Why We Love Quickies
Do you know that feeling? There's that newsletter in your inbox again. One that you are not interested in at all and never consciously subscribed to. So what do you do? You probably delete the email right away, sending it to your digital trash can. But that only seems to solve the problem for maybe this week. Perhaps by next Monday or Tuesday, you will find the next issue of the newsletter in your inbox. And then? Will you delete it again! Why do you do this? Well, apparently we are wired to prefer Quick Wins over Long Wins. We shy away from the effort involved in finally unsubscribing from the sender's mailing list - and instead, we are willing to keep getting annoyed by the newsletter over and over again. And having to click every week. The quick win is the time saved by deleting compared to the final unsubscribe. To do the latter, you would have to invest more time once, but then you would have the bigger success - never receiving this newsletter again.
Quick, Let's Have Some Chocolate
A bar of Kinder chocolate weighs exactly 12.5 grams and is usually eaten in 5 seconds. The brevity of the pleasure is in no reasonable proportion to the length of time the bar, along with all its friends, remains on your hips! These ridiculously fleeting 12.5 grams of Kinder chocolate contain a proud 70 calories. So, it's about 69 more calories than broccoli. Eating a bar and almost completely turning it into belly fat costs 5 seconds. But to burn off the equivalent amount of belly fat, for example, would take 14 minutes of heavy housework. That's 168 times longer!
Quickies Everywhere
That's how Quick Winners are. We focus on short-term successes instead of long-term results and wonder why we seem to achieve what we want in the short term, but don't get to where we really set out for in the long term. It's the same with everything, we often choose our profession too quickly and with little sustainability, management consultants aim for quick cost savings instead of sustainable strategies. Yes, quickies are everywhere.
Focus on Quick Success
The focus on any success is often greater than the focus on the right success. The bill is paid later. Hopefully so late that it affects others who have to foot the bill. This strategy describes politics in a party democracy. A term of office of four or five years at least has the advantage that the quick wins are chosen in a way that the bad consequences of government decisions or inactions only hit the successors four or five years later. This requires some skill, which is why after numerous internal party battles, only the best Quick Winners can be elected to high political offices. In business, it's no different: Publicly traded companies have to report quarterly - which in the long-lasting economy is like having weekly report cards in school. They are condemned to constantly produce good news, otherwise the stock price will plummet, and a healthy company can mistakenly become a takeover target for another company that knows how to supply the financial press more skillfully with positive numbers. Many companies that prefer to operate sustainably, substantially, and healthily avoid the bright shop window of the stock market hustle and bustle. At least the typical German medium-sized family businesses cannot be easily hyped up or down to report short-term success stories in challenging markets.
Opportunity Costs
Those who focus on Quick Wins believe they are pursuing success, but in reality, they are running away from quality, substance, and stability. Whether we lean towards Long Wins or Quick Wins, we always have a choice. However, if we want to calculate sensibly, we must not ignore the long-term costs in our calculation. By that, I mean the costs that arise because we do things or do them in a certain way and the costs that would arise if we didn't do them or didn't do them that way - the opportunity costs.
