Good Decisions Trump Hard Work
"It's not about working harder, it's about working the right way." — Greg McKeown
When you are trapped in a riptide, you need to chill. If you try to swim against the current, you might drown. All you have to do is stay afloat and swim in parallel. The sea will suck you in and get you out of the current. Then you can wade back to the shore, nudged by the waves.
In the mid-1990s, Apple was stuck in a riptide. The company had lost its innovative edge and market share was dwindling. The iPhone maker offered many products that weren’t selling. Like a swimmer fighting against the current, Apple was exhausting its resources with little to show for it.
When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he found a company on the brink of drowning. Instead of pushing the existing workforce to swim harder, Jobs took a different approach. He made some strategic decisions that changed the course of the company.
Good decisions saved Apple
The Cupertino firm had so many products that customers were confused and the production was inefficient. You could very well tell by the shrinking market share of the company. Something had to be done to turn things around.
Jobs made the bold decision to cut down the product line, focusing on just a few key products. A great example of less is more. He created a simple 2x2 matrix to define them: Consumer and Professional, Desktop and Portable. This was a game-changer.
Besides that, Jobs prioritised innovation and design. Products shouldn’t only function well — he believed — but also look and feel beautiful. In 1998, the iMac was born from this mantra, a colourful, all-in-one computer that had nothing to do with competing devices. The iMac killed it, and Apple could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
These decisions didn’t increase the workload for employees. But they changed the direction of the firm. No matter how hard you row if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
The law of the least effort
Jobs was a workaholic, but unknowingly, he embraced a timeless principle that shapes the physical world: the law of the least effort.
The law of least effort has always had a bad reputation. We are the bastard children of the Protestant idea that hard work dignifies and is worthwhile. But we forget that real life is not a linear system. More work always implies greater effort, but it doesn’t always result in a greater reward. We only have control over ourselves, that is, over the resources we use to achieve something. The outcome often depends on external factors beyond our grip, such as luck.
Our future is elusive, no matter how hard we try to capture it with plans and good intentions. A single decision, as trivial as it may seem, can revolutionise the course of our life. Trapped in a riptide, it can mean the difference between life and death. The law of least effort acknowledges our blindness towards the future; it is honest and recognises that the results don’t solely depend on you.
The best example of the power of this law is ourselves — homo sapiens as a species. We are the unexpected result of the perfection of the law of least effort over hundreds of millennia — almost a serendipity for the physical universe. Every inefficient feature was discarded; any excessive use of energy, penalised. If our ancestors had not applied the law of least effort, it is possible that we would not be here today; if they had not optimised their resources, I would not be writing these.
Embrace efficiency
Some people work a lot. They spend long hours at the office, often pressured by a sense of not being good enough. Others do it out of fear of losing their jobs. Some others embrace extended labour because they want to achieve perfection in whatever they do. Hello, burnout. Lastly, a small minority of people works their ass off because they truly enjoy it. Kudos to them.
I’ll let you in on a little secret here: I’m not any of those people. I’m lazy, and I think really hard to minimise my workload. I work hard to work less. That doesn’t mean I slack off on the couch everyday. But that I prefer painting, playing piano, or playing padel instead of working. These are things that make my life meaningful — unlike toiling for money.
I find comfort in knowing that laziness has spurred innovation along history, that the law of least effort is the reason we haven’t gone extinct. Take the invention of the electric washing machine, in 1910. Alva John Fisher, the inventor, has helped people all over the world save thousands of hours of menial, dull labour. What a blessing! If people weren’t lazy by nature, the washing machine wouldn’t be that big of a thing. Nor would it exist at all, perhaps.
Key takeaway
Next time you find yourself trapped in a riptide, don’t swim harder. Ask yourself the following: “Am I swimming in the right direction?” or better, yet: “Do I need to swim at all?”
Photo of the week
One of the reasons I cherish my free time is because it allows me to focus on my creative pursuits. I’m torn between studying musical composition or honing my watercolour skills. Maybe I’ll be able to do both in the future, but last weekend I did the latter.
Alejandro Lopez — The Psychology of Wealth
I’ve found my spirit animal in you! 🤣 I have always found ways to work smarter not harder. I’ve never believed in presenteeism and always felt that if people stay late at the office it doesn’t signify that they are such hard workers or doing more, to me it means they can’t manage their workload in the time they have to do it. I always tell my team to take their time back, starting late, having longer lunches, and I’m never a “green light” watcher on teams. If the work is getting done and one person isn’t doing all the work, then I don’t expect people to be robots. 😅