This is a post some twenty years in the making. So many of us, I think, have seen a photo of Machu Picchu and thought, “Wow! I wanna go there.” I know I did, and for a couple of decades I let that sit on my bucket list. Well this December I finally went there - and after so many years of building great expectations, the journey exceeded them. Let me tell you about it.

Day 1: Into the Wild

Planning this trip, I felt that surely Machu Picchu shall be the highlight, but that it would be even grander to hike to it, to set the mood and tone and anticipation. So that’s what Stephanie and I did - a four day trek on the ancient Inca Trail, reaching Machu Picchu on the morning of the fourth day.

We set off from Cusco around 5am, caught up on sleep on the bus, and after a quick breakfast set off upstream, following the Urubamba River from around Tanca.

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“Go! Go hard! Go go go!” Tommy yells over and over. Adrenaline pumping, we paddle like mad dogs to get enough momentum to punch through wave train of Hermit Rapid… and we do! We emerge on the far side, tired but victorious, and watch from an eddy as the other boats go in.

They follow our course… but suddenly there’s a head sticking out of the water. Lora, the guide, leaps to pull the person out, only to let the boat drift sideways into the next wave. The raft flips, and now there’s heads bobbing out of the water all around. “Get ready!” Tommy hollers, “We’re the rescue boat now!”

Watch the video to see how things unfolded from there:

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In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Goodreads

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That is the core advice Michael Pollan has for you on how to eat - it’s right on the cover of the book. It’s way simpler and easier to understand than the nutritional recommendations you usually see, which talk about things like trans fats and Omega-3s - things that you can’t see and touch.

Pollan traces the origins of such nutritionism to the aftermath of the 1977 report of the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The committee’s goal was, broadly speaking, to recommend a national nutrition policy. Towards this end, the committee’s report recommended that Americans “eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and less high-fat meat, egg, and dairy products”.

This was, unsurprisingly, met with a less-than-enthusiastic response by the cattle, dairy, and sugar industries, who proceeded to lobby the committee furiously, eventually pressuring the committee to change those guidelines to instead “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake”. Eating less is bad for business, plain and simple. And no longer do guidelines tell you what foods to eat - you must look within for invisible “saturated fats” and consult experts for guidance on what foods contain more or less of it.

And so, despite ever more fine-grained advice on what to eat, we’ve been getting fatter and fatter (image source):

And along with that, we’ve been suffering more and more from the “western diseases” like hypertension, heart diseases, cancer and so on. What gives?

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One of the most powerful takeaways I got from reading David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is to not rely on my brain to remember things that need to get done.

The trick is to instead rely on a system that is external to your brain and to fully commit to using it - to capture everything that needs to get done and any pertinent notes about it outside of the brain. This frees up brain cycles from trying to memorize long lists of things (which a piece of paper or software can do a lot better than you) and lets you instead focus on creating value. The effect of this on reducing stress is immediate and profound.

Allen first published the book in 2002, and his suggestions were decidedly old-school and paper-based. These days there is no shortage of digital tools to keep TODO lists - Asana and Trello and about a million others.

But while all these tools are reasonably good the core job of keeping a list of things to do and letting you check them off, they also kind of suck in capturing complex ideas and more generally supporting the job of figuring out how to do these things when they are nontrivial and the path to getting them done is not clear at the beginning - which one might argue is the case for most interesting, challenging, and valuable work.

What are the features and qualities of tools to do that?

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Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Goodreads

Jocko Willink became something of an icon after Extreme Ownership came out and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. The core idea is this:

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.

Everything comes back to that, no matter what. Your supplier didn’t deliver? Own it - make sure you don’t rely on a single supplier in the future, or keep a close eye on what the supplier is doing. Your boss isn’t getting things done? Own it - lead from below and make sure things get done anyway. There was one of those slippery “acts of God” and things got derailed? Own it - find a way to get things done anyway. You don’t know how do something that you need to do? Own it - learn it, figure it out, and get it done. Like Jocko says, no matter what, there is no one else to blame.

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