The Opportune Art Of Keeping Doors Half Open – The Secret To Being A Great Connector & Creating Life Options

In the movie Saving Private Ryan, we see the storming of Normandy Beach by the 29th Infantry Division and the second and fifth Rangers. As movie scenes go, it’s brutal. From the moment the troop carries open their doors, American soldiers are dying. Bullets ricochet off metal; the Allies charge past the anti-tank barricades as machine guns rip through the sand. They hunker under the sand dunes, and that's when we get to the turning point. Our brave heroes begin using grenades on the bunkers creating smoke screens. Allied soldiers adapted, overcame, and retook the beach by burning the Nazis out of the Omaha bunkers - and that's where the invasion ends. The D-Day siege is over.

The movie goes off in a new direction. For the next two and a half hours, they're searching for a missing private miles away in the French town of Rimmel - a town, which by the way, is totally made up. Ramel was invented to the movie could have its dramatic final battle a few days after Normandy Beach in a place that didn't exist. Which is a shame because we missed a lot of the real action that took place after the landing. In reality, the push inland continued for nearly a week. The Germans weren't fleeing from Tom Hanks and his rifle company. They were running from the non-stop shelling.

Fun fact, according to a data book of World War II, around 75% of all casualties were from motors and bombs, not bullets. In movies, motors are the background noise, while men with rivals to the real fighting. In reality, rifles merely keep the enemy pinned down while artillery does the killing. If the camera was somehow forced to give equal screen time to everyone at the battle, most of it would have been on the ships, not on the fictional town. Our story would be about the seven US and British battleships that kept the Germans on the run with wave upon wave of 14 and 15-inch shells for 11 straight days. The USS Texas, in particular, ran so many shells into the fleeing Germans it spent weeks’ worth of ammo in the first 35 minutes of the landing. It even left to reload at the nearest Port before coming back to put more craters into their French landscape.

What would be our movie climax? What's our Rimmel? That would have to be the moment the USS Texas realized most of the Germans were too far inland to hit, and the Allied troops still needed support. The Nazis needed to be pushed out of France, but the USS Texas was just out of range. So the captain orders on Battleship departments to be flooded. On June 15th, the other British and American battleships parked along the coastline and watched as a ship the size of a small floating city began to list. Her starboard torpedo blister was flooded. The ship's hall tilted, forcing the men on deck to walk at a slight angle, and the 14-inch guns boomed for one more day.

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 It's called many things in business: challenging your beliefs, being open to opportunities, and realigning your focus. All these are fancy ways of saying making new options for yourself. But guess what? That's not what the human brain is wired to do. Human brains effectively evolve to develop one trade, live in one town, and iterate on their abilities within a well-defined framework. Cavemen hardly ever migrated; they hunted the same game all their lives, and they were rarely asked to develop 10 different resumes to highlight their best job skills for different hiring managers. That's the focus of today's episode and our myths today.

 Myth 1: Geniuses like Warren Buffett say the key to success is saying no to almost everything. We're also told success is about creating more options. Can both of these philosophies coexist?

 Joe: I'm going to ask about a movie, and it's a bit old. Todd, have you ever seen the movie Half-Baked?

 Todd: I have not.

 Joe: There is a scene where one of the characters finally leaves his crappy fast food job, so that he can go sell an extremely potent strain of weed full-time. It's going to make them all the money. He is fed up with his job and he turns, and he says, "fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, I'm out." and it's such a hilarious yet satisfying scene. I see it and I hear it whenever somebody like is about to be fired, or they're about to leave their job or just if they want to cut ties. It's the idea that you're going to work up to a point where you're able to tell people no, and walk out forever and it to slam those doors behind you on places that you don't want to be anymore.

Todd: You didn't just burn the bridge; you swam back across the river and kicked your boss in the head a few times. You want to make sure you won't be hired back at this job. You're burning your boats in battle; there will be no surrender.

