27 Thoughts for Friday

“I thought so.  You remember our business partner Marsellus Wallace, don’t you Brett?” – Pulp Fiction

I got a CAPTCHA that asked me to select pictures of tractors and farm equipment.  That’s really not my field.

I’ve trotted out lists of thoughts from time to time.  The lists change based on (hopefully) me getting more wisdom over time.  Anyway, here’s this year’s list:

  1. Be on time. Seriously, it’s simple.  People notice, and people care.  It’s a basic principle of respect for someone not to waste their time waiting for me.
  2. Never be a little late to work or a little early to leave. Especially on a regular basis.  Being late an hour once every quarter is much better than being late a minute each day for sixty work days.  An hour looks like something happened.  A minute looks like I don’t care.
  3. Little changes at the start make big difference in the result. I’ve seen many people start their careers and become experts at the subject of their first assignment.  Many of them made a lot of money by knowing a whole lot about a little.

Who knew Cathy was Haitian?

  1. Choosing not to decide is a choice. I love reminding people that “doing nothing” is always an option.  But it is a choice.  And it has just as many consequences as “doing something”.
  2. For me, opportunities always showed up when I needed them, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. Thankfully in my case the opportunities weren’t subtle.
  3. After college, in a high achieving profession, it becomes rarer and rarer to be the smartest guy in the room, and someone in the room is often an expert at something in which I’m a novice. True humility allows a good leader to understand the capabilities they need, and not have to be “right” all the time.
  4. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. It seems that no one ever snaps over the house being on fire on the day the insurance payment was late – it’s that the trash wasn’t taken out on time and we have to hang on to it for another week.

What does Soylent Green® taste like?  It varies from person to person.

  1. People understand $10,000 more than they understand $10,000,000. The difference between $10,000 and $11,000 means more to most people than the difference between $10 million and $10 billion.  Most people can’t understand more than seven magnitudes of anything.
  2. Outcome is less important than process. When working on life, I try to not care about what the outcome will be.  I go in, make the best choices I can, and do the best work that I can.  If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I try to adjust to be better next time.
  3. Outcome is still important. Dead is dead, so sometimes the outcome is final.
  4. The last outcome is always final. How many refunds?
  5. No refunds.

My chute didn’t open once when I was skydiving.  I didn’t panic.  I figured I had the rest of my life to figure it out.

  1. Nothing breeds success like success, and nothing breeds failure like failure. I’ve been on streaks where I literally could not lose.  I’ve been on streaks where I couldn’t win.
  2. Corollary to 13: I’m never as bad or as good as my failures or successes.  The streaks where I couldn’t win set me up with the habits I needed to win.
  3. Beating myself up is a loser’s game.
  4. Most people don’t think about me very much and will have a hard time remembering my name after five years. As much as I like to think I’m the center of my story (and I am) I’m only a minor player in the stories of most other people.
  5. Corollary to 16: Except where I’m their personal villain.  Then I live on forever and will definitely have someone who will want to be at my funeral, if nothing more than to make sure I’m dead.

What was the name of that Mexican villain in the Bible?  Poncho Pilate?

  1. Protect the relationships with the people that genuinely do care about me in a positive way so maybe the sad people at my funeral will outnumber the happy ones.
  2. Listen to people, really listen. They tell me amazing things if I just listen.  One time I was interviewing a guy and he mentioned committing a felony at a previous job.  Yeah, I kept a straight face.  No, he didn’t get the job.
  3. If someone says I’m wrong, I need to have the humility to embrace that and see if they’re right. Especially when my first impulse is to try to defend myself.  Even if I’m not wrong, I at least understand why they thought I was wrong.
  4. When I’m wrong, admit it and apologize. It’s amazing how admitting error makes other think I’m more trustworthy.  And apologies?  Why not apologize, have some sort of problem with that?

Okay, he didn’t say that.  But he’s the first person I thought of.

  1. Being good at several things is enough for success, if they’re the right several things. Being an expert at useless things might be fun, but mostly nothin’ times nothin’ is, hmmm, carry the nothin’ . . . nothin’.
  2. If I spend my life waiting for the next thing, I’ll spend my entire life waiting and not living. The journey is the point, and rushing through it just gets me to my grave faster.
  3. Past behaviors are almost always the key to predicting future behaviors. Leopards, spots, etc.  When I listen to a person’s story, I realize that often they’re also telling me their future.
  4. Success is based on the last thing I did, not the next. People pay to keep me around because they think I might be able to do it again.

Orphans are often very successful at business – someone told them “Go big or go home” so they didn’t have much choice.

  1. Could I have done better?   Could I have done worse?  Yes.  I did how I did.  Success is based on how I change what I’m going to do to be better.
  2. Power and money are not the same thing. Just ask the rich guys after Robespierre or Lenin took over.

Okay, that’s 3³ thoughts for Friday.  See you on Monday!

