👇 tl;dr

Today I greet you from Sicily. I share some insights about my trip, a photo I made yesterday in Palermo, and some articles about distributed meetings and the benefits of coworking spaces and commuting. Finally, a thought about the benefits of accepting some discomfort vs. aiming for maximum comfort.

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📷 Photo of the week

Bus Stop - More Photos

👋 Good Morfternight!

This is the first of several Morfternight issues that will reach you from southern Italy. More precisely, Palermo, Sicily. Although I left home one week ago, I have been here only a few days, having spent the first three days of last week flying to Genova, catching up with my family there, then cruising across most of the Mediterranean Sea to Palermo.

There is no better way to cross the sea than on a ship. Planes are practical, but they deprive you of the sensation of being on a journey.

I have been greeted by rain, cold weather, and warm smiles, which has made me happy. It’s been a long time since I spent a decent amount of time here. Tomorrow, by the way, I enter uncharted territory, considering I have not spent more than one week in a row in Italy since I left the country.

🗺️ Three places to visit today

Today we focus on distributed meetings, commuting or not, and the benefits of coworking spaces.

1. First, an interesting Stanford School of Business study: Thinking Inside the Box: Why Virtual Meetings Generate Fewer Ideas.
   I have no reason not to trust their results and believe in-person meetings generate more ideas than meetings on video. But, on the other hand, I question whether more is better in terms of idea generation.
   Ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is incredibly costly, so their sheer number is a vanity metric in my book.

2. I shared four weeks ago how commuting creates some value that needs to be replaced in a distributed team. So here’s another interesting take on commuting and how a journey from work to home is about more than just getting there – the psychological benefits of commuting that remote work doesn’t provide.

3. Here’s what, though. Working from the company office or home are not the only two options, and recent research illustrates How Coworking Spaces Impact Employee Well-Being. This study focused on employee well-being deriving from meeting and connecting with other people but not coworkers. Coworking spaces also offer the opportunity for a short commute to introduce a sharp separation between work and home.

🏙️ Training old muscles

If, like me, you have alternated between phases of your life where you frequented a gym regularly and others where you didn’t, you know the drill. When you start training, you discover muscles you forgot you had, and it hurts.

It’s uncomfortable by design.

If you keep doing it, it remains uncomfortable, as it should, because, without that discomfort, there is no growth. The tradeoff is that in exchange for that effort and pain, you gain new abilities, you become more tonic, and you can do more things.

Or you can choose comfort.

That’s the choice we all make when we stop training. The payoff is immediate, and the pain stops. In the short term, it seems beneficial because we can still do everything we could while training. For a while. Then we lose tonus, and muscle, and some of those things become impossible again.

It doesn’t apply to training muscles only.

It’s a much more general reality of life. The more comfort you can afford and decide to introduce to your life, the more you lose the opportunity to enjoy things that were once part of it but have now become inaccessible.

I don’t know precisely where I am going with this; it’s a fresh train of thoughts that germed over the last few days. I’ll tell you more as I keep thinking about it. But, for now, I’ll leave you with this idea.

Choosing the most comfortable option you can afford isn’t always the best long-term choice.

👨🏻‍💻 From the blog, last week

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