Joe: As an introvert, that appeals to me. I want you to know that it feels better for me mentally to close doors behind me and to tell people goodbye forever when I leave work. I've never even thought about reaching back and contacting those people now.

Todd: Like the comedian says, what is this two-week notice stuff? So, you're going to let me work here for two weeks knowing I'm going to quit, and you're still going to pay me? You know I'm going to do a half-assed job halfway out the door, right?

Joe: It's funny you even say that. I gave it two weeks' notice at one of my jobs, and they thanked me. And then, two days after that, they fired me. Not because I was doing a poor job, but just because they didn't want to take risks that I would harbor ill will or anything like that. So there are companies where if you give them that loyalty, they will still sort of like throw sand in your face.

Todd: I worked for years and auto finance, it was a good job, and when you give your notice, you have your previa to a lot of information: Social Security numbers and financial stuff on the company. So, when you give your two-week notice, they literally come and snatch up your laptop. They do the Men In Black thing.

Joe: Well, the concept of today's episode, what we really want to talk about, is I have started seeing a trend with my most successful friends. I do the Half-Baked thing where I tell everyone where they could shove it on my way out the door, even if I'm going to be friends with them. I'll pick one person at work when I leave a job I will keep in contact with, and I add them to my Christmas card list so they can talk to me regularly. But that kind of closed doors behind you, even if it's on people's jobs, resumes, old contacts, whatever it is, it can even be just emails or forums that you used to go to…I have started realizing that is narrow and reductive thinking.

 Todd: Is it, though, a sign of maturity? For me personally, I'm a salesperson, and I run on emotion. No logic, logic is out the window. When you're in a toxic relationship, and a lot of those are work relationships, isn't it nice to have that f-you up thing and burn that bridge, you know, especially if they're romantic interest or whatever. If they are bad for you, don't you want to punch them one time before you leave? Isn't it worth it?

Joe: Yes, definitely. And movies have taught me that that's what geniuses do. Like, watch documentaries of Steve Jobs or, you know, The Social Media movie, or if I watch really anything about these trouble geniuses who startup companies and become amazing people, it shows them closing doors on people. They do it in such an interesting, very witty, and very funny-cutting way. They slay the other person socially before they walk out the door, and they never talk to him again. But I'm starting to see in my real life, they don't do that. They will sort of sit back and watch somebody implode. But they're not cutting people off left and right; The geniuses I know embrace the discomfort of doors open behind them. They just keep everything open and as an introvert, that troubles my mind. It actually hurts to watch somebody putting puzzle pieces you know into the wrong slots on purpose.

Todd: You're suggesting maturity and emotional intelligence.

Joe: Yeah, it's a professional maturity that I don't think I will ever be used to or enjoy. 

Todd: I think that we think that whatever business we're in is, is an ocean a lot of times, they're not, they're swimming pools. And you are going to have contact, and you are going to need these people, even though it doesn't feel like it right now, you're going to need them later and they're going to need you as well. It's kind of a loss-loss, you know.

Joe: Right. The busier you get in life and the more professional projects you are spinning at any one given time, the more you wish you had that person who had a very uninteresting unimportant skill at the time. You wish you could tap them and just say, hey, could you do this for me? Because you're going to do it three times as fast as I can and better than I can. There is a simple like Madmen 50s version of this, where you just have a list of people you send a bottle of whiskey every year and if you're on that list of 100 people, then that's your network. But we're far beyond that at this point. We're into hundreds of friends on Facebook and thousands of friends on social media and stuff. So we want to also say that we are not necessarily describing social media. We're not saying you need to keep all your doors and windows open for social media. That's just asking to have your time burglarized. But I'm starting to see it can benefit in your real life and your professional life. We got this episode concept because I was sort of watching how one of the friends of the show Chris Wilkes treats people. And I mean that in a very positive way. I mean that he keeps tabs on people and he messages them and it looks from the outside like it's exhausting. But I think people get used to it. You Todd, since you've been in sales for so long, how do you do that?

