It doesn’t matter how sure you are that this is a winning ticket, the ticket doesn’t care.
And there are lots of lotteries in our lives.
I was talking to a fifteen-year old the other day. He’s decided to devote the next decade of his life to getting drafted to play in the NBA.
Without a doubt, effort and skill make a huge impact on whether you’ll even make the final 5,000 people who have a shot at making the NBA. But after that, it looks a lot more like a lottery than a meritocracy.
The resilient approach is to bring discipline and effort to the work, but to know, deep down, that you better have a plan B. That’s not a lack of faith. That’s simply smart.
December 3, 2022
Every small business needs a bookkeeper, but few take appropriate advantage of accounting.
Accounting is a way to turn organized books into insight. Particularly:
- It can help us make decisions. Any data that isn’t going to help you make a decision is worth ignoring. More granularity isn’t better granularity.
- It can help us understand our cash flows. In any given moment, we know very little about a business. But over time, we can see how assets and expenses flow–and that flow is insight about what we own, what it’s worth and what could improve (see #1.)
- It can implement systems that build trust. When we know who is spending what and when and why, it’s easier stop micromanaging and focus on #1 instead.
- We can get better at predicting the future. Budgets based on past experiences are more likely to be accurate than those we simply make up in the moment.
December 2, 2022
Even with the powerful Ecosia engine, but especially with Google and Amazon, it’s getting rarer and rarer that a search feels as though it finds just the right site or product or information on the very first try. There are a few reasons for this:
- Our expectations are higher. Even a good search doesn’t feel the way it used to. Amaze us a few times and we get hooked on being amazed. It’s tough to top the extraordinary results that we became used to. In the last two years, I’ve done 10,000+ searches on Ecosia, so it’s easy to get jaded.
- The search engines are selling us out. They’ve discovered that selling ads to entities who lose at a given search is pretty profitable, so the non-organic results that are crowding out our searches are of course not as good as the ones we would have found for ‘free’.
- The manufacturers of products and the creators of sites are getting better and better at gaming the search engines. Not just fake books on Amazon that pretend to be what you were after, but entire product lines and industries built with winning at search as their core competency. You see it in any media ecosystem where search is profitable. Organizations built on more, want more.
- Lack of competition. Once a big organization wins at something, they shift their focus and work to profit from it, not improve it. Instead of fighting #3 and walking away from #2, the leaders at search are becoming complacent.
In the Northern Hemisphere, it gets dark in December.
And worldwide, people buy gifts for whatever holidays they celebrate, and a lot of them are around the corner.
For both reasons, books!
The Carbon Almanac was an Amazon Editor’s choice, a Do Lectures top 100 choice, a bestseller in every country it has been released in and ideal for anyone over the age of ten.
Several organizations are buying a copy of the Almanac for their annual gifts, and if enough of us share enough copies, the world will change. It already is.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a magical romp, a heartbreaking love story and a ton of fun.
The Flavor Equation is a terrific cookbook and also a useful inquiry into taste. The audiobook was free with my membership, but I confess that the hardcover is a lot more useful and a better gift too.
Kafka on the Shore is a mind-bending coming-of-age story, and the audiobook is simply perfect.
All the Birds in the Sky is poignant, fun and it will make you think. A lot.
The Very Nice Box is a lovely book with a message that will resonate.
Whether it’s by candlelight or on a beach, I hope you have a lovely end to the year.
December 1, 2022
The problem with winning all the marbles is that the game is then over. And owning all the marbles is not really worth the effort if it means no one else has a chance going forward.
And quick money? It pales in comparison with money earned over time for a job well done.
