A lot of successful athletes aren’t the oldest among their siblings. They’re often the youngest. I think this is because the younger siblings see what’s possible earlier and they start arriving for it earlier. They are trying to catch up with their peers, while the first born child started life having no peers in their …
Author Archives: Mitch
Some scars are forever
About 15 years ago, I broke my leg playing soccer. It was a bad break, a compound or open fracture, which means the bone broke through the skin. I stopped screaming of pain only because I was tired of screaming. It hurt. I had surgery and they put a metal pin in my leg and …
You can’t wait until you know everything for certain
Here’s a good quote from Amazon’s founder: “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is …
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People aren’t always going to do what you want them to do
My kids were playing with Magnatiles when the 2-year-old smashed the structure the 5-year-old had built. He was really upset and further upset that she didn’t apologize even after I asked her too. And, while not pleasant, that’s a good lesson to learn early in life: People aren’t always going to do what you want …
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What do you notice?
For the first time in my life, I am paying for house cleaners and gardeners. It’s nice and it saves me time and effort but sometimes I feel like I’m paying just for them to clean our bathroom and mow our lawn. They do much more than that, but that’s what I tend to notice …
“I grew up this morning.”
I visited my parents this weekend with my kids and my 2-year-old daughter can now reach the water of the bathroom sink when she’s on a stool. I said something about reaching that milestone and she said, “I grew up this morning,” meaning that she grew taller this morning. It seemed like a silly thing …
Maybe you’re singing the wrong song
I came across this YouTube video of Shaheen Jafargholi, a young Welsh boy, auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent. He starts to sing Valerie by Amy Winehouse and sings it for about 15 seconds before host Simon Cowell cuts him off and asks him to stop. He tells him, “You got this really wrong.” Simon continues, …
The way to win in the long run is to have a long run
In poker, you might make a good decision, one that has a chance of winning 2 out of 3 times over the long run but if the 1 in 3 times that you don’t win comes first, then you had better make sure that you don’t bet all your chips on that hand. If that …
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Be conservative while you still can be conservative
In Texas Hold ’Em Poker, there are forced bets that move around the table clockwise and the amount of these forced bets goes up over time. This means that the longer you play, the fewer chips you will have, even if you never play a hand. When you get low on chips, you have fewer …
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Talk yourself into it
I think we’re too good at talking ourselves out of things. It won’t work because of X, Y, and Z. Let’s practice talking ourselves into things. It might work, because of A, B, and C. Oh, and we forgot about ñ, ø, and é! It might just work. Let’s give it a chance to work.