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You Don’t Get To Decide If Your Work Is Any Good.
At the heart of the confusion about whether we only use 10% of our brains or not, is the fact that we spend almost all of our time operating at somewhere around 10% effort.
Life is basically a series of sub-optimal efforts until you die. And that’s mostly the way it should be. There’s a conflict between effort and time, and given that our time is limited, it makes sense that we sacrifice a little effort from time to time. I mean sure, I want the waiter to clean my table, but I don’t want him to do such a good job that it takes him 10 minutes. Neither does his boss. Most of the time, “good enough” is the sweet spot.
But only most of the time. Each of us has something to offer, and when we figure out what it is, we should put 100% effort into that one thing. We should do the thing that only we can do, and we should do it to the best of our ability. That’s when great things happen.
It might not always feel like it though. With great effort does not always come great recognition. Our society isn’t optimised to reward effort. Work that will take a while to pay off, looks a lot like work that simply failed. And it’s up to us to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t, we make the mistake of judging our work by the standards…
