Philosophy of Life

This morning my wife mentioned that she was going out to Target.

“Did I want anything”, she asked. “What do they sell at Target?”, I wondered aloud.

“Well,” she said, “would you like detergent?”

“What?”, I responded in confusion, “Detergent?”

“Yes”, she said, “Would you like some laundry detergent for your clothes?”

“You know,” I said, “In almost 30 years of marriage, I can honestly say you have never asked me that question before. I have no idea as to if or what detergent I would need. I have never figured out which kind works with what kind of clothes or in what circumstances. I just take the container closest to the washing machine and hope that is the one that would work best.”

That last part got me to thinking. There is a lot in my life over the years where that approach, take the closest thing and use that, has explained how I deal with issues that are not critical to me.

When I was in college and got to my senior year I was able more and more to take the classes I chose; not just because I was moving to electives but also because juniors and then seniors had a higher priority in class selection. My senior year I selected all my classes by how close they were to each other. I was able to arrange a number of classes so they followed each other and were in exactly the same classroom.

A good friend of mine provided me advice I often follow when attending a larger lunch or dinner. He told me that he felt he only had a certain number of correct decisions that he was able to make in any one day. He would identify the most important person at the table and then order whatever they ordered, saving the number of decisions to be made for other times. Not only do I often follow that, but I use that story to flatter the person I am copying, thus achieving two goals; saving decisions and sucking up.

In business, whenever I face a problem I do not have much background in, my first thought is to find some organization or person that I admire and see how they solved that problem and then copy them.

I use an 80/20 rule to show emphasis. I believe most successful people 80% of the time make decisions based on experience, sort of mental muscle memory. That allows them to concentrate on the 20% of the decisions they are not as familiar with, rather than having to think about everything. It occurred to me that these habits I follow are my attempt to increase the amount of decisions that fit into the 80% side.

One other piece of information I wanted to pass on. Some may wonder if the fact that I do my own laundry is a sign of someone who is trying to share household chores and be a sensitive, albeit aging husband. Sadly the answer is no.

When my two daughters were younger they would take clothes from my wife and use them, later it was jewelry. When it came time to doing laundry, fights would break out between my two daughters and between them and Ellen. I got tired of being involved with the struggles and decided to separate my laundry and do it myself so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. On reflection, this was a corollary to the above. It has served me well over the years and now is second nature. Or at least it will remain so as long as my wife leaves the right detergent near the washer.