Eric Blair

Trying to be the best I can be to better those around me.

[Eric Blair @ericblair47]

Do Anything

[William Jewell College @williamjewell]

Where will Jewell take you? @CommerceBank, @McCownGordon, @BKDLLP, @KansasCityFed, @ChildrensMercy, @LIBERTYSCHOOLS, our nation's capital, grad school, and anywhere you want to go! Students and recent alumni share why #CriticalThinkersCanDoAnything.
https://t.co/ouOFMWzKZE

[CoachFaub @CoachFaub]

Contact Me for your Camp Needs!!

[William Jewell College @williamjewell]

Lighting of the Quad is one week from today! Join us Dec. 6 to hang the green, light the Quad, sing carols and see Santa. And you can grab some Jewell merch at the Cardinal Store holiday pop-up, including limited quantities of this commemorative shirt! 🎁

https://t.co/ijW97gQC6t

[Eric Blair @ericblair47]

Sit Hardman forever

[Chandler @_chandler_____]

We took the most famous person on earth and turned her into a Grain Valley resident. Great work everyone.

[William Jewell Football @JewellFootball]

It’s a great day to be a Cardinal!

We are fired up to have @CoachAmbroson back on The Hill! 📈

[Kansas City Chiefs @Chiefs]

QB1 of 1.

RT to get @PatrickMahomes in 1st place for the #WPMOYChallenge

[William Jewell College @williamjewell]

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒍𝒊𝒎𝒃 𝒎𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒃𝒆 𝒕𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘 𝒊𝒔 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒉 𝒊𝒕.- 𝒱𝒾𝒸𝓉𝑜𝓇𝒾𝒶 𝒜𝓇𝓁𝑒𝓃
📸 : @TheTylerBrunner
#sunset #thehill #fallvibes #views

[William Jewell College @williamjewell]

Presenting the Class of 2027! Day one of orientation is in the books and the fun has just begun. Good luck this year, Cardinals! #JewellClassof2027 #JewellFamily

[William Jewell College @williamjewell]

🙌 👏 The Princeton Review names Jewell a "Best Midwest" and "Best Value" college as part of its "2024 Best Colleges" list for the country's top 15% of four-year schools!
Another reason why Jewell is THE place to be! #JewellFamily #itsagreatdaytobeacardinal

[Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson]

Never expect employees to care about saving your money unless they’re incentivized to.

Time and time again, people will do the easy thing as long as there’s no cost to them.

Example:

We once had a GM of a restaurant who would pay $300 to have the front window cleaned weekly when he could have done it in 20 minutes himself like any owner operator would have.

Incentives matter. And even more than that, shared downside + skin in the game.

Align your employees with the metrics you care about. If it’s profit, comp on profit targets. And if you give equity, make them buy it, or reduce base salary accordingly.

It’s staggering how much of a difference this makes to behavior.

You can talk about culture and values all you want, but at the end of the day, people need to benefit directly from doing the right thing for the business.

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

In 1998, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged.

They hired legendary designer Paula Scher to create a new logo.

In their first meeting, on a napkin, Scher drew what became the iconic Citi logo.

As Scher got up to leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked,

How can it be that it’s done in a second?

“It’s done in a second and 34 years," Scher replied. “It’s done in a second [and] every experience and everything that’s in my head.”

Takeaway 1:

As Scher has become a master of her craft, she's experienced an interesting problem.

"A lot of clients like to buy process," she explains. "they think they're not getting their money's worth [if] you solve the problem too fast."

This is known as the "Labor Perception Bias."

It's an interesting phenomenon: we are generally impatient, yet, we are skeptical if, for instance, we're at a fancy restaurant and the food comes out only minutes after we ordered.

One of famous examples of the Labor Perception Bias is the parable of the engineer and the hammer:

A factory owner hired an engineer to fix a broken-down engine. The engineer inspected the engine for one minute, took out his hammer, hammered the engine once, and then started the engine with no problem.

