Jason Fried Oct 19 2012 Link

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.

Reading this brought to mind a quote by Norman Schwarzkopf:

When placed in command, take charge. Project leaders are often called on to make decisions without adequate information. As a result, they may put off deciding to do anything at all. That’s a big mistake, said Schwarzkopf. Decisions themselves elicit new information. The best policy is to decide, monitor the results, and change course if necessary.

We’ve seen clients make so many changes and take so long to deliberate a single solution – that the project never gets done. As per Schwarzkopf, the project could have been produced, executed, modified, analyzed and repeated (or not) as necessary. And something – success, a different tact, new data, even failure – would have been learned and folded into a new strategy.

We love clients that are willing to look at new concepts, contradictions, the big picture, et al.  That said, a client who changes his/her mind (often and continuously) has to accept two important realizations:

1. Your project budget is now toast.* (We’re working on an hourly basis.)
2. Your project deadline is now toast.* (We may not make the due date, without invoking Rule No. 1 above.)

Other than that – let’s go!

*Definition of “Toast”: Destroyed, terminated, ceased functioning, ended abruptedly by external forces, as in “My car was toast after I hit that wall.” Source: Urban Dictionary

Men’s Journal By Sean Woods Oct 2014  Link

What’s the best advice you ever received from anyone?

Show up on time. If you didn’t show up 15 minutes exactly before your shift — if you were 13 minutes early — you lost the shift, you were sent home. The second time you were fired. It is the basis of everything. I make all my major decisions on other people based on that. Give the people you work with or deal with or have relationships with the respect to show up at the time you said you were going to. And by that I mean, every day, always and forever. Always be on time. It is a simple demonstration of discipline, good work habits, and most importantly respect for other people. As an employee, it was a hugely important expression of respect, and as an employer, I quickly came to understand that there are two types of people in this world: There are the type of people who are going to live up to what they said they were going to do yesterday, and then there are people who are full of shit. And that’s all you really need to know. If you can’t be bothered to show up, why should anybody show up? It’s just the end of the fucking world.

When should you say “No”?

I was offered a project years ago. It would have been spectacularly profitable franchise. And I went in with my partners, and we met with someone who’s very, very good at this business and would have no doubt made us spectacularly wealthy. We all emerged from the meeting and looked at each other, and I said, “Look, do you want to answer, when the phone rings, do you want to pick it up and have that guy on the other end? Do you want that person in your life? We’ll all be fucking miserable. I don’t want to go on that ride. I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero.” That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life.

What’s the best way to motivate other people?

Make them feel special. Create an esprit de corp, and a feeling that you are an elite, that even if you have the shittiest jobs within a large organization, you should feel proud of the fact that you’re part of something. Recognize excellence. Celebrate weirdness, and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can’t do. But also everybody needs to understand that there are certain absolutes; there is a certain line. That no matter how much I love you — you may be my favorite, but if you show up late, two days in a row, I’m sorry — but you’re going over the side.

How should you handle regret?

Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it. I’ve disappointed and hurt people in my life, and that’s just something I’m going to have to live with. If you made the basic decision that even in spite of your crimes, you are worth persevering, that it’s worth trying to get good things for yourself, even though you might not deserve them, then you eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life.