[AKN #115] To Solve A Problem, You Must Understand It First
LAUGH: The Perfect Outrage Thread, LOVE: Why Quitting Is Underrated
Sup homies?
You ever want to stop and give a stranger some honest feedback?
This happens to me all the time.
Like the other day I was walking past the women’s intimates section of Bloomingdale’s.
It’s not a walk I do often, but when I do, I try to linger for as long as I can…so I can source material for the introduction of the newsletter.
During this particular walk, I overheard a conversation between the woman who works there and an older woman who was shopping there.
It went something like this:
OLDER WOMAN: *very soft to completely inaudible voice*
WOMAN WHO WORKS THERE: “Oh so you have diabetes? So you have to wear compression socks? And you want some lingerie which works with that?”
Fuckin’ a, Bloomingdale’s lingerie lady. Guess Victoria’s Secret is out.
Now I can’t speak for this old lady, but something tells me she was maybe using her quiet voice for a reason.
So maybe you should keep your voice down, nimrod.
Unfortunately, I rarely follow up on this urge to give strangers advice. Especially when the stranger is a woman.
It’s hard to criticize women now a days without being labeled a misogynist. Which is a shame. Cause feedback is a gift after all.
The lack of constructive feedback to this demographic shows all over our society.
Like I follow this one former classmate on LinkedIn and she is really over the top with some of her female empowerment posts.
Every other LinkedIn post is like “Ladies it’s boss bitch o’clock! How about us moms fight the patriarchy today and breast feed in the middle of our QBR? Am I rite??”
I always want to comment “serious question, does anyone actually want to do that?”
But instead I succumb to my self loathing, guilt laden inner liberal and just end up commenting “yasss queen! 👸💅 ”
We would be better served if we started saying hard truths in public.
In fact, let’s start right now. And let’s go straight to the top of the most powerful women in the world.
Like let’s go after the Williams sisters.
I’ve long thought we need to put them in their place.
Seriously. We give them ALL the credit.
It’s always Venus Williams this or Serena Williams that.
But the truth is the Williams sisters would be nothing without their brother, Sherwin Williams.
Without Sherwin, how do we even get the lines painted on the court?
Worst part about that hypothetical is you can’t even Ask Sherwin Williams.
Speaking of paint.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: To Solve A Problem, You Must Understand It First
A hand crafted, artisanal post by me
The first real world engineering problem I ever worked on came when I was a hardware engineering intern for a car manufacturer.
Several car doors exited the paint curing process with bizarre cosmetic defects.
They had these wavy growths cured into the paint.
You could feel the ridges when you passed your finger over it.
We brought the world experts in paint in who explained every possible way in which the paint could form a cosmetic issue.
Then we did failure analysis and ultimately found that the paint DID NOT do this. This was a foreign contaminant with the material properties of cloth.
So we audited the painting line and found every single potential cloth source of contamination and removed them from the area.
Suddenly the defects stopped. Huzzah! Victory was declared.
…until two weeks later when the issues returned.
But how? We took care of everything?
So one of the line managers decided he would do another line audit.
And he found absolutely nothing…until he walked to another part of the factory.
That’s when it all came together.
Just as the assembly line workers for a separate station were leaving, he spotted one worker who took his sweaty gloves off and rested them on the oscillating fan to dry out.
So he went up to the guy and asked him “do you do this every day?” and he responded “well yea…except for the last two weeks. Since I was on vacation.”
Ends up the problem wasn’t an issue with the paint nor the people who worked the paint line, but rather just a guy with sweaty hands from another part of the factory.
This was the first — but certainly not the last — time I learned the most important lesson of my engineering career: in order to solve a problem, you must understand it first.
And this lesson has come to define the way I see the world.
I truly believe that if you understand the underlying mechanics of how something works, you can change it.
And that goes for losing weight, removing warts, or progressing in your career.
LAUGH: The Perfect Outrage Thread
A curated joke I found wading through the cesspool of the Internet
This thread is perfection.
For two reasons:
You cannot tell whether it is parody or not. So reading it is this constant sense of unease about whether or not you are in on a funny joke or reading the diary of a crazy person.
Regardless of who you are, you feel a strong compulsion to comment or react to it. We may never see someone put out better clickbait than this.
This is the Mona Lisa of the Internet Outrage Era.
When you go to the metaverse Louvre in 2067 this thread will be there.
LOVE: Why Quitting Is Underrated
Something I have been loving
I really enjoyed this article about why winners quit by former professional poker player, Annie Duke.
We lionize the person who toughs it out through the hard times and emerges on the other side. However, is this always a good way to act?
Should you always finish what you start?
This is a really thought provoking piece about how maybe the best thing you could do right now is just stop, but if you want the TL;DR this quote sums it up best:
“We fear that when we quit we are admitting failure—that we have wasted our energy. But we need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar on something that is no longer worthwhile is a far bigger waste than whatever we have already invested.”
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Understandably Yours,
K.Rapp