Sunday Setup
A weekly newsletter to help get your mind set up for a positive workweek.
03.02.2025 — Mitch Betta Have My Money
What a Play
Picture it...Paris 2025.
Two homeless men steal a backpack from a car, finding a wallet inside with a few credit cards. Naturally, they figure fortune favors the cold and decide to use one of those credit cards to purchase...scratch-off lottery tickets.
As improbable as it may seem that they would choose to buy something other than the essentials, like food and water, the more improbable fact is that they won $523,000. Well, sort of.
The owner of the wallet filed a police report for the theft, which puts the hapless homeless hijackers in a bit of a legal quandary. If they come forward to cash in the ticket, they'll likely be prosecuted and lose the rights to the winnings. But if they do nothing, they’ll be eternally tortured by thoughts of what could’ve been. However, there may be a way out.
The owner apparently not only wants his wallet back, but also a cut of the cash prize. He's agreed to drop the charges and split the winnings if the homeless men come forward. Essentially, he's offered them a double or nothing parlay with odds that favor the unhoused.
Gotta play to win!
Death by Committee
Group think can be extremely useful and productive. The writer's room of your favorite TV show can produce stories that are much more creative, complex, and authentic than Taylor can alone. However, collaborative progress can sometimes get burned when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, especially when they're not all working from the same menu.
If you've ever served on a committee tasked with distilling multiple options down to one, chances are you've experienced the challenges that can arise when trying to develop a consensus. Lock twelve angry men — or women, or non-binary, or...let's just say humans — in a room, and you'll get twelve different viewpoints that are influenced by twelve different lived experiences.
There's beauty in that diversity that should be celebrated, but sometimes it gets overshadowed by myopic views and self-serving goals.
Obviously, no one person knows everything about anything — not even Claude or ChatGPT (yet) — but we've all worked with domineering, dismissive, and downright disruptive colleagues that behaved as if they were omniscient. While it can be frustrating when you find yourself working on a project with Dr. No(-it-all), try your best to convert that energy from disruptive to constructive.
As you collaborate with your colleagues this week, regardless of whether or not you're a project lead, challenge them to check their agendas — and biases — at the door for the greater good. When teams remain focused on a project's overall goal and recognize that "we are smarter than me," group thought tends to seamlessly coalesce into one stream of consciousness yielding an outcome that benefits everyone involved.
Like the 3-way split of $523,000.