Mistakes of Omission
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have mentioned their biggest errors were mistakes of omission. These are the actions they didn’t take, or more specifically the companies they chose not to invest in (think Walmart, etc), These would have been huge successes for them.
I’ve recently been thinking about mistakes of omission in my personal life, after reading this wonderful graduation speech from 2013:
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness….Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” (George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates / nytimes.com)
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Leadership
“I have come to a frightening conclusion.
I am the decisive element in the classroom.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.
I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.“
– Haim G. Ginott
H/T BOZ.com
While the teacher / classroom dynamic is the subject of this quote, substitute any organization where you serve in a leadership role (job, non-profit, etc). It still works.
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Late Fees
“If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done. The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates — or doing more — it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.”
(Tim Ferriss – The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now)
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Ready to Receive
“That is, only after Thoreau had begun making discoveries on his own, would he notice and grasp things in books that expanded or confirmed his observations and theories:
‘a man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally…We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and travelling.’
Or as E. M. Forster put it so well, ‘the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.'”
(The Art of Manliness – The Libraries of Famous Men: Henry David Thoreau)