Meet Pagan Tuna - The Monday Morning Memo

“Now that we’re in the thick of another US college football season, it occurs to me that IT application developers might benefit from having a different mental model to represent the work they do.”

“When I talk to architects, analysts and programmers about their projects, they often describe them as if they were heading in a straight line from some known starting point to a clearly defined end state – almost as if they were running at a track meet.”

“And yet, when I watch football on autumn Saturdays, I can’t help but notice… very few touchdowns get scored this way. This is because the ball carriers have to avoid obstacles on the way to the goal line. And so what you see is something described by the picturesque phrase, ‘broken field running,’ meaning ‘varying in direction suddenly and frequently…'”

– Herb Bowie, AKA Pagan Tuna

“So whenever ‘I’ takes over from a place that should be about ‘we,’ you get catastrophe. Now, Tim, look at this catastrophe. And I’m surprised not more people have noticed it. Two of the countries that have done worst in the world in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 have been the two most individualistic societies in the world today, the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States, far more infections than anywhere else, far more fatalities than anywhere else. Britain, a terrible record of fatalities per million of the population, and a terrible record of economic collapse.

Now you ask yourself why these two countries, which were the greatest defenders of liberty in the 20th century, Britain and America, have become the worst at dealing with a catastrophe like coronavirus. And the answer is they have too much ‘I’ and too little ‘we.’ It is the countries that maintain that balance, like South Korea, like Taiwan, like Singapore, like New Zealand, like Germany. Those are the countries that have coped really well.”

- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in conversation with Tim Ferris

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