How RICE Led to FRED
"FRED!! WHY DON'T YOU EVER LISTEN TO ME?" My wife said to me moments before I had my epiphany. It wasn't that I hadn't listened to her. I suppose the problem is that she had only given her advice when I wasn't paying attention. Or, for some reason I didn't see how it was inherently easy to remember. Or, I was in pain so how could I be expected to comprehend what she was saying?...
My name is Fred Esser. I’ve studied personal training and statistical analysis. I’ve taken the Black Belt Course in Lean Six Sigma. I have a BS in Psychology. I have an MBA. I’ve read many books, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet some great people. My goal is to help people live their fantasies by making the best information easier to consume & remember. We have more than 100,000 Psychologists, 300,000 Personal Trainers, & 700,000 business consultants. Imagine what we could do if it was easier to remember what these people tell us. We all want to improve our fitness, abundance, and happiness; lose fat, gain muscle, increase endurance, feel better, be more productive, increase income, decrease expenses, etc. The FRED Super Acronym makes the best ideas in these areas easier to remember.
I recently had an epiphany when my wife saw me essentially ignoring her advice. To be clear, my epiphany didn't happen when my wife told me to
Rest my injured limb. It didn't happen she told me to
Ice my injured limb. My epiphany didn’t happen when she told me to
Compress my injured limb. My epiphany didn’t even happen when my wife told me to
Elevate my injured limb.
My insight appeared when I started to tell my wife about some great "new" concepts I had learned about. You see, since my wife is a nurse, I thought she might like to learn about cures that random people had told me. I said, "You know, I could be imagining this, but after resting my limb, applying ice to it, compressing it, and elevating it, it's starting to feel better. If only there was a way for people to easily remember these four actions to take."
"RICE!! Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate." My nurse wife said, "I've told you this over and over... How is it possible that you haven't heard me say this to you?"
In process improvement and the military they have a ton of acronyms: DOWNTIME, OODA, SWOT, 6S, etc. After taking the Black Belt Course in Lean Six Sigma I found myself in an entry level Yellow Belt Class in Process Improvement. At the end of the class we went to a food court and tried to think of as many ways as we could to improve the various processes that we saw. I felt tremendous pressure. Since I had bragged to everyone about the other courses I had taken the teacher told me that I had better come up with some great ideas.
I panicked and then remembered the DOWNTIME acronym; (Defects, Overproduction, Work in progress, Non-standardization, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Excess Processing). Since this acronym enables a person to remember an entire encyclopedia of applications to help processes run better, I was easily able to identify many ways for the processes to be improved.
As I started to consider some of the other improvement type acronyms & concepts I learned about, I started to put them together in a Super Acronym. I call it the FRED Super Acronym. I’ve put a bit of time into developing the acronym & as I’ve said it’s intent is to help people live their fantasies by making the best improvement ideas easier to remember & use.
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