Todd: Well, to touch on Chris Wilkes, Chris is a connector. I go to a lot of his parties as you have as well. It seems like all his friends are just so pre-screened and so interesting, you think how can there be this many interesting people at a party and he networks without social media where we're going to have him on the show as a guest soon - he connects people who are the head of their fields, and it's really fun to be around. And you just think, this can't be easy to do, to get all this kind of people together this consistently all the time.

Joe: I think that is maybe the secret hidden title of this episode is what the hell are connectors doing that I'm not doing. We actually do want to explore what our mind is built for and why not everyone does this. In addition, why this isn't a standard operating procedure for every type of brain? You had a phrase in sales, didn't you? Something like, he doesn't like me, but he knows me?

Todd: Yeah, this is very well-known. What it means is, I'll give you an example: You've known someone you've worked with or known someone in your life for a long time - almost too long. And sometimes when you work with somebody, it becomes kind of like a marriage; you can be kind of critical of them. But when you have a lot of history with somebody, as humans, we get a natural trust. This is someone who dresses up and shows up. We know that we'd been our life on that. We would count on this person we worked with and what's nice about that is you don't like them, but you know their strengths and their weaknesses probably better than they do. And so when you're thinking of that next position, you are going to eliminate their weaknesses. But you think their benefits are going to be worth it. And that's why it's good to have and keep those doors open because even though they're not the favorite person, at least you know you can count on them, and that's very valuable in relationships and in business.

Joe: I have the perfect example of that. When I was working in side gigs and law enforcement, I met a guy who I worked with for years. He was the worst person to work with. I worked with him for years. He was always converging and barely spoke a kind word to coworkers, but he was extraordinarily patient and kind with outside clients and anybody coming through the door. And I remember thinking, I would never sit and have lunch with this guy. But the moment we went to a training surrounded by 100 people we didn't know from different aspects of different fields, suddenly were sitting together and I'm like I'd prefer to hang out with this guy. Like, I'd prefer to hang out with this guy who I know all their strengths and weaknesses, rather than introduce myself to 100 new people and possibly have to work with them and not know what they're going to bring to the table.

Todd: I had a boss a long time ago who I hated. He said this quote and I don't I don't like anything that he believes in, but this has turned out to be so true. He said, when you hire somebody, you're hiring their home life whether you like it or not…and that's just so true.

Joe: Yeah.

Myth 2: We're making lots of flames about the brains inability to track moves in the game of life. But is there really a built-in limit?

Joe: So, can we talk about like what are the limits of your brain? We're just going to go very quickly through how many things you can keep in mind and how many people you can keep in mind. We want to get to what are the benchmarks of our brains processing power first and what the limits are before we get into you can do this constant connecting.

Todd: So what you're talking about is, how many friends can we have on Facebook? How many people could remember their names? How many relationships? We can juggle… if we're not Chris Wilkes, if we're normal people.

Joe: Right. If we are ordinary mortals. Do you remember the episode where we talked about Dunbar’s number?

Todd: I do, it stuck with me. It's a number somewhere around 140.

Joe: Yeah, it's about 150, give or take. The idea is that all social primates have an upper limit on how many people they can keep in their minds. And when I say people, I don't mean, like, 1,000 people on your Facebook list where you can remember their name and roughly what their personality is like. It's more about they occupy a space in your mind as a full entity - you have a sense of them emotionally, you can remember their face, you can connect their name to it, you know a couple things about their family, etc. Dunbar talked about how it's about 150. Corporate offices actually split at around 150, to keep things streamlined and to keep things working and connected. The same thing with close-knit communities. If you look at the Amish and Mennonite communities, they naturally split off into two communities to keep it around that number or lower.

Todd: Dunbar, just so everybody knows, is a very brilliant British psychiatrist. He's an expert in Behavior and studied it his whole life. He's worth listening to.

