Right at the corner of Yefet St. and Bet ha-Eshel St. in Yafo, Israel, there is a fruit-juice stand operated by a man named Yona (Jonah).  I always used to tell him, hachlatot tovot, Yona — “good decisions!” — and he’d laugh, knowing the story of his namesake’s big mistake in the very place he lived and worked.

The Book of Jonah starts with a bad decision: called to the service of God, Jonah takes the first ship sailing as far as possible in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:3).  I, too, made an unwise decision in Yafo, that of trying to write Growth through Governance on my laptop on the beach.  Oh, I thought, it’ll be nice to sit on the beach and write.  Get some nice sun and get some writing done.  Well, the same old sea that spewed Jonah right back up on dry land came for an unexpectedly strong visit to where I was sitting, and that was about it for that laptop.

All of us make a bad decision once in a while.  The question is whether we learn.  I, for one, will be doing no more laptop work on that or any other beach.

And as I wrote — in Growth through Governance, and here on npgovernance.org, we talk about making better decisions than that.