Wednesday Morning, 5:45am, Amsterdam.

A city I’ve come to know well over the past year through work, lies dark and almost dormant.

I get myself up, splash water on my face, throw on my shorts, top and jumper and lace up my trainers. It’s time to go to war again. Here we are again my friend, I’ve missed you.

I’ve never really been one for New Year’s resolutions. I don’t have anything particularly against them, I’ve just always favoured consistency over focusing on the switch of year as a reason to reset. I understand why people leverage the new year to re-align, establish goals, and map out the next twelve months, however for me, clarity of direction and persistent action hold more importance than the date on the calendar.

During a recent article I mentioned a new Wellness Centre opened in the town centre. When I first visited, I booked a couple of treatments to test the waters, one was Cryotherapy and the other was the Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber.

I recently listened to The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning by Gautam Baid following the audiobook release mid last year. It’s a wonderful book that I can’t recommend highly enough, both to investors and generalists alike.

Dave Itzkoff’s biography of Robin Williams. It’s a strange thing to read about someone you feel like you know a lot about only to realise how little you actually understood. The book revisits films I’d forgotten Williams was in, along with others I didn’t even realise were part of his catalogue.

Last summer I had a well overdue catch up with an old friend and colleague visiting from Australia. On the train back home, he asked about the book I had with me (I can’t actually recall which one it was now) but also mentioned that he’d just finished The Tao of Coaching.