This is the most valuable pie chart I have seen:

As the title suggests, you can only ever have 2 of the 3 options. For example let’s say you want to build a house. You can have:

A high quality house in a short amount of time (green & red) but it will cost you more money (sacrifice blue).

or

A house that will cost less and be built quickly (blue & red) but will end up being a lower quality project (sacrifice green).

or

A high quality house and costs less money (blue & green) but it will take more of your time for DIY (sacrifice red).

I have yet to come across a situation where this 2 of 3 approach hasn’t made sense and helped shed some light on a decision. Next time you’re approaching a project, consider which 2 of 3 are important to you, or perhaps which one you can sacrifice, and see how much smoother your planning and execution goes.

I love it.

When you apply for a job and aren’t successful the immediate reaction is to run through all the possible reasons for your lack of success. Generally these tend to be pretty cynical and feature them prominently and you not so much. As a 27 year old university educated business professional I had never before thought that my age would put me at a disadvantage. Little did I know that there exists a trend in hiring that says just that: businesses are hesitant to hire from generation Y. Here are a couple of caveats to get out of the way before I continue: I don’t care what generation you’re from there are going to be some useless slackers. Let’s assume they are getting weeded out in the hiring process. Second, I will say that there are companies that recognize the value in generation Y (hint: these companies don’t hire employees, they recruit them), but they do seem to be in the minority.

So – why do generation y’s make such poor employees?

The general consensus is that we are not interested in putting in the hard yards. We show up at 8:30am, put in our days work, and leave at 5:00pm. If something needs to get done it can wait until tomorrow. We like to socialize, we chat to our friends at work, we check our email a lot, check out our twitter feed, and read up on the blogs. All of this is done when we should be at our desk doing work. And you can forget about burning the midnight oil, we did enough of that in university thank you very much.

Whether this is a true depiction or not is beside the point. It’s out there and if we’re to overcome it, we need to know where it has come from.

Generation Y, like any other generation, is unlike any other generation (clever). More of us are more educated than ever before. A university education is no longer a luxury, it has become par for the course.  This leads to two important states of mind that will shine a lot of light on our employment predicament.

First is a sense of entitlement.

When we graduate from 4 years of university education we immediately assume that we are now entitled to a minimum salary working for a great company. Oh, and the respect and admiration we will get for achieving this education will be a given. It may seem a bit laughable but can you blame us? We’ve just spent four (at least) years studying everything there is to know about our field. We’ve spent $40,000 on the low side, and upwards of $70,000 on the high side to get this education, often times going fully into debt to do so. Top top it all off - universities operate more like business than places of higher learning. Universities advertise their degrees by unabashedly telling us "You will make more money with this degree". I don't think you can blame us for thinking that we will come out on the other side with some perks.

Unfortunately, there’s a fatal flaw in this way of thinking.

Let’s say I open up a cupcake shop. I rent the building for my store front, buy a few ovens and some baking equipment, invest some money into advertising and branding, purchase all the ingredients I need, and invest a year of my life into developing a kick-ass cupcake recipe. Opening day arrives and I set my very first amazing cupcake on the counter for a reasonable price.

$43.99.

What? I had to rent the store, buy all the equipment, and invest all my time and money into this? Considering all that I have sunk into this cupcake, it’s a bargain at $43.99!

At the end of the day a cupcake is worth whatever a hungry person needing a sugar fix will pay for it. It doesn’t matter what it cost to make. And the same holds true for you, cupcake. I don’t care how long you were in university or how much it cost you: you are worth what someone will pay you and not a penny more. Leave your sense of entitlement at the door.

The second result of this education is curiosity.

The modern concept of higher education is so full of holes that I could market it as a new swiss cheese  (thanks Black Adder). It fails on many levels and is often a simple exercise in memorization and regurgitation. However, when you go through that many years of it, there is one exciting byproduct that is hard to avoid:

Curiosity. 

Generation Y is a curious group because we've been bred that way. Learning is completely addictive. The more you know, the more you want to know. We want to know why things are being done the way they’re being done. We want to understand the hows so that we can help improve, to make things better, to leave this world in better shape than we found it. You’ll find us asking ‘How does that work?’ so we can follow up asking ‘Ok, now how can we make that work better?’. It leads to incredible innovations both online and on the ground. It also leads to frustrated employers.

Imagine a hammer that would always hammer in nails, but do it reluctantly while constantly reminding you that your construction process was flawed. You'd be forgiven for getting frustrated with your tool but is it the hammers fault or your fault for choosing the wrong tool for the job?

In the classical sense of hard work I will concede that Gen Y is lacking. We don't have that industrial sense of nose-to-the-grindstone determinedness. We are used to getting our mp3s in 3 minutes or less over a high-speed connection, communicating with our thumbs, and we get frustrated when things don't work as well as they should. Cogs in the wheel, we are not. But saying that we are not interested in doing the hard yards is untrue.

So let’s make an agreement. We will abandon the idea of entitlement based on education and instead determine our worth based on outcomes. We will do the hard yards, we want to do the hard yards, we’re desperate to do the hard yards. All you have to do is work with us to ensure that we are running in the right direction.

The act of thinking is something that I feel is undervalued. I’m not talking about the thinking it takes to chew gum and walk simultaneously, or the thinking required to drive a car and not end up at the bottom of a lake. I’m talking about the act of thinking; consciously weighing the pros and cons of a decision, determining that what you are doing is the best thing to do, and then going ahead and doing it. I would argue that the majority of things we do, we do simply because, well, it’s what we’ve always done. We rarely think about it.

