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“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
Henry David Thoreau
Two men lay wounded on the same field and the one with rank was carried first.
A man who could have been saved bled out behind a man whose wound could have waited.
Dominique-Jean Larrey served as surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon’s armies through 25 campaigns and 60 battles. He had more wounded men than surgeons, so the order was the only thing he controlled.
He threw rank out and sorted by injury instead, regardless of title or nationality:
- The gravely wounded who might recover went first
- Soldiers who could survive a wait, waited
- Those whose wounds were likely fatal were treated last
Alexander Kotov wrote down a method for choosing a chess move in 1971. Before you move, build a list of the moves worth considering. Work through each one until you reach a definite conclusion on it.
His instruction before any move: look at the whole board, rather than the square where the last one landed.
I started sorting my tasks against each other around 2018, after getting back into chess.
A few weeks ago, a teammate wanted us to write execution playbooks at Trends.vc: step-by-step guides to building in the markets our reports surface.
He brought me that plan with nothing ranked beside it.
So I pulled up the bets we could make, ranked against each other. Near the top was a PS: one line at the bottom of the emails we already send, going out millions of times a year. The playbooks needed building from scratch, so they landed well down the page.
Henry Singleton played blindfold chess at near-grandmaster level as an old man. He ran Teledyne without a five-year plan.
Warren Buffett called Singleton’s capital deployment record the best in American business.
Teledyne started in 1960 on $225,000 of Singleton’s own money and compounded at 20.4% a year against the S&P’s 8%. He gave analysts no guidance and held no quarterly calls.
“My only plan is to keep coming to work. I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan ahead way into the future.”
Henry Singleton, to BusinessWeek
I re-rank my list often. Singleton steered each day against conditions he said nobody could predict.
The more options you rank, the better the one you pick.
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What would you do first if each option competed?
