I recently read this post that has me thinking:

Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t acknowledge about offices: you literally have no incentive to improve. When your day is ultimately tethered to the number of hours you need to be there, why decide to be more efficient?

Why bother producing higher quality work?

Why bother improving your workflow to half the time it takes to do a task?

Why bother developing 2x complex solutions that deliver 10x impact?

Why bother being better, quicker, or more optimal? Why bother.

This concept, of not giving people space to innovate and create their own path to impact, compounds further.  

Why? I fundamentally believe that once you get someone to start considering how they can work more optimally, this permeates into other aspects of their life. They have now trained their brains to remove noise and optimize toward impact. This will inevitably impact the way an employee engages with problems they face across contexts.

~ Steph Smith

I don’t think this is really true in a lot of contexts. Hopefully there is at least some risk of losing your job altogether if you are not producing quality work. However, from experience there is at least some truth in the fact that incentives for innovation and producing high quality work are lacking in many a workplace.

To vaguely tie in with triathlon…this last paragraph speaks to us triathletes. Once you start working more optimally “this permeates into other aspects” of life. It’s difficult to spend time on career, family, AND train for a triathlon without looking to optimize in some areas of your life! And I do believe this impact spreads throughout your life and those around you.

Maybe it will even make you a better employee.

I suspect that some people have been hired in part because triathlete sits on their resume!