Seems like everyone from President Abraham Lincoln to Captain James T. Kirk of the
Starship Enterprise has addressed this one particular topic, and it’s a good one. A real
keeper of wisdom. But perhaps the simplest rendition of it is the Rule of Nines. It goes like
this:
You can probably do a thing, but it may take nine times the effort you thought it should.
Roger that. The philosophers might call it persistence, perseverance, endurance – and those
are all true. Ron White once captured the opposite as “There’s a lot of quit in that boy”.
But there’s more to it than a simple acknowledgment and smile at a burden we all share. It’s
also the cause for those unexpected times we find ourselves throwing our hands up in
disgust and declaring “forget this!”, or words to that effect.
It has to do with expectation. We may have been putting a job off for a while, then one day
in a burst of inspiration and goodwill, we undertake to do it. We set aside the $200, the 4
hours of time, and get started.
Ten hours later, as we pass $500, we suddenly get this flash of exasperation and quit. And we
may even be pretty angry about it. It doesn’t seem fair. We DID put out the necessary time
and money and goodwill to do it. And it STILL isn’t getting done.
Rule of Nines. On other projects, we might allocate $50,000 and a year’s time. So it’s not
like we don’t have the resources – it’s just that we didn’t expect to have to use so MANY
resources on THIS small project. That’s the lethal factor. The betrayed expectation.
It takes another big dose of goodwill, and humility, acquiescence, but we CAN re-classify
this project as a bigger endeavor, and re-approach it with the now-recalculated time and
money and go at it a second time. Usually that works and we get it done. But, by the time it
is done, often our disgust at what it took to do this “simple” thing is such that we don’t even
enjoy the success. We feel like, at these prices, it better be done – and frankly ought to
double as a washer and drier too. And serve coffee.
So the Rule of Nines is that rock in our shoe – being aware of it is the best defense.
You can probably do a thing – but it may take nine times the effort you thought it should.