The Rebel Allocator

by Jacob Taylor

“I feel a little sorry for this younger generation,” he said. “You have access to so much easy information and entertainment. It’s truly the best of times and the worst of times. With all of the electronic gizmos, there’s an overwhelming temptation to multitask. I’m not sure I would survive if I were you. I don’t have the willpower. I can see it in your faces that you’re dying to get on your phones and check the latest celebrity gossip. Here’s what my strategy would be if I were you: we each only have twenty-four hours in a day, no matter what’s in our bank account. What we focus on is what differentiates us. Every morning, ask yourself this question: ‘What’s the one thing I could work on today that if I did a good job, it would make everything else easier, or maybe even unnecessary?’ Keep four hours carved out of your calendar to work on that one answer. Make it sacred time with no interruptions. Put everything else away, including your phone and whatnot. Focus deeply during that four-hour stretch at making progress on your most important thing. I can guarantee you a huge advantage in life if you do this.

Most people overestimate what they can get done in a day, but radically underestimate what they can get done in a month… in a year… in a decade, with four hours of dedicated work. You could goof off the rest of the day and still run circles around your peers.

“Throughout your life, you should follow your own inner scorecard. What does that mean? Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think of you. Progress is only accomplished by those who are stubborn and a little weird. It’s easier said than done, but if you stay true to your own principles and follow your own inner scorecard, it’s your best shot at happiness.

What is leadership? ​“There are many definitions of leadership that are useful. Here’s my version: I view it as a five-step process. Step one: see a problem for what it is. Not worse than it is; not better than it is. I often ask myself ‘Why?’ three or four times to help drill down to the root problem. That’s what you want to address. The biggest mistake I find leaders make is not seeing for themselves. As Gorbachev supposedly told President Reagan, ‘It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.’” ​“Step two: have a vision of what could be. It often helps to have a strong why behind what you’re trying to improve. Where there’s a why, there’s a way. That motivation keeps you going when you want to quit. And I’ve found that just when everything looked darkest, victory and success were not far away. It just takes pushing through that last difficult patch.” “Step three: set high standards for yourself first. In just about every situation in life, you have to be willing to go first. Hold yourself to the highest standards.” “Step four: set high standards for others. Notice how you have to set high standards for yourself first? No one wants to follow a hypocrite. Expectations for others have to be clear and agreed upon.” ​“Finally, five: take action. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Yes, it’s important to make decisions supported by data, but realize you’re never going to have all the numbers to feel completely confident. You still have to move...

Leadership

The concept of yarak doesn’t apply to only falconry. Have you heard of the personal finance idea of ‘Pay Yourself First?’ Basically, you take money out of your account every month in an automated way to save for the future, and then you live on whatever’s left. Pay yourself first before you pay everyone else. Sometimes you have to get creative to make ends meet and not dip into your savings. You create an artificial constraint, a hunger, this state of yarak in yourself. Yarak sparks a creativity that can only be unlocked when your back is against the wall. You become the bird that has to hunt.” Through

Business is very competitive, and the difference between the Hall of Fame and the graveyard can be remarkably thin. Everyone says they want to run a tight ship, but the best way to harness your entrepreneurial verve is to tie your own hands to the yarak mast. It will turn all of your business SHOULDS into business MUSTS. I’ve spent a lot of time finding different places to apply the idea of yarak, and it never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is.

I let my guard down. I started hearing cheesy love songs on the radio... and they were making sense! WTF?! This must have been what they were talking about.

If we are delighting customers, eliminating unnecessary costs and improving our products and services, we gain strength. But if we treat customers with indifference or tolerate bloat, our businesses will wither. On a daily basis, the effects of our actions are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous. When our long-term competitive position improves as a result of these almost unnoticeable actions, we describe the phenomenon as “widening the moat.” -- Warren Buffett

“Here’s a little quiz,” he said. Damn it. “If you could get one percent better at something every day, how much would you improve in one year?” I knew this was a trick question and you couldn’t just add up one percent 365 times. “It’s more than 365% because of compounding, so like five times better?” I said. “You’re right about the compounding,” he said. “But you’re not even close on the effect. The answer is thirty-seven times better by the end of one year. I know people your age are dependent upon calculators,” he said with a teasing wink. “All you have to do is plug in one-point-oh-one to the power of three-sixty-five. Here’s another quiz: if you got one percent worse every day, how much would you deteriorate?” My first thought was -365%, but that made no sense so I simply guessed, “Umm, eighty percent worse?” “I guess math isn’t your strong suit,” he said teasingly. “The answer is minus ninety-seven percent. Point-nine-nine to the power of three-sixty-five on your calculator.” “Wow, so one percent better is a thirty-seven x and one percent worse knocks you down to three percent? That’s a big difference,” I said.

“Here’s the filter we use: Will this expense go toward delighting our customer? If the answer is no, then we’re ruthless about cutting it. We call these non-strategic expenses because they don’t advance our strategy of making the customer happy. We’ve found these expenses to be like fingernails; they always need trimming.”

“The building backed up to another complex so there were really only three sides of the structure that anyone would ever see. Being frugal, I only painted the three exposed sides, cutting my paint budget by twenty-five percent. There’s now a running joke in the company where people will tease each other by saying, ‘You’re trying to paint the fourth wall!’ The implication being what they’re advocating is a non-strategic expense. ‘Not painting the fourth wall’ is now ingrained in our culture.”

“In order for a business to thrive, the value delivered to the customer, V, has to be greater than the price the customer is charged, P, which has to be greater than the cost of that good or service, C. V is greater than P is greater than C,” he said, pointing to each. “They can be in a different order for brief periods of time, but anything other than C then P then V is not sustainable. Either the customer will stop buying, your business will go bankrupt, or both.”

“Is it kinda like looking at the same thing at different levels of magnification? Like say through a microscope or binoculars or a telescope?”

parts of the campus. Despite our slow pace, Mr. X’s mind

There’s an old joke in advertising that fifty percent of ads are massively successful and fifty percent of ads are a total waste.” He paused to build for the punchline. “The problem is, no one knows which half is which!”