Crockpot Lessons

We made a pork roast for dinner in the crockpot last night. Preparation, followed by 5 hours of slow heat and dinner was served. It came out perfectly.

This is how most great things happen. There’s the initial idea, a long stretch of working it out, and then, almost as if by magic, the finished product appears.

We have a natural tendency to overlook not only the process but all of the incredible stories that shaped the process over time. Cities are made brick by brick, methods evolve over time.

The value chain from the farmers and butchers to the grocery store to the engineers and electricians that brought us our crockpot meal are staggering.

I like stopping to remember that point.

Here are some other crockpot ideas I’ve been thinking about:

Harry Markowitz came up with the ideas surrounding modern portfolio theory in the 1950s. They weren’t widely used until the 1980s, and he won a Nobel in the 1990s. Now there are desktop optimizers we use in planning software daily.

Bill James broke baseball down into numbers in the 1970s, The A’s put it into practices in the early 2000s, Moneyball came out telling the story in 2003, and the famous Houston Astros Sports Illustrated Cover story predicting their worst to first reversal came out in 2014. We’ve gone from man alone to math replacing man to a man + machine approach over several decades.

I’ve got Astroball added to my reading queue now.

Look around – we’re surrounded by crockpot meals.

There are stories to learn and stories to tell.

That also means there is a ton of value waiting to be unlocked for those that want to start digging.

Always has been, always will be.