Hi friend,

I’m on the French side of the Pyrenees with my bicycle, in a wonderfully low-key stretch between the beautiful city of Toulouse and the tiny nation of Andorra. The diversity of landscapes and micro-climates makes riding a blast: in a single day, you can cruise past vineyards, cut through limestone canyons, and climb up a foggy peak to the ruins of a Cathar castle.

This is where I fell in love with cycling back in 2018, and I’m always scheming to return, taking a page from the Tour de France which faithfully comes through almost every year.

Because these trips are self-initiated and self-organized, I've realized they only happen when several things are true at once: that I'm on top of my workload, fit enough to enjoy hours on the saddle, and grounded enough in my mind and my relationships to detach without disappearing.

When I called my friend Stefan last week, he described these types of goals, or goal states, as epicurean. Selfish in their focus on simple pleasures that are legible only to you, without taking from anyone. It’s not a bucket-list item to cross off, or something to project-manage towards. You tend to the conditions, in a gentle, insistent pursuit.

I set something similar for myself when I started managing a team: as long as I look forward to our weekly meetings, we're doing alright. I want to want to attend this call, and for the other members to, as well. I think it's a reliable read on our levels of stress, interpersonal frictions and how engaged we feel in our work. So I watch for the small tells—whether we let other work get scheduled over the call, how much effort we make to show up when we're in transit or under the weather.

Douglas Hubbard talks about measuring intangibles through observable proxies in the management classic “How to Measure Anything”. He might ask, if aliens observed your world now, and came back some years later, what would you want them to notice as same or different?

For this stay, the mega heat wave that’s parked across Western Europe has stunted my cycling ambitions. As has a steady supply of absinthe and homemade chocolate truffles from a neighbor!

I'd love to hear about other proxies—what are the simple pleasures that tell you things are in order, or trending in a good direction?

As for me, I feel content writing you this postcard while hiding from the heat, knowing I’ll be back again.

Take care,

Tomomi