#106 – Competence & Mistakes

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Hope you’re having a great week!

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read time 3 minutes 

#106 at a Glance:

• Quote: The arrow doesn’t seek the target...

• Podcast: How to recover from huge mistakes in business.

• Mental Model: The Curse of Competence.

• Article: The Penrite Story.

• Tweet: Population collapse in Europe.

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Podcast I listened to:

The Game with Alex Hormozi Ep 723: How To Recover From Huge Mistakes In Business

You forget to ship an order, you didn’t get back to a customer, or you’ve done something that has damaged the reputation of your business in the eyes of your end user… what do you do?

Awesome pod from Alex Hormozi answering this exact question.

His advice essentially boiled down to the following:

Once a mistake in business has been made, accept that ROI is out of the window; you’re going to lose money in this transaction. Take full responsibility from the start and show the customer that you care about the mistake more than they do in order to validate their feelings of bitterness and frustration. Then, it is your job to make it better than right. A refund is an apology and an apology is not enough. You need to go above and beyond.

Practical tip: Equip employees with 2-3 things they can offer customers immediately in these instances. Bake the cost into profit margins and monitor frequency to assess whether any processes need to be changed.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

[Podcast Length: 26 minutes]

Mental Model I’ve been thinking about:

The Curse of Competence by Chris Williamson 

I came across this incredibly insightful piece of writing from Chris Williamson on the ‘Curse of Competence’ which I wanted to share:

“You’re probably pretty competent.

You can do things.

You’re prepared to try new stuff.

And when you try new stuff, you don’t suck that much and you seem to make progress more quickly than most people.

This is another Curse Of Competence.

Your options for life-direction are less constrained by your abilities, and more by your choices.

This sounds like a blessing.

Indeed it’s better than the alternative.

But it’s a unique category of problem, one which occurs while people tell you how fortunate you are to deal with it.

Barry Schwartz in the Paradox Of Choice talks about the process of buying jeans 60 years ago.

You went to the jeans store and there was one type, one colour, one cut.

You found your waist size, paid and walked out.

Now you may have wanted a slightly different style of jeans, or length, or colour, but you had no choice other than what was given to you.

So your total utility from the jeans may not be maximised but your satisfaction with the decision is pretty high, knowing you got the best you could given the circumstances.

Compare this to today.

You go to a jean store and look around.

Do you want skinny or bootcut? Straight legged? Cropped? Ripped? Blue? Grey? Acid wash? With contrast stitching or without?

The options are endless.

Hurray! You can finally select exactly the pair of jeans you’re looking for.

But this also means that any suboptimal decision is entirely your fault.

If you were unhappy with your jeans in 1960 - it’s the fault of the crappy jeans store.

If you’re unhappy with your jeans in 2024 - it’s the fault of your research.

Previously, your experience was largely out of your hands and limited by the world, today, it’s only limited by your choices.

This is how a constraint of options makes the decision making process easier.

The Curse Of Competence plays into this too.

If you only are good at one category of things, you sure might be unhappy that you can’t do something else, and that indeed is a rubbish situation.

But the constraint helps to narrow your choices down.

On the other hand if you’re good at lots of things, there are many paths open to you which is liberating but can also cause you to be scared, confused and frozen in place.

In one world your life options are constrained by opportunity, in another world they are constrained by discernment.

We could call this a Titanic Problem.

An issue that everyone says you’re in such a privileged position to deal with.

“This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you’re so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree, but you’re also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment, and you’re not sure why.” — Adam Mastroianni

Having lots of competencies you could follow in your life is exciting, but it’s also terrifying and paralysing too.

Plus you have the added challenge of feeling guilty for your seeming ungratefulness even though the world is at your feet.”

Brilliant.

You can check out everything Chris has ever written here.

Article I read:

AFR Rich List Australia 2025 | The Penrite Story

Toby Dymond’s engine oil company, Penrite, started out as one petrol station in Melbourne’s Caulfield 99 years ago. Transforming it into a company now worth ~$700 million has been a family effort, but he is clear about the hero of this Rich List origin story: his mother.

Margaret Dymond, now 93, immigrated to Australia from England in 1957. His dad, J.D., worked for British Petroleum developing fuel additives and soon discovered a gap in the market for oils made for the local environment.

J.D. met Les Mercoles, who started Penrite in 1926 by selling oil and petrol from the kerbside. Mercoles had no children and stricken with cancer asked J.D. if he wanted to buy the company. It was Margaret who pushed them to do it.

His parents paid five figures for Penrite in 1979, when Toby was six, mortgaging the family home and two investment properties to buy it.

***

A really inspiring Australian business story.

Being exposed to the Penrite brand many times throughout the years having grown up around the V8 Supercars, this was an eye-opening look into the remarkable success of a private, family-owned Aussie company.

Another thing I took away from the article was the emphasis that the Dymond family places on younger family members acquiring business and life experience elsewhere before joining Penrite in their late 30s.

Uncommon yet clearly highly effective. I really admire that approach.

You can check out the full article in the AFR here.

Tweet I liked:

Population Collapse in Europe

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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