Today I advocate patience as an often overlooked quality for improving business. This is a direct attack on the often used axiom referring to “low hanging fruit.” The basic idea there is, pick the simplest thing to do first. And the rationale is mostly sound, the idea is that you have to do it anyway, and it will make an impact on your environment and workload so get to it. Why are you still sitting around looking at that low hanging fruit, pick it for goodness sake the work day is a wastin.
But I have to imagine that anyone who picks fruit for a living is thinking, if I fill up my basket with the low fruit, it’ll be a real pain in the ass to climb up a ladder lugging a basket that is partially or mostly filled with fruit.
The point here is that business analogies are mostly stupid and can be construed anyway the proveyor of the proverb would like. So instead of planning your workday/week/month on some phrase of the day. Take a minute to think first. Decide what is important to do. I know humans are usually stupid and thinking about many factors at the same time is hard, but at least you aren’t running around like a maniac jumping on top of the fruit that has already fallen to the ground thinking you are doing something special.
Understand that anything worth doing, is worth doing well, and sometimes to do something well takes time, focus, and forethought. Just because something can be done quickly doesn’t make it a better thing to do. It only takes 5 seconds to check email, but you all know that guy who literally spends 2 – 3 hours of their day chomping on that low hanging fruit.
Try being patient, understand that things take time to do, and use that knowledge to decide what is important. Make gains on your goals daily.
