The Million Dollar Question

The other flaw is that the amount doesn't really matter. What matters is the pain that it causes the client. Many large corporations can and do write large checks for consulting that they never intend to follow -- for various reasons. Just because the amount seems big to you doesn't mean it's even noticeable by the client.

But still, rates are a signaling mechanism. Even with higher rates, there's still a lot of careful screening you should do before accepting a client. Assuming you're in that position, of course.

There's a whole school of thought that says that even when clients are playing political games with consultants, it's still possible to have positive influence. But that's completely off the track from the simple point about people accepting advice. People are more likely to accept advice if it is done as part of some reciprocal arrangement or trade. Free advice is mostly worthless.

I've done years of world traveling and met so many people that remind me of this guy its uncanny. They like to talk big, but that's about it. From an interview with this guy, question is "what is your profession?" Answer: Entrepreneurship. Current company does technology, engineering, and business processes for a few different high margin fields. Two sets of business cards - one with "General Manager", the other with "CEO"

Oh really? What's your company? Do they have a website? What are the "high margin" fields? You write 8 million word blog posts about crows cawing in Miyagi prefecture but when it comes to what you do it's extremely vague and there's usually a reason for that. The huge numbers are for show and attention. $1k an hour! $40 million! Yeah. Right. Whatever, man.

My vote for the most important bug is as follows.

It looks as though human brains were architected to think in two modes: "near" mode and "far" mode. The reason for this is that early human tribes had important rules that directly impacted survival and reproduction (for example, "don't take more than your share of the food", "don't sleep with another man's wife"). It was critical for us to tell others that we were going to uphold these rules or we would get kicked out of the tribe. At the same, time our genetic fitness would increase massively if we could find a way to covertly break those rules while still upholding them verbally (more food and more descendents for successful rule breakers).

The upshot of this is that even if something looks good when processed using far mode it's not necessarily easy to translate it into near mode where it actually gets done.

In my view, this is an explanatory factor for procrastination as well. For example, the popular Google Chrome extension Chrome Nanny (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gpdgmmdbbbchchonpf...) requires the user to enter 64 random alphanumeric characters before visiting a distracting site--which moves the idea of visiting this site from near mode (where it might actually happen) to far mode (where it won't).

For more on near and far modes you can read http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html. Note that novel tasks and desirable risky acts are both associated with far mode.

I think it's exactly his point -- why don't you just take his advice? He seems like he's perfectly happy to help.