View from the Mountain

Are People Really this Dumb?

The photograph in this post is actually the pocket of a tee-shirt that I bought on sale this past winter.  I didn't pay a lot of attention to the tee-shirt when I purchased it.  The price was right, and it was one of the shades of blue that I like.

This weekend I got so many of my tee-shirts dirty that I got down to a new level in the pile, and this new shirt was the one that came up for me to wear after my shower.  I didn't think about it a lot until I saw the warning label when unfolding the shirt.

It is really hard for me to believe that anyone would think that it was possible to use a tee-shirt as a navigational aid.

But it is even harder to imagine that a company would be worried about being sued for someone having a shipwreck from using a tee-shirt to navigate.

There are a lot of strange things that happen every day, but this is one of the weirder things that I have seen.

I am just going to hope that this is a temporary bit of insanity invading the Southern Outer Banks.

We have enough challenges in our little piece of paradise without worrying about lawyers suing people over navigational tee-shirts.

There is plenty of room for people on the Crystal Coast, but I would hope that we can keep the number of tee-shirt lawyers at zero.

Mistakes can make you stronger

There are people who will never admit a mistake. In their mind, it is better to deny the obvious than to look weak by having been wrong.

You can count most politicians among that group.  I have run across people who are positive they have never made a mistake in just about all professions.

Some people just really have a hard time saying, "I am sorry, I made a mistake, it will not happen again."  There are corporations where admitting a mistake can seem like career suicide.  The whole culture of Apple is built around Steve Jobs never being wrong.

The interesting thing is that being in an enviroment where making mistakes is not the end of the world is often better than being in place where mistakes are swept under the carpet and ignored.

Everyone makes mistakes, and as I used to tell my team members, the first time you do something wrong is actually a learning experience if you are wise enough to see what has happened.  Only when you do the same wrong thing a second time have you made a real mistake by not learning from your own experience.

We all learn by trying things and figuring out what works and what doesn't work.  We run into trouble when we refuse to admit that our best efforts haven't accomplished what we intended for them to do.

It is then that you can easily get trapped into doing the same wrong thing over and over.  When you objectively look at what you have done and decide that there must be a better way to accomplish your goals, you have made some progress.

When you stubbornly refuse to abandon what is clearly a wrong-headed effort, you end up causing yourself embarrassment and then often the problem spreads to others.

Mistakes can be fatal, but more often than not the bigger problem is an attitude that cannot admit to making a mistake.

In a certain sense admitting to a mistake frees you from the mistake and gives you a chance to redeem yourself.

Trying to blame someone else for your mistakes is an exercise in arrogance and futility, but in our world it is something that we see every day.

The next time you have screwed up, trying apologizing and making a best effort to do better the next time.  You might be surprised at how liberating it is.

 

Charting your own course

When I grew up, I was the first of my family to go away to college.  There was no one in the family to offer suggestions on what to do or how to handle my education.  I managed to get my degree in four years because part of my upbringing was to finish anything that I started.  I also knew that my getting a college degree was very important to my mother who had made some sacrifices to make sure I got the best education possible.

After college I headed off on my own little adventure which took me to the shores of Nova Scotia and eventually to a Canadian snowbelt in central New Brunswick.  While my degree had nothing to do with farming or raising cattle, I ended up doing just that for ten years.

Running a farm in the wilderness essentially by yourself teaches you a lot of things.  One vital lesson is that if a chore is going to get done, you might as well suck it up and get to it.  When there is no one else to do the work, you tackle it whether you are well, sick, or just plain tired. 

The weather also doesn't matter.  It can be blazing hot riding a tractor in the summer and freezing cold in the winter, but the job still has to be done whether it is feeding the 200 head of cattle in a blizzard or haying when you don't feel so well, the only option is to finish the job.

However, the most important lesson I learned is that your own motivation isn't going to come from anywhere but yourself.  Back when there were a number of jobs still being advertised, it was not unusual to see ones calling for a "self-starter."

Trust me, when it is minus 40, the cows need to be fed, and there is over a mile of new snow 24 inches deep that needs to be moved first, only the self motivated folks pull on their insulated suit and head out the door.

Being self motivated served me well in my career even after the farm because I often worked remotely from corporate offices.  I never found it challenging to get up and go to work or even to work late hours to finish whatever job that needed doing without supervision.

I did learn along the way that corporate America, especially companies like Apple, know how to pick people willing to work until they drop. At some point you have to get some balance in your life and make certain that you give those you love some undivided attention.

I also figured out that as you get older, most companies don't really care how well you do your job, they mostly think about how much you cost, and whether or not they might be able to replace you with someone less expensive or perhaps a little more willing to hew the corporate line.

To be successful in sales, you end up walking a fine line between the customer and company.  If you have developed great customers over time, you respect their views, and often some products which come down the corporate pike aren't exactly as advertised. 

Sometime the good stuff which customers really want isn't available and the corporation wants you to force feed your clients products which might not meet their needs. 

That is a recipe for disaster. The longer you are in a corporate sales position, the more resistant you get to doing things which might harm a client relationship that has taken years to build.

There are times it comes down to doing what the corporation wants you to do or doing the right thing. Fortunately for my conscience, I have always tried to come down on the side of doing the right thing.

However, I think that is an easy decision to make if you have charted your own life.  Picking that fine line of doing what is the closest to being right for everyone is never easy, but I believe you get better with practice.

Having parents or bosses that make every decision for you is no way to learn how to find the right path for your life.

Making your own decisions, taking responsibility for them, and living with the results is the essence of being an adult. Those who know how to make decisions and live with the results make the world a little better place to live.

It is a lot easier to enjoy the stunning natural world around us and your life in it if you have taken charge of that same life.