Looking in the mirror

Almost everybody likes to think that they are honest. Some will admit that they will tell a white lie if it means not hurting someone they care about...it is better to kept the truth from them rather than let them get hurt. However there is someone that we all lie to and we do it with amazing frequency....we lie to ourselves. Those extra few pounds don't make me fat, I am just out of condition. It wasn't my fault the assignment was late, the other people didn't do their jobs on time. We keep lying to ourselves because we can't face the reality of what we are....we are over weight, we did procrastinate, we did lose our temper and so on. We don't call it lying. We can't even tell ourselves that we are telling ourselves lies. We call it rationalizing the situation.

The only time we tell ourselves the truth is when it can no longer be denied. When we step on the scales and look in the mirror, when the evidence is placed before us and can no longer be denied. We eventually have to own up to our condition but by then it is usually too late to do anything about it.

The next time you are tempted to "rationalize" (read: lie to yourself) stop. Think about what you are doing. If you were talking to a friend would you say the same thing? If we can't be honest with ourselves, are we really being honest at all?

Sea Change v Tree Change

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about moving out of the city, getting a nice piece of property and having a change in perspective. There has been a great show on TV called Gourmet Farmer that is really inspiring. The main person in the show was a restauranteur in the city who decided to live semi self sufficient life on a farm. The challenge is to provide all of the food from the farm. So he has learned to make cheese, to milk a cow, smoke fish etc. In the last episode one of the neighbours came over and showed him how to butcher a lamb. All very inspiring, makes you want to get out and live on a farm.

Do you want to live near the beach or in the bush? How much of the self-sufficiency stuff do you really want to do? Hard choices. Most people could learn the basics but we don't realize how much is actually involved in running even a small hobby farm.

So will it be a Sea Change or a Tree Change? Still haven't decided yet but it has to have some water....and fish.

Optimists v Pessimists

Someone once said that the definition of an optimist is someone who keeps repeating the same behaviour and expecting a different result. Likewise a pessimist is someone who keeps changing their behaviour and expecting the same result. Why do I bring this up? Recently I have been part of discussions with the marketing department of a medium sized company about the performance of some of their products. They have been actively encouraging consumers to change their purchase from one size of Product X to a different size, by changing the way they promote and their on-pack promotions. Shock! Horror! The consumers actually changed their behaviour....but more surprising is that the marketers wanted to know why the original size of Product X declined. Did they have that little faith in what they were doing?

Before taking action we should fully consider the possible outcomes. Pessimist or optimist, we may not always get the outcome we would like but we wil almost always get the outcome that is intended...whether we know what that is or not.

Lies, Lies and Statistics

I heard a good one on the radio today. A politician was trying to make a case for something, which I won't go into here. He was talking about the teenage abuse of drugs used to treat ADHD. He said that the statistics proved his case. Here is his argument - as the level of prescribing the drugs went down, so did the abuse of the redirected drugs. Let's have a reality check here......If the level of prescribing went down, there were less drugs available, of course there will be less abuse.

One of the great things about a democracy is that anyone can run for office....Local Council, State Government or Federal Government.....no training necessary. But that is also the problem. Politicians, along with most other people will use numbers to illustrate any point they are trying to make. Very few actually take the time to analyse what the numbers actually mean.

Don't believe all the numbers that people throw at you. Take time to investigate for yourself. If you want some good reading on numbers, try these books and blogs:

1. Super Crunchers by Stephen Ayres
2. Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
3. Super Freakonomics by the same guys
4. And their blog - Freakonomics Blog

Railroaded Again!

Well they have done it again! The State Government has announced another iteration of the North-west rail link. What's that - version number 5. So, if they are to be believed the rail link wil be commenced in 2017. A bit ironic in that this is when the last version was going to be finished!

By my reckoning a start in 2017 gives them two opportunities to go through the "Yes, we are going to build it - No, that has been scrapped" cycle before they would actually have to start work. The only problem with that is that each time they scrap/re-announce the project they start time goes back.

This is the same government that gave back the tolls on the M4 and M5, and just recently lifted the toll altogether on the M4 "because it was an election promise". That must be the only one they have kept.