I love analogies. Here’s another one! Let’s say you have a house, an older house: 30, 40, maybe even 50 years old. And it’s having electrical problems; lights flicker, outlets don’t all seem grounded, switches don’t all work. If you brought in a highly experienced and skilled electrician, that person could probably, within about 45 […]
I remember a valuable lesson I learned from a mentor a few years ago. I was speaking to this person and probably complaining about how our organization had so many processes and policies that it felt like we couldn’t do anything, everything we wanted to do we were told “no”. He said something really valuable. […]
One important personal concept that you have to learn to handle, especially as you get more senior, is how to handle what are seemingly contradictions. Let me explain via example. As you get more and more senior, you need to stop worrying about the days, in terms of what specific things did you accomplish today. […]
Imagine your goal is to gather apples. Your immediate instinct might be to wander through a forest, spotting ripe fruit on the ground and collecting them. For a small family or a spontaneous snack, this works perfectly. There are apples readily available, and the effort is minimal. This “foraging” approach is akin to how many […]
I started a training class one time with this statement. Sometimes I still do. It’s intentionally facetious, a tongue-in-cheek admission that aims to set the stage not for certainty, but for critical thought. Because the simple truth is, for almost every topic, every rule, every best practice, there will always be exceptions and edge cases. […]
I remember reading in a book one time about coaching football. There was a (probably apocryphal) story about a team playing. Game is tied, 60 seconds left, they have the ball on their own 20, and the starting quarterback gets injured for a few plays. The coach puts in a backup who has barely played. […]
When I was in high school in college, I worked a lot of different part-time jobs in the restaurant industry, usually in the back of the house. And in fact, a lot of the lessons that I still use today, I learned from that industry. You might’ve seen my relate these lessons in some of […]
When I was a newer driver, I found there was a specific situation that was creating a lot of stress and anxiety for me. This is whenever I was in line, in a car, at a stop sign to turn right. Now in a situation like this, you look to the left (in the United […]
Something I’ve started to hear more and more lately is “just use common sense in your decision making”. Well, the problem is, you’d be surprised at how much gap there is between different people’s definition of common sense. So here’s an example. I spilled some juice on the counter the other day and I went […]
Following up on this post. I was discussing this post with someone who was giving me feedback, and their comment was, “well yeah nothing happened, but that’s because the consequences weren’t big enough. What if the driver had been seriously injured?” So I thought about that while I was writing the post, as in, what […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 