Stories and Calculations

There's a story here. And it happened 6 times. One of the times was my version, but I saw the pattern immediately.

Here's MY version of the story. The other versions share at least a bit of that shape.


My wife makes chili on most Mondays. One of my kids DEVOURS it. He's on a growth spurt. We recently discovered it's good with the "fixin's"...shredded cheese, sour cream, bacon bits, chopped green onions.

We had done our primary grocery shopping earlier in the day, but forgot the fixin's. So I had to make a run later in the day.

I went to a grocery store I don't usually patronize, a store that carries the Kroger brand. Sour cream was my last stop. I grabbed a Kroger Brand sour cream and headed toward the checkout. But then I passed the end cap you see pictured.

Kemp's brand sour cream was on sale, for a lower price than Kroger. Suddenly I had a choice to make, and I observed the calculation at multiple levels:

1️⃣ Easy to do, easy not to do, and ultimately it doesn't change our finances much, but little things add up. Always take the quarter over the nickel if you have to choose. Pure Milton Friedman.

2️⃣ What do I do with the Kroger sour cream? Is the difference worth going back to return it? Oh, NVM...I see that 5 other people solved this problem by simply exchanging them here. I wonder who the first was 🤔 What was THEIR calculation like? I bet it got easier with each new foreign sour cream that appeared in the end cap.

3️⃣ Is this the right thing to do? Is it tacky to leave the unwanted sour cream in a place it doesn't belong? Doesn't it look bad and make more work for the people who run the store? I run businesses too, and I always appreciate when people see how hard it is. Will I lose self-respect for doing this?

Ultimately I chose to do the exchange and add a sixth Kroger sour cream to the Kemp's end cap.

What's your takeaway?

Here's a couple for me:

👉 I think everyone is making calculations for their next action, but some of us are more aware of those than others, and they tend to be particularly creative and leadership-savvy. I call it "awareness of self-awareness". I think it's a special quality, and in some ways a burden. It often brings a sense of absurdity. This calculation is an example of what it feels like.

👉 Reality is constantly telling you stories and it is empowering to see them. As soon as I saw the exchanged sour creams I imagined 5 other people intersecting with my path. I wonder what they're doing right now. We share this little piece of our story, and in this way social groups are formed.


This is a small example, but its lessons can be generalized to much harder, more complicated ones. All leadership choices are based on similar calculations, and every choice tells a story. A friend of mine specializes in the field of semiotics, which basically looks at the world as a massive collection of signals, each of which tells a story. To change your results, look at the stories.