Josh Allred's Blog

A gallon jar of pickles from Walmart can be purchased for $4. Incredible!

This is one of the crowning achievement of the industrial economy: Stuff is cheap. Now more than ever.

But there are hidden costs for every gallon jar of pickles.

The service is lousy. The wait time to talk to a customer service rep is longer. The shopping cart wheels are falling off.

For stuff to get cheaper, companies need to find ways to shave a little here and little there. Until, one day, they don’t even recognize who they are or what they stand for.

If you are not happy with the service or the product, that is fine. No product or service is for everyone. But don’t complain when the checkout lines are long and the cashiers are not friendly. You are paying for that privilege.

1. We fail to plan.

2. We fail to follow the plan.

3. We fail to revise the plan when the circumstances change.

The tactics rarely have anything to do with why we fail. Buying fancy exercise equipment is fine but it does not actually work by itself. You have to pedal.

Tactics can change as new information is gathered. The cost of failure for starting with the wrong tactic has never been cheaper. What is essential is learning to decide. We have to decide to push through the dip—the hard part—where most people quit.

We also need to decide how were going to make things better. And there is no way to make things better without first doing something different.

Many of us have been suckered into seeing only what the world has given us. We are fixed. Worst, we are stuck.

The world is full possibilities. They are endless. We just need to stop living a status below our potential.

The moment gifts stop moving from one hand to another is when they stop being gifts, they becomes commodities.

Commodities are closely monitored. Their exchanged for equal value. This for that. There is no balance left in the transaction. It’s fair and square. Even Steven. This form of exchange drives us apart. There is no generosity. Without generosity there is no connection to bring us closer together.

What a waste.

When gifts come your way consider moving them forward. (I don’t like the phrase “pay it forward” because it insinuates you have to pay.) Take less than what you need, contribute more than you should.

You may be surprised to discover that when you feed the network often enough, the network turns around and feeds you back.

Toward the center of our brains is the limbic system. The limbic system controls our feelings but it has no capacity for language. Language is controlled by the outside part of our brain in the frontal cortex.

What’s fascinating is that this voice in our head comes after a decision has been made, after the chemicals have kicked in.

The thing is no matter how much we try we can’t bargain with this narration. The brain has already made a decision.

The best we can do is learn to ignore the voice in our head when it is subverting us from doing our best work.

We tend to believe that human thought is consciousness and that our emotions can be separated from these thoughts.

This isn’t true.

Our thoughts lead to emotion and emotion leads to thoughts.

Our brains are also wired to try to make sense of the world by assigning value to auspicious and trivial events, creating expectations. Cause and effect. These expectations are what drive emotion.

The result, of course, is that we end up using logic and sound reasoning to justify the decisions we have already made. Basically, we seek re-assurance so that we can make ourselves feel better.

The fact that life changing goals are so hard to achieve is precisely why they are so meaningful.

If it was easy everyone would be doing it.

You might be in charge of a movement or a budget or a company.

However, people are not the same as code on a computer or numbers on a spreadsheet or names on a clipboard.

Control over projects doesn’t mean you get control over people.

Like it or not, we are all risk managers. Human beings spend an enormous amount of time trying to eliminate the risk we face in every situation. We want guarantees and re-assurances.

We live in the safest world in human history. Yet, we still find ourselves waiting for the fear of failure to go away before we will start living our lives. Fear is never going to go away. So, we’re stuck, waiting for a day that will never come.

The answer then is not waiting for the day to come when market conditions are perfect or the environment to be completely free of risk, but to learn to dance with the fear, to reduce risk to a level that will allow you to continue to play the game if you fail.

Heading to Vegas, betting your entire 401K on Red 13 is a game of high risk/high reward. The cost of failure could be crippling.

On the other hand, failing to close a sale might mean embarrassment or shame. But it probably won’t cost you your job, you will still find a way to pay the mortgage, you won’t end up on the streets, you are not going to starve to death (even though we think we will).

If failure isn’t an option than neither is success.

This might work. This might not work. But you won’t know until you try.

The thing about truth is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

We can’t fix problems unless we admit they exist.

It is difficult to convince organizations to restructure and change the way they do business when we blame people for our problems. But often, if we look hard enough, we will find that it is the system in place that allows for these type of errors to keep reoccurring.

Sakichi Toyoda with Toyota developed the Five Whys method, asking why over and over again until a root cause was identified.

Why is this customer unsatisfied?
Why did the product not ship on time?
Why are the sale staff making promises they can’t keep?
Why are these sales goals so high?
Why don’t we adjust them?

Why is my son flunking math?
Why is he getting poor test scores?
Why is he not doing his homework?
Why is he locking himself in his room?
Why is he spending so much time online?

As a rule, ask why at least five times until you have actually uncovered some kind of underlining cause of the challenges you are facing.