This Management Monday we’re going to look at what we expend daily: Effort.
Effort a fancy word for the amount of work and energy you put into something. It can be anything whether making something new, repairing something old, or doing something. A lot of people absolutely hate wasting effort and one of the main ways to waste effort is to apply effort half heartedly.
It can occur when we doubt ourselves or when we change our mind in the middle of exerting effort. The best examples of what can happen if we don’t carry through our effort to the end of the project are in the physical world. Both are oddly craft related. The first one happened a couple of days ago with me. I was crafting some wooden switches that I had meant to turn into arrows at some point in the past but they were too twisted to make decent shafts. So I decided to make them into something else, I chose to try and make some small shanks, working on that skill set. And it came time to test the various tip designs that I carved/filed into the pieces and I also wanted to test the effectiveness of my new letter opener. I like using cardboard tissue boxes to test piercing ability because if it’s done wrong the cardboard will just crumple. What I found is that the designs I used or copied only worked if they had enough power behind them, without hesitation on my part (I was trying to not stab my hand). I had to carry through on my effort in order to get the best results. If I didn’t it just completely crumpled the cardboard and skittered off, both with the shanks and the letter opener.
The second example came from an old bit of information I learned about five or six years ago. A common injuring among blacksmiths is tennis elbow. It’s a case of inflammation in the tendons in the elbow resulting in pain. It’s an injury caused be repeated motion which blacksmithing has a lot of. The way to avoid it is to not immediately bring the hammer back to you after you hit the metal. You need to drive your force through the anvil, at least that’s how I think of it to remind myself to carry through with the force of the blow so that I don’t waste the strike and injure myself.
The effort we exert on things should be exerted with the full purpose of success. If we try to do something we’re not sure of we should put as much direct force as we can behind as if we think it will absolutely succeed. If we don’t it makes failure more likely and it ends up wasting not only our effort but also our resources as. Haphazardly trying something is different than a risky gamble. A gamble has a chance of success with circumstances beyond your control. Poorly attempting something features more of what you can control being allowed to go wrong. There’s enough factors out there that we cannot control, we can plan for them and try to counter act them, but we should not make it worse by adding things we can control into the mix. If we don’t control what we can, we increase the possible things that can go wrong. Managing our effort goes into helping managing negative outcomes and risk. Those outcomes and that risk will pour so many possibilities of failure into something it will doom it to failure before it is even started.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
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