Evergreen marketing content has no obvious expiration date. Testimonials, FAQs, and “How to” guides are examples of content that doesn’t change much. Evergreen trees don’t change much either, although they lose their foliage it’s gradually and not all at once like a deciduous tree. I’ve noticed that kid’s football has now turned into a year-round sport, tournaments replace fixtures, and friendlies fill the gaps. Football is now evergreen not seasonal.

Riding past four construction workers today my youngest pointed out that only one was working. One was eating, one was smoking and the other stood there watching the one construction worker who was actually living up to their title. It is easy to find something to do other than work. …

Picking a player of the year feels predictable. Only one goalkeeper, LevYashin, has ever won the prestigious Ballon d’Or since its inception in 1956. But what if you picked a player at random and celebrated their contribution? Building a life that accepts randomness as a part of it, might just make us more resilient, and appreciative of the things we do have.

Based on the assumption that novice trainers, including kids, don’t know how to squat. The logical course of action for the professional coach is to provide visual inputs for them to copy. Demo, demo, demo. But what if that assumption was wrong? What if the “expert” didn’t know what they didn’t know? What if what they were paying attention to was irrelevant? And what was missing was important? When you work with unknown unknowns the best way forward is to experiment. What happens when you move faster, or slower, put your arms in the air, and so on?

When you love the sport that you have played since you were a kid you want to give something back. The question is what. Maybe it’s the passion for the sport, perhaps it’s a unique insight or simply to extend a hand to the next generation. Whatever it is, by staying involved, you think you can pass it on. How do you think people will learn from you? What will that look like in practice? How will you facilitate this in practice?

After a long drawn-out process, I’m back towards the top end of my fitness. My numbers are as good as they were when I was in my 30s and 40s. My conclusion is that I’m working hard and probably closer to my potential than I have ever been. By my reckoning, I’ll be putting more into the Watt bike and lifting more in the gym than I ever have by the end of the year. I’ll be 52 years old. Which challenges the thinking that we should accept that we are getting older and that we are unlikely to achieve a PB. That assumption is based on the idea that we were working to our full potential in our 30s and 40s. I clearly wasn’t.

If you want to understand our attitude to risk head to a gym and wait for the questions. How much can you lift? What’s your 1 RM? This is Bro shorthand for what is your point of failure? We build our hopes, attitudes, and systems around being able to nudge our point of failure slightly further north. The assumption (and it’s a poor one) is that our point of failure points towards our improvement (often unspecified).

If getting along and getting ahead by playing by the rules is a virtue. It stands to reason that the most virtuous acts are those by which you stand to gain the most. And although it doesn’t make sense, it explains a lot. What makes more sense and yet needs no explanation is that the more virtuous an act the greater the cost to you personally. One creates attention and status, the other not so much.

If coaching is an improvised act then we could argue that makes planning a questionable act. Which makes it difficult to proceed with certainty when it comes to creating boundaries for your coaching practice. Here are two boundaries that you might recognise. In the pursuit of less Greg McKeown argues…