2015 in Nine Themes
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For my 2015 lookback, I read my every tweet from the year.
Firstly… man is Twitter an accurate picture of what I like.
If you only knew me on Twitter, you’d rightly assume my life was split thematically 9 ways:
- Thinking about mortality.
- Reading great writing, and trying my best to replicate it.
- Finding and listening to music and podcasts.
- Obsessing over sport (the NBA, the NRL, Jarryd Hayne, SBW, tennis and sports documentaries).
- Learning about life at the coalface of digital health.
- Idolising parts of people like Jerry Seinfeld, Atul Gawande, Bill Simmons, LeBron James, Paul Graham, Barack Obama and Paul Keating.
- Consuming what I can of Australian politics and Australia’s past and present.
- Dreaming about building houses in the bush.
- IRL learning fatherhood.
What you like ends up being what you do. And what you repeatedly do is who you are.
So then, here’s some of the best of what I shared in 2015, some of the best quotes I came across and, in a loosely connected way, who I am right now.
1. The Inevitability of Death, & The Power of Mortality
- Why Time Flies — by Maximilian Kiener.
- The Tail End
- What To Make of the Mass of Uncertainty
- The Best Possible Day
- Before I Go: A Stanford neurosurgeon’s parting wisdom about life and time.
- The Friend
“You have to go the way your blood beats.”
— James Baldwin
2. Writing.
- Japanese Maple
- After Charleston
- Kalief Browder, 1993–2015
- We Do Salad Wrong
- Jumpers
- The Other France
- Ten Days In June
- Personal Best
- Why Web Pages Suck
- How History Got The Rosa Parks Story Wrong
- How to Swallow $200 Million Accidentally & Don’t Outsource Your Thinking & Wealthfront: Silicon Valley Tech at Wall Street Prices
- Tiger Woods On His Pain & Comeback
- The Day You Became A Better Writer
- 100 Days of Writing
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.— Robert Frost
3. Music…
Documented here, but also:
- Begin Again, Begin Again
- Daniel Johns covers ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
- Noel Gallagher in Esquire
- Trance Frendz — An evening with Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm
- David August — Boiler Room Live Set
… and Podcasts
- Song Exploder.
- David Axelrod’s The Axe Files.
- And all the usuals — Serial, Simmons, Zach Lowe, and some TAL and Radiolab.
“For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”
— 1 Corinthians 14:8
4. Sport
- Thirty Minutes of Madness
- “I Fear God Boi”
- My cameo on NBA Inside Stuff
- The Greatest Rivalry In Men’s Pro Tennis History Is Happening Now
- Steph Curry Can Deadlift 400lbs & The Baby Faced Assassin
- Steve Kerr Q&A: 2015–16 Warriors vs. 1995–96 Bulls
- D-Wade Interviews LeBron
- In The Presence of Greatness
- The Time A San Francisco 49er Saved My Laptop In New Zealand
- The Most Awesome Sporting Experience of My Life
- A year of many wonderful hakas, including this one.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman
5. Digital Health
- Skin In The Game
- Personal Best
- Modern Life & The Slow Decline
- How healthcare reform impacts digital health.
- Can 70-year-olds lose weight with digital health?
The tiring thing is banging your head against the wall, not the number of hours worked.
— Sam Altman
6. Idols
- President Obama and Bill Simmons: The GQ Interview
- A Conversation with President Obama and The Wire Creator David Simon
- Remarks by the President in Eulogy in Honor of Beau Biden
- Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin: Jerry Seinfeld
- Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee: Trevor Noah
- Jerry Seinfeld’s Last Time On Letterman
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein
7. Australia & Australian Politics
- A better Australian flag, and A Better Australia.
- Paul Keating in conversation with Kerry O’Brien
- Raging Turnbull
- Stop at Nothing: The life and adventures of Malcolm Turnbull
- One Last Ride With The Australian Outback’s One-Man Police Force.
- Wouter Van De Voorde’s Australian photography.
- Welcome To The Surf Club
“If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for.”
— Paul Graham
9. Fatherhood
- On Father’s Day, 2015
- The Best Parenting Advice So Far
- What I Want For My Son
- Books for New Dads
- Marc Andreessen on fatherhood and optimism.
- Unexpected Joy On The Road To Fatherhood
- Every Two Hours
- The Avalanche of Parenthood
- Closing The First Loop
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
— Winston Churchill
