The Weekend Wind-Down #22 - July 21, 2024

I hope you're having a good weekend, here's this week's list!

What I learned from volunteering with TEDx this week

As we prepare for the event in November we are going through the process of curating speakers. I volunteered to be part of the speaker team because this is the most interesting part of TED to me. We had an "open mic" session this week to bring in some people we felt were interesting, hear their stories, and see if both sides want to move forward to start developing their talk. It was really cool to hear from these very diverse and interesting people. Singapore is known for being a big rat race, but it turns out there are lots of people doing interesting and out-of-the-box things that I'm excited the TEDx Singapore audience will get to hear about.

What I cooked this weekend

Last night we had a couple of friends over and I made a Korean BBQ style meal. Although I'm ethnically Korean, I didn't grow up in a Korean household or with Korean food. And honestly, Korean isn't one of my favorite cuisines, but you can't go wrong with a lot of meat, and I especially like ssambap where you put meat, rice, kimchi, hot sauce, and other goodies inside a lettuce leaf, wrap it up, and eat it in one bite. To go along with the pork belly, jowl, and ribeyes, I made cheesy corn, sesame bean sprouts, spicy cucumber salad, cold tofu, and served it with radish and greens kimchi. Part of the fun of Korean BBQ is cooking it while you eat, and eating things hot off the grill, but cooking everything before sitting down to eat worked well, and I am looking forward to when my daughter is big enough to make her own ssambap and eat with us.

What I read this week

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a fun look at how, where, and why people traveled in the old world. It is full of interesting anecdotes and stories. It was interesting to me that virtually all of the travel writers of that time included made up stories, took tales told by others as their own, and included local folklore as part of their writing. As someone who loves traveling, I'm jealous of the people then who could travel places that no one they knew had ever been to before and how exotic and different places really were compared to the relative uniformity of today. However, I'm not jealous of the horrible conditions and challenges travelers had to go through during those times. One tidbit I thought was interesting is that people used to collect souvenirs from popular places they traveled that were usually some sort of jewelry or pin that they would then wear on their travel clothes to show off how experienced a traveler they were.

What I listened to this weekend

This episode of The GaryVee Audio Experience was actually aired on Ryan Holiday's "The Daily Stoic". I love both of these guy's work, so I was really excited about this episode, the bonus being that the title is "The Single Most Important Parenting Advice". Well, they covered a ton of topics like marketing, being an influencer, social media, AI and algorithms, and much more. But the parenting advice was a gem, basically you should show your kids how to live, not tell them. Because frankly they aren't going to listen to you, but they will learn from your example. So as Ryan said, "You have to be about it more than you talk about it". I'll definitely be thinking about this concept more, and the whole podcast is well worth a listen.

Work success I'm celebrating this week

This week we hosted an event with a key association in Singapore. I'm particularly proud of this event because, when I joined last year, many on my team expressed the need to collaborate with this association, especially since our competitor had already done so. Securing this partnership wasn't easy as the association only accepts high-value events booked over a year in advance. It took me six months to convince them, leveraging our unique expertise in AI in treasury. I am also very proud of the venue we hosted the event at, a newly opened hotel and restaurant in downtown Singapore, housed in a renovated early 20th-century landmark by an award-winning architecture firm that wasn't easy to book either. The restaurant is led by a Michelin-star chef and this location is special to me as it’s near my gym, and I've watched it transform from a bare bone structure into a beautiful space as I have walked by several times a week over the last year plus.

That's all for this week. Have a great rest of your weekend!

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This post was originally published on my website at https://nicholasbraman.com/2024/07/21/the-weekend-wind-down-22-july-21-2024/