Are you preparing or procrastinating?

When you face a challenge, how do you know how much effort to put into solving it? How do you determine whether you’re preparing or procrastinating? When I was 21, I got sick with a complicated and poorly understood illness. After seven years homebound and bedbound, I got test results that suggested a surgery might be able to cure me. The problem? No good surgery existed. I was neither a surgeon nor a doctor, but I was unwilling to live sick if there was a chance I could be well. So I decided I would invent the surgery and convince someone to give it to me. But to take on the challenge, I needed to figure out how to know when I was ready to pitch the idea to surgeons. To do this I developed a tool: the cost of trying. The cost of trying is the preparation it takes to put out a best effort. Some tasks are low cost of trying; others are high. The most powerful way to use this tool is to combine the cost of trying with the cost of failure and plot them, low or high. When you do that, you have a two-by-two matrix, and it reveals the strategy most applicable to your task. Plotting the Costs and then Plotting Your Course 1. Low cost of trying, low cost of failure: repeat action If you determine that the cost of putting out a best effort is low and the cost of failure is also low, then taking repeated action is your best path to achieving your goal. When I was developing the surgery, the quintessential low-cost-of trying activity was searching for medical papers on some aspect of adrenal surgery. Even if the search came up empty, the only cost was the effort it took. Eventually, that’s how I got my first big break. After a year of looking, I found a single page from an online Georgia State lab manual explaining how to do the surgery I needed on rats. It wasn’t a solution, but now I had momentum. If your task falls within quadrant 1, keep trying until you succeed. 2. High cost of trying, low cost of failure: try early This is the “move fast and break things” quadrant. It’s