The Endstate, Part 2

As a young Army Lieutenant in an aviation unit I made the mistake of telling the aviation Battalion Commander that we needed two Blackhawk helicopters for the upcoming mission. At which point he efficiently told me that was incorrect. What I really needed was to move 22 people from one point to another. THAT was the goal. The means by which that would happen would be based on multiple factors, none of which included my “expert” opinion. Since then I have been careful to distinguish ‘means’ from the goal. But I see a lot of the confusion of the two when we spend effort that has nothing to do with what our ultimate goal is, and that brings us to core thought #2:

2. If “success” is achieved, most often the rewards don’t equate to the amount of effort expended.

We’re always told that hard work and perseverance is the gold standard for success, when in reality it may only give us the experience of working hard and persevering. The core thought results from two things: We may not have understood the endstate to begin with and couldn’t figure out the actual effort required to achieve it, or it wasn’t the endstate we wanted anyway. In either case we incorrectly understood what we truly wanted. We confused the effort with the endstate, and the means we think we wanted, may not be the easiest, nor the most effective way to achieve our goals.

We’ll share lots of different examples of this, but in each case our goal will be to lower the effort to success ratio and we’ll talk about that next.

Song of the Day

In honor of the NCAA Basketball Tournament (the Big Dance), and the full moon being closest to the earth on its elliptical orbit since 1983 tonight, the song of the day is a live version of Van Morrison’s "Moondance". Check out moonrise around 7:30 pm in the mid-atlantic.