If someone hands you a deck, you can be sure there are 52 cards covering four suits. The universe is finite. The cards are the cards, and games work precisely for that reason. Every deck is the same, and all the players have the same options. Some of the systems we compete in have a limited number of cards, known to all.

I'm not sure this is the right word for it, but we certainly need one. Not 'entrepreneurship' which is a distinct skill. That term is usually reserved for people who start at zero and get to one, and mostly for people who operate in small businesses creating financial value through assets and equity. But what about the person who navigates an important non-profit through changing times?

Play Bongo on Puzzmo, Five words. Infinite strategies.

When the long-term cost of our situation is uncomfortably linked to the short-term expense and pain of changing the situation, it's easy to feel stuck. One way to deal with the feeling is to insist that there's no way to change the situation. That the price we'll have to pay upfront is so big, we simply have to live with the day to day consequences, forever.

This is the challenging insight that every generation comes to grips with. It might be a rising cohort of teachers or managers. It might be the next cycle of companies. And it might be the shifting power dynamic in families or organizations. No one gives you a certificate, an endorsement or a magical sword pulled from a stone. The moment simply arrives. What will you do when it's your turn?

Ideas open doors, lead to connections and make things better. But not all good ideas are good businesses. Crop rotation is a good idea. So is sous vide cooking and the sport of juggling. But these aren't good businesses. A business thrives when it can charge a premium--selling something for more than it costs. That means that there has to be a competitive advantage, an asset that produces value.

This is a bonus post about a couple of my hobbies. We will return to our regular scheduled post tomorrow. Wonder is the feeling we have when our experience extends beyond our expectations. It's uniquely human, and available whenever we can create the conditions for it to occur. Wonder is a fine place to do your work, but it’s also a reliable way to find joy in your hobbies.

Seth Seiders, (Al Capone's accountant) wrote a book about the "pivot man." This is a key function in industrial organizations, bureaucracies and any organization with more than thirty people. It's someone (often not a 'man') with a boss and with employees. In our modern world, this person goes to meetings. That's their job. The company can afford to pay them well and give them resources to help keep things in sync.

It might be your website, your brochure, the inside of your store... This is a fine thing to do, but it's not particularly effective. The secret isn't to optimize the landing page. it's to optimize the reason people are coming to your site. You can't convert people who don't want what you have… you need to attract people who do.

If the answer is over there, then we're off the hook. If it comes from the future, comes from away, comes from someone else, then our job is to simply wait for it to arrive. But it could be that your organization already has all the resources it needs to change the dynamic in the marketplace. It could be that your keyboard has all the letters needed to allow you to type the book you have inside you.

We can't change the past. But the future might be up to us. It might be best to daydream about what might be, not what already happened.

Each task brings three options. But first, let's be clear what we mean by "delegate." If I can hire someone to do a task so well that my customer can't tell, I can choose to delegate this work. The Uber driver is probably capable of changing the oil in the car, but if the passenger can't tell, doing it herself is a choice, not a requirement.

Landlords collect rent, tenants pay it. Landlords own an asset that increases in value over time. Tenants have the freedom to move on. If you're building a business, it pays to own an asset. Your labor doesn't scale well, and success can be exhausting. It's better to be Google than it is to be hoping for traffic from Google. And it's better to own trust and attention than it is to have to borrow or lease it.

The second time you install vacuum tubes into a handmade 2A3 stereo amplifier, you'll know that two of the four pins are slightly larger than the other two. And you'll know that the tubes go in pretty easily, you don't have to force them. You may know these things because the first time you did it, you pushed really hard and wrecked the tube. Experience has easily measured value. If it's important, don't hire a rookie.

This is not a promise to be made lightly. It's not, "I've got your back until it becomes difficult or inconvenient for me." It puts us on the hook, without exception. This is a powerful promise, a commitment that can change the life of both parties. Don't do it lightly, but do it. It's worth it.

Cities used to die slowly. Ancient Rome, Babylon, Memphis (in Egypt) and others took generations to fade from their peaks. The reasons were easy to see: Shifts in trade routes Loss of political capital status Slow environmental changes (silting harbors, soil exhaustion) Incremental population drift Now, we can see it happening in a single generation. Rust Belt cities, projects in China, mining towns--they come and they go.

We wait and hope for the first kind, the magic that arrives just when we need it. This is the magic of inspiration, or of good fortune. The magic of opportunties offered and connections made. There never seems to be enough of this sort of magic. The other kind, though, is surprisingly abundant. This is the magic of being able to turn on lights for others. It happens when we cause connection or open doors. It's the magic that comes from creation, and it's based on abundance.

The first things humans invented, before fire, the wheel or baked brie, was trust. Trusting the others in the village. Trusting that you could get a good night's sleep. Trusting that what you heard was true. We've expanded the village from twenty people to billions. Walter Cronkite was effective because millions of people trusted him, and he earned that trust. And as the media became more powerful and fragmented, that contract begin to erode.

When we're a little behind, we borrow to catch up. Perhaps we borrow goodwill and spend less time than we might on a project. Or we need some money to pay the rent, so we borrow against a paycheck. And a good night's sleep is tempting to borrow from as well. The borrowing compounds, with small debts turning into bigger ones.

So many bits of information are flying around. Emails to us, articles, posts, videos, updates, memos, meetings, books... The most common (and apparently efficient) approach is to quickly look over the new information. If it confirms what you already know, check it off. If it contradicts what you believe, find a reason to ignore it. The alternative is to take new information and try it on for size.

It takes about 900,000 minutes to become a board-certified dermatologist. At that point, you might be very skilled and well-informed. It takes less than nine minutes to make your patient feel seen, understood and reassured. If you skip the 9 minutes, you wasted the 900,000.

Organizations and brands can choose their quadrant. It's tempting to want the best of all four, but it's going to take effort and focus. All of these terms are relative choices, not absolute judgments. Where does your offering fit in?

Visitors to your new bookstore are likely to have a phone in their pockets--they could buy a book from the competition without even walking into the shop. And diners at your funky restaurant have to pass dozens of other places to eat on their way to you. Places that are faster, more conventional and probably cheaper as well. Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business.

It's possible to consider the next event in our lives as something the world is trying to teach us. But it might be even more effective to realize that, whenever we choose, we can learn something from what's going on. We're not getting taught, we're choosing to learn. There's a lesson in every interaction, if we want there to be. When we choose to learn, our active participation makes a difference.

If someone with less skill and less dedication than you took over your job, could they degrade the quality of your work? It's not difficult to make a list of twenty things that could be done to make it late, expensive or defective. Here's the hard question: If someone with more skill and dedication took over your work, how many ways could they make it better?