It's a Team's Life
Opportunity Costs
One of the blogs I get each day is from Seth Godin and this one really hit home with me:
Opportunity costs just went up.
Here are a few lines from his blog that stood out to me:
A car with a bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be surfing,” tells us a lot about the driver (including the inconsistency of his or her actions). But it’s proof that each of us wrestles with opportunity costs every day.
With that in mind, the cost of watching a cat video on YouTube is real indeed.
And the internet has raised the opportunity cost of time spent.
Our access to the world of learning and online resources means that the alternatives are far more valuable than they used to be.
You’re about to spend 11 minutes perfecting an email to a customer. You could do a 90% ideal job in one minute, and the extra 10 minutes spent will increase the ‘quality’ of the email to 92%.
Human beings don’t like thinking about opportunity costs. As they approach infinity, it’s easy to get paralyzed. As they get harder to compute, it’s difficult to focus and be mindful of the choices already made. That’s a challenge.
But worse, far worse, is to ignore them and fail to learn and connect and level up.
How often do we see someone spend hours watching one video after another of cats playing, car crashes, people being silly, or other mundane things instead of learning about a new product? What about the hours spent looking up sayings that have personal meaning? The time that could be spent solving the problem instead of wallowing in the problem.
How many hours a day are wasted playing non-educational online games or watching TV? Not saying all games and TV are bad but the majority are mind-numbing. What about cutting back on some of these activities and doing something real? Learn more about your profession, start a new hobby or something that keeps your brain activated?
As truck drivers or owner operators we live in a constantly changing world and living in a cocoon can suddenly end a career without the driver having any clue why.
Seth Godin has a daily blog that is inspirational and I suggest you consider subscribing to them. Are you stuck in a mind-numbing rut?
Bob & Linda Caffee
TeamCaffee
Saint Louis MO
Expediters since January 2005
Expediting isn't just trucking, it's a lifestyle;
Expediting isn't just a lifestyle, it's an adventure;
Expediting isn't just an adventure, it's a job;
Expediting isn't just a job, it's a business.