Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m.

Welcome back to five minute rants. Well, guys, today I’m going to talk about unintended consequences. And one of the things that I want to talk about with unintended consequences is essentially this. They are not intended. You don’t know that this is going to be part of the outcome from whatever you’re deciding to do or whatever you’re building.

And let me give you an example of this. Recently, we got a bird feeder for the house, and the birds come right? And our goal is like, hey, let’s feed the birds. Let’s attract some birds and squirrels and things like that, right? And so the birds came, and squirrels came, and even some deer came. The thing that we did not expect, though, was that we’d be feeding cats. And so really, by buying a bird feeder, we started feeding cats.

And this may sound crazy, but what happened is, there’s a lot of stray cats by us, and we started producing food for them in the form of birds and squirrels, and so they, all of a sudden, started showing up in our yard. And I pointed this out to my wife the other day, and we were talking, and I said, this is what normally happens in real life, the consequences that we intended, or the outcomes that we intended by buying the bird feeder happened. The birds came, we’re feeding them. The squirrels came. We didn’t really want to feed them, but yeah, they’re fed too. And then the outcome that we did not intend to happen, or expect to happen was have our backyard filled with cats and for it to become a hunting ground for stray cats.

This is how life works. This is exactly what happens in life. And this is one reason why experience matters even more so than just general knowledge. And the reason why I’m saying that is because if you have experience in what you’re about to do, you can already list out and know a lot of the unintended consequences that would have not previously been seen. They’re known now because you’ve been through it, you can list them out, you understand how to avoid them, and you understand how to prevent them. And so part of our jobs as leaders and mine and Andrew’s jobs for building the company is to go through and think about the unintended consequences. How do we build correctly, and how do we avoid the things that we don’t want or that we’re just not intended and the question we often ask ourselves is, how do we see the things that we actually don’t see? Because that’s the hard part.

I didn’t see the cats coming it’s just how it is. I didn’t see them coming to the house. I didn’t see them coming into the backyard, and then watching, it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve been feeding the cats. The moment we bought the bird feeder, we fed the cats. This. Another example of this is my wife and I went on vacation, and she got a room for us, and she was like, Hey, I would like to have a hot tub with the room where we’re going. It’s like, okay, that’s cool. And so she found a place. There’s a hot tub, and it was awesome. The room was great, but the one thing she didn’t look at was where we were next to in the road. And so there’s so much road noise because we were by the only highway, not even Highway. It wasn’t even a highway. We were by the only road down this little strip of beach. And so everybody in their grandma drives up and down this road all the time.

And so it was loud while we went out there, and while we were at vacation, it was allowed, and there’s just a lot of road noise. And we talked and we laughed about it, and I was like, it’s so funny. You never would have thought, hey, maybe let me use Google Maps Street View to figure out to see if we’re actually by a road that’s going to be noisy or not. That was one of the things we never thought about, and one of the things that she didn’t think about, but she went with a hot tub hot tub.

I’m saying this because this is how life works, and this is how when you build things, this is exactly what happens. Cool, you start getting more customers, and you start bringing more customers in the door, and sales increased and revenue increased. Cool, now you got a production problem. You didn’t think you’re going to cause problems in production, but you did, and now you are behind production, and now you got fires in the house and all these things, and all of a sudden, your team and who you’ve been working with, they’re the processes and the infrastructure they have to work with aren’t up to where they need to be to handle the new revenue. And so what happens is you get this chain reaction, this domino effect.

You knock down one domino, another one falls, another one falls, so and so on, etc. And that’s what happens. And when that happens, it really actually makes a massive impact on our life. When we do that with 20 things, we’re not thinking through what our next step should be, all of a sudden you got like, 20 fires in your life. You got 20 noisy roads, or you got tons of cats he had no idea what to do with.

And then you’re wondering why my life’s on fire, and part of it too is part of it’s due to just lack of critical thinking on our parts. Oftentimes, when I miss things, it’s because I just haven’t critically thought through what I should think about. And some of them are unknown. Some of them you’re not going to be able to see until you have experience. And that’s true. But. But for the most part, you can pretty much think through anything.

Anyways, guys, I’ll catch you later. Peace.