Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 121

High Capacity People

There are ideas that shout. High Capacity People is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

A joint family runs on unspoken job descriptions. The day someone writes them down, half the quarrels lose their employment.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Print it on a card if you like. Better: print it on a habit.