The Self-Employed March Madness Bracket
One of the small, unexpected side effects of being self-employed is this:
When March Madness rolls around, there is no office bracket.
No pool. No strategically blocking your calendar on Thursday and Friday of this week. No intern who spent three hours on his and still picked Duke.
Just you, a laptop, and a bracket that isn't going to fill itself out.
If you run your own business, you're already used to making decisions with incomplete information and no one to blame but yourself. March Madness is basically just that, but with worse odds and a 12-seed that somehow keeps ruining everything.
Purdue.
My champion pick, as always, is Purdue.
Not the sexy pick. Not the pick that makes you sound smart at a bar. Purdue went into March as a #7 seed in the Big Ten, fairly underwhelming for a #1 pre-season team, who ended up playing in Michigan's shadow for much of the year.
Then they won the Big Ten Tournament anyway.
Nobody much noticed. Michigan got the headlines. Purdue got the trophy and boarded a quiet bus ride home.
That's the tell.
Every year people chase the story. The hot team. The Cinderella. The mid-major with the "system." They want a pick that sounds interesting when they explain it.
Bet on the quiet ones who've been doing the work.
Because every year, smart people talk themselves out of the obvious answer.
They fall in love with value picks. They read three articles about a mid-major's pick-and-roll. They convince themselves the team that looked like the best team for four months suddenly can't be trusted.
So they put McNeese in the Final Four.
This is how brackets die. Not from bad luck. From talking yourself out of what you already knew.
Contractors Understand This Instinctively
If you’ve been around good contractors, you notice something.
They don’t overcomplicate decisions that are obvious.
When a roof needs to be replaced, they don’t hold a symposium. They replace the roof.
Purdue is the same kind of decision.
Experienced guards.
Disciplined offense.
A team that actually knows who it is.
In other words: A team that behaves like a company that’s been around awhile.
The Self-Employed Rule of Brackets
When you run your own shop, you learn one thing fast: Make the call. Own the call. Move on.
No committee. No hedging. No leaving yourself a backdoor in case it goes sideways.
So I'm not going to tell you Purdue might be my pick, or that I like them if their defense holds up, or that Houston is interesting depending on matchups.
My bracket says Purdue. Bottom line. Done.
If I'm wrong, I'll do what every self-employed person does when a decision doesn't pan out.
Learn something. Then make the next call.