Riley was angry. Not visibly. But it wasn’t hard to ‘see’.

He had been fighting the fires as they encroached on his house with his father. He could see the fire down the street, but right then he felt it was all manageable. He was about to cut down the fences while keeping the house wet with the water hoses.

That’s when the Fire Department arrived.

“We’ve got it”. They said. “But you and the family need get out to safe ground.”

Riley looked around, the fire was a quarter of a mile away, the Fire Department had arrived, there was a water hydrant right there in the road.

“We’ve got it.” They reiterated - you need to leave.

Riley and the family left. They only took what they needed.

They returned the next morning, their house was gone. All the houses from where the fire was through to his were gone. The house next door was still standing.

Apparently The fire had ‘jumped’, quickly with speed - there weren’t sufficient resources, once a fire took hold the strategy was to not to ‘protect’, but to ‘contain’.

It would have taken them maybe 10 minutes more to load up their cars with the boxes of pictures, the memorabilia, the family history … packed for an entirely different reason, but left behind because they ‘trusted’ the authorities, the professionals, the people who ‘knew what they were doing’. All that was now gone, along with their house.

Yes - Riley was angry. ‘If only’ - he had stayed, it would have been different. ‘If only’ - they had loaded the cars, mom would not be crying every day … 6 months later. ‘If only’ - the fire service had done their job. He had a lot of ‘if only’ in him…

But he knew in his heart that they had done their job. He was really just angry at himself. He seemed to feel that he had failed.

What he didn’t know was if he had stayed whether the outcome would be different. And if it was different, would the outcome be better or worse.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal held in your hand, with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the only one that gets burned.

Buddha

“We quit taking credit cards because of the fees.”

“Couldn’t you have passed the fees back to customers that wanted to use credit?”

“That would have been too complicated.”

“And now you are closing down because there aren’t enough customers?”

“Yes.”

Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.

Mark Cuban

Thinking Allowed

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“I was born in Tijuana. I grew up In San Diego. I moved to San Jose and then San Francisco. Now I’m in Oregon. I guess I’ll get to Canada eventually.”

“Always a barman?” I asked.

“Always a barman.”

“Never thought about doing more? Management? Your own place?”

“Nah." He said. “Increase my hours, increase my responsibilities, increase my workload, reduce my interaction with my customers and slash my earnings? I might be a barman, but I’m not stupid!”

“I recently asked a room full of 100 managers, ‘If you could keep your current pay but go back to your old role as an individual contributor, would you do it?’” Wellins says. “About 90 people raised their hands. It startled me. I see it as an indication that lots of managers accepted promotions for the wrong reasons.”

Richard Wellins

Thinking Allowed

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