Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 286

Two List Strategy

A method is a promise: do these steps and something improves. Two List Strategy keeps its promise if you keep yours.

Try it for a fortnight before judging it. Most methods die in the court of first impressions, which is the least competent court there is.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.