Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 138

Last Tuesday

Last Tuesday is a small handle on a large fact. Grip it, and the fact becomes easier to carry.

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.

It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Keep the name. Use the pause it gives you. That is the entire homework.