One Letter, One Day, One Timeless Score ⇪

Our aim at Athena is to give you your time back so you can spend it in the ways that matter most.

In each issue of our newsletter you’ll get unique delegation tips.

One Letter, One Day, One Timeless Score

Before Christopher Nolan even shot a single frame of a project codenamed “Flora’s Letter” (which would become Interstellar) in 2013, he asked composer Hans Zimmer to write music for the film but handed him only one thing — an envelope.

No script, no details about the movie.

Inside was a single page. A father's letter to his daughter.

No mention of space travel.

No hints at the epic scale.

Just the heart of the story — how becoming a parent changes the way we see ourselves. Nolan said “you work for one day, then play me what you have written.”

What he created became "S.T.A.Y." (the emotional anchor of Interstellar's score that Nolan called “the heart of the movie”).

The piece that would play as Matthew McConaughey's character reaches across time and space to connect with his daughter.

Over the next months, Nolan and Zimmer met 45 times to experiment with the score - triple their usual sessions. They abandoned tried-and-true techniques. No more action-scene drums. Every sound had to be “new.”

"The core of the movie is about the quest for adventure," Zimmer said. "It seemed only right to throw everything out and make it all about invention."

When they finished, Nolan gave Zimmer a watch. On the back, he had inscribed: "This is not the time for caution."

Sometimes the best results come with the help of constraints, where you: A) strip away complexity and B) start working purely on the essentials.

More Rounds, More Wins

As we close out 2024, here's a final tip from Jonathan Swanson, Athena's co-founder:

Most leaders delegate too little because they're stuck looking for perfection — they want the task to be done flawlessly.

But the most successful delegators ask themselves "did I get value from this?" instead of "is this done perfectly?"

Here's a simple way to think about it:

→ If you delegate 3 tasks per week with 100% success, you get 3 wins.

→ If you delegate 20 tasks per week with 50% success, you get 10 wins.

The more delegations you assign, the more you take off your plate. But there’s also a second-order impact: delegating more leads to compounding leverage due to there being more rounds of feedback, and your assistant becomes an extension of you much more quickly.