Advice on Finger Food

The day I turned 50 an AARP application arrived in the mail. Fuck AARP. One advantage of being a gray beard is that the Ski Patrol lets you stray outside the ski area boundaries without bothering to check your pack for an avalanche beacon or a shovel.

The Ski Patroller assumes you've had a good life and is comfortable knowing that hypothermia is a pleasant way to die. 

The other advantage is that one earns the right to give advice knowing it's rude for polite folk not to listen to gray beards.

Professional Advice

1. Be Flexible
2. Cultivate Humility
3. Question Assumptions

Be Flexible If your colleague presents you with doll-house-sized plate attached to a ring, make a tiny sandwich and call it finger food. One's professional longevity relies more on Yoga and Jujitsu than Power Lifting and Bruce Lee theatrics.

Make it a habit to be flexible and accommodating.

I think Pringles original intention was to make tennis balls... but on the day the rubber was supposed to show up a truckload of potatoes came. Pringles is a laid-back company, so they just said, "Fuck it, cut em up!"

   ~Mitch Hedberg

Cultivate Humility One could spend a life seeding and watering humility, then never have a bumper crop. That's okay. The penultimate in humility is an okay crop. The ultimate in humility is its dastardly flip-side hubris.

You'll probably never have the right amount of humility. Still, you can be diligent about weeding out hubris by remembering

We are all one black swan from the soup line.

   ~Bob MacNeal

Toyota's hubris is about to tank its quality reputation (see How Toyota Can Find Its Way Back). The black swan of electromagnetic interference that causes gas pedals to stick has Toyota engineers scratching their heads and Toyota management too proud to fess up to systematic flaws.

Question Assumptions Be as pesky as a corn-stealing crow with assumptions. It's human nature to be lazy so most of us operate on notions and whims, rather than data.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance

   ~Orville Wright

Usually data are better than notions and whims. Google VP Marissa Mayer says, "Data is apolitical". Of course, data might be biased. If your assumptions are based on data, are you collecting the right data?

Most things we consider to be facts are hypotheses that have yet to be disproven.