Try this today?

The next time someone asks you for a commitment, think about whatever you were about to promise them, and chop 25% off your promise before you actually speak.

If someone asks how long it will take to get something done, and you think it’s going to be 6 hours, tell them 8. If someone asks how much profit you think a new project is going to earn and you think it’s going to be $10k, tell them “$7,500, tops”.

The point isn’t that ADDexecs constantly miss by 25%. The point is that ADDexecs constantly underestimate efforts and overpromise results. We do this for many reasons: an eagerness to please, optimism, a failure to account for all the subtasks it’ll take to get a project done. But whatever the reason, we’ve grown comfortable with calling out the wrong number. This exercise forces us to live with speaking something different out loud. In the process, we discover that the world doesn’t punish us when we “fail” to be overoptimistic. That’s a good discovery.

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Remember the Seinfeld episode when George Costanza realizes that since his life has been such a failure, he might be well-served by doing the exact opposite of whatever his first inclination is? That was a great episode. This blog entry isn’t that great — but then again, it isn’t just something you’re watching on TV

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 12:42 am and is filed under Articles, Try This Today?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.