Have an Unqualified Summer
If you’ve enjoyed reading Unqualified Opinions, the person you have to thank is Nikki Galloway. That’s because it was only as a result of her joining Permanent Equity as CFO that I was able to shed some of the hats I was wearing and loved to wear (underqualified as I was to wear them) as CFO and think about other interesting and potentially valuable ways to spend my time as whatever it is I do now (CIO).
When I thought about that, I remembered a time I listened to John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, speak. He said something then along the lines of “Keep giving up the things you love to do because the reason you love them is you’re good at them. Instead, always find something different to do that’s valuable to you and the business.” This was specifically in reference to an anecdote he told about the day he stopped selecting store locations, and his point was that other people need to know how to do things and you need to know how to do other things.
Point taken.
We have a lot of interesting conversations at Permanent Equity. In fact, at the risk of sounding egotistical, I think we’re way undervalued based on our influence to interestingness ratio (i.e., we are significantly less influential than we are interesting). I think that should change, and I wanted to do something about it, and I thought that would be valuable to me and the business, and so here we are.
Unqualified Opinions was born out of a challenge I gave myself. Could I/we (and yes I have appropriated a lot of material from others) have something interesting to say every day (well, every weekday, except that bonus Opinion where I owned Mark for questioning how I spend my time)?
Mostly, I think that’s been achieved.
But more gratifying has been the conversations these emails have kicked off. You may not know this but every Unqualified Opinion goes out internally to Permanent Equity before it ever goes public. And those guys are not shy about giving feedback (we wouldn’t have it any other way). While the point of doing that was to make sure I didn’t send out publicly anything that made us look stupid, the real value has been in sending everyone at our firm an email every morning. The learning is communicate with people. It turns out we’re social creatures.
Now extend that learning to the dozens of subscribers Unqualified Opinions now has (I appropriated that joke from Chris Hill). It’s exciting to get responses. It feels like I get to have a conversation with the world. It turns out we’re social creatures.
Where am I going with this?
If you’ve followed the programming of this daily email, then you know I like to send our four solid Opinions per week and then something flippant on Friday. This is this Friday’s flippant Opinion. It doesn’t really have a point other than to explain what we’ve been doing and thank you for participating.
Also, we’re past Memorial Day. Summer has begun, and I expect readership to drop off and may also be running low on ideas. So call this the end of Season One of Unqualified Opinions.
We are going to keep publishing and try some interesting stuff (and let’s face it, very few people read the first two months so we may republish a few of those with some value adds), but it may not be a daily new written piece again until the kids are back in school. That said, I hope you’ll stick around for Season Two. And if you have anything you think there should be an Opinion on, send it in. Again, I/we are not shy about appropriating ideas.
Have an Unqualified summer.
– By Tim Hanson