I actively try to be open minded. I will take opinions or beliefs that I hold and ask myself: "Why do I feel this way?". There are times that this leads me to realize the opinion is founded in something as solid as jell-o, and other times that it solidifies my belief – allows me to say “Yup, that does makes sense.” One thing that I think a lot of people believe, but do not necessarily think about, is religion.

My mother in law recently finished reading John Grogan’s memoir: The Longest Trip Home. I have no trouble admitting that I loved his book Marley & Me and so it took little encouragement for me to take up his newest tome. The book is a memoir and details John’s growing up in Detroit, struggling through adolescence, and moving into adulthood. What holds it all together is the accompanying story of his relationship with his devoutly catholic parents. He struggles to understand how his parents adhere to their faith so completely when so many things seems to not make sense to him. I got the impression that many times when he was confronted with a facet of faith he could not identify with, his rebuttal would be: “Yes, but when you think about it…”

When you think about it.

The Longest Trip Home was a great read. Funny, honest, and relatable. It got me thinking about thinking and thinking about religion. My father and I always enjoy great discussions on religion and so I mentioned the book to him to see what he thought. Meanwhile, he had sent me another book: Velvet Elvis.

Velvet Elvis is not a fun book about a boy with undertones of religious commentary, it’s a full on book about Christianity and makes no bones about it. That’s not to say it’s not a good read – but if you’re looking for it in the book store I doubt they’d be on the same shelf. Or aisle. Or store.

I digress. Velvet Elvis is another great read because it breaks down the Christian faith into a much more digestable, understandable format. A few common threads so far are that:

·         It’s ok not to understand things

·         Relgion is not a set, solid, permanent thing. It’s growing, adapting, changing.

·         It’s about the conversation we have with each other – not so much the end result of who's right and who's wrong.

·         It’s about asking questions.

I don’t relate to a lot of things in the book. I mark each page that contains something I don’t get, something I don’t agree with, or something that doesn’t make sense to me with a yellow tab (as you can see here, it gets a bit crowded). Armed with my little yellow army, next time I skype with my old man I can go through the book and we can talk about the points, argue about things, ponder others, and laugh about the rest. We won’t necessarily agree, but we’re both open to having the conversation, to asking questions. Two people on either side of the fence – but we’re both open to thinking.

I’ve often tried to figure out the goal of this blog. Is it about cars? Is it about improving? Is it about telling stories? Yes, to a degree, it is. But the my main goal, above all else, is only one thing:

To encourage you to think.

Forgive me while I use my blog to post an undeniably adorable video of the newest addition to our family: Nova the dog! Back to scheduled programming soon, I promise. 

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I used to play a video game where there were four separate spots to capture. You would play with 19 or so other players on your team over the internet. Capturing a spot gave you a few points and then gave you more points continually as long as you held that spot. The more spots you held, the more points you would continually gain and when you reached the set amount of points you won. Hurray! The best way to win was to split into three groups of 7 (ish), each group took a spot and then you just sat there and defended until you won – it was universally accepted as the easiest way to win.

Except it wasn’t so easy.

You would have your three spots and be sitting back defending when you would notice some drooling moron creeping ever closer to the abyss that is the no-man’s land between the spots. “Come back!” you would call (type) in your most assertive voice (CAPS). But drawn by the shiny temptation of action, onward he would creep.

Sure enough, he would eventually get far enough away from the safety of the group that he would end up laying face down in a pile of his own drool and innards. Another drooling moron would rush to his aid and before you know it, we’d be over run and lose our sure win.

What does this have to do with anything you may ask? Well, as it turns out, everything.

I recently read this article about the new Ford Focus which was unveiled in Detroit recently. Scanning the pics I made the usual observations. Then I came to the picture of the interior. The seats look racey and the dash looks like the love-child of the Starship Enterprise and, well, another Starship Enterprise. There are so many buttons and shiny knobs that you can’t help but think some of them must be for show and have no practical purpose. How can a car have that many functions? There are THREE LCD screens for crying out loud!

But what really got me was the gear lever. It was most definitely an automatic which didn’t make any sense to me as this was certainly the sports version (look at those seats). But why an auto box on a sporty car? Then I saw them. Sitting behind the wheel with glowy blue arrows on them, speaking of the hidden speeds that they could un leash. Yup. Flappy paddles. (For those of you who don’t know, modern sports cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis run with two paddles behind the wheel to shift gears. These paddles can shave milliseconds off acceleration and lap times which makes a difference in a hyper car.)

As I mentally lambasted Ford for putting such a stupid option on a Focus something in the back of my head (Maybe my sternum - wait, where is your sternum? What is a sternum??) knew exactly why they had done it. Because we want it.

If I bake you a cake and you then consume that cake, I can safely assume you liked it and would eat it again. If everyone I know is buying gerbils, I can open up my new gerbil emporium with confidence. It’s stupid of us to complain about products we get because, in essence, it’s exactly what we’ve been asking for. The trouble is, we often buy with our hearts and not our heads. These flappy paddles are a prime example of this.

When confronted with the options list for your new Focus, how hard would it be to not tick that box? "You mean I can drive around like an F1 car, blipping the throttle and changing gears with these paddles to squeeze every inch of goodness from my little engine? YEEhaw!!" When you really think about it though, it’s a bloody terrible idea. The gear changes will be jerky 95% of the time, hill starts and parking will be a nightmare, and you’ll look a complete arse trying to explain it to the people who used to be your friends.

So, fellow consumers, I urge you to purchase with both your head and your heart. For God’s sake think about the options you have before you hand over your cash. Your cash is the only bargaining chip you have, if you waste it on crap then manufacturers will keep feeding us that same crap. We have the power and if we use it wisely we'll force manufacturers to make better and better products. The key being the we. All it takes is a few drooling morons to spoil it for the rest of us.

Oh – and that Focus actually looks pretty sweet.