A Funny Anecdote

Listening to Eric Ries discuss his "5 Why's" proportional investment program made me remember a funny story about my father. He was always responsible for setting up the family computer. I was still pretty young at this stage in life an so my trouble shooting skills were non existent. All I knew at the time was simply the computer worked or it didn't work. So whenever I would encounter a problem with the computer I would go to my father and say, "the computer is broken". He would roll his eyes and say back, "the computer is not broken". Every time I went to him I was sure that time the computer was actually not working. Pretty much every time he would come over to the computer sit down and in under a minute say, "the computer is working just fine". Man it was frustrating. In my mind the error was always the computers fault. To my father the error probably always looked like my fault.

That was probably a good proportional investment moment for my father. He could have taught me how to troubleshoot any issues I was having instead of coming to him every time the computer would freeze up or something went wrong. I'm not knocking him, he was a great and patient man, but he did miss an opportunity to teach me how to fix the problem. If he had taken the ten to fifteen minutes to teach me once he could have avoided the thirty or forty times I came to him to "fix the computer". In my life I hope I can recognize the opportunity to find the "why" and then invest into fixing the problem.