december 2024

If November was mostly about moving out, December was mostly about moving in.

Specifically, this was the timeline:

Red is moving out - which mostly happened the last week of November
Yellow is moving in - unpacking boxes, buying furniture, organizing, etc
Purple is family time - around Christmas and New Years

As you’ll notice, the moving in has not yet finished and probably won’t for a while.

The unpacking made me think of something I read this month:

You never set out to add bureaucracy. You just get it. Period. Without even knowing it. So you always have to be looking to eliminate it.

I feel the same way about my stuff. It just builds up in layers without me being aware. It happens consistently, in the background. And I haven’t been consciously looking to eliminate it.

Hopefully this will motivate a sharper focus on reducing/donating.

calendar

I made a calendar during December and I think it’s pretty cool.

Last year, I bought a big year-long calendar at Staples in January. I enjoyed using it - checking off each day helped me keep a bit of perspective.

It was laid out like:

This is cool because every row represents a quarter, but

jumping from the end of March to the beginning of April is weird (same with June → July, etc)
I don’t like portrait mode
it was coloured a grating shade of blue

A couple months ago, I found this calendar. It looked perfect but:

it didn’t ship to Canada
it was sold out

So, after spending several hours trying to pirate Adobe Illustrator, I made my own!

This format reads more like a book - every line is a month, every box is a day. Also, importantly, the weekends are highlighted. We only get so many per year!

Here’s a couple interesting things to note about 2025:

We get five weekends in both March and November
September and December both start on Monday, the 1st
There’s only one Friday the 13th this year - in June

I added some personal stuff for my own copy too - birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Anyways, I want to sell this thing! Using Shopify!

Sam Walton

I read the Walmart book over the holidays. It tells the story of the late Sam Walton out of Arkansas and how he built the company from scratch. Walmart, at time of writing, is the largest company in the world by revenue and employees - around 2 million people.

It’s a special book too as he started writing it after he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

The truth is that if I hadn’t gotten sick, I doubt I would have written this book, or taken the time to try to sort my life out. As you now know, temperamentally, I’m much too biased toward action to undertake such a sedentary project.

I was struck by how opposite it felt to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. Both are entrepreneurs and business magnates, but there’s so much more warmth and humanity in Sam’s story. More talk of people, relationships, community (at least the way he tells it).

His stance on CEO compensation is refreshing!

if American management is going to say to their workers that we’re all in this together, they’re going to have to stop this foolishness of paying themselves $3 million and $4 million bonuses every year and riding around everywhere in limos and corporate jets like they’re so much better than everybody else.

And the way he talks about hourly employees:

If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.

He and his wife would host a few thousand of them at their house every year:

After the meeting, Helen and I invite all the associates who attend—about 2,500 of them—over to our house for a big picnic lunch catered by our own Wal-Mart cafeteria.

He’s was also a fan of this idea of constant change:

I like to keep everybody guessing. I don’t want our competitors getting too comfortable with feeling like they can predict what we’re going to do. And I don’t want our own executives feeling that way either. It’s part of my strong feeling for the necessity of constant change, for keeping people a little off balance.

I agree with this! Change is good, it keeps us sharp. That said, on a personal level, it’s hard to build deep connections with people when they’re always changing.

This is a big contradiction in my makeup that I don’t completely understand to this day. In many of my core values—things like church and family and civic leadership and even politics—I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.

And, along those lines, Sam has some humility about what it took to grow the company.

Here’s how I look at it: my life has been a tradeoff. If I wanted to reach the goals I set for myself, I had to get at it and stay at it every day. I had to think about it all the time.

Finally, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom about three weeks before he died. The following is from the postscript written by his son:

The award was presented on the morning of Tuesday, March 17, in the auditorium of the Wal-Mart general offices. The room was filled with several hundred of his associates, and their affection for Dad on this special day was particularly moving. I think they may even have startled President and Mrs. Bush—not to mention the White House press corps—by giving one of the most enthusiastic Wal-Mart cheers we’ve heard around here in some time. Dad’s pleasure was evident, and he called it “the highlight of our entire career.” Of course, he shared all the credit with his associates. But it was a poignant day. He had to be rolled onto the stage in a wheelchair, and I think most of the associates sensed that it would be their last get-together with him.

…

less than three weeks after receiving the Medal of Freedom, and just days after his seventy-fourth birthday, Dad’s struggle with cancer finally ended. On Sunday morning, April 5, he died peacefully—as inspirational in facing death as he had been in facing life. We will all miss him.

More highlights are here.

end

And that does it for year two of kahvi’s newsletter! Thank you so much for reading! We’re onto season 3!

I hope to have some resolutions and year-end newsletter stats next month 🤞

See you then!