John Lennon's To Do List

Even the rich and famous find a need to make to do lists. Maybe they are rich and famous because they make to do lists. Below is a To Do list handwritten by John Lennon. For sure it is a way to keep from forgetting things. A principle of Cowboy Safety is to have some way to keep track of what needs to be done. When we learn the wrong way to do something we should make a record so that we do not repeat that mistake. I find that 3x5 cards are a good way to do this. 

David Sneed 

Cowboy Safety and Resource Value

A teenager lost a contact lens while playing basketball in the driveway. After a fruitless search, he went inside and told his mother the lens was nowhere to be found. Undaunted she went outside. In a few minutes she returned with the lens in her hand. "How did you manage it Mom?" the teenager asked. "We weren't looking for the same thing," she replied. "You were looking for a small piece of plastic. I was looking for $150."

Too often we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. 

The Cowboy Safety philosophy, that learns from the past, established values for every resource, tangible and intangible. This process is not immediately obvious. Once learned it is not easily forgotten. 

David Sneed

Modelling and Record-Keeping

Practitioners of Cowboy Safety need to rapidly create future models of the short term and sometimes very very short term as well as years into the future. There are a variety of well understood and reliable tools for doing that starting with simple spreadsheets.

These practitioners must also keep records of the past even when they do not understand why. It is from these records that models of the past can be made.

"If you can't model the past where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?"

This is a most succinct quote from William Happer who is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University. While admittedly not a climatologist, Professor Happer has made the most rational and believable argument why increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to be desired rather than resisted.

Thucydides, author of The History of the Peloponnesian War, wrote in great detail. He wrote in such detail that his book has been called the most boring book ever written. He wrote in detail because he said he did not know what might be needed by future historians.

It is by modeling the past that we can model the future and thus avert the injuries and sometimes disastrous effects of hazards.

David Sneed