The Power of Not Doing
What you do not do can often be more important than that you do.
“Why do you always leave the towel here?” I heard myself complaining to one of my wife messes. “Please always hang it here in the bathroom.” I doubled down as I picked up the moist towel from the bed and walk over to hang it on the hanger inside the bathroom.
This situation might sound all too familiar to many of you, especially perfectionists. You easily feel exhausted faster than people around you because you spend a lot of time thinking, perfecting everything, more often than not, on your own and by yourself.
However, when you insist on doing everything because you simply think you are the best, you aren’t harnessing the true power that has brought human race up to the top of the food chain over the course of history — collaboration.
Collaboration is the key to human productivity because it simply scale much better. You would think getting another helper might offload at most half of the any workload and the sum of all output over time (i.e. wattage) is always the same. Well here is another example with my same wife.
The Cottage Industry
Recently, my wife started her e-commerce business selling collections of collectible fabrics online. It has grown quite a bit to the point that on some days she has to wake up at 3 am in the morning and work on the orders — sourcing, cutting, ironing, folding, and packing the fabrics — until 4 pm, when it’s time to hit the post office to ship the goods (that’s where I usually come in to help). She had recently got quite worn out that she altogether started to snooze the work because she didn’t have enough time to be with her family and play with our daughter.
I had occasionally helped her out for a few hours in some repetitive tasks, but soon realized it didn’t make the process faster. She would manage to ship out every order for the day on her own at pretty much the same time as when I was helping her.
But when I returned to help her out, I noticed that while we get things done no earlier, she was more energized and having more fun with her work. After 4 pm, she would still have some energy left to be engage in other chores and spend time with our little one. Things that would have been left for me to sort out or simply unattended.
The Chicago Bulls
Let’s take a different example, this time a championship sport team we all know, the Chicago Bulls. Early on, shortly after he was drafted to join the Bulls, Michael Jordan would some time score up to half of all the points his team made. He was named Rookie of the Year, then an MVP. He was unstoppable and unquestionably the world’s godsend super athlete.
But at the time, his team was mediocre. It did not have the fun and inspiring Phil Jackson as the head coach, or the brilliance of Tex Winter. Most importantly, it did not have the great teammates to support him. Year after year he couldn’t get the Bulls to anywhere past the playoff.
Later, as Phil Jackson joined the coaching squad and persuaded him to become the leader instead of the skilled player he already was, skeptical at first, he decided to put more trust in his teammates. The rest was history. No other team could stop the Bulls to its consecutive championships.
And guess what? He was still scoring half of all the points anyway! But the change was prominent. He didn’t hustle his way into making the shots, but his teammates would help in making it happen.
That’s a thing with collaboration. It doesn’t work in a 1 + 1 = 2 manner. It unleashes powerful explosive power because humans, unlike machines, have different ways of tackling the task at hand. When one mind work with another, a much better solution is more likely to occur. This is why a team that listens to everyone, regardless of rank, is likely to be a more productive team than those with a single authority.
Practice Trust
The hardest part of letting go and let someone else help you is trust. Trust feels like stepping out of an invisible bridge on top of a cliff. It gives you this butterfly churning in your stomach. It means risking it all and become vulnerable to disappointments. The other person might have a different way of looking at how the job has to be done, or she might just postpone it altogether. She might thinks it’s absolutely fine for the wet towel to lay on the bed for a while. How would you tackle that? One word. Talk. A lot. Keep telling and reminding after the fact, without emotion and keep it very brief. If it is more than a few sentence, it is heading toward the Complaint Land, and it escalates quickly from that place.
Let’s just say it only took me 3–4 reminds to get my wife putting her toothbrush back in the cup. That might have had something to do with me helping her out with some other things. She still occasionally forget, but it’s just plain cute.
