It's a mind-bending, life-changing story for me. I had a senior officer who always carried four dominoes in his pocket.

Just standard dominoes. He always carried them in his pocket. Whenever he got to his desk, he would stack them on his desk, two dominoes next to each other, and then two dominoes on top, right?

So kind of like in a criss-cross pattern. And he always had them with him. Well, one day I was in

there and I sat with him and I asked him, I was like, why do you carry these dominoes? Like what?

It's extra weight. They're awkward. You know, they jingle when you walk down the hallway. Why would

you carry these things? And then he sat them up and he told me most people go through life knocking out tasks or to-dos like this.

And he set each of the dominoes up facing him, but in a row from left to right.

And then he flicked the domino on the left and knocked it over. And then he flicked the next one and knocked it over and the next one and the next one. And he knocked all four dominoes over with four flicks of his finger, right? He said, that's how most people go through life. If you want to succeed in espionage, he said, you have to stack the dominoes differently. so then he put them in a line the way that

we all put the dominoes in line when we're kids right one in front of the other but all but with only

the first one facing him and then he flicked over the first one and then the falling domino knocked

over the next domino which knocked over the next domino which knocked over the next domino

so he was basically demonstrating how the average person will go through life using four times as

much energy to get the same four tasks accomplished as a smart person who puts the things in the

correct order and a light bulb went off for me. Because

in espionage, when you're spying in a foreign country, when you're trying to steal secrets that aren't

supposed to be stolen, there's an order that you have to accomplish tasks. You can either put a lot of

effort into each step. And then by the end of the

operation, your resources are spent and you don't know if you're going to be successful. Or you can do

things in a certain order where they grow momentum with each task. And then you're saving yourself

energy. You're saving yourself resources, you're making momentum

work for you.

And ever since then, I mean, my operational behavior changed, my operational tempo changed,

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