Woolgathering # 154: The Answer to Keep in Your Back Pocket for Tough Questions
Plus: An enlightening brain-teaser involving cabbage,
Early on in my sales training, I had to sit down with engineers and learn about the technical side of what the company sells. The company I work for places a lot of emphasis on its technical aptitude and sells based on industry-leading technical services. So when I began talking with the senior engineers, I expected some definitive and informative answers to most of my questions.
Instead, I kept getting the same answer to quite a bit of them. In fact, I got the answer so often that it became a kind of inside joke among those of us training with the engineers. The answer I kept getting was: “it depends.”
I would ask the senior engineer what he would recommend in this case or that. He would say “it depends.” Inevitably, I would ask “on what?” To which he’d often reply, “what are the customer’s goals? What are their constraints? How strict are they about making changes?” And so on.
When I first heard it, I thought is was a cop-out — a way of avoiding blame if a recommendation was wrong. But as I continued to receive that answer, I realized that it wasn’t a cop-out. In fact, it was a sneaky way of encouraging me to stop looking for quick answers from supposed experts and start asking for more information from the people who would feel the most impact from whatever answer I gave.
Read This
A Sheep, a Wolf, and a Cabbage need to cross the river…
Better Humans founder and all-around helpful guy Tony Stubblebine wrote about an interesting riddle in his newsletter.
A guy with a canoe is trying to get a sheep, a wolf, and a cabbage across a river. But his canoe is only big enough to fit himself and one other thing. How can he get all three across the river without the wolf eating the sheep or the sheep eating the cabbage? (The guy can’t leave the wolf alone with the sheep or the sheep alone with the cabbage.)
Not too easy, eh?
Scroll to the bottom of the link above for the solution. It’s really helpful in reframing how we approach problems. The most straightforward and linear solutions are not always the most effective ones. It’s helpful to keep that in mind.
The Tyranny of Ideas
By Nadia Eghbal
A really fun essay on the relationship between ideas and people. We may think we come up with ideas, but Eghbal’s take on this is a better one: ideas jump into our heads, and use us as vessels to get where they’re going. We can very easily lose control of the ideas we thought we had come up with. At that point they become public, and then they control the so-called creators. The question then becomes how people who “came up with” ideas can avoid becoming slaves to them.
Being In Time
by Paul Bloom
If given the choice between having already had a long, painful experience 2 days ago, and having a painful experience tomorrow—which would you choose? The former, right? But why? Why do we favor our future selves over our past ones? Is there a recipe for a good life hidden in the answer?
This piece from the New Yorker is chock-full of excellent paradoxes of identity and rationality—as well as data from various studies on how we view time. You’ll never look at yourself the same way again.
Listen to This
How to Choose the Right Budget for You
This is a great succinct podcast episode that provides an overview of 3 different budgeting methods for personal finance. The 50/30/20 method, the reverse budget, and zero-based budgeting are all covered well enough to get you started. If you’re looking to simplify your budget, or just start one, this is a great place to start.
Watch This
Dopesick - A Limited Series on Hulu
Here's a great binge watch for you, that's revealing about human psychology, marketing, and how quickly helping can end up hurting. It's a limited series (8 episodes) that follows the opioid addiction epidemic in the U.S. across 25 years, and through the vantage point of several different groups of affected people.
There's Richard Sackler of Purdue Pharma—out to get out from under his father's shadow by creating a ‘wonder-drug’ he thinks can end the epidemic of untreated pain. There's the compassionate doctor in the small coal-mining town who doesn't like prescribing narcotics, and the young, ambitious pharmaceutical sales rep that convinces him that this one is different. There's the young coal miner who injures her shoulder, but needs to keep working despite the pain, and it destroys her life. There's the U.S. Attorneys and DEA agent whose lives become utterly consumed by figuring out if there's a case for fraud and malice tied up in all of this.
It's well written, well directed, well acted, and just great viewing. And it's all based on real events.
A Question to Ponder
What systems are you a part of, and how can you leverage them to your advantage?
There are systems working all around us. From ecological systems to social systems, financial systems to mechanical systems. We are parts of these systems. And these systems are parts of other, larger systems. They each have their own inputs, outputs, processes, momentum, and cycles.
The more you can learn about the systems that are a part of your daily existence and how they work, the more power you have to change your life. There are some systems at work in your life that you can opt out of. Simply wait for the cycle to finish, and remove yourself from that cycle. There are other systems whose momentum can carry those who grab on at the right time and point of entry. If you can recognize where the momentum and points of entry are, you can make progress with much less exertion.
But don’t restrict your thinking to external systems that you’re a part of. There are systems within you, as well. Your thinking habits, patterns of behavior, and default emotional responses are all systems—or parts of systems. These are systems you can identify, tinker with, and change the outputs of. You can leverage your tendency to get restless right before bed by keeping a notebook next to your bed, and writing all your racing thoughts down to review in the morning. You might find that you tire yourself out more easily, and as a bonus, gain insights from reading through your racing thoughts in the calm of the next morning.
Examples like that abound. But the point is simple. Learn about the systems in your life. Find out how to work with them rather than against them. Change them from within or leverage their momentum to get your desired outputs.
A Quote
“Success consists in staggering from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”
- Unknown
(though often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill)