Today’s “knowledge workers” are paid according to their effectiveness; not based on time. Defense trial attorneys work as a function of time (paid high hourly rates). Plantiff’s trial attorneys are paid a contingency fee, generally 33% of whatever the jury awards for damages (e.g. $33k of a $100k lawsuit).
Because plaintiff’s attorneys aren’t compensated as a function of time, they can work more effectively and focus only on high order bits.
Do you know what you gotta get?
Can your work boil down to a singular metric? Maybe.
As I watched this, I was encouraged to re-think my daily routine. How much time do I waste on meaningless inputs, when all that matters is what I gotta get.
The man speaking is Mark Lanier, a trial lawyer based out of Houston, TX. The video was filmed at Harvard Law School and he’s got some great war stories.
I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day.
Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?
She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’ Her parents beamed.
‘Wow…what a worthy goal.’ I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $100. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $100 to use toward food and a new house.’
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $100?’
The Tour de France started in 1903; but it wasn’t until 1910, seven years later, until race organizers included the Pyrenees in a stage.
Stage 10 of the 1910 TdF was a beast: 326km (203 miles) that started at 3:30am and finished (in a sprint) 14 hours later.
I can’t imagine what riding the Tour de France course would be like today, much less in 1910. Back then, the bikes were heavier and didn’t have proper gearing, the roads were terrible, riders wore wool clothing (no Dri-fit), and they weren’t assisted by cars or other support vehicles.
The Tour de France is the pinnacle of competitive sports. No other race or feat is more demanding. Watching this video gave me a true appreciation for the old cyclists long forgotten.
It seems as if all my bridges have been burned, You say that’s exactly how this grace thing works It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, But the welcome I receive at the restart
I use Delicious pretty religiously to bookmark all the interesting things I read/see on the web. Besides Amazon, it’s probably my favorite site on the Internet. So when the Delicious plugin broke when Firefox 4 dropped last week, I was devastated.
Luckily, there is a fix:
1. Open the following file in TextEdit: “~/Library/Application Support/ Firefox/Profiles/xxxx.default/extensions/{2fa4ed95-0317-…-5f3e3912c1f9}/install.rdf” 3. Change the following statement: ‘em:maxVersion=”4.0b3pre”‘ in to ‘em:maxVersion=”4.0″‘ and save the file.
“You’re a graduate thinking you know everything, but you really don’t know anything at all. Your employer knows this, but all they care about is that you are trainable. You’re whole [business] education can be summed up as follows: marketing- red and eye level; finance- buy low, sell high; accounting- 2 plus 2 equals…. what do you want it to equal?”
Everyone throws away those annoying mail coupons. Near our mail station at our apartment complex, there is a trash can. It’s full of unopened credit-card offers, spam mail, and local coupon pages. I usually give the coupons a brief skim before tossing it.
In the latest edition, Chick-fil-A is giving away a free biscuit AND sandwich… on page 3. Normally people don’t look that far, so I dumpster dived and got tons of free sandwiches and biscuits.
