I had another post ready to go today, or at least I was close to having it ready to go when I felt prompted to go in another direction. I think the post today follows nicely off of yesterdays.

Fatigue messes with our performance no matter how disciplined/high performing we become. Researchers have spent large amounts time looking into the reasons why plane crashes occur. What they have found is not what movies portray, the dramatic, catastrophe, were the engine blows up and the plane takes a massive nose dive. This is not the cause of planes crashing on a consistent basis. Nor are crashes the result of negligent individuals that have a history of poor performance. What they have found across multiple crashes is that fatigue is at the root of the problem.

Fatigue undermines the normally high performing into making mistakes, and not just one mistake, but, several mistakes that all come together to cause an accident. At times fatigued pilots failed to noticed warnings ten to fifteen times. The same appears to try across the board in our lives. When we are worn out we do dumb things, we say dumb things. I can attest to this.

Just yesterday I had one of those days where I was scheduled to the minute it felt like. One delay and I was going to be behind and that is not good when you are giving talks and you have a whole camp of over a hundred kids and coaching waiting for you. Simply, I couldn’t be late. One of the tasks I needed to get done was drop packages off at the post office. While I was at the post office I grabbed a diet coke (clear sign I was running low). But in my fatigued state, feeling run down, I grabbed a 500 ml bottle for $1:50 instead of the 2 litre bottle for $1:00. Not that .50 cents is that big of a deal but I dislike (hate) making bad decisions on any level. It took me about ten minutes to put this lesson behind me.

Bye the way the lesson was to SLOW DOWN and think. When we are fatigued we tend to worry rather than think. When are not thinking we make bad decisions. Simply, when fatigue sets in we do dopey things.