The Common Strategic Error “Hard Working” Stagnant People Make
There’s nothing worse than working your hardest and still facing stagnation. If you have this experience, it’s very likely your making a common strategic error. Whether it’s in your career, sports, or in a relationship, becoming stagnant is frustrating. Especially when you know you are working you hardest.
Specifically, stagnation in the context I’m referring to is the lack of progress. You are not going backward and you are not going forward, and you clearly recognize this situation. Your hard work is not paying off and you aren’t sure why.
When I shut down my startup in 2015, this was my exact scenario. I was working hard every day, yet I wasn’t making progress. I made a common strategic error hard working stagnant people make.
This strategic error is confusing the essential with the nonessential. I came to recognize this strategic error while revisiting my notes from a book I read in 2011 named The Executive Odyssey. This is a quality book by Frederick G. Harmon. About two-thirds through the book Harmon provides this superb insight on essentials vs. nonessentials.
Essentials vs. Nonessentials
Essentials are always those few things that are absolutely critical to getting the job done. Sometimes they are simple survival factors…
We know the essentials in sports. The baseball manager is hired to win games, the outfielder to get hits and catch fly balls, and the pitcher to prevent runs.
With this in mind, everything that’s not essential is nonessential. A pitcher who can hit is a nice to have. Hitting is a nonessential for a pitcher. So pitchers shouldn’t spend too much time in batting practice if their struggling with their essential job of preventing runs.
Breaking Down This Common Strategic Error Using The Baking Cake Analogy
Harmon continued to elaborate on his essential vs. nonessential insight using an analogy he got from an Apple executive.
I can’t cook a cake unless I have flour, eggs, and shortening. If I have extra spice and raisins, great, but if I don’t have those core ingredients, I can’t bake the cake.
Spice and raisins are very helpful because they provide the personal twist that makes the individual cooks feel as if they are doing it themselves.
Every manager should exploit the opportunity to bring that personal twist to the job through the nonessentials, but only after ensuring that the flour, eggs, and shortening are completely taken care of.
Reflecting back on why I had to shut down my startup, I was much too focused on nonessentials. I am a software engineer by trade, so I spent nearly 80% of my time working on the software. As a result, I neglected the essential task of sales. I thought if I kept making the software better the sales would naturally come.
However, we all know of crappy software products generating tons of sales all the time. No matter how counter-intuitive it is, building great software is not essential to selling software. By not recognizing the essential vs the nonessential I made a strategic error by investing time on the wrong things.
Natural Talents and Strengths
VS.
Essentials and Nonessentials
If you’re working you hardest and not making progress, then you must analyze how you’re investing your time. I recommend you write down what tasks you’re spending the majority of your time working on. Then break down the tasks required for progress into 3 or 4 essentials. Finally, you must be willing to honestly assess and compare the two list.
If you are not spending the majority of your time with the essentials, then work on discovering why. The answer is likely because your natural talents and strengths don’t fit well with the essentials required for progress. In my case, I don’t naturally gravitate towards sales. Therefore, I must force myself to work on selling in order to make progress as an entrepreneur.
In the best case scenarios, your natural talents and strengths correlate directly with the essential tasks. So it’s possible that the best course of action may be to completely change directions. Change careers, change positions, or change relationships. It may be a hard pill to swallow. However, the fruit of your labor may be best invested in something with essentials that capitalize on your natural talents and strengths.
If this is not possible, then you must learn how to manage your weaknesses so they don’t continue to stagnate your progress. The best way to do this is to leverage your natural talents and strengths in a way that overcomes your weaknesses.