“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
― Warren Buffett

I’ve been thinking a bit of late.

There are times when I could have done a much better job of something. I had the ideas, I had the skills. Yet, I didn’t.

I sometimes do things that are pretty mediocre – that is one big reason what pulls my results down, I think.

I wondered why.

One answer is – our brain is automatically incentivised to choose the ‘easy’ and ‘now’.

We could do something in 2 hours or we could do a quickie fix in 10 minutes. Many a time, we just settle for the latter – and justify it with umpteen reasons – no time, will do a revision soon, whatever.

And many a time, we are too ‘impatient’ to wait for things to be rolled out – we are too focused on the ‘now’. Could we afford to wait for a day or two and do a better job? We could – but we go ahead and do a quickie fix in 20 minutes because it is ‘now’.

The program you wrote has a bug and you need to fix it – how do you do it? You patch it up instead of taking the longer route of ensuring the code is clean, well thought out and reusable. Of course, you fixed it – for now. Easy.

But in the long term, that is what puts you along with those 6.99 billion mediocre people out there.

Want to be better than just mediocre?

Get rid of the easy and now.

I want to – hopefully wil get there one day!