If your one-trick tool at work is endurance, it could be a long time before you realize you’ve been cracking eggs instead of nailing it.
I’m an endurance queen. For over a decade, my shortest work week was 69 hours. I like endurance sports like hiking. I’ve got endurance big-time and it’s served me well. But the dark side to endurance is that it can set you up to overlook options.
When we use endurance to deliver results, we don’t stop to ask ourselves how we could be doing something faster or more efficiently. We’re too busy just grinding out the work.
For example, I was working on a task with our team. It was an important task and we were all focused on it. We divided it up and went at it. We worked nights, weekends and still didn’t finish. I realized that the deadline was less than 24 hours away, it was after eleven PM and I still wasn’t even close.
It didn’t matter if I could stay up all night. What I was doing would not be finished by the deadline. I closed my laptop and went to bed.
At 3 am, I woke up to the voice of my working brain.
Brain: “Hey! I noticed you gave up on the task we were working on.”
Me: “Ugh. Go away.”
Brain: “Um, so I’ve been working on an alternative. What you wanted to do? Wouldn’t really work for you later … it’ll always take this long. It’s not suitable.”
Me: “Huh. True. But Go AWAY.”
And because I’m a Zen Master when it comes to shutting my brain down so I can go back to sleep, I slept.
At 4 am, I woke to the voice of my working brain again.
Brain: “Hey! You approved the redesign so I’ve been tackling that.”
Me: Where am I? I’m in bed. I don’t work when I’m here. Go Away!
Brain: “Well, I just want you to know that if you let go of the design you wanted to use and do this other thing, it’ll take three lines of code and you can be done before you shower this morning. I’m heading out now.”
Me: “Wait! What?”
It wasn’t until endurance was no longer an option that my brain even tried to come up with another solution. Once working longer or harder was off the table, then I had to come up with another way.
It’s not just endurance that shuts us out from other options. Anything that we typically rely on to “win”, to succeed, to stay safe – is going to be an automatic “do that first” for our brains.
Sometimes, taking your best tool and leaving it at home can be your smartest move.
And that? Is just good to know.
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