Mediocrity pills: Easy (I)

Easy

I find it very funny how some titles are translated from their original language. Allen Carr’s “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” was translated to Spanish as “Es fácil dejar de fumar, si sabes cómo”, which actually reads as “It is easy to quit smoking if you know how”. My first thought was a mock with irony thinking If I knew how, of course, it’d be easy. And I was wrong. It wasn’t long until I realised that knowing how wasn’t enough to make it easy. And in my professional -and personal, life, even with the right know-how easy wasn’t common, redundant nor abundant.

I hope you’ve heard of Usain Bolt, eight-time Olympic gold medalist and the world record holder in the 100 metres, 200 metres, and 4 × 100 metres relay… I happen to hear a quote attributed to him. And after some research I found a video of him showing just a tiny bit of his experience on what it actually takes to get to easy. Easy, to him, is hard. Hard work behind the scenes.

As I got to face a few challenges over the years – and this of course is not only applicable to digital marketing or tech, I came to realise that hearing easy as first answer to a new task was more a sign of alarm than a relief. Ignorance, ingenuity or just negligence. In the work I have to deal with, with complex global enterprises cerniando (sieving) their campaigns and processes to the smallest ticket in a sprint you can think of… easy doesn’t fit.

You can be given a 2 mins job. A 2 mins ticket. But to get to that point, there’s effort, resources beyond the individual. That’s why I say easy is a fallacy. And simplicity, whilst real, can eat your inner guts to be executed. Once you’ve seen how difficult easy is, you should consciously invest in sharing, cross checking, improving, nurturing, training it… so it can live and be a common scenario. A scenario, as any others that truly bring value, to be both conquered and cared for constantly.

The risk of easy is taking things for granted. The risk of easy is forgetting the unexpected, unwanted and out of our capacity. The risk of easy is even thinking that the lack of full control should leave us with the mediocre relativism or the even worse micromanagement. The risk of easy is to believe we can’t offer the mandatory security to those we serve, knowing they’ll get what they need. The risk of easy is to ease the core capacity of keeping everyone and anything involved in a masterpiece played by the trio or the orchestra to a deadly blind spot. The risk of easy is to think it will always be that way. The risk of easy is thinking you’ll be able to replicate a task of the past that took little to no energy to be properly done. The risk of easy is thinking you have a Delorean to bring the past to your next task or project. You better keep your guard up at all times, because the only easy thing I see here is to fail due to overconfidence. Focus on giving your best, execute and deliver. The more I’ll give you is to, afterwards, on every single thing you do, to answer if it was easy or not. And I’ll still doubt the answer is always yes. And I seriously doubt nothing that brings added value, true progress, is.