Joe: Dunbar's number I jokingly refer to as the monkey’s fear, and that has given me an excuse throughout my entire life to only keep track of about 150 people at once. And after that, I just throw up my hands.

Todd:  I make cuts all the time. You are no longer important enough for me to remember who you are.

Joe: I'll be like, I'm sorry you were number 161.

Todd: You are not as cute as you used to be. You're out.

Joe: Now, if we want to keep track of small things in our working memory - meaning like our immediate eyes in front of us, if we want to memorize a phone number, you're cooking in the kitchen and you have to do 10 things to get dinner ready, how many things can you immediately put your hands on and think of in that moment? How many multitask can you actually multitask? And that number, according to science, is about three or four. You can jump quickly to higher numbers. You can completely put your attention on a different group of tasks. But you can only keep track parallel about three or four different tasks or numbers or subjects at a time. In fact, there's a reason why phone numbers are capped at seven numbers because we generally can't remember strings of things that will either unless we use a monic device or something. So generally speaking, the reason why we have sort of limits on how many people we communicate with and why it feels good to get rid of things, like not just people, but why it feels good to cross something off of your to-do list - the reason why it feels good to narrow your options is because you your brain gives you a reward for it. You get a little bit of dopamine when you complete stuff because it takes mental effort to do these things to keep simultaneous. People or tasks in mind it actually takes processing power and your brain is an efficient machine. It wants to limit that; it wants to burn fewer calories and do things more efficiently. So we don't by default create options. We don't go through life creating options. That's how you get errand fatigue, which also known as option paralysis. 

Todd: You can't read every small print; it's impossible. There's not enough time in the day and you don't have the energy. To summon a lesson in this if you have a very needy toxic partner/work problem, can that really drain? Can one person drain down your number and just sewer and soil your relationships because you putting so much time thinking and working with someone who is difficult?

Joe: Oh absolutely. I'm not going to speak for anybody, but I've noticed the connectors in my life, who are good at being connectors, they seem to pick people who look like they're professionals or they're operating at the top of their field, they also pick people who are low maintenance or people who are not going to absolutely absorb their attention and their resources. That sounds like it is a Machiavelli and play, but honestly, you can't be a connector at that level without doing that. You have to vet people who are not going to become part of errand paralysis.

Todd: Well, how do you do that Joe? Joe is very sought-after to help, and I've abused him a bit on that, referring him with friends and stuff to work on presentations and speeches. Joe always likes to help people. He's a fixer. But how do you say no to people? Because you can't help everybody. I guarantee there's more people in line and that can’t be easy.

Joe: I have stages, I've always kind of blamed it on being an introvert. But now I'm starting to see that professionals generally do this. If it is something where they want advice, I will give them resources. I'll cut aside a small bit of time, about 30 minutes to an hour and I'll have lunch with them, and I'll talk to them and I'll see what they're up to and what they're about, and what they're working on. But after that, the way it usually goes is they will either have something concrete they want help with or they want to be my friend and they want time. I try to limit my interactions to mammoth hunting. I will tell people, you know, if you have a mammoth to slay, if we are going after game, I will definitely jump in and help. There's only so many like projects people can work on. So that actually helps me limit how much time I give out. If somebody comes to me with a short story they want to bring into a contest, I'll give them an hour to sort of like talk it out with them and figure out where it's going. It same thing with the speech. This is going to sound maybe egotistical me to say but not a lot of people that I've met want to actually do the work. So when I say, hey I'm going to be here for the next project you work on - go ahead and call on me. Not a lot of people actually take me up on that. The people who do, we end up working on really interesting and amazing stuff. I mean, when I talk about advising on like city planning stuff, when I talk about meeting people who are in agriculture or chatting with people who are going to Toastmasters, that's always how it is. They actually have taken me up on my offer and we end up working on something interesting or strange.

Todd: Joe's been trying to fade me out for four years and I'm still fucking here, man.

