Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 150

Looping

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

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.

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.

Picture the government office at four in the afternoon. The file moves only when someone owns it; until then it is everybody's business, which is to say, nobody's.

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.