Eating the Broccoli OR Why the short cut doesn’t always work

jitha
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Eating the broccoli

What it is:

We’re always looking for short cuts. Whether the latest fad diet, get-rich-quick schemes, or clever growth hacks, we’re all looking for that easy way out.

But to get what we want, we do have to do the hard part. We have to, as the metaphor goes, eat the broccoli.

This is especially relevant in nutrition / dieting. There’s a new fad diet every week. But nothing works unless you eat the broccoli (or give up sugary foods).

 

Examples in business:

  • Marketing: Growth hacks and Dropbox style incentives to acquire users are fine. But they’re ultimately useless if you don’t build something users want, and would pay for. Similarly, you can have the latest Material Design for your app, but it’s useless if there’s no reason to use the app.
  • Content: You (I) can try all kinds of content marketing SEO tricks to get traffic to your website, but the most important thing is – write to be helpful. To be useful. That’s the hard, but necessary, part.
  • People Management: Many of us hate giving negative feedback. We hope people take a hint, when we are brusque / don’t give positive feedback. We hope they can read our minds. Instead, the simplest way is through. Have the candid conversation. Your team and your relationships will be the better for it.

 

Rules to follow:

  1. All things that are worth doing have some broccoli to be eaten. Identify the broccoli – the painful, necessary, non-scalable first step – and you’re already ahead of the others.
  2. Instead of ways around the broccoli, identify ways to make it easier to eat it. If it’s a feedback chat, prepare a script for it if required. If it’s understanding what customers want, do structured interviews.

Now, an analogy can only go so far. But in summary, as Seth Godin says, when you’re looking for the trick, remember: it often turns out that the trick-free approach is the best trick of all.

Simple. But not easy.

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Further reading:

 

Filed Under: Decision-making