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

29 thoughts on “27 Thoughts for Friday”

  2. Saw an interesting remark on ZH the other day, this is close to what it said:
    “Strategy doesn’t matter without logistics.” Perhaps #28.

    1. A famous Naval officer (I forget who, but he was good at his job) in charge of logistics said “The winner is the one who gets there firstest with the mostest”. I like that.

      1. The Internet attributes that quote (with variations) to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate officer (rose from private to General; I’m not sure what he was at the time).

        1. Anon @451:
          Huh. You are correct. The intertube is indeed awash with said quote. The first I was aware of it was on a Naval base while gazing at a painting of a Naval scene in a hallway where, apparently, we were to gain inspiration while walking to our doom, er, I mean, an informational meeting. It is possible my remembering is a tad faulty…

    2. Strategy requires logistics, but per G.W. Bush……Strategery knows no bounds…..

  3. All good reminders. All good pun. Thanks for, as always, starting my day with a smile.

    1. That’s my job. And I really enjoy it.

      Thank you – it keeps me going knowing it keeps you going.

  4. Regarding #20 and #21 … Jeez, I hate being wrong. Hate it so much in fact that I always question my assumptions first, before questioning others’. I call it ‘doing my homework’, and I rarely jump into an argument unprepared.

    Sometimes it can come across as bullying, or overkill, when I whip out three peer-reviewed white papers and present notarized affidavits proving that, yea and verily, my conclusion is backed up by irreproachable, unimpeachable, rock-solid fact. But if that’s what it takes to be rewarded with the eyeroll of resignation (EOR) from whoever it is that I am debating, so be it.

    Or I might just nod pleasantly and walk away. Depends on my mood.

    1. So, that’s one of the reasons I *LOVE* when readers point out my mistakes. I then fix it and . . . make it better. And I also find myself factchecking more and more. And then I’m right more.

      Win-win!

      1. I’ve come to notice, John – that you have an answer for everything. 😉

        But sometimes – what *really* is important – is having if not the ultimate question, at least better ones.

  7. #21 Admit when you are wrong and apologize.
    I have known people who wouldn’t or couldn’t admit they were wrong, they could apologize but never admit they were wrong. These were Strange people who I avoided as much as possible, unfortunately most were Bad Bosses.

    1. In ref to #21,
      In the Weather career field we have a training aid that has helped me learn and I have applied it to life in general. In The Air Force, when you Forecast Wrongly the regs say you must do a “bust review”.
      This is a written report where you describe the conditions that actually occurred that busted your Forecast. Then you list the conditions and data that led you to develop the wrong forecast and then you explore the data you missed or miss-read that would have maybe led you to a better outcome.

      It was required to be a formal written report because Government said so, but a lot of bust reviews were pencil whipped, because some people don’t care and most of the admin types who are required to review them don’t care either. Luckily my first was one was one I cared about a lot. And the Supervisor who slaughtered my first attempt wanted to see me improve as well. While I haven’t done written reviews in many years, I consider self reflection with a goal of improvement to be one of the most valuable tools I acquired from the Government.

      I LOVED it when I heard that SpaceX Values and Promotes the Policy that mistakes are an opportunity to LEARN and Improve. If this company had stock, I’d BUY it!

      I am heartbroken at the sight of our current Equity at all costs military.

    2. They are awful bosses. They are frightened little people who live on the edge of terror every moment in life.

        1. I do pray at work when I get there. I try to spend at least a few minutes each day in contemplation.

  9. Wow, #3 really hits close to home (as well as #6). I worked in R&D for most of my career and noticed that scientists and engineers were pretty evenly split between narrow field experts on the one hand and generalists on the other. I left grad school with the idea that I wanted to be one of those specialists. But per a chance encounter, I talked to someone about the Russian TRIZ theory of invention (a theory still mostly unknown in the West). Turns out the founder of the theory combed through all of the patents and discovered that most all successful inventions derive from applying a solution in one discipline to a problem in a completely different field (i.e. invention very little to do with specialization). So I changed my ongoing training towards a more multi-disciplinary approach and then started looking outside my field for solutions to problems we were encountering. Paid off handsomely in terms of new inventions/products launched and it only happened because of a few chance encounters early in my career.

    1. Dayum! Just yesterday evening after dinner, Roscoe and I were discussing the TRIX theory of, ah, what you said. Then here you are!

      Anyway Roscoe seemed to embrace my analysis, alternately it may have been the treats I was feeding him, the neighbors getting upset he was barking so bad.

    2. Interesting! Lots of fodder there on TRIZ. I’ve been more of a generalist, and had been doing that almost unconsciously . . . .

      1. Same, same – but I eventually came to understand that what I’d done is become a jack of MANY trades, and a master of a few. Better than putting your eggs all in one trade, as it were….

Comments are closed.