I arrived in Oklahoma City yesterday. OKC is about 80 miles from Fort Sill and I’m staying in the hotel for this evening. I’m quite satisfied with the Day’s Inn I’m staying at. I’ve determined that being recently renovated and offering free WIFI are my top 2 criteria when searching for hotels. I’ve traveled about 1400 miles solo to get here, so there are two things I’ve been enjoying: audiobooks and fast food. Here are some reviews:
Fast Food: KFC Double Down Sandwich
When I asked for the sandwich in Joplin, MO the clerk asked me, “Do you want the cheese, bacon, AND sauce.” Of course I told her I wanted it all, I needed the full experience. Now I see why she posed the question: The cheese was far worse than Kraft Singles, the bacon was leathery and very salty, and the sauce was some sort of soupy mayo with a faint chipotle flavor. The chicken, on the other hand, was great! It was thick, juicy, didn’t have any breading, and was nicely seasoned.
I love the idea of the Double Down. I’ve always understood that the bread is often the worst part of a sandwich - this sandwich drops the bread and doubles the meat, win-win! What I don’t think people realize is that you can choose between KFC’s original recipe fillets OR grilled fillets. (The grilled fillets have about half the calories of the original recipe, check it out here.) I’m not sure why, but the clerk decided to build mine with grilled filets and now I can’t get enough of KFC’s grilled chicken. To be fair, I really like chicken in general. I typically have it at both lunch and dinner and estimate I eat 5 or more chickens a week by weight (self-call, but I guess so is a blog).
Bottom line: Get the Double Down once, and ask for it with grilled filets. Come back to KFC and order their grilled chicken whenever you need a quick chicken fix.
Next stop: Friendly's Grill Cheese Burger Melt
Audiobooks
Outliers – worth the read/listen, though not as mind-blowing as many reviews would have you believe.
Malcolm Gladwell attempts to explain the success of a number of a number of individuals including Bill Gates, the Beatles, railroad tycoons, Canadian Junior hockey players, and Jewish lawyers in NYC. He also looks at the effects of culture on success.
What I picked up as Gladwell’s main takeaways:
1. Hard work and opportunities can lead to extraordinary success. Hard work is needed for this success, but does not guarantee it. Opportunities may be as simple as the opportunity to work hard.
2. 10,000 hours is roughly the amount of time needed to master a skill.
3. There is a “smart enough” point, where a higher IQ does not lead to more success.
4. Culture and parents affect your success in certain areas. (one example: because of easy expansion and use of machinery in farms in the U.S., Americans tend to look for easy success – the difficulty of growing rice paddies and lack of room for expansion has lead Asians to look for success through hard work.)
I apologize the vague use of success and I wish I could compare this to Gladwell’s other works, but I have not read them. The audiobook was unabridged,5 ½ CDs, and was read by Gladwell. He was a pretty good narrator.
Stephen R. Covey on Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Team, Great Results
A road trip to my first post in the Army would not be complete without read/listening to something about leadership. This is my first time with one of Covey’s books so I can’t compare to this other works. He gives four imperatives for all leaders:
“1. Inspire trust among your direct reports, superiors, and peers.
2. Clarify purpose by articulating how goals are established and how an individual contributes to achieving those goals.
3. Align systems and work processes so they facilitate rather than hinder achievement.
4. Unleash the unique talent of people on your team.”
The three CDs use various audio clip examples of how these imperatives have been implemented and the success they created. My favorite example was for imperative number three. Covey suggested using a public “scoreboard” in order to track, motivate and keep team members accountable for their responsibilities.
This audiobook is 5 cds, abridged from the novel, and read by the author. This version was hard to stop listening too, but I wonder how much background about the characters was lost. The author, James Bradley is a good narrator and also wrote Flags of our Fathers. The book is graphic at times, attempting to depict the brutality of the U.S. fire-bombing of Tokyo and treatment of U.S. flyboys on Chichi Jima. What I found particularly fascinating about Flyboys is how well Bradley was able to recreate the stories of men who did not survive the war. For obvious reasons, you so often only hear the stories of the survivors.
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