Joe: It's because you keep taking up every one of my offers. Every time you come back with an actual thing to work on, so I'm like, okay, I got to change my policy. How do you do it? How do you limit your interactions…or do you? You have so many friends; I can't imagine. Do you have like a structured set of how much time you give people?

Todd: I do. I think I hand them off a lot. I've probably introduced to date about seven married couples. And I got a couple that are probably closing in on that. The other day, I was talking to a very attractive woman and she was talking about being single and I said, you know, I have a lot of friends who are handsome and rich and tall and she asked if I could introduce her to them, and I said I will. So, I think that's a lot of it. I try to kind of blend my friend group together, because I have the same issue as probably a schoolteacher has. You have 30 students in your class, you got the bright and brilliant students, and you’ve got some misbehave students and they get all your attention. So I try to limit my time because I just have to preserve my energy, but I still want everybody on my team or in my inner circle to feel loved. So it's tough. It's not easy, and it takes constant effort.

Myth 3: Whether we're a ship at sea or a desk in the corner cubicle, how do we make a practice out of creating options? Is there a secret mental muscle to develop?

 Joe: Okay, when you're working on ongoing projects, you do try to put them to bed? Or do you get the satisfaction of like, crossing things off your list? You know, even if it's tangentially related. Like, they're not necessarily yours but you're tied to it.

Todd: I respect others who see things all the way through, who complete tasks. I don't like to start things unless I know I'm going to finish them. So it's easier for me to say, no to something. And I've gotten better at that, or just avoiding it rather than not seen it all the way through. I want to be a finisher. The big thing that Joe and I work on is speeches, and the nice thing about a speech is when you have a deadline, you got to make it. If you have a book deadline or writing deadlines at work it makes it easy. But on creative projects and things you do outside of work, where there's not a boss or customer telling you to do it or paying you, you have to be disciplined.

Joe: Yeah, it helps to have a deadline not because it puts pressure on you necessarily but because there is now going to be a time where this project is over. Whether you succeed or not, this will be crossed off your list. Which for me like you said, closing, it feels nice.

Todd:  Progress. Progress is everything Joe.

Joe: Would you believe it if I told you that satisfaction, if you make a decision especially about like a project or a person, if it is reversible, it makes us less happy?

Todd: Really?

Joe: I would think it would be the opposite. I would think that if you buy a vase that being able to bring it back at any time and get the one you actually wanted or to change your mind, that would make us more satisfied. Like having options, and being able to reverse like, being able to undo the mortgage just got or like undo a marriage, etc.

Todd: Or what you studied in college, what you majored in and what your career is in, thinking man I should have done something else.

Joe: You would think that we would like reversible decisions, but I found a study that we're going to link off to about photography students, and the study basically tested them to show that they can keep a print they had done or what somebody else has done. And people who had the opportunity to change their minds with their prints were less satisfied. So, they would pick the one they want just like the other students, but if they were able to change their minds, whether or not they did change their mind, they were less satisfied. The people had to pick once and stick with it, they actually were more satisfied. They reported more satisfaction because they had to like it, and I think that is the big separation here in our minds is we actually don't want the decision so much afterward. We want a thing to be owned by us and that includes goals, projects, and people. Like if it's not reversible, then we own it; we have to add that to our narrative personally.

Todd: There's something to be said for that, you know, every time you pass academics, they give another letter or initials by their name. You don't lose that; you'll always be doctor after that.

Joe: So, when you drive home, how much does your brain go on autopilot?

Todd: Always. Sometimes I don't even realize I’m driving.

Joe: I do it with walking, with driving, with going room to room. I used to blame writing, but now I'm starting to just think it might be brains in general. I used to think that because I was always so focused on writing fantasy and coming up with stories and plots, I never saw my environment around me. I can enjoy walking in nature, and I can enjoy seeing things around me and being in a comfortable space, but my brain is on autopilot all the time. And I deeply suspect this is part of the reason why we don't create options everywhere we go. Our mind wants to be as efficient as possible. We don't have the processing power to recognize everything on the street as we drive down it, especially if we've been there a hundred times. So our brains tune those things out, simplify things, and let us sort of like dissolve into a daydreaming kind of state.

