Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Prioritization
In a high leverage role, you should stop doing work that simply provides a positive return on investment, ROI. And you should start focusing on work that minimizes opportunity cost.
When we reprogram ourselves to think in terms of opportunity cost, we are no longer thinking, 'Oh, is this a good use of my time?' Instead, you are thinking, 'Is this the best use of my time?' And it's a subtle but profound shift in our thinking.
If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away.
Low-impact work begets low-impact work. The more low-impact work you do, the harder it is to do high-impact work, the more likely you are to do low-impact work.
We still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work, rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.
You can follow all the best practices, but if your company goes out of business, they're not going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.7.
If you wouldn't start this today, then that means that everything that you're putting into this going forward is the actual waste.
When you're doing something, there's not just the cost of doing something that's not worthwhile that's direct, but there's also the cost of not being able to devote your attention to other opportunities that might be available to you.