The engineer charged the factory owner $5000. The factory owner was shocked, protested that the engineer had worked for only one minute, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer sent the factory owner an itemized bill:

Hammering the engine: $5
Knowing where to hammer the engine: $4,995

Takeaway 2:

On my desk, there is a notecard that says, “All success is a lagging indicator.”

The line comes from one of my favorite Ryan Holiday articles. “When a day’s writing goes well,” he writes, “it’s a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking… Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator of a lot of preparation.”

Knowing where to hammer the engine is a lagging indicator of the years and years working with hammers and on engines.

And Paula Scher’s ability to create an iconic logo in a second is a lagging indicator of 34 years spent honing her craft.

- - -

“When you sit down to create something...what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” — Tinker Hatfield

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

I read this quote at 30 and thought it seemed directionally correct.

At 40, I consider it to be one of the most insightful and accurate statements ever made.

[Eric Blair @ericblair47]

A one of a kind opportunity! https://t.co/Gs52gqq6iQ

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals classic GLADIATOR was released 23 years ago today. An enormous production full of star names, the making of story is as epic as the film itself.

A THREAD

1/35

[Wes Kao 🏛 @wes_kao]

I used to work at the Gap HQ. When the team got stressed we used to say "Remember folks, we’re selling jeans and socks."

There are lots of jobs that are life or death.

If yours isn't one of them, remember to calm down and keep things in perspective.

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie.

That wasn’t the plan.

According to the script, the mechanical shark, “Bruce,” was supposed to get way more screen time. But Bruce was built for and tested in a North Hollywood freshwater tank.

Oops:

Jaws was to be the first major motion picture shot in the Atlantic Ocean. The first time the mechanical shark got into the ocean, the electrical substructure was destroyed by the salt water.

So director Steven Spielberg had to film the movie without his main character.

This, Spielberg said,

“torqued up the suspension of the movie…Rather than seeing the shark in every scene, I played a lot of the fear from the people in the water, from seeing their legs kicking, from the point of view of the camera moving along the surface of the water. That’s what turned the movie into more of an exercise in suspense than just a horror film.”

“So if you had the shark when you wanted it,” Spielberg was asked, “you probably would have had a different movie?”

“I probably would have made a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful,” Spielberg said. “I think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.”

Jaws had a record-setting $7 million opening weekend and grossed $100 million in its first 59 days, passing “The Godfather” as the highest-grossing film in history.

Takeaway 1:

The iconic POV scenes in Jaws were forced out of necessity.

Innovations are often forced by limitations. Tony Hawk, for example, is credited with being the first skateboarder to ollie into his aerials.

"It wasn’t like I was trying to create movement," he said. Hawk was too small and skinny "to get the inertia to get in the air like other skaters."

Because of his limitations, Hawk changed skateboarding forever...

Takeaway 2:

In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie.

“This goes to show,” @_coleschafer writes, "that anticipation is scarier than confrontation."

The Stoic philosopher Seneca famously wrote, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

---

"If you break the human struggle down to one word," Jerry Seinfeld says, "it's CONFRONT. And so, I approach everything that way."

Confront the reality that the shark is broken. Confront the problem you're putting off. Confront the hardest task on your to-do list. Confront the workout. Confront the blank page.

Anticipation is scarier than confrontation.

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[James Clear @JamesClear]

When working with people, assume good intentions.

When listening to people, interpret their words in a generous way.

You will occasionally get burned and mistreated by always assuming the best in others, but it is a far better way to live than the opposite.

[Mandy Green CPS @MandyGreenCPS]

You either hate losing enough to change or you hate change enough to keep losing.

[D. Scott Fritchen @DScottFritchen]

Jerome Tang discusses his decision to climb onto the scorer’s table after the emotional win over No. 2 Kansas in Manhattan

[Great Lakes Valley Conference @GLVCsports]

🤼‍♂️ John secures the first-EVER #GLVCwrestle Wrestler of the Week for @JewellCardinals!

🔗 https://t.co/0Z7en5yMaL