Cameron Herold warns against the "quick hit" mentality and instant-gratification culture, arguing that meaningful business results require long-term, consistent effort to reach a "flywheel" effect. He urges leaders and individual contributors to prioritize the "critical few" tasks over the "important many," focusing their three inputs — people, time, and money — on high-ROI activities. Using social-media busywork as an example of low-return effort, he recommends persistent focus until the flywheel spins, then adding other initiatives.
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So that quick hit mentality I think is really impacting negatively a lot of business people out there. The reality is it takes a long time to get to that flywheel effect where your effort is actually working. So this is a message to all the COOs and CEOs out there about effort and kind of focus as well. The reality is it takes a long time to get to the night before you become the overnight success story. And I think for far too many business people these days, they expect the quick hit. They expect the instant gratification. I mean, heck, we can just swipe left or swipe right, whatever it is, and get a date. We can look stuff up on Facebook and get a dopamine rush. We can order something on Amazon and get it delivered to our door and next day and sometimes even within two hours if you're in North America. So that quick hit mentality I think is really impacting negatively a lot of business people out there. The reality is it takes a long time to get to that flywheel effect where your effort is actually working. And the key is to make sure that you're only working on the critical few things versus the important many. So often business people, whether they're small businesses, medium sized businesses, or even executives in larger companies, tend to be working on the busy work, or we're taking on way too many things, working on way too many projects that aren't necessarily going to give us that return on investment. At the end of the day, you've only got three inputs, people, time and money. So for you as an individual contributor, or for you as a CEO or a CEO of an organization, you need to get the highest return on your people. That's you and your employees, the time, which is the days and weeks in front of you, and the money that you're putting into something, whether it's your hourly rate, your effective hourly rate, or even maybe outsourcing fees, that you're investing in a project or investing in initiative, the key is to make sure that you get the highest return on those three investments. But a lot of the busy work that you're doing, let's say as an example, it's social media and you're working on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn, and sending out newsletters and sending out emails and working on copy and working on the perfect hashtags and the perfect SEO strategy, a lot of that perfect stuff doesn't necessarily scale or because you're spending so much time working on it, whether it's days, weeks, months, or even a year. You don't necessarily get that return turn as fast as you're expecting. So what happens? We give up, or we change strategies, or we change the actual focus of what we're working on. The key is to pick the key few things that you can invest your time, like a flywheel, like Jim Collins talks about, and the more effort that you put into it, the flywheel starts to spin. It's almost like launching a satellite and getting it up into orbit. Once you put all of that energy and you get it into orbit, it stays there forever. So for all of us as individual contributors, or whether we're CEOs or CEOs, make sure that you're picking the critical few things versus the important many. And you keep working on them until you get that flywheel effect happening, and then add the other pieces of the puzzle. But resist the urge to work on everything instead of working on the critical few things. So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from. And together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.
