I met a young guy—let’s call him Aditya—at a SXSW event last week who, upon learning that I teach finance, asked me about how he should go about investing the $5,000 or so of liquid capital he has. While starting to invest at age 22 is exactly the right thing to do, spending many hours agonizing about what to do with a relatively small pool of capital at age 22 is not.

I told him his asset allocation is really simple—take as much risk as possible (100% stocks, but no leverage), since even if the market crashes, he’ll have plenty of time to recover, and to split his assets 50% in U.S. stocks, and 50% in Indian stocks, since he doesn’t know whether he’ll stay in the U.S. or India long-term. Ultimately, at his age, the question isn’t “how do I invest my $5,000,” it’s “how do I make enough money that this decision actually matters.”

Busywork

All of us have busywork. The problem is that it is rarely worth doing.

Many of us fill up our to-do lists with things like reorganizing files, updating contact lists, researching tangential business ideas, and the like. People gravitate to this kind of low-stakes optimization because it feels productive. Knocking busywork off our to-do lists is tangible, measurable, easy to grasp, and feels like real work.

Unfortunately, most of it doesn’t matter—reorganizing my files probably has no impact on any aspect of my long-term success. I’ll just do it because, well, it feels like work and I can tell myself that I got a bunch of things done on Thursday. In reality, taking an afternoon to tackle busywork is ultimately just a distraction from discomfort and anxiety—not much different from spending the day on YouTube and Instagram, only that I can maintain the illusion that I’m working.

The Illusion of Forward Progress

Doing lots of work doesn’t mean we are moving forward.

I see this a lot with novice entrepreneurs. People want to build businesses and are very good at one thing (let’s say writing software), and just keep doing that one thing, while neglecting the other areas that the business needs (e.g. sales, building a team, and checking to see if a customer actually wants the software you’re writing). For very young businesses, the things you’re not good at are usually the things that need attention.

I think this comes down to people wanting to feel competent rather than doing the hard work of building competence. It doesn’t feel good to be bad at things. In order to avoid feeling bad about my lack of competence in the skills I need for my business to succeed, it’s all too easy for me to fall back on doing more of the things I’m really good at. If all I have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But to make significant progress in life, most of us need to master new skills that are outside of our zone of competence.

The Most Important Work Is Usually Scary

The most important work is the work that produces the highest potential returns, and since return and risk go together, and risk = scary, it follows that the most important work is usually scary.

The risk itself comes from the uncertainty, ambiguity, and “newness” of the important work. If I’m a software engineer launching a startup, and I have no experience in sales, that’s scary because I haven’t done it before. It’s not scary to a 20-year veteran salesperson. The important work also doesn’t typically have clear answers. When I tell Aditya that he ought to figure out how to double or triple his salary, that’s scary! If he knew how to do that, he would have done it already.

I’ve found that the work I’m avoiding, or the work I am most scared of, is usually the work that I need to do. It’s not necessarily the most effortful. For example, I could spend three hours responding to emails or spend 45 minutes taking a sales meeting with a potential customer. The former requires more “effort,” but the latter involves more emotional discomfort.

Real Progress Is Messy

The part that is really frustrating about all this is that even if we focus on the right problems, the path forward is so ambiguous that we often have no idea if we are making any progress at all.

The decisions in life that produce the biggest positive changes—career pivots, committing to a big creative project like writing a book, making a major family decision like getting married or having kids—often don’t produce positive feedback at the beginning. In fact, they often produce negative feedback early on. But just because we are getting negative feedback at the beginning of a career pivot, for example, doesn’t mean that it was the wrong decision or that we aren’t making progress. In fact, if we are not experiencing any setbacks at all it probably means that whatever we are working on isn’t the most important problem on our plate.

Ultimately, the work that really moves the needle should feel uncertain, ambiguous, and scary. It’s a sign we’re in the right place, as opposed to the low-value, easy work that provides positive validation. If you are optimizing small decisions instead of facing the big ones, maybe it’s time to ask yourself: am I really working, or am I just keeping busy?

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Inquiry

Where in my life am I spending a lot of time on busywork or small decisions? How much of my energy do I spend on low-value matters, versus the high-value matters that will make a real change in my life?

We often wrongly think that the low-value questions are actually high-value. The clue is that if it isn’t scary or uncomfortable, there’s a good chance it isn’t the high-value work that drives growth.

2)      Observing Patterns

When I embark on a new project, to what extent do I stick to the aspects of it that I know well, versus exploring the areas and skills that I don’t have yet, that I need?

This relates to the example of the software engineer. Are you spending all your time writing code because that’s what you’re good at and feel safe and comfortable doing, and neglecting the sales and leadership skills needed to build a successful company?

3)      Action

How can I take a step towards spending more time and energy on the high-value matters?

Most likely, this is the action that you have been avoiding!