Challenging Conventional Wisdom

“If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.”

-Michael Lewis, Moneyball

I just finished reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not a sports fan, have failed to pay attention to popular or financial culture, and do not closely follow/are madly in love with Brad Pitt (I don’t believe anyone could make it through all three of these and still live in America).

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Moneyball covers the Oakland A’s and their General Manager, Billy Bean. In a game that often revolves around teams with massive payrolls like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox, the Oakland A’s showed a remarkable success rate despite their minimal payroll by consistently winning and making the playoffs throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

The main point of this book is to show some of the reasoning behind how this was accomplished. The A’s dumped players they felt were overvalued and grabbed players they saw as undervalued by paying attention to statistics that many teams and individuals overlook. Instead of focusing on the “eye test” that scouts and the majority of major league baseball have treated as the gold standard for evaluating players, they used a different set of criteria (on base percentage, slugging percentage, walks). Essentially, their main purpose was to try to create runs by working to best eliminate the possibility of making an out. It sounds obvious, but it goes completely against the idea of “manufacturing runs” that baseball often swears by.

It was a great book, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in baseball, statistics, or are interested in a great story about the little guy beating up on some of the big guys. It’s also a great example of someone attempting to look at something unconventionally and using it to their advantage, thus the quotation at the top of this post.

Sometimes I feel like Heather and I continue to spend our lives trying to do the same thing. We have both finished school, but instead of settling down, having kids, buying a house, and looking for our piece of the “American Dream,” we are taking a road trip and then heading to Japan.

We hear from many different people that this will be a “great experience,” and “an adventure,” but no one really sees it as a potential career move. Everyone still expects us to, “sow our wild oats” for a couple of years before eventually coming to terms with “reality,” heading home, and settling back in to living the conventional American Dream we are now leaving behind.

I don’t have a problem with the traditional American Dream, and I think it is great for a number of people. I just don’t think that it’s a great idea for us. I’m ecstatic about this current journey, and looking forward to Japan as a practical and profitable way to pay off my fairly sizeable debt.

On to Ohio, more to come soon!

Clint