Here's the thing...

I had no preconceived ideas about Morocco except that there would be sun. It’s not that I wasn’t curious, or had gotten lazy, rather that the time before this holiday – like most every period before a holiday - required an intense, almost manic, attention to work to make space for time off from it.  Sun was promised. That is all that mattered. Google, the omnipotent god of our times to whom we bring all our supplications and in whom we invest an almost unlimited amount of trust, assured me that there would be sun. So, on faith, we abandoned the gloomy, January skies of England for North Africa. When we were growing up in California every winter we were inundated with people like me. We called them snowbirds. That was before we knew that the average person gets less than half of the daily vitamin D they need unless they use supplements. And, that this deficiency only increases in Northern climates where our skin isn’t exposed to the sun for much of the year.  ...

At the end of 2019, I spent some time thinking about our company. Partly because it was the end of the year and reflection always seems the right thing to do around 31 December but also because in 2019, the management assumed control of the company. In some ways there is no difference being the CEO of someone else’s company and being the CEO of your own company. However, in some ways it’s very different. Not the least of which is the stakes are a bit higher. If you make a mistake with someone else’s company there’s someone else holding the bag. If you make a mistake with your own company the blame is your own. In the words of Ben Horowitz (who has penned potentially the greatest book on leading a business ever written, The Hard Thing About Hard Things): “Everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. You will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills you don’t have. Never...

Perhaps you have a healthier relationship between your mind and body than I do. Perhaps as a child you were taught to listen to what your body was telling you about the rest, food, drink and activity it needed. I was in yoga the other day when the instructor told us to spread our toes. ‘Spread my toes?’ my mind thought. And in that moment I realised that I’ve got no idea how to spread my toes. My mind has no idea how to talk to my toes. And in that moment I also realised that I’ve never been kind to my body – as I count kindness. By that I mean that my mind has never treated my body like it would treat any friend or family member. If I’m being generous, my mind treats my body as a child. If I’m being honest, a slave. Somewhere along the way I’ve learned that my mind is in charge. It makes the rules and lays them down. The body follows them. The body says, ‘I’d like a little more rest, please.’ The mind says, ‘The alarm is set for six, suck it.’ The body says, ‘I don’t r...