From Seth Godin's The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick):
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want. And most people do just that. They quit when it's painful and stick when they can't be bothered to quit…
Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you. If you realize you're at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it's a smart one…
Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through… The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance… All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting. Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else…
Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.
In my experience most of us are overcommitted, spreading ourselves too thin, and failing to deliver excellence where it really counts. We're coping, when we should be quitting. I hear an echo of Peter Drucker in Godin's message:
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
The implicit corollary to Drucker's message (which Godin picks up and makes explicit) is that only excellence matters. Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.
I find it liberating to start thinking along these lines, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life. Where can I deliver excellence? Where should I expect excellence in return? And how can I focus my time and energy to make this as likely as possible?
This allows me to do some strategic quitting–or even better, not to start misguided efforts in the first place–and substantially increase the return on my personal investments. And even when I can't quit outright, I'm better able to set boundaries that put projects and activities in perspective and prevent them from hogging resources (most significantly, my finite time and energy) that they don't deserve.
Photo by Jeremy Thompson.
5 Responses
Ed,
That is the classic thought of the stone ages. In the new era u gotta have breadth. If u think developing a new skill to a certain extent is a waste of time then life is not fun. Also the best guys learn from new skills and apply it in all facets of life. After all u r one single human being!
Wonderful post!
*Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.*
Makes so much sense.
Thanks, P–I appreciate it.
BN, I agree that having a broad range of skills is wonderful and that developing new skills is deeply gratifying, but until you’re skilled enough to truly add value in a given discipline, you’re a hobbyist. And as switching costs diminish and the scope of markets expand, you need to be excellent to add value.
I’m not encouraging people to limit themselves and focus their lives on a single, narrow sub-specialty. But I AM encouraging people to consider carefully the returns they expect on investments of their time and attention.
Sometimes we have fairly low expectations, and we can spend our time and attention without worrying much about the return. For example, I’ve spent most of my free time over the past two weeks reading Tony Judt’s 800-page “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.” I’ve enjoyed it immensely, and I’m a broader, better person for having read this book, but for all that time and attention expended, I’m no closer to being able to add value as a historian. That’s fine, because reading books like this is a hobby of mine, one I’m willing to support with substantial amounts of time and attention and no expectation that I’ll get anything other than intellectual enjoyment in return.
But a lot of people are encouraged to spend time and attention on projects and initiatives and jobs and careers where the investment is never going to yield the expected return. They think they’re advancing themselves professionally, but because they’re never going to be sufficiently expert to add value in those areas, they’re actually pursuing expensive hobbies (and probably not having much fun in the process.)
We all have a certain amount of time and attention dedicated to our professional development, and we have high expectations for the return on the investment of effort in those areas. And we all have hobbies, where we can spend our time and attention with a different set of expectations about the return.
These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive categories–in some cases our hobbies can become professionally rewarding. But given that our time and attention are our most precious resources, we should be clear with ourselves about how we’re investing them and what we expect in return.
Ed
hmm, the advice put forth here is in contradiction to advice from brian tracy. i’m not saying he’s “all knowing” or anything but he was suggesting that at times evaluating the areas your _weakest_ in and working to improve those areas may be all you need to raise yourself from mediocre to first-rate.
i actually find his advice immensely better since it’s natural for people to spend more time devoted to things they feel they’re good at. (there’s even been some coverage of this in nytimes…i’ll send over a link if i have time to find it). that being the case, people naturally avoid the areas they are weakest in, creating a self-fulfilled prophecy of failure.
to your example, reading a history of contemporary europe may not be directly applicable to your career but improving your ability to think and analyze is never a waste of time.
i see a lot of people who just never read anything and THAT is a waste of time because it’s typically time spent watching sports or something else equally mediocre such as shopping or drinking.
what you’re also illustrating, and i’m not sure if this intentional or unconscious, is that experts know more than non-experts, which has also been shown to be statically incorrect.
essentially (and imho), our society has a bad habit of assuming that if someone’s been doing something for 20 years, then that same person is better at doing “whatever” than someone fairly fresh at a job. typically i find that it’s the people not specifically qualified for a particular task that hustle a bit more and end up providing a better finished product (be that website, report, whatever) than the expert.
meaning, we’re duping ourselves into an elitist mentality that is ultimately destructive for everyone involved because it relies on false indicators (resume, loudest voice, claimed expertise, etc)to make decisions. there needs to be more emphasis on people who can think outside the box as well as have the gumption to go after things on their own, even if they’re not “qualified” (by a piece of paper).
hi, another quick thought.
i was thinking over what you had written here a bit more last night and i realized that if we didn’t spend time improving areas where we’re weakest, we’d never get good at anything!
meaning, because we pretty much start any new activity at square one (knowing nothing), it’s not until we try and fail a few times do we actually start to learn from those failures, making us more competent than before.
so, yeah. i guess i’m saying i completely disagree w/ the general premise you’ve outlined here…unless i’m missing something…