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Why You Probably Don’t Need an 80-Year-Old Scotch
I once asked a food industry expert if he’d ever seen a refusal to deal with data
and the problem of perfectionism hurt a restaurant. He laughed and told me a
story about a business that was sprinting toward failure.
“I worked with a chef who had a twenty-two-dollar meal he was serving. He
was using a thirteen-dollar piece of meat and a six-dollar sauce to make it. He
had nineteen dollars in that meal before he turned on the lights, paid for his
lease, purchased his equipment, or hired people to serve the food. The sauce was
six dollars! Why? Because he was making it with an eighty-year-old Scotch.”
Most people don’t have palates that can distinguish minute gradations of
quality in Scotch. Sure, you might be able to tell if a Scotch came from a plastic
bottle on the bottom shelf of a Panama City Beach gas station or if it came out of
a hand-carved mahogany box from a safe behind the counter, but you’re not
picking up notes of pencil shavings and particular foggy moors in Edinburgh.
And that’s Scotch that hasn’t been lit on fire as part of a sauce.
There’s a chance that if the chef used a 40-year-old Scotch instead of the 80-
year-old Scotch, very few people would rebel. Most patrons would not say,
“Hold on a second, is this thing only four decades old? I demand sauces made
with ingredients from before we walked on the moon! What is this swill?!”
But chefs are artists and artists are prone to perfectionism. I promise that
chef wanted the “perfect Scotch” for that recipe. In the same way that

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chef wanted the “perfect Scotch” for that recipe. In the same way that
perfectionism demanded we chase goals bigger than we could really accomplish,
perfectionism told this chef only the most expensive Scotch would do. Cheaper
Scotches don’t count.
Given the choice of go out of business or changing the Scotch, even the
cockiest chef would get a cheaper bottle.
If the chef wanted to lower his fourth-quarter expenses, if that was his goal,
the Scotch decision would become easy.
That’s the whole point of data—it makes things easy.
It is not emotional. It’s just data.
In fact, by the end of this book, as you sprint toward your goal, that will be a
phrase you find yourself saying out loud: “It’s just data.”
Data will save you in career decisions as well.
Data told Steve Butler that he needed to take some free classes online.
After losing his job, he had to take the next job he could get. Not the best
job, because he had a lot of commitments as a married father of two, but the next
job. He applied for several positions and got a good-enough job.
The good-enough job covered some of his bills, but data told him it wasn’t
going to cover every bill. He could have felt shame about that, he could have
beat himself up, but instead he listened to the data. In addition to his full-time
job, he got a part-time job cleaning a dental office on the weekends.
“I hated to spend four hours on Saturday morning cleaning the dentist office.
I’d come home and my neighbor would be in his front yard throwing the football
with his son and I’d be overwhelmed at all the moments I missed with my own
son that Saturday. But I knew I had to do both jobs.”
He wasn’t failing as a father, he was going through some short-term pain for
the long-term future of his family. He was knocking out a big goal.
Most people get used to situations and get stuck. They ignore the data until
disaster forces them to make a hurried, ill-prepared life change. Not Steve. He
knew that his good-enough job wasn’t going to be his forever job. So he invested
in an intensive career-profiling exercise. The results suggested that he might be
well suited for the computer industry. He’d never considered that, but the more
he studied the data the more that made sense.
As with any life change, perfectionism got mouthy. Steve worried that if he
changed careers, if he explored the computer industry, he would be wasting his
college degree. That’s a valid concern. Everyone wants to make sure that their
college degree was worth it, but in this case, data came to the rescue.

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Steve was forty-eight and graduated when he was twenty-two. He finished
college at a time when four years of education cost about $50,000. That means
he paid $50,000 for a degree that he used successfully for twenty-six years. He
got almost three decades of service out of his degree, at only $5.20 per day.
What a deal! Data showed him that the fear of “wasting your college degree”
was foolish if you’ve enjoyed it for twenty-six years already.
Instead of quitting his job in an emotional “just go for it, follow your heart
moment,” Steve continued to look at the data. Data always encourages us to
stack the deck in our favor.
He decided to take some free classes online so that he could explore what