People are very bad at evaluating opportunity cost, in general. In both directions. They’ll do stuff that has way too high of an opportunity cost, and they won’t do stuff when the opportunity cost is practically zero.

Someone may say to you, “Hey, want to go do this weird thing with me today?” The wrong question to ask yourself is “Do I want to do this thing?” The correct questions is: “Do I have anything better to do?”

You probably don’t! So go do the thing. There’s a lot of potential upside and very little to lose.

If the scope of something you want to do isn’t working, remember that you don’t have to scale everything up or down proportionately.

If your workout routine isn’t meeting your goals, you don’t have to do more of everything. You can do the same routine more frequently, or you can do one of the exercises more but not the others, etc.

If you try to sell 10 luxury cars in a month and don’t make it, you can try to change just the model of car, or just the number, or just the timeframe.

The point is, if a project isn’t meeting its objectives, that doesn’t mean the whole thing needs to change. You can stretch and crop and adjust the levers individually.

Something is only “its own reward” if you want to do it. If you’re doing it because someone else is making you, they have to incentivize it.

A common thing I see in the business world is that senior leaders try to make mid-level managers do all this professional development, but they don’t reward it or support it. “You have to attend this manager training,” they say, but they don’t carve out any reduction in their work duties to go to it, they don’t promote people who take it, they don’t even make successfully completing it part of what they get evaluated on, let alone actually implementing it.

When the mid-level managers show up to those trainings as disengaged zombies, it’s no wonder. Senior leaders get angry, saying: “Don’t they want to invest in themselves professionally? That’s its own reward!“

Professional development is great. I do want to do it, because I want to be better at my vocation. But I want to be better at my vocation because my vocation is an input that generates other resources. So if I’m “investing in myself professionally,” it’s exactly that – an investment. I want it to pay off. And it will – one way or another, boss.

If you make your mid-level managers attend mandatory training in the way I’m describing, you get only one of two outcomes. Some people gain nothing from it and are annoyed, stressed, and less productive because of the experience. Others gain a lot from it and leave when you don’t reward them for it.

There’s no third person, the unicorn that says, “I’m so glad someone else decided my professional development path for me, made it mandatory, and then didn’t support or reward me in any way for doing it!”

But a lot of senior leaders seem to assume their staff is nothing but those unicorns. Do better. Because the reward is real: a team that works.

When germ theory was first introduced to doctors, they weren’t just skeptical. They were offended to the point of hostility. The suggestion that infections in surgical patients could be caused by germs on the doctors’ hands was an absolute insult. Their hands were clean, obviously! They were medical professionals who knew how to wash their hands, and to insinuate otherwise was dire slander.

Nowadays, we know better. Not only do we know that germ theory is correct, but we know that scientists like Louis Pasteur weren’t insulting the doctors. To point out that you have microscopic bacteria on your hands that you couldn’t have known about isn’t an example of fightin’ words. It’s a fact of the universe, and it was offered up in the sincere hope that the knowledge would help people overcome it. Once we know that our hands have infectious diseases on them that we can’t see but that can nonetheless threaten a patient’s life, we can take steps to eliminate those germs and protect the patient. Having germs on your hands doesn’t make you an unclean wretch. Only refusing to take responsibility once you know the truth should mark you as an enemy of progress.

Of course, I say “nowadays we know better… with germs. Sadly, we’re doing the exact same thing today in another sphere. Replace “doctors” with “leaders” and replace “germs” with “unconscious bias, heuristics, and mental noise” and you have a good approximation of the state of leadership today.

All humans have these “mental germs.” It’s a fact of our evolution, our psychology. It’s not an insult to say that a human is susceptible to recency bias any more than it’s an insult to say that humans are susceptible to having germs on their hands. But like the doctors of the 19th Century, the leaders of the 21st tend to get awfully mad when you suggest it.

The point, of course, isn’t to offend. When I run a training course on the halo/horns effect, I’m not telling leaders: “You shouldn’t be a manager of people because you, specifically, keep making this stupid mistake, dummy.” I’m telling them specifically how to overcome a dilemma that every single human has. I’m telling the doctors how to get rid of the germs.

Some doctors, of course, were more concerned with their status as gentlemen than they were with the potential harm to patients. And some leaders are more concerned with their position than they are with effectively leading people. I feel your pain, Louis.

We all want to believe that our minds, in their natural state, are as unbiased and rational as the doctors believed their hands were clean. But true responsibility to those under your care requires that you acknowledge that they need active sterilization in ways that don’t occur to you naturally. If you shirk that responsibility, then I am saying that you shouldn’t be a leader. If those are fightin’ words, so be it. I’m fighting for the people who count on you.

A small job done well is better than a big job done poorly, or not at all. Don’t judge your accomplishments by what you set out to do, judge them by what you actually did, and by how you did it. There are many small jobs, but only small people resent them.

Nobody can undermine you like you can. Self-sabotage is the most effective kind of sabotage there is. A shocking amount of progress and success can be had just from figuring out where you’re shooting yourself in the foot and stopping.

Imagine driving somewhere, in big rush. You’re in a hurry, so you think: “The best thing to do is get out of my own car and push it, to add speed.”

There’s a… sort of logic there? Pushing something generally does make it move, after all. But you’d be completely wrecking yourself. You’d give up steering for physical effort, and you’d lose the ability to add mechanical effort as well. Everything you wanted to do was best accomplished by you being a force multiplier. By directing the efforts of powerful resources instead of being a far less powerful one yourself.

This is what people often do as leaders. They “get out and push” and the whole thing moves more slowly. They create bottlenecks, they let the whole thing start veering off the road, they get themselves disconnected from the process. It’s a mess.

Stay in the driver’s seat. Recognize when the panicked impulse to push is misguided, which is pretty much always. Don’t undermine yourself.

Get to the hard stuff quickly. Don’t delay a punishment or a trial. Face all things at your most brave, and bravery is eroded by time more swiftly than any other feature or emotion. If you are ever shot by a firing squad, may they shoot you in the front.

Happy New Month, and happy St. Chalie’s Day.

Today is Superkid’s birthday. On the day he passed, those closest to him talked about what we wanted to do to honor him on this day. Chalie was a lot of things, but more than anything else, he loved people and he wanted them to be happy. He worked so hard to bring people together, to find common ground, to help people move past the things that kept them apart.

And so that’s what we’re doing today, and what I’ll make my new month’s resolution, too. To forgive people, to seek to be forgiven, and to get over the things that keep us apart. I love you, Chalie, and I miss you. And I’ll keep trying.