Like a Duck Swimming

There used to be big families of mallards living on the river by my house. Sometimes, the mamas would come nest under our trees and I'd watch new generations waddle down to the river to learn how to swim and beg for tourist food. Whole generations grew up while my kids grew up, so I've seen a whole lot of ducks over the years.

When you see a duck swimming, it looks like pure grace: like watching a remote controlled boat. There's just a placid slice of a duck moving through the water, seemingly without effort. But under the water, it's crazy.

Success is Often Like a Duck Swimming

What we observe is the serenity of movement. What we can't know unless we experience it ourselves is that there's a lot of effort to get the end result that we want. So frequently, we think very little of the process that gets us there.

When did you last think about a very mundane product in your life and wonder about how it really gets assembled? This video shows people making automobile oil filters. It's 8 minutes long, so maybe skip a bit, but if you watch the whole process, it's fascinating. And all that effort goes towards something you never think about at all.

The story I'm telling you today while we take a break from other things is that there's work in all those things that appear effortless. Everything is more difficult than you think. It all requires work. Because those things that don't require work are rarely as good when the time comes to need something specific.

Know Where to Put the Effort

The real lesson falls down to that cliché: work smarter, not harder. All the victories come from knowing where to apply all that duck swimming energy and where it might be wasted time. My most successful people at work are the ones who figure out something that when mastered will be of great value to the larger organization, and they figure out the best possible process to make that happen in a repeatable fashion. The people having the hardest time are the ones who see everything as a moment of duck swimming.

I'm telling myself this lesson too, you know. I wasn't very good at knowing when to do which type of effort, and so I would either seek out the effortless path, or I would go frenzied duck swimming mode, and rarely did I apply my efforts to the right part of the process.

That's what I hope you can pick up today.

Swim with me?

Chris...