Todd: Have you ever had those situations where for example, a friend will take you to a restaurant and it's in a subdivision or a business park. The food is wonderful. And you're like, why have I never even noticed this restaurant? You never saw the sign. I mean, you've driven past it thousands of times and just never ever saw it just not in your brain pattern. We're predisposed to save calories and simplify our life, right?

Joe: Right. And if you go around creating options as sort of a matter of like professional habit, you undo that. You pull on that tapestry of unconscious autopilot and you unwind it. And the reason why is because if you have 300 people on your contact list and every time you go out to lunch, you bring somebody or talk to somebody you haven't spoken to in months every single time you do that, that is a new experience. It is forcing you to pay attention, forcing you to be connected and engaged on something else not in your normal day-to-day. You're ruining that autopilot. Also, I find it interesting that of all of the stories that we kept running into, you're going to find people who are extraordinarily skilled at finding unconventional solutions and finding new ways to operate. But for some reason, we kept gravitating because I think it's because I've read too much. Our opening narrative is about the USS Texas flooding its own deck to make the ship start tilting so they could shoot farther, which is just madness.

Todd: The leadership is making that call and you would think that the crew would have been like, are you crazy? The stakes are very high.

Joe: It sounds like a drunken person's logic.

Todd: it does. And also, we know the history of the Barb, which is a famous submarine. Submarines before the Barb would just sit and wait. But it's the Barb that started being more aggressive. It wouldn't lay in wait; it would attack. One time it surfaced underneath a Japanese boat and snapped it in half. It was also one of the first to use rockets rather than torpedoes. The Barb actually even sunk a Japanese train, which was only done once in history. They ended up sinking more ships than any other submarine. Now, the most important thing about them was not only that they had more successful battle missions, but they also didn’t lose one life. Their whole crew was intact for their whole Naval career during World War II, which is unheard of. The Barb sold when it was decommissioned; it's sold for $100K. Just to give you some context, if you were to build a nuclear sub today, it would cost three billion dollars.

Joe: Who's who bought the Barb?

Todd: I don't know, maybe it's one of the drug cartels or something.

Joe: So, I went looking for the science of how we become better connectors. How do we keep options open, and how do we make a constant mental practice of keeping our options open in a way that is professionally mature? First, I went science and then I went philosophy. One of the answers that you might encounter is Buddhism. There are a lot of warm, fuzzy, comfortable Buddhist sayings that challenge your ideas about how things should work or look for opportunities in tough situations. And a lot of Buddhism is about open-mindedness and keeping things in the air, but that's not as practical as what I was looking for. So instead, I turn towards psychologist Albert Bandura who talks about self-efficiency. He believes that when you're creating options, you're going to get there by acknowledging uncertainty involves having to experiment and get things right. That sentiment kind of started reconstructing my brain with how to create options. I see professionally adept connectors in my life. They don't look uncertain to me; they don't look like the people who would let an email sit unread for six months and then look at it and say, I forgot to get back to them. They don't look like the type of person who will get a text and then put their phone down and forget to answer. I'm describing how bad I am at being a connector and how bad I am at keeping my options open. But the idea is that if you think about your practice of creating options more about an exercise, it's more like you are creating options as an exercise day-to-day and less about, you know, being so wired tight and trying to get everything right - it's more about the exercise of opening yourself up to options and trying to communicate with people as often as you can.

Todd: That is a good point about communication. How do you feel if someone doesn't respond to your email for a few weeks or a few days? Do you feel that they're so important that they're doing other things, or do you feel devalued? And how do you walk that line? Sometimes I'm I get back to people too fast and rush the information that I don't think it all the way through, mainly because I'm afraid that they're going to think that they're not important to me because I didn't get back to them right away. How do you balance and manage that?

