I remember reading a short story many years ago. In the story, a kid decides to make some money by mowing lawns. His neighbor tells him that there are three different types of lawn jobs: $3, $4, and $5. She also tells him that nobody can do a $5 job. This inspires him to prove her wrong. He spends all day mowing, weeding, trimming, and doing other types of work in her lawn, even stopping to take naps and breaks as needed. All his effort pays off as he gets $5 and his neighbor’s respect.
The story seems intended to show the value of hard work. At this point in my life, however, with everything I’ve experienced since reading that story, I can’t help but think about it differently. What stands out to me the most is the opportunity cost of that kid working all day to get $5 from one lawn. If he had been able to do three $3 jobs in the time it took him to do one $5 job, he’d have almost double the money for the same amount of work, and almost triple if he could have done three $4 jobs during that time. That’s a large difference that grows even larger over time.
As for any possible concerns about doing lower quality work in order to get more jobs, there has to be a balance between effectiveness and efficiency. Lots of companies do just fine with poor quality products and services (especially huge companies with big name recognition, many locations, and long track records), so anyone who offers good products and services has an advantage. Nobody has to shoot for perfection in order to succeed. Sometimes it’s better to do a good enough job than to try to get everything perfect.
Additionally, some things can only be learned by trial and error. Lots of folks in business start out slowly and simply, learn as they go, and steadily improve the quality of what they offer as they accumulate more knowledge about running a business. Their business might eventually end up in a very different place than it was when it started, and they will almost certainly be more knowledgeable, efficient, and effective than they were at the outset. If they didn’t start where they were and with the level of knowledge and skill they had at the time, they’d have never improved their business or even started it at all.
With the food delivery gig I started earlier this year, it took me a long time to figure out how much to look for with the orders. Specifically, the amount of driving that comes with any given offer compared to the amount of money in that offer. In the spirit of what I said above about the story of the kid doing yard work, I’d much rather make a few higher-paying deliveries that don’t involve too much driving than make a lot of deliveries that pay way less money each. However, I’ll accept slightly lower-paying offers if they come with far less driving than slightly higher-paying offers. In any event, I always strive to avoid offers whose mileage is higher than the pay (for example, an offer that requires ten miles of driving and pays $5).
Sometimes I’ll even forgo delivery driving altogether if a better deal arises. There was one week in which I made hardly any deliveries because I was busy with another project. Since that project made me much more money over three days than I’d have made doing deliveries during that time period, I knew that it was worth sacrificing several small opportunities in order to accept the one big opportunity. I’ve done similarly at past jobs by taking time off to perform at juggling gigs that paid me much more money than I’d have made working my regular shift (the gigs also were more fun and took less time).
The changes I’ve made in these different projects have all come about gradually through trial and error. Small changes are always easier to make and sustain than huge changes. Easing into delivery driving was much easier than other jobs in which I suddenly went from unemployment straight into working nearly full-time, or in which I went directly from one kind of job into another very different job. The two biggest changes I’ve had with regard to my dog Sawyer were the day he came home and the day he died. In the former, I went from never having had a dog to having a new best friend. In the latter, our friendship of eleven years ended in a matter of minutes. While it was fairly quick and easy to adjust to life with Sawyer, adjusting to life without him has been the longest, hardest, and most painful process of my life. I’m certain it would have been easier if I’d had more notice or if there had been some way to gradually reduce our time together until we had none left.
Finding the balance between efficiency and effectiveness is something that comes with time. I’ve gotten pretty good at doing this with my hobbies, various jobs, and even this blog. On the days in which it’s difficult to do anything, doing just a little bit is enough to keep the ball rolling in a good direction while still giving me time to rest so I can do more another day. That has kept up my skills with juggling, unicycling, swing dancing, writing, and so on. All without making me feel extraordinarily frustrated and wanting to give up on the hard days. This approach still seems to be the exception in general. Whether or not it becomes the norm on a widespread basis, I hope that I can keep developing it in my own life and interact primarily with others who do the same.