THREAD: meet my brother

Unsurprisingly, being locked down over Xmas and New Year turns thoughts to family – and to my brother who died almost 14 years ago in a motorbike accident when he was 39.

First some context: Andreas was 8 years older than me – big difference when we were kids, but we were close as adults and instant messaged every day (yahoo messenger! remember that?!).
Last week I found some of the message chats we used to have that I collated for his funeral & they made me laugh out loud and miss him all over again. So I wanted to share some of my funny, quirky brother with the world – here goes…
He worked at Yahoo doing difficult coding. He loved coffee (with milk). He was also very funny.
He was a computer wizard – there was nothing he couldn’t code. I was and remain a rank amateur compared to him.
My brother was known to be of a literal turn of mind and there was a running joke that I was training him out of it. (PS they did go to California that summer – a trip my dad treasures now).
As a family we would meet often, especially at Christmas, and play games all day which we loved. In 2004 & 2005 my sister had my nieces which changed things a little for a while :-)
Neither me nor my brother were great with small kids but we managed 😊. 2007 was the last Christmas we had as a complete family. As it happens, my (now) teenage nieces are delightful, love games and he would have loved spending Christmas with them. And I got old but he didn’t.
I was also the one who tended to end up suggesting presents for him to buy for birthdays and Christmases…
As siblings, we parcelled out responsibilities
We both worked in central London in the years before he died and had lunch often. Arranging lunch meetings could sometimes be a trial...
In 2005, I’d recently returned from 3 yrs working in the US and Andreas had been on a hiking holiday with me in Montana. He fell in love with the US scenery then and went back as often as he could in the 2 years after that.
We talked about it often and were planning more hiking holidays together.
Weirdly enough, a few days before he died he had a very minor motorbike accident… eventually was admitted to hospital overnight for observation but he was fine and went home the next day.
Below is the last conversation I ever had with him – discussing where to go together that summer. He died that night, just after midnight, hit by a car which turned into his path.
We never did get to do that summer holiday. My (now) husband & I did eventually do both the Norway and the US trip Andreas and I discussed all those years ago. They were amazing. Even now, whenever we are somewhere beautiful, we think of him and wish he could be there to see it.
Well that’s it. I found these messages again and am glad I did. And now you all know a bit about my lovely brother too. END

More from Life

How to get smarter very fast:

Interact with smart people here on Twitter who have different world-views than you do.

And let them change your mind on something.

Here are the 30 people you should follow (along with my favorite tweet from each)👇👇

Twitter can be terrible if you follow negative people.

It can also be more valuable than a college degree if you follow (and network with) the right people.

You get to look right into their brain and read a daily narrative of HOW they think.

Ok lets go:

#1: @ShaanVP

You know he's all about venture capital based entrepreneurship. I'm about small (non-sexy) business. We disagree on a lot of stuff.

But he's done it and he's won. Bonus follow: @theSamParr (@myfirstmilpod podcast


#2: @fortworthchris

He is where I want to be in 15 years. Has built a massive real estate private equity firm from the ground up. Super grounded with what the way he does business and his podcast @theFORTpodcast is top


#3: @Julian

I'm a scattered thinker and procrastinator.

Julian is a master of clear thinking and simple but effective writing. A world class example of content marketing and
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

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