Mitten bytes

Published on 27 Jul 2011 by Mithun Shanbhag

[This post was migrated from an old facebook note (remember that?) of mine]

So what’s weighing on my mind? Nothing. Just random things from the last 2 - 3 days. None of this will make any sense anyways. These thoughts aren’t coherent.

Ok. Here goes……

Nighttrain by GNR is stuck inside my head. Especially the last 90 seconds and guitar-outro of that song. In his prime, Slash totally owned everyone….
Don’t work hard. Work smart. Follow the Pareto principle. Identify what’s really adding to your team’s bottomline. Do those well. The rest of the activities are just sideshows. Eliminate them.
Learn that ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ are not the same things. Urgent can wait. Important cannot. Focus on whatever is important…..
But never take shortcuts. Roll up your sleeves when you have to. Often times, there is absolutely no substitute for hard, grunt work. Observe, learn, absorb, do. Repeat.
Thanks to Spotify, I’ve discovered that people have awful taste in music. Hits of Michael Bolton? Seriously….? 😄
Ah, Seattle summer. All 78 glorious minutes of it…..
Make a decision. Even a bad decision is better than not making one. I’ve made several seemingly important decisions in 30 seconds. Some worked. Some didn’t. But I’ve never had the regret of NOT taking a decision when I needed to.
Alice was lost in wonderland. She came to a cross-road and didn’t know which path to take. She saw the Cheshire cat sitting nearby and decided to ask him -

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”

Alice: “I don’t much care where–“

Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”
People like Alice frustrate and infuriate in equal measures.
Much like the congressmen. Reid vs Boehner? Raise debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion? or just $1 trillion? Cut spending? or make entitlement reforms? Should we increase taxes instead? I say, just flip a coin. Time is running out. Any decision is better than debt default.
Chocolate chip mint > Extreme moose tracks.
The WA-520 / I-405 interchange is my private hell on earth.
Words can mean whatever you want them to mean….

"One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests" - John Stuart Mill, 1861, British philosopher, economist and philanthropist.

"One person with belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests" - Anders Behring Breivik, 2011, Norwegian mass murderer.
A skeleton goes to a bar. What does he order? A beer and a mop.
Grandiose vision statements. Company-wide manifestos on realignment for organizational agility. Emails on org synergies & efficiencies. Endless slide-decks on strategy & planning. Ultimately, all these land up right where they belong. In the trash folder, next to those p***s enlargement junk mails.
Yesterday’s 5K run on treadmill was 27:12. Neither happy nor sad. It is what it is.
“Receipt with you or in the bag……….?”.
“Just put it in the frickin’ bag.”