Golden Oldies: ROI On Personal Change
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
As you know, the blog was dark last week. It was the first time I’d taken time off and, while I needed it for many reasons, one major one was to revaluate the ROI I get from writing a daily blog. As I explain in this post, we should expect as solid an ROI from our actions when investing in ourselves as we do when investing in the outside world.
I haven’t made any hard and fast decisions, but I do know that changes are ahead.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
How many times have you said something like, “I’m not very good at X.” only to be told not to be so hard on yourself, not to put yourself down, or some variation of that theme?
I grant you that sometimes these comments are accurate and that the person is under-rating herself, but, just as often it’s a valid statement of fact.
Maybe it’s partly a function of age, but, it’s mainly a function of knowing one’s self and knowing when a viable ROI on the time/energy investment to change/create/fix something in ourselves just isn’t there.
For example, All my life I’ve been a procrastinator. I was about an 8 on a scale of 10, with ten being the worst. Over the years I invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in changing that—and I did change it, to a 4. When I hit four, I realized that the effort it was taking me to move to 3.8 was larger than when I moved from eight to seven.
That meant the change wasn’t particularly productive, in other words, bad ROI. So I stopped investing in change and learned to compensate instead, meaning I channeled my remaining procrastination into areas that don’t really impact the important parts of my world.
The point of all this is two fold
- Know yourself well enough to know what you really want to change—change is a very personal decision—because to change successfully, it must be your idea.
- Recognize when the return on your time/energy being spent is too low to warrant the investment and develop work-arounds to deal with the remnants of the change-item.
Finally, don’t let those pesky don’t-be-so-hard-on-yourself comments push you into actions that aren’t in your best interest. After all, they don’t know me as well as I know me, or as well as you know you.
Image credit: Euro Betting Tips