Be the Acorn tree not the Squirrel
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006There are a lot of Squirrels out there. Squirrels run around collecting Acorns and storing them for winter. Just like people who try and save every last cent on a transaction. They also save for the rainy year in 2047. Squirrels won’t buy new socks until there’s at least two holes in the old pair. Today I caught myself being a Squirrel, which isn’t normal because I don’t like Squirrel mentality. I was choosing between two laptops for Saasu.com, trying to discern which was better value for my dollar. In the end I bought the more expensive one that had slightly more features and I based my final decision on time saved to me by those features (more memory and grunt, faster computer, less waiting). This took half an hour but could have taken two minutes. With hindsight, I should have immediately checked my feature needs and said I’ll buy this one (even if it was $100 more). The alternate cost was half an hour of time spent on the business. I think people who operate like the Acorn tree are generally much more successful at what they are doing. They tend to build a structure and a system for achieving their objective. In our example this is the “Tree”. The result is that it generates a lot of payoff in a multiplying format, the “Acorns”. While I was squirreling for value I can absolutely guarantee you one thing. There was a big boy of an Acorn tree out there producing hundreds of thousands of Acorns and feeding bucket loads of Squirrels. So the moral of this story is to be the Acorn tree not the Squirrel in life if you want to be successful at achieving your objectives.