Posts by Allan Lacoste

A leader doesn’t defy the wind, or blame the wind for pushing him off course. A leader doesn’t blame those around him for the way the wind blows. But most of all, a leader doesn’t allow the wind to decide his direction. Instead, they understand the wind, embrace it, and know how to use it to arrive at their chosen destination.

A boat can sail against the wind by slightly tilting its sails in a direction ahead of the vector of the sail. Birds fly against the wind not by beating their wings more furiously, but by cutting across the eddies and currents of the sky. A leader, like a boat or a bird, must understand that the wind is never against them, although they may occasionally need to tack against it when the journey so demands.

• Allan Lacoste

There is a sleeping giant in the middle of Utah- a place where the world’s largest organism has lived for millennia. Pando was ancient when Christianity was new. It lay dreaming in loam-filled beds near the shores of Lake Bonneville while humanity was covering itself in animal skins and inventing names for the stars. When North America was covered in ice, Pando waited, drawing its roots in around it like a cloak, and waited for the years and decades to pass until the sun returned.

Our lives are as brief as that of a mayfly when compared to Pando, the great Old One of the American southwest. He was here before the first bipedal primate trudged across the primordial land-bridge and settled the land. God willing, he always remain.

– Allan Lacoste

There are some who will tell you that watches are a sign of modern slavery, a mark of our subservience to the Almighty Dollar and servitude to modern obsession with productivity.  The mark of an OCD mindset that we’d all be better off without.

I disagree.

I believe that watches are merely a tool that, like any tool, can be used or abused.  Or maybe they’re not even that- maybe they’re just a fashion statement.  Something fun that doesn’t have to have much more depth than that.  For instance, the watch on the left is whimsical and utilitarian at the same time, a wearable piece of art.

The one on the right is minamalist, striking, and somehow manages to be both retro and futuristic at the same time. Is it a sundial, or the nose-cone of a rocket? Or neither? Or both?

Then thare are watches like this one by Ferrari, which say “I had a quarter of a million dollars to spend on a watch that doesn’t actually show what time it is.”

• Allan Lacoste