The $1600 Lesson

Tough lesson today.

I no longer have an iPhone.

I was at the batting cage filming my kid. Normally, I use a tripod outside the cage.

Today I didn’t.

So I set the phone inside the cage.

One swing later… direct hit. Done.

My Thought Process

“What are the chances of that? Maybe 1 in 50,000.”

Wrong.

After thinking it through, it was closer to:

• 1 in 900

• Maybe even 1 in 300 based on phone placement

My kid took about 300 swings.

So this wasn’t bad luck.

It was a near guarantee.

Why This Matters

I hear this all the time in lending:

“That never happens.”

But it does.

We just don’t measure it.

What we call “rare” is often:

• Untracked

• Repeated

• Breaking our process

At scale, those aren’t outliers.

They’re system problems.

The Lesson

If you don’t measure it, you’ll misjudge it.

My “1 in 50K” assumption felt safe.

It wasn’t.

It was a guaranteed loss.

The Challenge

Where are your “iPhones in the cage”?

• What are you calling rare?

• What actually happens all the time?

• What needs to be measured so you can fix it?

— Jesse