait for someone else to act, he answered the call himself. He showed us that courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep going in spite of it. He proved that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they commit fully to a cause bigger than themselves.

If CBC ran The Greatest Canadian again today, the names might change, the rankings might shift, and the debates would most definitely rage on.

But Terry Fox’s place would remain unshakable.

💡Learning Something New

This is a great visual for anyone who is trying to learn something new.

🤣Rain!

It's supposed to rain in my part of the world this week. This is me 🤣

​

😎Cool Links

🤖How people are using ChatGPT. Despite all the talk about LLMs potentially revolutionizing the workplace, a significant majority of all ChatGPT use has nothing to do with business productivity, according to OpenAI. Non-work tasks (as identified by an LLM-based classifier) grew from about 53 percent of all ChatGPT messages in June of 2024 to 72.2 percent as of June 2025, according to the study.

🤔You Need to Be Bored (Video). Boredom isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why boredom unlocks creativity, activates a powerful brain network, and might even protect you from depression. Learn how the mind wanders—and why that’s a very good thing.

📝The Surprising Reason Writing Remains Essential in an AI-Driven World. Great writing requires you to position your idea in a way that will resonate with the reader. Average writers start with what they want to say without considering how it will land with the reader. Great writers understand the journey starts with what the reader desires. Think of the difference as starting at the beginning or the end of a maze. When you start at the beginning, you have to convince people the path is the right one. When you start at the end, they already know you’re taking them where they want to go.

🦈Finally, this week marked the 48 year anniversary of the "jumped the shark" episode on Happy Days. The rest is history.

💌Tell a friend to subscribe​

Thank you!

Let’s connect! 💬 You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter