Beavers had been extinct in Britain for roughly four hundred years. Over the next three years, McCormack, Newton, and a coalition of wildlife groups worked to bring five of them back to Paradise Fields, an old golf course in Ealing, West London, right next to a tube station that flooded every time it rained hard. The Ealing Beaver Project was born.

In October 2023, the beavers arrived, relocated from a wild population in Scotland.

Two and a half years later, Greenford station hasn’t flooded once. The beavers’ dams have turned the site into a wetland that now supports insects, fish, and birds that weren’t there before.

Nobody engineered a drainage solution. They released five rodents and let them do what beavers have always done.

Sometimes the best fix isn’t a new system. It’s restoring the one that used to work before we removed the part that was doing the job. That’s often the case with nature at the very least.

(H/T: The Daily Difference newsletter)

     

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I’ve found this to be so true in my experience. It is easy to say there is light at the end of the tunnel. And there is.

But it isn’t always easy to see it.

     

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Trying to land on any global list, richest, most followed, most anything, rarely adds up to much. Very little any of us does will be significant across generations. That’s just true, and it’s fine.

But that doesn’t mean nothing we do matters. Significance is a local concept. It lives in the people and living beings within range of your life, the ones you can actually touch. For most of us, that range holds far more weight than we tend to give it credit for.

Chasing likes, followers, or any metric everyone can measure and compare puts us on a global scoreboard built for envy. The real scoreboards, the ones worth keeping score on, are local.

     

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I’m no Ed Sheeran of course. But over the years, I’ve come to realize the same is true of writing.

When I write about something I feel indifferent about, the words don’t flow, even when the lesson underneath is a good one. They come out feeling… flat.

When I’m feeling something strongly, a memory of a moment in a national park, or sitting with the disappointment of a failure, the writing just hits better.

Embrace those extreme emotions, we must.

     

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1. Do something easy to moderate, three or more times a week, for at least thirty minutes. He has a collection of good suggestions. My experience is that a run and some mobility work make for a great combination. Few things get the body going quite like a short run or even a swim (if you have access to a pool you can go to regardless of the weather). And on days none of that’s possible, a walk with a weighted vest or a rucksack can do the trick.
   
2. Then strength train twice a week.
   
3. And once a week, go (kind of) hard. Something high intensity that really gets your heart rate up.

It’s a simple way to think about exercise, and if you layer in a bit of work with a coach, it’ll covers the fundamentals: balance, some time spent in zones 2 and 3, zone 4 or 5 during the hard session, and grip strength from the lifting.

I like his framing of “consistency over intensity.” The truth about any exercise routine is that the best one is the one you’ll stick to.

     

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But once they were inside, they realized problem sat underneath everything – loose product-market fit.

It’s the one thing that separates companies in early stages. When you have it, you’re serving a painkiller, something a group of people need. When you don’t, none of the rest matters. Not the money you raise, not the plans you make. You either pivot until you find it, or you die.

The flip side is the good news. If you do have it, you get an enormous luxury: time. Time to figure everything else out.

Because most small companies are a mess in one way or another.

The ones with product-market fit just get the room to clean it up, even as they scale.

     

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“One of my favorite conversations on Plain English in the last few months was my talk with the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard about her grand theory of the uni-context. For the purposes of the following paragraphs, I would define the uni-context as the ethical and value-based consequences of telecommunications technology making everybody feel as though they live in the same universal room together. Callard predicts that the uni-context nudges people to focus on negativity over positivity and identity over character, because in both cases, the former is more context-independent. (That is, I am a white guy in every context, but I am only jealous or patient in certain contexts, so my identity as a man is more context-independent than my character.)

I was particularly struck my Callard’s observations about comparison and envy. She asks us to imagine two schools in separate school districts. One day, the districts are redrawn, and the schools are in put in the same district. Suddenly, they are in competition. Parents now compare the schools as if they exist in one evaluative field. Over time, the schools might become more similar, or they might specialize to become more different. Either way, they change as they become part of the same evaluative field.

It is such a simple story. And I think it’s a stunning metaphor for life online. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, we see people just like us. They are happier or sadder, richer or poorer, funnier or crazier. They are small faces on a screen, just as we are. Life online seems to place us in the same evaluative field as thousands of strangers who are often more successful than us along some dimension, which makes it impossible to avoid comparing ourselves to them, or feeling a bit jealous of their success, or feeling quite righteous when we learn of their downfall. Jealousy and schadenfreude are more ancient than broadband technology. But there really is something about living in a universal room with everybody that makes it harder to live without that infamous thief of joy known as comparison.

More of life feels like a competition, because the uni-context encourages strangers to imagine themselves in competition, even if they will never meet.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I read it.

A friend recently pointed out something curious. The big technologies of the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, all arrived on a wave of excitement. AI has arrived on a wave of anxiety. People worry it will take their jobs. The people building it worry about its impact, and about their own jobs too. There’s a lot of anxiety to go around.

I suspect uni-context is part of why. When everyone shares one room, the comparisons sharpen. You can see it in how people talk about the job market in technology. It is easy to walk away with the feeling that, unless you’re working at four or five “AI-native” companies, you’re left wondering what you’re even doing, and whether anything else is worth doing at all.

That’s uni-context at play, flattening a wide world of good paths into one narrow scoreboard.

Maybe it’s fitting that anxiety is the emotion of this era. We hold technology so wondrous that not long ago we’d have sworn it was magic, and still, inside the universal room, the loudest feeling is the worry that we won’t measure up.

     

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It got me wondering what a life like that is actually like to live.

Nobody optimizes a single dimension. We’re all balancing some mix of health, career, wealth, family, friendships, community. What separates people is how they weight them.

Hyper-wealthy people usually get there by putting enormous weight on one component. They’re spiky. The ability to pour yourself into one domain and let the rest slide is exactly what makes you formidable in it.

The other option is to be broad. You spread your energy across work, family, health, and relationships, and you can end up with good results across many of them. Good, but probably a champion in none.

Both are fine. The trouble starts when you pick one strategy and then quietly grade yourself on the other’s scoreboard. You choose the broad life, then measure yourself against someone spiky and wonder why you feel behind.

Every path has its trade-offs. Maybe the most useful thing we can do is choose your strategy on purpose, and make peace with the trade-offs that come with it.

     

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Simple and resonant.

     

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It’s a beautiful, analytical way to put it, and I think it captures a real part of what wisdom is.

But there’s a second part. Seeing a trade-off clearly is one skill. Knowing which side of it you’d actually pick is another. The first is analytical. The second asks for a great deal of self-knowledge, and a fair amount of acceptance.

So maybe wisdom is two things held together. Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions, and knowing which of those consequences you could live with without resentment, and still be at peace.

     

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