Go Joe

Only in America could you have a political system engineered so that the 58th-best person to be your party’s presidential nominee gets selected without any competition.

I breathed a big sigh of relief when Biden pulled out. It was like watching a slow-moving train smash. He is older than the last four US presidents!

This got me thinking about how important timing can be. Joe could have read the tea leaves a lot earlier and stepped off the train with dignity, rather than getting pushed off it.

Roger Federer won 80% of his matches, but only 54% of the points. But he got his timing right and won the points that mattered.

YouTube was not the first video streaming platform, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. But their launches coincided with other factors that springboarded their success. The timing was right.

Getting timing right can sometimes be just dumb luck, and other times, cunning foresight, or plain common sense.

So how do you pick it? You’ll hear the ‘just do it’ gurus they say the best time to start something is yesterday. And the second-best time is now. In many cases that is right. But in some, the best time may be tomorrow.

But they do not talk much about the best time to stop. And that should be the first consideration before you start something. But subtraction is hard because we all love to add. More is better.

Poor stops. They don’t get anywhere near the airtime they deserve. We should celebrate stops as much as the starts.

What is on your stop list?

And it’s worth considering your timing, so you don’t be a Joe.