Brain Food: On When to Decide, Character, and Automatic Rules

FS | BRAIN FOOD

Hey ...

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a newsletter full of wisdom you can use.

FS

🎙️ Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric, on decision making:

"1,000 books get written about leadership and change and all that stuff. Knowing what to do isn’t that hard, knowing how to do it isn’t that hard. Knowing when to do it is really hard"

Leadership in a Crisis

▶️ Sometimes, it's hard to make decisions in the moment. You know what you want to do but you end up doing something else. You walked into dinner with your friends telling yourself that you weren't going to eat dessert and you walked out having devoured it. There is a way to make this easier. Pre-decide what you want to do and make it an automatic rule.

Explore Your Curiosity

★ "For all intents and purposes, a plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket. Conditions might be annoying and uncomfortable, but the plane is not going to crash. Turbulence is an aggravating nuisance for everybody, including the crew, but it’s also, for lack of a better term, normal. From a pilot’s perspective it is ordinarily seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue ... Over the whole history of modern commercial aviation, the number of jetliner crashes caused by turbulence, even indirectly, can be counted on one hand."

Turbulence

★ “It goes without much saying that burying themselves in medical textbooks is not exactly a common method of training for Olympians. Their competitors across the globe took a slightly different approach. ... “They eat, breathe and sleep fencing.” Kiefer and Meinhardt barely had time to sleep. Olympic fencers who are not also in medical school tend to practice five days a week.”

The Doctor Will Stab You Now

★ "[E]ven with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are costly to undo (it’s a lot easier to pour concrete than to unpour it), and are highly sequential (and thus time-sensitive). A building, for the most part, can’t be beta-tested to work the bugs out. Combined with the riskiness inherent of building large, heavy things that will be occupied by people (any failure becomes a potential life safety issue) and are heavily regulated, this means that any given process failure has the potential to completely derail your project.

Why It's Hard To Innovate in Construction

Insight

“Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling."

— Bill Belichick

Tiny Thought

Words are easy to say and hard to do.

While your words are how you see yourself, your actions are how other people see you.

Sponsored by MetaLab


MetaLab has helped some of the world’s top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day. You probably didn’t realize it at the time, but odds are you’ve used an app that they’ve helped design or build. Apps like Slack, Uber Eats, Facebook Messenger, Coinbase, and many more. Let them take your product idea and turn it into the next big thing. Check them out at metalab.com

Stay safe,

Shane

P.S. I love the craftsmanship involved in repairing this badly damaged watch.







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