It's a metaphor for a metaphor.

If the bottleneck is the part of the bottle that's the narrowest, then in a production setting like a factory, it refers to the stage or element of a system that limits the output.

Like traffic on an on-ramp, unable to flow onto the highway, the inputs get backed up. No matter how much you increase production in other areas of the system, the throughput (and ultimate productivity) will be limited by that bottleneck.

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I am changing.

Just recently, I made a series of decisions that were radically different from those I would have made in the past, setting me on a new path.

While I can't trace this shift to one particular source, I believe that it's the result of attending conferences, reading books, having stimulating and challenging conversations, watching videos, and listening to podcasts—in short, encountering a constant stream of new ideas that are altering my mental landscape.

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At Eclectic Music, we have a saying: “No blind items!”

A blind item that would appear in a gossip column might sound something like, “Which married sixty-something financier was seen stepping out with young actress from a well-known film franchise?”

In our office, we've got our own version, which might go along these lines: “What do we do when a parent is asking to move their six-year-old student from thirty-minute lessons to hour-long lessons, but the teacher doesn’t want to?”

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The other day, a friend sent pictures of five pies she and her wife had made.

"Recipe testing," she said.

And I had to laugh. Of course. Recipe testing. That makes so much sense. And I've never done it.

It's another example of how people who are good at a thing have a fundamentally different approach from those who aren't. The people who are good at the thing use a different set of tactics that yields much better results.

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To get from mainland Greece to the island of Santorini can be done in a few different ways.

You can fly directly from Athens in under an hour.

You can also take a couple of different types of ferries from Piraeus, Athens’ port city. One is a high-speed ferry that takes about four and a half hours. The other runs at a more moderate speed, taking more than seven hours to make the trip.

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