As I sat on a hilltop along Tapline Road, the main east-west highway that runs the length of Saudi Arabia’s northern border, I watched the scene below in disbelief. One of our company commanders had ordered troops to gather up excess equipment, move it into a 40-foot shipping container, and bury the container in the desert. Beside the simple fact that he was accountable for the container, I knew from experience that much of that “excess” he wanted buried wasn’t actually excess. Meaning someone would eventually pay for it.
Months later, as we prepared to redeploy back to the United States, our battalion logistics officer noted that we were missing a container during an update briefing. As the battalion commander thumbed through a spreadsheet, the executive officer asked if anyone knew the location of the missing container.
“It’s buried, sir,” the company commander replied.
The battalion commander looked up, glancing over the top of his reading glasses. “What?”
“We buried it up by Tapline Road.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Well, we had all this excess property, so we put it in the container and buried it.”
For the first, last, and only time during his command tenure, the battalion commander dismissed the entire staff for what we euphemistically call a Come to Jesus Meeting. Three months later, the company commander learned the hard way what happens when you knowingly – and wrongly – dispose of Army property. To the tune of $375,000.
Making the Wrong Call
When I was growing up, my father seemed to constantly remind me, “You always have to learn things the hard way.” I was a little stubborn. I preferred to figure things out myself rather than have them explained. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way. In other words, I was my father’s son. Something that others seemed to remind him of frequently.
But those lessons were never unnecessarily painful or unrecoverable. I might try to stretch a tank of gas a little too far or try to put something together without the instructions. I never learned a lesson that cost me my job, my paycheck, or my house. Yet there are people around us who do so routinely. Perhaps unknowingly, they make a habit of making life more difficult for themselves.
Why?
In a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, Mike Erwin focused in on why some people make such bad choices. “The typical person makes about 2,000 decisions ever waking hour,” he wrote. Most of those decisions are low-stake choices that we trust to our intuition. But not all of them. And that’s when things get sporty.
When someone makes a particularly bad decision, there are six true culprits at work. First, decision fatigue sets in. You’re simply mentally tapped out. So, you make a decision without considering the consequences. Second, you’re in a steady state of distraction. When you’re distracted, you’re not thinking clearly. When you’re not thinking clearly, you make poor choices. Third, you have a lack of input. Whether you don’t ask for it or it’s not offered, the end result is the same. Fourth, you think you’re multi-tasking. You’re not. You’re distracted. You lack focus. Fifth, your emotions are involved. “Facts, not emotions” should be tattooed on everyone’s forehead. When your emotions are involved, your decision-making is compromised. Finally, you suffer analysis paralysis. You have a big decision to make. All that pressure. So, you don’t make any decision at all. Bad choice.
Learning Lessons the Hard Way
No matter how well we prepare or how hard we try, there are some lessons that we all learn the hard way. That’s just kind of how life plays out. With a little luck, you learn those lessons early enough in life that you carry that wisdom for many years. Typically, when you hear someone complain about adulting – behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult – it’s because they didn’t learn those lessons when they should have.
Thank your helicopter parents for that one.
We all learn our share of lessons the hard way. Sometimes, we like to pretend we don’t. But the truth stings. As I put pen to paper – or fingers to keys – for this column, it didn’t take me long to identify 10 things we all learn the hard way.
1. The enemy gets a vote.
About that brilliant plan of yours. You forgot that there are others who have a say about how brilliant it really is. And they have plans of their own.
2. Back up your data.
Every day you go without a data backup, you’re rolling the dice like someone at the craps table in Vegas. The House always wins in the end.
3. Email is not your friend.
Eventually, we all make a mistake with email. Your only hope is that yours wasn’t catastrophic.
4. The Internet is forever.
Somewhere, someone is archiving everything you post. Think long and hard before you upload those pictures from your last business trip.
5. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
You’d think this was obvious. I can tell you that it’s not.
6. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
More people are procrastinators than you might think. Success in life is all about momentum. Get ahead of the power curve.
7. Don’t spend like there’s no tomorrow.
There will be a tomorrow. It’s a lot sunnier if you’re not broke.
8. It’s possible to do everything right and still fail.
It’s not always about talent, planning, and hard work. That’s just life.
9. Never say anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times.
Above the fold. In bold print. Next to a picture of you doing a perp walk. Be smart.
10. You can’t fix other people.
You can help them. You can support them. But only they can fix themselves.
There are many more. Many, many more. All hard-(l)earned lessons that come with scar tissue. There’s an eleventh one that I share openly with people who seem to be in a perpetual state of learning the hard way: Experience is something you never have until after you need it.
