Heads or Tails. Legend of the Domino Chief

In the wise words of Ice Cube, from the 90s cult classic, Boyz N the Hood, “Domino mutha F*&%-er!!!” Call me crazy, but whenever I hear the word “domino” that line instantly pops in my head. Well, recently I had a “domino” thought. The kind where one thought leads to another and another…until you are mentally fixated on something totally different than what initiated the original thought. While walking back to my truck the other day, I spied a coin on the ground. Despite the germ-aphobe in me, I excitedly bent down to pick it up only to realize it was a 1938 nickel. Yahoo! I gave it a quick lucky flip from my thumb in the air. Maybe not as exciting as finding a twenty dollar bill, but I was still excited to acquire this vintage chieftain collectable.

Finding this coin was the catalyst of my domino thought chain. It made me think of the act of flipping a coin. Which led to my curiosity of how many people had flipped this particular coin in it’s 77 years of service. Which led to wondering how many decisions had been made from those seemingly innocent tosses.  How much history had been cast due to the decision of a nickel? How many of us leave our decision making up to a coin toss?

And this ultimately made me wonder, why do people live their life by chance…rather than by the more difficult process of choice? That’s where I landed on the final thought, ‘why toss the coin in the first place’?

I can only think of two reasons why we flip a coin to come upon an outcome for action. Either number one we really don’t care what the outcome is, which means the decision is really irrelevant and the tosser should put the coin away, decide and move on with their day. Or number two, we don’t want to be held accountable for the outcome and therefore transfer all responsibility to the coin itself. Afterall, if it was a bad call, that led to an unfavorable outcome, no sane person is going to go back and start an argument with a coin…but they might a person. In this event, the person doing the flipping probably isn’t the right person for the task and should hand the coin over to someone else who is strong enough to live with the consequences of the outcome, rather than letting the old chieftain take the blame, or get the credit.

Either way you look at it, a decision should be made by a person, not a coin. So when looking at the mental dominoes scattered all around me, my conclusion was this:  In the end, there is a helluva lot of potential for us to grow more confident when making decisions as we carve a path through the history books, because the person those very books put on that coin is done growing…but you’re not. In the wise words of one of history’s great carvers, Winston Churchill, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Domino my friends!

Cheers,

Matt