Month: September 2022

The broad outline of the training cycle at the gym I patronize is a few months of exercise programming and then tests to measure your benchmark numbers for a series of main lifts. At the conclusion of the most recent cycle none of my numbers increased. I largely blame my second bout of COVID for this, but there was a major decrease in one lift that was due to something else, something positive. That something is the subject of this post.

My hamstring flexibility has always been limited. I’ve never had any serious muscular injury, but this lack of flexibility has been and is a problem. I’m working to address this both through a dedicated stretching routine and through placing special emphasis on loading my hamstrings during weighted exercises. A key aspect of this is going through the full range of motion of the squat, something I haven’t really done in the past. Given the limitations of my hamstrings, I can lift less going through the full range of motion than if I only went through half or three-quarters of it. This caused the number on the board to go down quite dramatically. Now, though, I’ll be able to consistently perform the full exercise at weight ranges where I might finally improve my strength and flexibility after a long period of stagnation.

It’s not enough just to track metrics. For starters, you need to track the things that actually matter. This is not easy and something of a trial and error process. Then, once you home in on the correct things to measure, you need to measure them accurately so you aren’t lying to yourself. This can be even harder. Lifting weights offers some easy metrics—how much weight and how many reps. Most things aren’t so simple, but I was deluding myself to my detriment even with easy metrics available. Let this be a reminder that both measuring the right things and being accurate in your measurements matter if you want to improve something.

One of my tasks today is to mark up a purchase agreement, a routine part of my work. I have already skimmed it and know what is ahead of me. Actually, I didn’t even need to skim it to know what I’ll face. It will be a document designed to achieve three purposes: to catch out the unwary; to anchor to aggressive positions; and to increase legal bills. Never mind that time kills deals and the attorneys on both sides know the final terms will not resemble those presented in the initial draft, going through the back-and-forth of sending redline after redline is the process of “negotiating” a contract. An entire economic model has been constructed around this process, the almighty billable hour.

Our value proposition is different. We charge our clients to deliver positive outcomes no matter how much of our time it takes. We also offer pricing certainty. Those are the things clients care about and why our model will prevail. It is the difference between delivering a process and delivering an outcome. I came across a blog post this week that presented a story illustrating this. I’ll reproduce part of the post here:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young boy. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00

Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

That story is apocryphal. Nonetheless, it really was the man’s knowledge that constituted all of his value, not his time. We take more time on our projects than did the old man in the story, but we too are in the outcomes business. And even though we have lost the business of potential clients who would prefer to pay for a process, the outcomes business is where we will stay.

I ate dinner at one of the many new-to-me restaurants in Raleigh over the weekend. It was the sort of meal made possible by a visit from my parents as the restaurant serves small plates and you need multiple people to sample enough of the menu to get the full experience. The restaurant is only a few blocks from my apartment and I had walked past it many times but never eaten there. From the outside the entrance is only large, unadorned wooden doors. Inside, the space opens up into a two story dining area looking into an open kitchen. The back wall is the Instagram bait of the restaurant’s décor, a collection of Chihuly style glass in every color of the rainbow displayed from floor to ceiling.

We ordered dishes with flavors from all over the Mediterranean, from Spain to Greece to Morocco to Israel. Some were better than others, and for me the best were the short rib and the lemon potatoes, but we ended up eating in three courses as plates were brought out as they were ready. It is not normally the way I eat at restaurants, even with a group of people, but variety is good sometimes.

The food was good, though probably not good enough to justify another trip. There are, after all, many other restaurants to try in the Triangle. What was more notable, and why I chose to write about this restaurant, was that there was nothing about the place that indicated we were in Raleigh. Yes, the cuisine was Mediterranean, but that absence of place made the dining experience somewhat hollow. It may that be my own focus on trying to make this place my home that drew my attention to the way in which that restaurant would fit in perfectly well in Miami or New York, but that was my experience nonetheless.

Has anyone else felt something similar recently? I’d like some validation that I’m not the only one who has this observation that everything is becoming more and more similar regardless of where you are in the world.