On my way to play tennis with Z yesterday I got a call from Whitey. Just to check in and say hello. This was a super-nice little treat, the kind of thing I maybe haven't been doing enough of myself recently. A small-town, small-businessperson touch that just feels right. It was also great that I could tell Whitey that I had messaged with his daughter earlier in the day to connect her with this kid who has been working with us this summer who is joining Deloitte soon, so she could counsel him.
I had been on the phone with another of our Chapel Hill contemporaries -- this one a client so he shall remain nameless -- talking about some new business activities he is spinning up now out of his academic area. He had needed counsel on some business formation stuff (LLC vs. S Corp), and I started off by refreshing my memory on that topic, then I realized what he really needed was to talk to someone who spent more time in those weeds, like my friend Donna who has a law practice focused on that. I went to her web site and blog and was checking out the guidance she offered and saw that the indexing and date stamping on the blog was not what it could be and made it hard to navigate and find things. So I dropped her a quick note with suggestions on how it might be made better. She wrote back to thank me. Again, I love that shit.
It is hard to operate and get everything right, and it's hard to know how to set one's boundaries correctly. I am reminded of something Jason Zweig said not long ago in an interview with Michael Kitces (they are both great forces for good in my professional world, look them up using your search engine of choice if you are curious). In response to a question, Zweig said that the essence of professionalism was knowing when to say "I don't know," and saying it a lot.
By the way, Z beat me 6-3, 6-4 yesterday. It took 2 hours as we ran each other around good. I am in a bit of a slump right now against Z for whatever reason, but we continue to slug it out, beat each other up thoroughly, and sleep well at the end of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment