Mental models during delays

I was sitting in a bit of traffic yesterday and whilst it would have been easy to get fussy about the delay, instead I realized how lucky I am to be sitting in London traffic. "Surreal" probably isn't the right word, but I did have one if those moments where I felt like past, present and future were all coming together, and I was sitting there patiently, right where I was supposed to be at that moment in time.

The traffic gave me time to think about "good leadership". One of my favorite definitions of leadership is "getting the team to do what's best for the team, because they want to do it". Recently, I've been simplifying it to "someone I want to learn from". Seeing the great leadership here, I'm thinking about adding "humble confidence", "giving other people opportunities they dreamt of", "collectively defining the shared vision" and "making progress", just good ol' making progress. You've seen the book called The Progress Principle?

Few words of the day for you, envisage=envision, telly=tv, till=cash register, trolly=shopping cart.

Tonight we went to Holland Park and Kyoto Garden. Nice park of course and Kyoto Garden is absolutely beautiful. It's maybe an acre or two, so nice and compact, it has a circular path around it, the middle is a coy pond and a fantastic little waterfall. There's a tiny footbridge you can take across the pond, right in front of the waterfall. The story is something about a castle that was destroyed, the a Japanese man designed this garden in it's place, really really well done.

There were 2 hour delays on the train ride home due to "signal failures". That's relatively rare, so I thought back to how lucky we are to have this learning opportunity.