Steve Jobs once did a speech on consulting and how crucial it is for learning and improvement to “stick around” for a long time, several years, to fully “own” the consequences of your recommendations. I have worked as a consultant most of my professional life and it hit very close to home. In the building industry where I am an acoustic consultant, the delay between your first advice to a client to the finalized building is measured in years. And I am finally getting old enough to seeing several of “my” projects materialize. It is equally scary and wonderful.
Read MoreSometimes things happen, that are so unlikely that they can only be explained by some kind of divine intervention. We’ve had two of those occasions recently during our renovation project. The first one, and most unlikely, was the impeccable timing of our electrician who arrived here just in time to install new wiring in my office at the same time as the construction workers had torn down the old roof. To have a house without a roof is obviously a bad idea, so this type of work is dependent on weather conditions. Then they work very fast to remove and replace the ceiling in a day. So, we’re talking about a time window of 4-6 hours, maximum, when the roof is gone (i.e. half of it). And there will never be a better time to reinstall the electrical wiring. I booked my electrician months ago, with a gut feeling that “this day will probably be the day when the roof is removed”. And he arrived with the precision of a Japanese bullet train, exactly when the roof was gone.
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