There’s an argument to be made for dedicating some part of each business week to self development. Clay Christensen’s article How will you measure your life? made this idea tangible to me. You can catch his great Ted talk here. Two ideas in that article that caught my attention. Achievement bias and marginal cost thinking.
Marginal cost thinking for the purposes of his talk is when, in order to maximize profits, you discount your sunk costs and preferentially undertake tasks that rely on your existing infrastructure rather than building out new capabilities. This means that established companies naturally become tied to undertakings that rely on those structures. New upstarts don’t have existing structures to leverage and so they innovate faster. Achievement bias, which is my own term for a concept he introduced me to, takes the basic short term pleasure construct and adds a new twist.
We all know that we’re wired to be efficient, which basically means we prefer to take familiar, dopamine-driven actions like tackling our email instead of working on our projects, hitting up the office candy bowl instead of going to get a salad for lunch, chatting with office mates instead of doubling down on our work. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you know that much of our control in life comes from being aware of these patterns and getting our prefrontal cortex in charge of things inside our heads.
Christensen ups the ante on this by pointing out that it’s worse than we think.
We are motivated as humans by the desire to learn and grow, have more responsibility and contribute to the tribe. In other words, we want to achieve.
Here’s the rest of the news – some of what we do in the name of achievement falls into the short term pleasure vortex.
What???
People who are drawn to achievement, which is basically all of us, will prefer to do tasks that help us hit short term goal markers over things that build out personal infrastructure.
Dudette. Did you see that coming? Me neither.
It’s marginal thinking on a micro-level.
This helps explain how goal achievement can be an avoidance tactic and an addictive practice all on its own.
Before you head off to get a cookie and check your email, let’s break down what our personal infrastructure is. It’s the systems that keep us running. The stuff we need to keep the lights on in this business we call being alive: family, friends, exercise, nutrition, sleep, relaxation, purpose, meaning, goals, thinking that processes your experience – whether spiritual or creative – you get the picture.
You have a personal work infrastructure, too. That’s your specialized knowledge, your personal networks, your industry knowledge, your skills, training, and experience. And for some of us, when we get a bit of spare time, we preferentially tackle some task that will give us immediate achievement instead of investing in these infrastructures.
This explains how come when we have a few minutes, we spend it cleaning or catching up with work, or fiddling with something rather than sitting down to plan out a family reunion next year, or reading up on the latest business trends.
It’s easy to notice when a company is letting its infrastructure get out of date and choosing short term profit over long term competitiveness. It’s also easy to notice when a programmer creates technical debt in the drive to bring a program to market.
But this pattern also shows up when we put off working on our development in order to meet our day to day goals, fail to attend training in favor of getting to inbox zero or insist on attending every meeting on our calendars instead of working through a self-study course.
If you’re like me, you’re not looking at emails, meetings and day to day work as short term pleasure-seeking. These behaviors trade short term gains for future payoffs. They are achievement bias built on marginal thinking at a personal level.
And that? Is just good to know.
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