#112 - 50% of What You Know is Right

Welcome to another episode of the Sprinkler Nerd Show. As always, my mission is to get inside the minds of world-class landscape entrepreneurs and tease out their habits and lessons learned so that you can apply them to your own life and business.

But today, it's just me, and I want to share a quote that opened up my mind in a really good way and inspired me to think about what I know and how we should be more open-minded.

Before I do that, I want to tell you a story of self-reflection I had recently. I was on spring break in Honolulu, Hawaii, with my family and had the chance to catch up with two other sprinkler nerds, my good friends Paul Bassett and Dave Woods. They are working on a killer project at Pearl Harbor that I was fortunate to assist with, and it was great to see them both.

During the flight home, I was catching up on emails and remembered that I had been asked to be interviewed on the Scaling UP! H2O Podcast. As part of the scheduling process, I was asked to answer a series of questions, one of which was to write a short bio about myself and my business history. It was during this process of reviewing my past that I had a few moments of self-reflection that I typically don't allow time for.

I asked myself a question: If someone were to ask me for advice about what got me where I am, what would I say? At first, I wrote down a ton of accomplishments, timelines, work, projects, etc. But then I reflected again and asked myself how I could simplify this. I realized that if someone were to ask me this question, I wouldn't rattle off all of this goobliguck to them. Instead, I thought about something specific that ties my different successes together.

I boiled it down to two specific traits: creativity and curiosity. That's pretty much how I got here, talking to you, and it's how I'm going to get where I want to go.

Now, I encourage you to ask yourself this same question: What makes you, you? What makes you successful at what you do? What got you where you are? Spend time reflecting on this from your own life. If you've never had a thought like this before, give it a try. It may seem awkward, but I can tell you that the benefits will start to compound over time.

So, let's transition into the quote of the week. I heard this quote while listening to the Tim Ferriss Show, and I highly recommend it if you want to expand your mind. The quote is this: "Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong, and the other half is right. Our problem is that we don't know which half is which."

This quote resonated with me because of my passion for curiosity and creativity, but also because this is all just a big experiment. Seriously, watering plants is just a big experiment. It's important to remind ourselves that what we think we know may be correct, but it may also be incorrect.

Think about sprinklers. How we water the landscape today is different than how we watered it in 1975. The tools we use are different, the scheduling formulas are different, and the automation is different. This is to give you permission to keep an open mind. You don't need to be an expert who has all the answers. Instead, I encourage you to be an expert who continuously questions what they know, in constant pursuit of perhaps a better way of doing things.

In the end, I encourage you to stay curious, ask questions, try something new.