BRACKETING - TAKE ACTION IN THE FACE OF UNCERTAINTY
===
[00:00:00] Hi folks, Dennis Guzik, here again, with Be the Ultimate podcast. So today, I want to talk about something that has applications to your career. So going back to my early days, when I was a young Marine officer, the first job I had in the field in the fleet was as a forward observer.
[00:00:24] So a forward observer is a person on the forward lines of troops, with the infantry, who spots, targets, and calls back to cannons located in the rear to fire on those targets. Now, we have a lot more accurate ways of doing things electronically, but back in the day, there was it was pretty interesting. Because, you're the forward observer and you kind of sorta know where you are, to a certain degree of accuracy, and you look out and you find a target out there, and you kind of can tell where it is.
[00:01:03] You may have to use a compass, do a little map spotting, but you've got an idea, not obviously precise, of where that target is. Then you have these cannons behind you, a couple of miles behind you, sometimes, they know roughly where they're located. So if you think about this, there's a lot of unknowns in this thing here.
[00:01:27] So what you do is you do the best you can and you go, okay, well, I think I'm right here down to maybe a hundred yards or maybe 10 yards location. I think my targets here, and I know the guns are kind of there. So you call that into the artillery unit. You do something called you adjust onto target.
[00:01:51] So the cannons may take these unknown positions. Oh. And by the way, there's also the environment to consider how windy things are what's going on around you, everything else. So they take this into consideration and they fire a round out there and you observe it and you say, whoa, okay, well, that was way further than I thought it would be.
[00:02:16] So you tell them to drop 500 yards. In other words, come 500 yards closer. You fire it again. And hopefully you're on the other side of the target. I mean, hopefully you're right on it, but hopefully you're at least on the other side. And what you're doing here is something called bracketing. And once you now got this down, the cannons got the data that's going to hit the target, given the environment and the locations, and then you do what's fire for effect." And then the the entire battery or battalion will fire on that target.
[00:02:47] So why am I talking about this? I started thinking about this in the context of a of a career. So here you are. You think, you know where you are. You know, you're a student getting ready to graduate. You've got, or maybe you've got five or 10 years on the job and you're a manager or you're not, or you're doing whatever, but you know, you got an idea where you are maybe not exactly sure. And then you look out there and you've got some goals, that's your target, right? That's your target out there.
[00:03:16] And you're pretty sure that you want be something or do something. Maybe not a hundred percent sure, but you're pretty sure about it. And then you got all these people supporting you, you think, right. And maybe you're not sure how much they're in support of you and what they want to do. But you're pretty sure they are and you know, where they are. You think?
[00:03:39] So the reason I bring this up is, just like in the artillery sense, the fact that you don't know exactly where you are, exactly where your goals are and exactly who supporting you doesn't mean you do nothing. It doesn't mean you sit back and try to go, oh, well, I need to find exactly what sort I want to be here in the next five or 10 years, or I want to find exactly who's willing to be a reference for me first. Just like we do with the bracketing and we fire rounds out there, do the same thing with your career.
[00:04:13] Go for it, right? Say, okay, well, let me, let me look into this goal. This target I have. Let me go and talk to people who are supporting me and see what they think about things. The bottom line is you're bracketing. And you're getting closer and closer to being able to go, okay, I got it.
[00:04:29] I know who's on my side. I know where I am professionally and I know where I want to go. Now you can put together a plan and attack it. You can, "fire for effect." That is a way that you can get off the dime.
[00:04:41] If you're not sure about things, just think about it in these terms. Just know that not knowing everything isn't a good excuse for just doing nothing.
[00:04:50] Do something, get out there, "fire for effect." Thanks for listening and look forward to hearing from you. Bye.
