Brain Food – No. 567 – March 10, 2024
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Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives).
FS
“Your worst day is a chance to show your best qualities, to stand out, and to learn an enormous amount about yourself. Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best.”
— You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day
Insights
1.
“A vision gives a purpose to daily pursuits. A reason to push yourself out of bed each morning and do something. Without this purpose, it’s easy to drift.”
— Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’ coach
2.
“There was something heavy in me. … I wasn’t doing the right thing. I was just trying to copy exactly everything I had learned. And I think that happens in every craft in life. You’re young. You have a master. You want to emulate them, do what they do. But at some point in life, you have to turn around and say I have to find my own way in my own language.”
— Chef Francis Mallmann
3.
“I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need. From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.”
— Yvon Chouinard
Tiny Thoughts
1.
“We need to redefine “problems” into opportunities.
Problems are an opportunity to create value.
Problems are an opportunity to strengthen relationships.
Problems are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from others.
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.”
2.
“Talent and potential mean nothing if you can’t consistently do things when you don’t feel like doing them.”
3.
“If you’re not willing to look like an idiot in the short term, you will never look like a genius in the long term.”
(Share Tiny Thought one, two, or three, on X).
Positioning
Chris Davis tells me a powerful insight from Charlie Munger on keeping certain customers away:
“Charlie [Munger] made an interesting comment once when I was challenging him on this idea that there’s a certain number of customers that would go to a Costco if they didn’t have to be a member.
And so, I said, “Let’s say the membership fee is 2% of revenue. If you raised prices 2%, you would still be lower cost than anybody else, and yet you would have more customers. And because you had more customers, you’d have higher revenue. And so, it would seem to me that keeping customers out of your store that would otherwise be there is a mistake.”
Charlie’s insight was, “Think about who you’re keeping out. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken. Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize how they’re…” He said that cohort will have a hundred percent of your shoplifters and a hundred percent of your thieves. Now it’ll also have most of your small tickets. And that cohort relative to the US population will probably be shrinking as a percentage of GDP relative to the people that can do the math, that are responsible enough.”
— The entire conversation is full of rich insights you can use in work and life. Listen (Apple Podcasts | Spotify | FS) or go directly to the start of the excerpt above.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.S. A fun little puzzle to solve.