Wednesday, 22 July 2026

Seth's Blog : State champs

Compared to what? 98% of the time, the state champ loses at nationals. Every billionaire but one isn't the richest person in the world. Only one of the 300 people who direct a feature film each year will win an Academy Award. And only one public company ...
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State champs

Compared to what?

98% of the time, the state champ loses at nationals.

Every billionaire but one isn’t the richest person in the world. Only one of the 300 people who direct a feature film each year will win an Academy Award.

And only one public company has the greatest share price growth.

Competition is often a useful source for fuel. In our scarcity-driven world, looking for external metrics might be a productive way to focus our energy or gather resources.

But it’s also a trap.

A trap that seduces us into accepting someone else’s priorities.

A trap that causes us to forget what got us here and to ignore our good fortune.

And a trap that takes us out of this moment as it pushes us to imagine another one, less likely, in the future.

When we’re captured by the death spiral of scarcity and dominance, we’re signing up for a journey that’s all about the destination, a destination we’re quite unlikely to reach.

Consider what made this worth doing in the first place. Why isn’t that enough?

        

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Tuesday, 21 July 2026

Seth's Blog : The Having/Doing job gap

It's a dance between workers, bosses and the market. The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets ...
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The Having/Doing job gap

It’s a dance between workers, bosses and the market.

The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets extraordinary performance. That’s someone doing a good job who also has a good job.

A particularly unstable quadrant is the worker who gets all of the above, but because of culture, choice or lack of enrollment, simply doesn’t do a good job. That mismatch could last for a while, but it’s shaky.

Consider for a moment the boss who takes advantage of people (and the system) by creating lousy conditions and paying too little but still manages to enforce output that they consider acceptable. Once workers realize that they don’t have a good job, they leave, if the culture and the economy permit it. Government is critical in helping people doing a good job get unstuck once they realize they don’t have a good job.

And the last quadrant is all too common: you don’t have a good job and you don’t do a good job. It’s not clear which came first, but they often go together.

Everyone deserves to have a good job. And smart bosses show up to help make that possible.

        

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