I was emailed yesterday by someone, who wanted to know what to do about a boss, who wouldn’t allow him to do work that matters.
I gave him 3 suggestions. He quickly replied, explaining that my answers would be difficult for him to use.
Easy or correct?
In my experience, people tend to fall into one of the following 2 groups, when it comes to making decisions:
- Those committed to being the best they can be, look for effective or correct answers. They know that the medicine may not always taste nice, but that it is required if they want to get better. They get the best advice they can and then act on it.
- Those who tend to look for the easiest answers. They refuse the medicine because it will taste bad in the short term, and they are all about short-term thinking. This group ranges from those who simply want a quiet life, to those who buy into get rich quick scams.
The late Zig Ziglar put it like this:
“If you will be hard on yourself, life will be easy on you. But if you insist upon being easy on yourself, life is going to be hard on you.”
Easy by default?
I’ve discovered that one of the secrets to a happy, fulfilling life is to learn to embrace the things in life, which most people avoid because they require too much effort. Yes, the easy route is sometimes the correct route. However, setting our compasses by default to ‘easy’, places a very low ceiling on what we can achieve.
In short: We make life a lot harder for ourselves in the medium and long term, if we focus on doing what is easiest, rather than what is right.