Month: November 2020

I said I would get a thing today at the store. I didn’t.

It is still today. Go get it.

EDIT: I went. (If you want to feel good, just do what you said you would do.)

Interesting side effects. This was a trip to the local Rite-Aid.

First: I went because I wanted to buy a simple, commodity product. They didn’t have it or at least it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that they had it. I bought a substitute. And got a small measure of hell for it when I got home.

Second: inventory is sparse in all departments. I went down one aisle and there was 20 feet of empty steel shelves. That’s expensive to leave commercial shelving empty in a big store. It’s 20 feet of things you will never sell. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t make, etc. Light bulbs? Pathetic selection and quantity.

Is Rite-Aid as a company suffering? Is this store in particular suffering? Is this only a temporary condition? Or is there a deeper problem? I must say that I hate going into this Rite-Aid and always have.

Time to do a bit of research. And maybe some tentative short-selling.

EDIT 2. The message boards say Rite-Aid (ticker RAD) is in trouble. The Rite-Aid website’s newsfeed is full of incoherent prose written by AI. People coming and going at the executive top level. A debt restructuring. Some sort of new mission for the company to be holistic or some bullshit.

Zombies are running Rite-Aid.

Isn’t this interesting is that reality laughs at a publicly-traded company? Well, not at a company as such, but at the people who volunteer to be part of a group that engages in commercial activities.

Lying (by the high-level executives and the Board of Directors) leads to collective ruin. It’s like the young Lieutenant, straight out of the Naval Academy, leading his platoon of Marines to disaster, ignoring the hard-earned, practical wisdom of his men. (Famously, newly-minted Marine officers don’t know how to operate a compass. Check out /r/usmc for a fun read.)

I’m sure there are people working at Rite-Aid who see what is happening and know how to prevent disaster. There’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

Get out, people. Save yourself. When zombies take over you must flee, lest you die or become a zombie yourself. If you’re optimizing to get the best severance package you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.

I think, in one thing (a physical possession), I’m there. For now.

Enough is not a number. Funny, though, in this case, I made my decision based on a number. The number is an unspecified few thousand. And the number is higher (by about a thousand) than the number I had originally set in my head.

Still doing it daily.

Watch out for doing stuff in the name of “getting ready” or “getting smarter” or any other phrase you can think of.

You’re doing things today for stuff that might or might not happen tomorrow. And what you do today, in preparation, may or may not be relevant to what may or may not happen tomorrow.

Nothing is at all wrong with being prepared, having contingencies, etc. Risk only exists in the future.

But don’t be dumb about this. Don’t be like those preppers who stockpile 50,000 rounds of ammo to be ready when the SHTF. If and when the SHTF, your 50,000 rounds of ammo won’t matter. There are hidden risks in SHTF situations that you are not accounting for and you can’t even see. And there are some risks that don’t even exist yet so they can’t be seen.

Action now. That is what matters. Take territory, consolidate your position, and build buffers. Move forward, become antifragile, move forward again.

Being antifragile is action, reaction, movement, adjustment. Stay put, hunker down, protect? That’s fragile, but it looks robust to you. “This extensive fortification you built looks good, Monsieur Maginot. France is secure. Let’s go have a cocktail.”

A great real-life vignette in a short blog post to show the point.

There is a reason this man is a success: he sees and he acts. He has eyes to see, ears to hear.

You might quibble with my use of the word “success”. Where he lives, what he does for a living, what he believes. These things might not meet your criteria for success.

You would be wrong. You are judging his life by your personal yardstick. And when you do that, you close yourself off to learning new things.

Happy is action. Happy is doing. The journey is the destination.

Life is 10,000,000 micro choices, one after another.

How am I going to choose a career, make a living, find a mate, raise a family?

It’s ridiculous to think you can make some sort of central planner’s five year plan for yourself. It’s daily, hourly choices. One at a time.

Find a North Star. Keep walking toward it, around obstacles, getting lost then back on course again.

What’s a North Star? Look for what people have valued since antiquity.

What am I living for? The Mark-Almond Band answers that question, if you listen carefully to the song.

Be a dad. That’s a good start. it’s been done before. That should be a good enough signal to you that it is a worthwhile path.

That song is a song of despair, but that’s wrong.

Why am I living, why am I giving all my life

To bring up a family, children, and wife

Listen my friend, its been done before

What am I living for?

There is no “living for”. That’s the ego talking. And the fact that it has been done before tells you that it is worthwhile for you. Ask a random dad whether being a parent is good. Odds are you will get a honest answer.

This dawned on me.

Writing stuff here is a way of coaching myself.

Self exhorting self to action.

Self reminding self of insights, quickly written down before The Forgetter vanishes a lesson learned.

Note: not, by the way, self revealing self to self. Revelations about self can only come from outside of self. A catalyst of some kind is required, which may be from a book, a person, etc.

If I am open-minded and willing to accept truth, the catalyst will lead me to see who I am, or what I think. And then I can see who I am and make a change.

It’s hard to be open-minded. Willing? That’s easier. Even if I’m stuck, I can get unstuck if I am willing.

This happened today. A life insurance salesman wants to network. He didn’t present himself as a life insurance salesman, of course. They never do.

I talked to him. He set up a call with someone he knows that would be a good contact for me. Sure. I talk to that person.

His process is to be an Introducer. Introduce me to all sorts of people. He is a “shake the box and see what happens” marketer.

He has been on me to do more schmooze calls. I have put him off. Finally I sent him an email asking if he is real and what he is doing. And why. And followed up with a call.

I asked him whether we had a definite purpose with the schmoozing, and explained the four types of luck and how I don’t want to play in type 1 or 2.

His response was to say he’s “not a throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks” person. And then he proceeded to throw spaghetti against my wall to see if any of it stuck.

He is what he said he isn’t. He did what he said he never does.

This is the same as someone who loudly proclaims his own honesty. That is a clue that you are dealing with a dishonest person. An honest person just is.

How do you keep yourself open to serendipity from the universe without burning all of your time on bullshit activities with bullshit people? I confess I don’t have an answer.

Maybe “no meetings unless transactional”? Push all meeting requests to calls? And push calls to emails, emails to text messages, and text messages to nothing?

Anyway, that’s a business question.

Live your life by seeking what is real.

As soon as someone self-declares a personal attribute, assume the opposite is real unless a string of actions over time confirms the truth of the assertion.

And if you smell someone playing the type 1 or type 2 luck game, know that they don’t understand reality the same way I do.

Help them to see what you see, if you can, but if that doesn’t work stay away from them. Some people don’t have eyes to see, ears to hear.