This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek. Patrick Rhone joins me again for the latest installment of our monthly PM Talks series, and this month we landed on a word that does a lot more heavy lifting than most people realize: tolerance. We start where we always seem to start lately — wandering through names, nicknames, and the strange cadence of how people get called what they get called — before Patrick pulls us back on track and asks the only question that matters: how much tolerance does anyone have for two guys talking about etymology for an hour?
From there it opens up. Tolerance isn't just the human, get-along-with-people meaning we all reach for first. It's also a range — the amount of variance you're willing to accept before something stops working. Patrick brings the language of circus rigging, I bring the darts scene from Ted Lasso that shows up in my book, and somewhere in between we end up at Costco, minimalism, graduation dress shopping, and why "enough" is really just tolerance wearing a different shirt.
Six Discussion Points
- The two meanings of tolerance — the "getting along with people" sense and the engineering "range you'll accept" sense — and the surprising place where they overlap
- Patrick's world of circus rigging: static load versus dynamic load, and why the right tolerance depends entirely on the act being performed
- The Ted Lasso darts lesson from Productiveness — why accuracy beats perfection, and what "be curious, not judgmental" really teaches us
- How "enough" is a form of tolerance, told through Patrick's wife and the great graduation dress hunt — a static need that suddenly turned dynamic
- Costco, the ketchup aisle, and Toffler's idea of "overchoice" — how narrowing your options lowers decision fatigue and quietly sets your tolerance for you
- Why real tolerance demands patience and grace, and why it lives in the reasoned middle rather than at the purely logical or purely emotional extremes
Three Connection Points
We didn't set out to make tolerance this expansive, but that's the fun of these conversations — they go where they go, and the topic ends up proving its own point. If there's one thing I want you to sit with after this one, it's that tolerance isn't about getting things perfect. It's about knowing your range, respecting that other people's ranges look nothing like yours, and giving yourself a little grace in the gap. Patrick and I will be back next month — possibly to talk about nuance, possibly not, because the whole point of nuance is that we might not get there.
If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness. What is A Productive Conversation?
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