Bruised Apples
How Troy Mitchell Won the Game of Life
I recently pulled an apple out of the fridge and noticed there were slight signs of bruising around the perimeter of the sticker. And then I peeled the sticker off and saw that there was in fact a bruise underneath it.
This disturbed me because I started to think about how intentional this act of covering up the flaw was.
I began to think about how this decision to cover up the bruises didn’t just start on the farm, or on the factory floor. It started in the mind of someone in charge.
Troy Mitchell worked his way up to the top of Dole’s Pacific Northeast division after years of backstabbing and brown-nosing that got him to where he is today.
He was well aware of the industry secret when he put the directive into place: Nancy from Winnipeg and Pedro in Atlanta don’t like to buy apples that have bruises on them. As such they don’t sell and the discard rates are higher for these brands.
Even though his division had a code of ethics to not deceive customers, Mr. Mitchell had higher aspirations to buy things like the latest Tesla and a brand new cabin in the San Juan Islands where his kids could do activities like jet skiing and play pickleball on a private court.
This sort of abundance and not needing to worry about money doesn’t create itself, he thought.
So one afternoon, the memo was written and distributed. It made it quite clear that anyone who thinks the old way of doing business is the right way would be swiftly shown the door.
Financial success for the Mitchells didn’t happen overnight. Yet after months and even years of instilling the practice of putting the sticker over the bruises, it started to pay off.
Until the day that I pulled that apple out of the fridge, and I began to uncover a litany of deceptive practices that Troy Mitchell was guilty of going back to 1997 when he bought his diploma from Harvard Business School by essentially feeding cocaine to the dean on a weekly schedule.
Three Ideas from My Notebooks
News flash: You will never feel ready to do the thing. When you say you’re going to do something and you put it in your calendar to sit down and do that thing, just remember this sad yet liberating truth.
The amateur barista complains about the coffee beans, but the professional will figure out how to work with them.
Every day you can make the choice to begin again. Or you can keep wearing a backpack of shame, guilt or fear. Pick your burden and choose to discard it.
A long archive of the ideas are located in The Ideas Index:
August Homepage Playlist 🦁
The homepage playlist project continues, where I pick a few songs from my catalog to share with you on Soundcloud. This makes it easy for everyone to listen without thinking about what streaming service you subscribe to.
For this one I pulled out a fingerstyle guitar piece that was previously unreleased to include:
Thanks for reading today, and have a great week ahead and an even better rest of your long weekend if you’re in Canada 🧡🥯🧡
Elliott