Joe: Right. So, I don't want to like out myself as being very old, but I used to read etiquette books from like the peerage age and it would be like you're only supposed to attend parties 45 minutes after they start. And it's not being rude, it's showing that you have high value, and it's because you want to give the hosts plenty of time to set up the party. I went through my sort of, like, OCD adult life with these ideas thinking that you could just follow a code or a rubric or a series of actions to succeed socially. However, the better way to approach is what Harvard Business Review calls construal. Construal is thinking that your actions have bigger meaning or purpose than what you're actually doing. So, for me, what I'm thinking of is, I just need to answer my damn emails and I need to call people who have contacted me. What I should be doing is I should be construing them as something that serves a higher purpose, which is I am creating a support network in my life and I am making sure that people know I'm an available resource to them, especially if I like them and that goes for everything. You should try to think of it as not that you're throwing doors open and making your life more hectic. You should think of it as…in our in our example, the USS Texas they could have just thought we're just lobbing exploding shells at the enemy to make them run but what they actually thought of is we're liberating occupied France by giving our troops one more days of artillery cover. There's always a construal way to think about things. If you construe things in a more action-oriented, more inspired more motivated, way you can start opening options all over the place and it doesn't feel fatiguing. It doesn't make you feel dread, like I have when I look back at my un-responded text messages.

Todd: I think you're right Joe. I think what I've been hearing you say to is you focused on winning the reward, the dopamine, and the connection, right? You have to kind of create that carrot to I think, and not look at it as like a chore but look it as it as a connection.

 Joe: Yeah. And feel okay about having things stay open. We've talked on this podcast about hospital debt, and we are going to have an episode soon about how much this country runs off debt, in general of all types. But I think I told you once that I was uncomfortable because I owed the hospital a bunch of money and I paid them because I needed to cross them off my list. It was causing me stress and you know I needed to have that box checked. But what ended up happening is I messed myself up badly because my Union was going to fight them. My Union was getting ready to pay them, but also to battle with them about how much they were charging. And if I just let my insurance and my Union slug it out, it would have been fine. I would have just sat back and let them do it. Instead, I end up costing myself a tremendous about a money because I needed to have that checked off my list. Have you ever burned any bridges or settled up when it was satisfying but unnecessary?

Todd: I have. We talked about earlier about you burn bridges and then in time, it seems to heal a little bit. People were romanticize or mis-remember the tough times. I think that they kind of give you a pass and they forgive. But my advice for anybody younger than me in a corporate world or in any relationships, I like to do the work stuff because money is easy to measure than connections. It's hard to really put that in a box. But I don't want you to ever burn any bridges. Keep options open in business and I'll tell you why. It isn't just the hiring managers and that's who we usually put our focus on. That's usually where lots of our pain is from and that's where we put a lot of our hate when we walk out the door. But I can honestly tell you how you act and how you behave and how you connect with your coworkers, I promise you. Joe, you're going to be shocked at how many of those are the next hiring managers and the next business owners and the next CEOs. It's the people you work with that end up being bosses that someday you're going to need a job from. You're going to need something from them, and they're going to need you because they might not like you, but they know you. And they're not going to remember your work as much as they're going to remember your attitude.

Final Thoughts

Settling the dispute, reaching a goal, deleting old emails, paying off old debts. We get a lot of satisfaction from shutting doors and completing our checklist. Humans are natural, reductive thinkers. We like to close our case files as often as possible, not open new ones. But they're gifted folks out there who are capable of the more Buddhist approach with work and relationships, people who keep their contact list open, and people who open doors as they wander the hallways of life instead of closing them. We're not suggesting you stop being a completeness or that you leave mounds of work untouched. But sometimes, we could be more like the captain of the USS Texas. If we see a goal that's just out of reach, we should squint, tilt their head, and ask...what are my other options?