Which Cake Would You Eat vs. Which Cake Would You Make?
Seth Godin recently wrote a very insightful blog post on process vs. outcome people. His basic premise is that there are two types of people:
- First, there are those who look at the outcome before they decide if they’re happy with the process that led to it.
- Then there are those who insist on a reliable process and learn to live with the outcomes
If you are a type 1 person then you will tend to focus on results. If you are a type 2 person then you will tend to focus on learning.
When you focus on results, it doesn’t matter if the process is broke if you can game it to lead to success. When you focus on learning the results matter, but don’t define success. Instead, learning what you need to do to improve the process to lead to better results is what matters.
A good analogy for this is comparing two people who bake cakes. The first person makes a cake with 4 sticks of butter and 4 cups of sugar (among other ingredients). It takes the first person 30 minutes to prepare the cake. One slice of cake is 2000 calories and is extremely unhealthy. The second person uses less than half the amount of butter and sugar. It takes this person 90 minutes to prepare the cake. One slice of cake is only 400 calories. Both of the cakes taste good.
The first person could care less about the number of calories and the health detriments of the cake as long as it taste great and it’s easy to make. The second person insist that the cake taste good, but keeps working on perfecting the recipe to make it healthier and is willing to sacrifice some of the taste to achieve this end. The time it takes to make the cake is not a factor either, this person is willing to sacrifice however long it takes.
The question to ask yourself is which cake would you eat vs. which cake would you make?