Edmond Chan

I started working from home on 17th March, and I started showing symptoms of Covid-19 on 19th March. I’d been out shopping that morning. Sainsbury’s was busier than I’d ever seen, with queues for the checkout going to the middle and the back of the store. I decided to go to Waitrose instead, which was only marginally less busy. I thought I had hayfever so I went to Boots to stock up on medication, and I went to Poundland to stock up on household essentials like washing liquid and bleach. At this stage, there was talk of a lockdown for London, but nothing firm. There was a rumour in the FT that the lockdown might involve the army, and start on 20th March, but this was squashed by ministers. That afternoon of the 19th, I started to feel achey, and by the evening, I began to feel cold and shivery. …[Read More]

Hey there! This week I’ve been reading a corking article about US Air Force Pararescuemen (also known as PJs) who are the guys that Navy Seals call when they’re wounded and need help behind enemy lines. PJs are elite combat medics who can provide expert medical help and rescue in the most hostile environments. The article is: The Savior Elite: Inside the Special Operations Force Tasked with Rescuing Navy SEALS They are the military’s “guardian angels.” They are trained paramedics, paratroopers, and combat divers. This is the story of one such airman, and the mission of a lifetime. It tells the story of a civilian vessel hundreds of miles from the nearest port and hospital which had had an explosion that left several sailors with horrific burns and life-threatening injuries. The surgery that needed to be done in tight, fearsomely hot confines is compelling and just another of Esquires’s excellent long-form reads. From …[Read More]

Hey there! This week I’ve been reading A great article in Esquire called Exposure Therapy and the Fine Art of Scaring the Shit Out of Yourself On Purpose. In it, the author describes how her fear of heights has periodically debilitated her life, such as not being able to climb to the tops of cathedrals on holiday, and how it’s probably impacted what she’d like to do such as rock climbing. She uses new research into exposure therapy to systematically reduce her immediate physical and mental fear when in a heights situation. From the Esquire article: Exposure therapy is basically an inversion of a well-known psychological technique known as classical conditioning. If you can teach an animal to expect pain from, say, a blinking red light by repeatedly combining the light’s appearance with an electrical shock until the animal reacts fearfully to the light alone, it makes sense that the twinning …[Read More]

Hey there! Clayton Christensen Renowned management guru Clayton Christensen passed away this week, and Adam Grant shared a link to one of his most famous articles on Harvard Business Review: How will you measure your life? In this article, Christensen encourages us to not measure our lives by money, status etc. but instead by what we truly consider to be most important: relationships with friends and family, and finding meaningful work. He points to contemporaries of his at HBS such as Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, who Christensen remembers as a “good guy” back in college. But Skilling went on to make less than good choices, Christensen contends because of measuring his life against the wrong things. The article reminded me of the book by the same name which expands on as well as having different material to the article above. In the book, Christensen recommends not basing a career choice …[Read More]

Hey there! This week, I’ve been reading an essay in the FT by Simon Schama on What Tolstoy’s War and Peace can teach us. One of the things that Schama talks about is when a ‘brigadier’ saw him reading it in a lunch bar and asks him if it’s his first time. When Schama says yes, the brigadier almost sighs with contented and kind-hearted envy. If you haven’t read it yet, then I contentedly and kind-heartedly envy you too. It’s a life-changer. As Nietzsche (I think) said, there are books where you mark your life as before you read it and after you read it. It’s up there in my top 5 books. Treat yourself to the Rosemary Edmonds translation and see you in about 3 months. Well that’s how long it took me :). The first couple of hundred pages read like The Sopranos on steroids and set in Napoleonic-era Russia. The …[Read More]