Pete's April 2025 update
Confidence boosters and retrospection
Birthday beer! Also fried enoki mushrooms which were waaaay too salty but also delicious.
April ended up being quite a retrospective month and not because I hit mid-40. I have a “photos” widget on my phone’s home screen, so every day I see a photo that Apple/Siri has decided to highlight for me. It’s a reminder of awesome moments that often prompt us to open the full gallery and talk through the other photos from the same day or place.
A year ago we were still in Waitati, still doing open houses every weekend. Autumn was in full swing and the trees looked beautiful, though had already started shedding their leaves. It used to take us two days to mow the lawn, clean the house, get some clutter packed into the boot and then get out of the house for an hour and spy on the house from the next hill.
I miss what we had but I’m glad not to be there anymore. I had some days off over the long weekends in April. Did some writing. It felt strange, not having a big list of things I should have been doing instead.
Work and startups
Some good confidence boosters this month. Feeling 🦾
The latest Blackbird Giants cohort kicked off again, and I did another face-to-face speed mentoring session at the Melbourne office. This round it was 2 startups at a time, which is a format I’d not mentored before. A good test of my ability to listen, facilitate, get to the crux, and offer some input, under time pressure. 😅
Retrospection again for work, digging into my old USyd teaching folders. Startup Dunedin was invited to teach an Entrepreneurship paper at Otago Business School, and we’re making some changes to the previous lesson plan to give it our own flavour. (I’m also quite chuffed that my name came up in a conversation about a Chair of Entrepreneurship position there.) 🪑
For Paddl I threw together a quick 1-hour PD session, using the analogy of Wordle and applying it to some work-relevant skills. “One framework; three applications.” Feedback, GenAI, and innovation. 🟩🟨⬛
And I’ve been running Thursday morning sessions for Scalable Leaders, and feeling like I’m making an impact on the participants there, too.
This ‘portfolio career’ thing is working well right now. Though some days—especially when I’m coaching different startups—there’s a lot of context switching.
Nutmeg’s pupdate
Most of the Nutmeg photos I pick for her updates have her asleep. That’s because it’s when she’s at her most reliably cute and my phone can concentrate long enough to focus. But here’s proof of life.
She’s having a bit of a rough time at the moment, with some back issues and back-end issues. She has extra physio exercises she needs to do which I’m sure she could be good at if she wasn’t so hyped up for the treats that come with them.
Fiction update
Sold a reprint! The first original story I sold just got picked up as a reprint. An exciting milestone.
Otherwise, a slower month. Submitted a handful of stories. Wrote 4000 words, and it feels like I’m getting into a headspace where I want to write longer things. Novella/novelette length. It makes no sense to do this, commercially, when I still can’t sell short stories—where there’s much more of a market. When I know that anything I write will probably never see the light of day. But I’m enjoying it, and it’s practice. Heck, I’m only a couple of years into this. I’ve got time to get good.
(Also, I now have access to a podcast studio! Looking forward to testing it out.)
Read/Watch/Listen
[Watch: Movie] Omni Loop (on Netflix) is a time loop story done well, focusing on the relationships and human impact.
[Watch: 3 minutes] The negative consequences of privilege. This is wild. Just… watch it.
[Watch/listen: 11 minutes] The Moth story by Erin Barker, Good news versus bad, is well constructed and well told. (The voice audio is mostly in the left ear, FYI.)
[Watch: 7 minutes] This is a joyful magic trick. The premise of the reality show Penn and Teller Fool Us is that two seasoned magicians — Penn and Teller, the two old guys on the couches — know how most magic tricks are done. They challenge magicians to do something that P&T can’t figure out; if they do, they win the big F U trophy and get to perform in P&T’s big Vegas shows. This trick uses a bit of meta-misdirection to extend the routine beyond the routine.
“We translate perceptions and experiences of being better off than others - materially, to being better than others.” — Paul Piff
Thanks Pete,
Very interesting video of the Monopoly game.