What Is Your Effort Truly Worth?
What matters more — your effort or the result?
Every year an aspiring photographer brought his stack of best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment.
Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good.
Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack.
Once, he turned to the young man and said, “You submit this landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?”
The young photographer said, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”
What the young photographer was politely saying was, “You don’t know how much effort I put in to click the photo.” But he failed to realize that the effort didn’t matter because the photo was bad.
Does Effort Matter More Than Results?
We often assume our effort is directly proportional to the quality of our creation.
If we spend five hours baking a cake, we assume everyone who eats it will praise our culinary skills.
If we spend two days preparing a presentation, we hope our manager will praise us in front of the entire team (and hopefully…
