Pushing through is (not) a strategy

I never really understood the Just do it1 mantra.2 If it was so easy, it would already have been done. Just suggest it is easy, implying the person doing is the problem. Just do it can be perceived as not very motivating and even can feel a bit condesending, if said to someone who’s failing at something in the very moment.

It’s similar to the idea that success is a matter of mindset. Success is a matter of mindset, amongst other things: circumstances, privileges, like a (financial) safety net, education, etc. Mindset however is something which comes from within according to Wikipedia: “[M]indset is the cognitive process activated in response to a given task”. In other words the term mindset ignores all other factors of success. Mindset can be important, but stating you need the right mindset to be successful, also implies that not being successful means you have the wrong mindset.3 It’s essentially blaming the person rather than providing an approach to achieve a goal.

The third and last phrase which somewhat falls into the same category of toxic motivational believes is Never give up. Persistence can be vital for achieving a goal, like building muscles in the gym for example. That doesn’t mean that giving up is a bad idea generally. That would mean that even if it turns out an initial idea was wrong, for example based on wrong assumptions, continuing pursuing it would be a good idea. It’s not. It’s important to learn from failure, but admitting failure means giving up on the idea or approach. You can even take it a step further and say Fail early. Fail, learn, adjust, repeat. The earlier you fail the more iterations can be done.

All of this advice is essentially dump as it doesn’t help with how to reach a goal. It’s try harder, rather than work smarter. It lacks strategy.

What is a strategy? A strategy defines how to reach a goal and stay there. If you want to reach a certain number of sales in business, it’s not just enough to grow the number of sales to a certain point and then have them drop again.

A (good) strategy addresses the reasons why sales were low. And by addressing those reasons, sales stay up. Could be a lack of quality in the product, or in how it’s sold or simply customer’s not knowing the product exists. Improving the quality of the product, selling it online directly to the consumer or giving samples away for free addresses the reasons sustainably. Whereas reducing the price in order to increase sales isn’t (financially) sustainable. It increases sales short term, but to increase them further, the price would need to stay low or even drop lower.

TL;DR A strategy ensures a goal is reached sustainably. Pushing through to reach a goal isn’t going to do that.

  1. The origin of Just do it is a bit surprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It ↩︎

  2. This is not to say that doing things has no value. It does. We learn a great deal from doing things. For example from failing at them. Or simply by practising the very thing we’re doing. Doing creates momentum (even if we do the wrong thing), which creates motivation to keep on doing. ↩︎

  3. That is not true if you look from a pure logic perspective. However humans are not machines and natural language doesn’t follow the rules of logic. ↩︎