I provide IT services to a customer of over 200 employees, which I view as me having over 200 bosses (if you believe the old line that the customer is always right). As such, I've learned over many years to "gauge" each individual so that I can provide them not just an answer to a technical problem, but also a superior customer experience. This "gauging" comes naturally to me as I am a "people" person; it's almost instinctual. But I've learned over time to make it a conscious part of my daily routine as well so that as each situation comes up, I have a collection of data points and experiences to help me do my job better.

What I've found has helped me shape what I share here in this podcast. We've reviewed this in many episodes: people exist in broad categories and at every point in each spectrum: introvert/extrovert, Type A/Type B, patient/irascible, geniuses/"not the brightest bulb in the pack", artistic/athletic, EQ/IQ, conservative/liberal, dog-lover/cat-lover, etc. We typically attribute these to "nature vs. nurture": your genes vs. how you were raised. Some of this is due to random chance, or what we might call luck, or unpredictable variability (i.e. the variables in life are too many to observe, record, and predict).

I notice this in my own children, and how they have different attributes, some from me and some from their mother. Although statistically we can fairly accurately predict the various permutations and combinations, still we can't get that down to the individual level, which leads us to using words and phrases like luck, random chance, karma of the universe, or a roll of the dice. Still, it's been hypothesized that if we knew the state of every atom, photon, and sub-atomic particle that we could predict perfectly what is going to happen next, even your next thought, but that complexity masks the immutable direction of the future and so we attribute what comes next to random chance.

But random chance gets short shrift these days, just walk into a casino and it proves the point: the House always wins. That's because they know perfectly well the statistical chances of each game and modify the house rules so that (sooner or later) they always win. Look at life insurance companies: it's a 100% certainty that you are going to die, yet they still sell you a policy, that's because their statisticians and actuarialists know what to charge you based on "risk factors" and past statistics; even if by "random chance" you get run over by a bus the day after you get your policy, they are still profitable (overall, and in the long run).

So, armed with this knowledge, I approach each interaction with another person, no matter how well I know them or not, with a certain level of confidence. That, quite quickly, I can gauge them and the situation, and regardless of the random chances of their genes, or how they were raised, or even the state of the atomic particles in their brain, that I can make the right decisions to affect a pleasant outcome; that I can take a roll of the dice and know I'm going to hit the jackpot...

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