Month: June 2025

MITs

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Do you have a list of pending tasks that´s longer than your arm? Do you get up every morning with the intention of doing a number of things, and finish your day exhausted, stressed out and unable to finish them all? If so, welcome to the club 🙂

Photo of a notebook page with the words "To do..." written at the top left corner, space to write the date at the top right corner, multiple lines with chckboxes for writing tasks, and a box labelled "Priorities"

(Photo of one of the pages in my «things to do» notepad. By the way, "a list as long as your arm" is a very Irish thing to say; in Spanish it sounds a bit weird, but in any case, I love it, I think it´s very visual.)

Something that works really well for me on days when the list of "I have to´s" is overwhelming, is asking myself what the most important task of the day is. It´s what Leo Babauta from Zen Habits calls the MIT, the Most Important Task).

Babauta suggests listing every morning up to three priority tasks (or MITs), with at least one of them being directly linked to one of our goals. Then, the key is to do those tasks as early as possible, so that, regardless of how the rest of the day goes, we will have made progress already. That way, we will go to bed every night feeling successful, instead of feeling like a failure.

A list with three tasks seems a lot more manageable than a list as long as your arm, right?

But we can even take it another step further, which is what I do sometimes. We can reduce the list to ONE single task, THE most important thing that needs to be done (or rather, that you choose to do) on that day.

And each day will be different: sometimes the most important task will be work-related, sometimes it will be more related to your personal or family life. Sometimes it will involve motivating yourself and finally tackling that thing you´ve been postponing for so long, and sometimes it will make you go back to basics and get some rest, go for a walk, meet a friend or simply go to sleep, just. because you need it, so that will become the priority.

The key is to recognise that it´s not humanly possible to complete each and every task we burden ourselves with, and to prioritise the time and energy that we do have in a way that makes us feel good and allows us to keep making progress.

What about you? What´s the most important thing you have to do today? Pick one single thing, and go for it!

Summer solstice

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Yesterday was the longest day of the year (in the Northern hemisphere), followed by the shortest night, and the girls and I marked the occasion by going for a walk on the beach at sunset.

Photo of the sea and the sky at a beach in the evening, with the sun hiding behind a cloud and a few trees and houses in the distance on the left hand side

(Photo of Malahide´s beach yesterday evening, with the sunlight seeping through the clouds.)

According to what I learned in school about the seasons of the year, June 21st marks the beginning of summer, but for places with Celtic tradition, like Ireland, we´re already halfway through summer, as the season started (according to their calendar) on May 1st. The story in Shakespeare´s famous play A midsummer night´s dream unfolds precisely around this date, as the title indicates.

In any case, the summer solstice is an occasion that many cultures have been celebrating for centuries. In Spain, the "christianized" version of this day (probably taken from the Celtic festival of Grianstad) is Saint John´s Eve, where fire is the protagonist, whether it´s in the form of bonfires or fireworks.

Today I had the privilege of participating in a small summer solstice celebration, with St. John´s water and sound bath included (thanks, Isabel!), and I´m thinking about preparing a micro-bonfire in a bowl tomorrow night, like in the old days... Why? Because these rituals help us to get grounded: they allow us to momentarily get away from the rush and the noise of daily life, and look inward, listen to ourselves for a little while, reflect on this first half of the year and think about our path going forward.

It´s time to feel renewed, to close some cycles and start new ones. To decide what we want to keep in our lives, what we want to attract and enhance, and what we want to stop holding on to, so that it can go away and let us move forward.

And you? What do you want to keep or attract at this moment in your life, and what do you want to free yourself from?

Education

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These days, a frequent conversation topic at home is universities and college courses, among other things, because Irene is currently doing her leaving cert, the equivalent to PAU / EVAU / selectividad in Spain (hang in there Irene, you´re almost done!)

Photo of the Harvard University library, in Boston

(Photo of the library at Harvard University, where I had the fortune to go for a walk when I visited Boston a few years ago.)

