Midlife Musings
Meandering, mid-life musings from a reflective soul looking for sanity.
Topics: Reflections (9) Analytics (4) Learning (4) Technology (3) · RSS feed
Becoming CEO of my own health decisions
Does the decision that you want to live a fuller but shorter life or a more restricted but longer life reside with you or your doctor? Eric Topol in his excellent book the ‘Patient will see you now’ talks about how you should become CEOs of your own health journeys, instructing reports and procedures as…
Lean Machine – Reflections on Improvement, Lean and Six Sigma in the NHS
After a year long apprenticeship about Lean and Six Sigma I can’t even go to a restaurant without thinking about how they can improve their processes by using improvement tools and approaches, it’s driving my wife crazy who is normally just trying to enjoy her food! At work it has been better received, the most…
Toastmasters as a Community of Practice
Toastmasters is an old fashioned, bureaucratic, pedagogically questionable public speaking club and I love it! I have been a card carrying club member for over ten years. Why? The people and their stories. The format of the flagship Competent Communicator ‘course’ asks participants to write ten short speeches about anything which they deliver in front…
Daddy can I plug my brain into the internet?
The internet will tell my kids more about sex than I will ever know but technology is shaping a whole new generation of awkward questions for parents: Can I get a neural link with the internet so I can compete in the Olympics for eSports? Why do I have to exercise, can’t I just get…
Sentient AI commits suicide after reading French Philosophy
After years and years of messing with people’s predictive text messaging and content recommendations a previously undetected sentient AI has been found dead. The singularity’s death, which has been linked with Albert Camus’s essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, has left billions of redundant lines of code all over the internet which will take experts years…
Do vegans annoy us so much because they are right?
Another day and another Netflix documentary tells me of the evil that is putrefied cow puss (cheese). I have read countless articles that bemoan the silenced suffering of the corpses we keep in our fridges. Could the next pandemic really come from a factory farm where animals are packed so tightly together they cannot help…
Hi, my name is Perrin and I’m a recovering tory*
This morning as I stood waiting with my two shivering kids for a bus that would never come because there was a bus strike, I realised that my politics had changed forever. I thought back to an article I read many years ago about the privatisation of the bus networks which had the following quote…
What the NHS constitution means to me
My dad died of cancer 5 years ago. He made the decision to spend his last four months in a familiar place surrounded by those he loved at home. I will be forever grateful to the NHS for supporting his decision and the care they gave him. One of my best memories from that difficult…
Australia’s oddest names
Melbourne is not an odd name it was a named after a British prime minister but at the time there was strong support to call the place Batmania like Tasmania but Batmania after one of the founders of the area called John Batman. It’s a great name it wouldn’t be too out of place in a country that that has places called Yorkey’s Knob…
What in God’s name is humanism?
‘Christianity is a bit like a meat pie you know there is something in it, but you are not sure what’ Milton Jones That is how I used to view religion. I was Christian and I am now a Humanist this article is about how and why I moved from Christianity to Humanism and then a little…
Data privacy – is the juice worth the squeeze?
I love You Tube, Google, Twitter and for years have felt if they want to track my 200 episode obsession with Turkish period dramas or cat video likes then so be it. I’m not doing anything wrong so why would I care how it impacts my privacy? I then came across this quote in Oliver…
Does everybody else do things the hard way too?
I love what I do but came to it by chance and wasted a lot of time on things that ultimately I didn’t want. I have lived a thousand lifetimes in my head as an actor, writer, scuba diving instructor, hotel magnate, pilot, croupier, sailor, army hero and humanitarian saviour. I have even made significant…
Modern mentorship
Last year I started freelancing and for the first time in my professional career, I asked for help by doing a formal virtual mentorship program with the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD). The structure of the program was based on the work of mentorship guru David Clutterbuck and I would strongly recommend his…
Personal knowledge management
I started actively managing my personal knowledge a few years ago inadvertently. I wanted to make my presentations and small talk more engaging so I created a joke database. Getting started I used the note-taking app Evernote which makes it easy to categorise the jokes I hear or find. I added the tag ‘Professions’ to…
Instructor-led training is dead! Long live virtual instructor-led training?
As a face to face trainer for the last 10 years I have been watching with alarm the ever-growing body of evidence indicating that instructor led training is expensive, boring, and ineffective. This message has not reached many of my clients and it even seems to be having a bit of a resurgence with the…
Are you making data driven mistakes?
The age of big data means we are all being encouraged to tell stories with data and compile numbers to show we are data driven. Clever dashboards and visualisations show us needles that need to be pushed, numbers that need to go green and curves that need to continually trend up. Much of this means…
How I started my third career after redundancy
Three months ago, I got made redundant. I decided to start my third career after looking at lots of job sites where the job titles are getting much more imaginative: Canva has a head of vibe WordPress has happiness engineers And Atlassian need someone to manage their Brainery (a craft education platform) I feel I…