If you go to a restaurant and order a meal, you are
automatically given the right to get as much salt as possible
for free. However, just because it is free, you do not end up
putting a lot of salt into your meal, as it will decrease its
taste. Similarly, you should not do a lot of things just for
the sake of your capabilities of doing them.
That salt might be seen as free of charge, but it is actually
included in the price of the meal. When you put too much of it
in the meal, it might not be delicious to eat. That is also
the case with our actions and tasks that we do. Just because
we are capable of engaging into forty different tasks a day
does not mean that we should engage on that type of endeavor,
if our purpose is being really good at what we do.
We should try to be both efficient and effective with our
commitments; being effective means doing the right things and
being efficient means doing the tasks well. Our day is
comprised of twenty-four hours a day and there is an infinite
pile of tasks that we could be doing during those hours. The
ability of selecting some of these tasks and doing them well
will make the difference in comparison to others.
Imagine the CEO and founder of Mark Zuckerberg during his
early days while developing Facebook. If he would
simultaneously start to also focus on making a search engine
that would be a rival against Google, Facebook would not be
where it is today. At least, not in its quality and the user
base that it currently has.
Successful people focus on a few things and deliberately push
their limits and as a consequence of this, they end up
producing remarkable results. Therefore, before you start
doing a task, ask yourself what would be the consequences of
not doing it at all.