High Performance and a Toaster
This is a story about high performance… and a toaster.
On my recent holiday, I found myself in the restaurant in the morning preparing myself some breakfast. During which time I observed some interesting behaviours. For the majority of the patrons of the breakfast buffet, they would pick up their bread, put it in the toaster and press it down. They would then stand there and continue to pop the toast up after a minute or so and re-submerge it for further grilling upon the discovery that it wasn’t to their tastes. I then witnessed the same behaviour from some of the same individuals the next day, and the next day. Some individuals I saw a few times over the course of the 8 days, and some I only saw once.
Only upon observing their behaviours did I stop and look at my own behaviours. Had I done the same thing? Demonstrating a complete lack of trust for the toaster and it’s ability to do it’s job? No. The first day I wanted toast, I experimented. I tweaked the settings, made some mistakes, but ultimately landed on the optimum settings for producing toast, exactly to my liking every single time.
So what?… You’re literally talking about a toaster for the love of god man! In that moment, I was taken back to a mindset that has stuck with me ever since a previous mentor drilled into me in the early days of software engineering. Zero, One or Many. Everything falls into one of those categories, Zero, One or Many.
Zero: If it’s something you’re never going to do, then don’t even give it a second thought and just move on.
One: If it’s something you can only perceive being done once, then just do whatever the quickest simplest path to success is.
Many: But as soon as you are going to be doing something more than once, regardless of how many times you expect to be, you should treat it as the potential for an infinite number of uses and spend the time upfront, to ensure the future success of the many.
In this scenario, I spent the time upfront to understand how to get the best results out of the toaster that I was fully expecting to use every day that week. The end result? While on the first day, I spent more time and ultimately made more waste and mistakes than the other patrons. On the 2nd, 3rd, nth day? While they were standing, waiting, popping and re-submerging their toast, devoting their entire focus this one singular task. I was free of my toasting burden to simply set the toaster, walk away and continue prepping my breakfast only returning at the point where it’s popped up and I have absolute faith that it’s perfect and ready to go.
Now naturally, in this very minor example I’ve saved myself all of a 10–20 minutes over the course of a week. But when you apply this thinking to work, business, life, anything really, it enables you to begin benefiting from compound interest in all things you do. Spending the time upfront to save yourself a few minutes every day for the lifetime that problem exists, will very quickly result in a net positive.
This kind of thinking is a key tenant to what ultimately leads to high performing individuals/teams/departments/organisations.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
