Jim signing the visitors book, with our sommelier making sure we don’t touch anything we shouldn’t
What needs a little more time?
If you read the last newsletter, you’ll remember my Extravaganza Trip with Seamus through bits of Europe.
One of the unexpected delights was realizing that two great friends of mine, Jim Knight and Christian van Nieuwerburgh, were going to overlap with my time in Paris.
Jim and Christian are both real movers and shakers in the coaching world, particularly within the sphere of education.
But more than that, they’re lovely, funny people.
But even more than that (not really, but kind of), they (like me) love good wine.
Underground
We met up at the Four Seasons hotel, where Jim had organized a tour of the cellar.
This cellar is legendary. Carved out of the bedrock of Paris (the displaced rock was used to help build the Arc de Triomphe), it holds 50,000 bottles of wine.
50,000 bottles of very, very, very good wine.
To get there, you’re led through various back passages until you come to a vault door, which has Mission Impossible levels of security to get through.
You then descend to another level: a chilled catacomb, lit with candles, and with bottles of wine stacked high to the ceiling and stretching out into the gloom.
Time
I’ve had absolutely no luck trying to build a cellar at home. If we’ve got a bottle of wine, not only do we not really have anywhere to store it in wine-friendly conditions, but we’ve not got the patience to do that even if we did.
We buy wine that’s good to drink now, and we drink it. It’s a good plan, and it works.
But I hold a fantasy of having the foresight and discipline to buy some fabulous “young” wine, and returning to it in three or five or twenty years, when it’s finally come into its own.
I can’t do that with wine. But, perhaps there are other things I might apply that discipline to.
What might benefit from resting, relaxing, losing its raw edges, and integrating?
You’ll have your own answers (and hit reply to tell me what they are), but mine include:
Third drafts of books I’m writing
Strategies for projects and businesses I’m working on
Responses to failed plans and launches
Related, feelings of anger and frustration … about myself and about others
Artisanal
I’ve just realized, as I write this, a final connection. One of my two “words of the year” is Artisanal. What that means to me is taking the time to create stuff that’s human and elegant and gorgeous.
With AI speeding up the production of crud, I’m trying to double down on what’s real and personal. You’ll find it in this newsletter (I hope), in the Change Signal project, and anywhere else I show up with Ainsley, Claudine, Emma, Jill, Kelsey, and Tugba aka Team MBS.
Think of us as your own beautiful bottle of wine, for savouring and enjoying.
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