If you listen to some of the more popular thought leaders in the entrepreneurial space, you'll hear some of them talk a lot about effort, hustle, and grind. You'll also hear others talk about quality of life, impact, and meeting client needs. People can get easily get caught up wondering which is better, or which is right.
Here, we’re going to go over each viewpoint, and how each one can help you to maximize your results, whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee who wants to become an entrepreneur, or an employee who simply wants to get paid more, or a business owner who wants to grow your business.
Effort vs. Impact
When you look at effort versus impact, some people believe that effort and hard work alone are the primary keys to success and wealth. Certainly, there are some examples of this being true, and there are some people that just work so hard that they eventually figure things out.
Then there are others who believe that impact, results, outcomes, and value creation are the primary keys to success and wealth.
That’s not to say that these people don’t believe in hard work, or that the other side don’t believe in making an impact; this is just what they believe their primary focus should be.
Impact requires effort, so impact does have to have effort; impact is not going to happen by itself. And there's that quote, “Just about anything worth achieving is going to take effort”, and it certainly will. But effort alone doesn't guarantee impact.
There are plenty of people working in jobs where they're working hard, but unfortunately they're not making an impact. Maybe they’re being forced to do the work, or maybe they can’t really engage with the job. So we can see that success is not a guaranteed result of working hard: there's got to be some sort of interplay for people to achieve real results and real, lasting impact.
The Effort/Impact Categories
To understand this better, let’s take a look at some different kinds of workers, and sort them into categories.
The Laborer
Everybody's got a little bit of effort and a little bit of impact in them, but in the effort extreme we've got a person who's just a pure laborer, and they work really hard. Their work is higher effort, and perhaps lower impact, because they don't have a lot of control over their situation.
This person is typically going to make towards the lower end of income when they’re young, but as they get older, they're still going to make towards the lower end of income because labor or effort that's not directed in a way to bring about high levels of impact is really not all that valuable in the marketplace.
The Dreamer
If you go to a lower effort situation, which perhaps is a little more desirable, but if that's still low impact, this is what I call the dreamer. The dreamer is the person who’s hoping that some easy thing is going to come along, and they're going to just do well, they're going to win the lottery, or they're going to get appointed to a job by a friend or a connection, and everything's going to work out.
They're making lower impact, and even though they're doing low effort, they're still not going to make a lot of money now, and they're probably not going to make a lot of money in the future.
The Hustler
The hustler usually has a higher impact in their work, but it's taking a higher amount of effort. They might be making a high income now, but I'm going to tell you something that I've seen in over 25 years of working with entrepreneurs. A huge percentage of the hustlers end of having a lower income later, and that's because they get tired. Non-stop hustling gets tiring after a while.
The Multiplier
Finally, the multiplier is the person who looks to use less effort to achieve higher impacts. This is where, for a lot of people who believe in hard work, their red flags fly up and they say “Oh no, this is impossible Wade, you can't work less and make more.”
But if you look at someone like Bill Gates and the results he's been able to get, it's through efficiency, through greater productivity. It’s taken him lower effort to get the same result, lower effort to get higher impact. That doesn't mean the multiplier just stops working, and it doesn't mean they want society to take care of them; it simply means they want to get higher impact with less input. They want to get more out of the effort they're putting in.
Because some people are so focused on hustling, they miss that distinction.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
As a father who has coached soccer, you can tell which other parents aren’t as familiar with the game. The coaches who didn’t know what they were doing would tell these little kids, "Hustle, run, run, work harder." Why? Because they have no idea what the heck else to tell them to do.
And then you could tell which ones played the game, and they understood how to get more goals with lower effort.
This isn’t about trying to cheat the system, or being lazy. This is just to say that hard work alone is not the answer. It's got to be applied in some way that's going to give a higher impact. There are some common trends that I've seen over time, which we’ll go over now.
Laborers
Laborers never seem to create or get a break, because they're more focused on working hard in their job than working smarter on their job. So they're rarely unemployed, because they're hard workers, but their income grows very little. It almost feels unfair: these people work so hard and they don't advance very much because they're always in their job, just laboring away, not looking at how could they do better, how could they evolve, how could they get paid more, and what would it take.
Dreamers
Dreamers are completely focused on their vision, their needs, their products and services. A dreamer could be someone who's working hard but they're so focused on their own stuff, that they can't really see the client. So they work hard without an effective compass and they make little progress whether they work hard or not, because they’re not focused on creating greater value for the client.
I remember I had a boss that said to me once, "Wade you know what? You do great work for the people in our company, and you do brilliant things, and sometimes you do both at the same time." And that was his nice way of saying “It's not about you, it's about you doing something that creates impact because it's important to the client.”
Hustlers
Hustlers see success quickly and get addicted to being right. They're very often self-starters, and they often devalue learning from others: they prefer doing it themselves. This means that they'll often take the longer route to gain strategies, wisdom, and insights, and so they'll burn out quicker. And the burnout leads to fewer results and less income.
Very often hustlers are rebels. If you're rebelling against something such as working in a corporate job where nobody cares about you, I hear you. But you know what? There are plenty of other people who did it before you, and there are plenty of better causes you can align with.
The problem with being a rebel is you always have to fight. Even if someone told you that you wouldn’t be able to do something, so you do it just to prove them wrong, then you're still being controlled by something outside of you. You’re not moving towards a result that you want just because you want it. It’s better to work for something, not to go against anybody, not to go for somebody, just because it’s something you want.
Sure, there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who have broken the mold, left the system, or got out of the matrix. But you don't have to be a rebel to do that. There are enough people who have done it, you can just learn from them and hustle, and work hard, and respect systems, and learn from those who've been there before you. There's no need to do it all yourself. There's no merit in reinventing the wheel.
Multipliers
Multipliers do three main things:
1. They clarify the client's most desired results, or, in other words, “What does the client most want that I'm serving?” I should say here that the multiplier isn’t just finding a group of people and doing whatever they want. The multiplier has already specialized in whatever field they choose, and then within that field, they clarify their client's most desired results.
2. They seek out proven strategies that have been learned from others. They're still open to improving those strategies and creating something better, but rather than starting from scratch, they take something that's already working and make it better, to create value, and create more income.
3. They commit their hard work to creating constantly increasing impact and income. The multiplier knows that if they apply focus smartly, this goal is going to happen.
Compare this with the hustler, who’s saying "Look at me, look how hard I'm working.” But is it getting results? Is it not? If you're not getting the results, I don't care how hard you work.
As I've said before, I pay you to cut my lawn; I don't care if you use a pair of scissors or a lawnmower, I'm going to pay you the same amount. I assume you use a lawnmower, and if you use scissors, I'm going to think you're kind of foolish, not that you’re doing a better job.
