Bee Stings and Beer
When I was a kid, I was deathly afraid of bees. Or, more specifically, I was afraid of bee stings. This is somewhat interesting, because I didn't get stung by a bee until I was in seventh grade...but I was afraid of bees long before that happened. Just the fact that my parents told me about this particular insect, that could stick a needle out of its butt on command and use it to pierce...
Good Judgment and Bad
Being human means being susceptible...to erring, to caffeine addictions, and to doing stupid things in order to impress members of the opposite sex. Judgment sneaks in there, too. We're an opinionated animal, so it's rare for us to sit completely on the fence without falling onto one side of any given debate. This isn't always a bad thing. Judgment is bad not when it's wrong, but when it isn't constructive. Judgment will let you find...
Railroaded!
I've dealt with a fair number of salespeople in my time. Some of them come across as being high-pressure and manipulative, while others come across as being reasonable and helpful. What differentiates the two? The question matters, I think, even if you don't happen to work in a company sales department or in retail, because all of us are salespeople at certain points in our lives. When was your last job interview? How well did...
Conclusion Du Jour
There are a few very simple lessons that I hope people take away after they read they stuff I've been writing on here, and one of them is: don't take your own ideas that seriously. Economists call it the endowment effect, which basically says that we tend to place a higher value on things once they're in our possession. We're loss averse, and while that's a great survival tactic, it can become a hindrance if...
A Skeptic's Meme
I came across this short video today:
A Watched Pot
Brilliant in its simplicity, and funny to boot.
In the Marketplace
Nobody's selling used stuff as with as much gusto, effort, and enthusiasm as new stuff. Manufacturers create new widgets and incentivize their sales force to peddle them. Outside of the Antique Roadshow, we usually don't place a whole lot of value on old and used junk, even if we are able to use it. The kitchen stuff at your local Salvation Army doesn't have a snowball's chance against the goods at Sur La Table. In...
What We Deserve
There are some days when I wake up, days when my head isn't so far up my own ass that I take everything I have for granted, and I start to wonder how I got so lucky as to be where I am. I start to question whether or not I deserve everything that I have. Deserve is a funny word, because it's a means of evaluating the balance between the merits of one's actions...
Selling the Snake
My friend Brad owns somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 snakes. He lives in a single room in house with other people. In that little room he has a few dozen drawers, cubbyholes, and terrariums where the snakes live, and right smack dab in the middle of it all is the bed where the sleeps. It's an interesting place to visit. (I sometimes wonder how often he brings girls home from the bar and, when...
Standing Out
Most of us haven't been trained to recognize a good idea when it strikes us, or to pursue a new path. If my twenty or so years of education taught me anything, it was to follow and comply with the authority figures in my life. Stay in line, don't speak too loudly, and you won't end up being humiliated in front of the rest of your classmates. It was in seventh grade math, when my...
Local Police Department
I keep the local police department and fire department non-emergency phone numbers programmed into my phone. It's pretty easy to remember 9-1-1 in an emergency, but for little things, I find it pays to keep those numbers handy, because for something small and insignificant, I'm going to have to overcome a lot of inertia to track them down. A few months ago I was walking down the street and came across a trash can that...