Coincidentally, our friends are in Dublin this week to visit universities, and we´ve been sort of comparing education systems across several countries: Spain, Ireland, the UK, the US and even France... Needless to say, they´re vastly different from each other.

But in any case, the underpinning idea is the same, at least in theory: acquiring a good education.

A few months ago, I wrote my reflections on the topic of choosing college courses in the post titled Career paths (III), and back in the day I also wrote about lifelong learning (Time to learn) and how to make the most of what we learn (Learning, re-learning, unlearning). Today, I´d like to simply take a step back and acknowledge the value of education, whether it´s through formal training or self-directed:

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

Robert M. Hutchins

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Sydney J. Harris

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Butler Yeats

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

Edward Everett

Untranslatable words: networking

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Today we´re resuming the untranslatable words and phrases section of this blog, with a term that´s widely used in English, especially in workplace and enterprise-related environments, and that, for the most part, I don´t think people are even trying to translate into Spanish anymore: networking.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines networking as "the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions. Specifically, the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business". The term was formed by turning the word "network" into a verb, and I love it because it perfectly encapsulates its meaning: working on your contacts network, to expand it and make it stronger (you could also read it as net+working, which is literally working on your net).

In many workplace environments (if not all), as well as in life, networking is paramount, even though we may not realise it sometimes, or it may take us a long time to see it. I remember that, back in the day, it took me a while to shake off the belief that "chatting to people at work" didn´t count as working... And now I do recognise its tremendous value, I pay a lot more attention to it, and I enjoy it immensely when I get the opportunity to meet others in person, like last Friday, when I was able to spend a day in our Galway office and (re)connect with several colleagues (thanks, folks!).

Having said, that, I get the impression that many of us have a love-hate relationship with networking, so here are a few phrases (translated by me) which I hope will help to add some perspective, starting with the message in this picture, because at the end of the day, that´s what this is all about: "When people support each other, amazing things can happen".

Page of a book, with colourful drawings of a smiley face, a rainbow, a heart, a star, a butterfly and a flower, and the test "When people support each other, amazing things can happen"

(Photo of a page from the book Be kind, be cool, be you! by Nikki Miles).

Networking is more about farming than it is about hunting.
It’s about cultivating relationships.

Ivan Misner

Networking is not about just connecting people. It’s about connecting
people with people, people with ideas,
and people with opportunities.

Michele Jennae

Everyone you’ll ever meet
knows something you don’t.

Bill Nye

 And lastly, my favourite:

Networking with integrity creates a greater willingness of all parties to be part of a human conduit to serve as energy and resource to one another. Sometimes you will give more than you receive, and sometimes you will get back more than you give. It’s not about keeping score.

Chris London

How about you, how good are you at networking? And how much do you value it?

Circle, or spiral?

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The other day, when I was having a chat about life with a friend of mine, he complained about "being back at the same spot" where he was over a year ago, just as if, instead of moving forward, he had gone round a circle just to end up in the same place. Does this ring a bell?

For, as the old saying goes, man is the only animal that trips over the same stone twice. And when we say twice, we could say three, or ten, or twenty... Sometimes there are stones we keep on tripping over for our whole lives.

But, what if we took the opportunity to learn from each of those trip-ups? What if, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves or cursing the stone, we observed what happens around us (and more importantly, inside of us) every time it reappears?

The day we get to master this skill, we will discover that, in reality the path is not a circle, but a spiral: with each lap we get to go deeper and become a little bit wiser, and even though the same old challenges will reappear once in a while, they will not be exactly the same anymore, because we will have acquired new resources and tools to tackle them differently.

Photo of a flattened dark blue paper spiral on a clear background

(Photo of a decorative paper spiral, which looks very much like a circle when it´s folded, but once you stretch it, you can clearly see that it´s not)

Do you get the idea? I think this poem by Portia Nelson also illustrates it really well:

 Autobiography in five chapters

Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

Chapter Three
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter Four
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter Five
I walk down another street.

Circle, or spiral? Your choice.