Knaddison Specific

My mom is wicked smart. When I was a kid I would often say "I'm sorry" in a manner that wasn't good enough for her. She had a formula for how to apologize and amazingly enough it has proven enormously valid and useful. One drawback for me is now that I've been trained in how to apologize I insist on receiving apologies in this format from other people. They're not always so ready to do this and are sometimes genuine in their apology without doing the whole system, but usually I can recognize that and move on. Usually.

1. Look them in the eye

This is good advice whether it's about a handshake or an apology, but when you see kids apologize they will often look down when they do it. That's not good enough, you should look people in the eye. Perhaps you can't always look someone in the eye, but the real point here is to be genuine in tone and delivery.

2. Say I'm Sorry for X

Don't couch it in "I'm sorry for X, but..." or "I'm sorry for the misunderstanding." If you're really sorry you'll say what you did and not reduce the sincerity with limitations like "but." If you don't fully understand what you did wrong and why it was wrong from the perspective of the people you are apologizing you can never get better, and getting better is step 3.

3. Give your best assurance it won't happen again

People don't like being tricked twice. Give your best assurance that you will not let the event happen again. If you were careless offer to pay more attention. If you made a bad judgment call offer to get their advice.

4. Offer solutions and ideas to make them whole

If you can do something to fix the situation offer to do it. It's that simple. If you can't fix it you should at least acknowledge that it can't be fixed and offer to do something else to try to make it up to them.

This is great advice whether it's person to person or a company apologizing to their customers for a blunder or anything else.

This was a really cool thing. As an individual investor, I believe in iShares from a financial perspective. They are low fee highly efficient ways for individuals to invest wisely. So, when they called me to be in a commercial about iShares I was really excited. The commercial finally made it to YouTube (I stand up at 37 seconds into the video and then walk on a red carpet for a few seconds):

We like our house. But we are realizing it will not be exactly what we want in the long run.

So, long run, here is what we really want and/or want to do in our new house shortly after we move in:

Features Of The House

• Somewhere between 1600 and 2000 square feet
• A single large kick it room
• 2-3 kid bedrooms
• 1 master bedroom
• Kitchen that opens onto the dining room/living room
• "Office"
• Garage

Existing Features or Things to Tweak Right After Movein

• Steam shower
• Compost pile
• Energy Efficiency review by Dirk's friend Jay
• Fireplace with wood pellet stove insert

Here are some of our avatars that we use sometimes. Yay avatars!

That last one is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/scatteredsunshine/2539289591/

Since comments are getting kinda crazy, here goes:

1) We may delete your comment for any reason. It's our site.
2) We may edit your comment for any reason but we're pretty likely to edit it if you abuse: foul language, personal insults, and/or rudeness.
3) If your comment seems to serve mainly as a vehicle to add a link to this site, we'll probably keep the comment and the URL and delete the link. That way people looking for your site may find your unsolicited useless post here.
4) Your comment is filtered by Mollom so if you don't like the idea of your data being sent to them, don't comment. Maybe instead you could contact us and I can post whatever you have to say.
5) Your comment will be reported to Mollom if I feel that it is spam. This will be bad for your ability to comment on other sites on the interweb that use Mollom. Just saying is all...