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Why making do with less can boost your career

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Krys Boyd, Contributor

Voltaire famously warned that "perfect is the enemy of good."

The advice he offered during the 18th century Enlightenment turns out to be just as true for 21st century tech executives, scientists, athletes and artists: Making do with less can make you better at what you do.

In our pursuit of excellence we tend to look at what our competitors are doing and we attempt to gather as many resources as we can. The problem is, that effort can actually lead us in a never-ending chase for what we don't yet have, at the expense of progress using what's already available to us.

Scott Sonenshein's new book is called, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less --and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined.

You draw a distinction between chasing and stretching. So what happens when we're chasing in our careers?

When we're chasing, we believe that the more resources we have, the better results we can achieve. So we orient our careers, or if we're building organizations, we build those businesses, they're all based off of trying to acquire as many resources as possible: more money, more expertise, more people. And what happens is, we end up displacing our real goals because our whole goal, our whole mode of operation, becomes about getting more. Meanwhile, we're not making meaningful progress toward our true goals.

Why is it so easy to get hung up on what we lack?

Well, a big part of that is what social psychologists call social comparisons. We look around ourselves -- at work it could be our colleagues, at home it could be our neighbors, our friends -- and we see what they have. And we believe that if we only had the same things we, too, can achieve great success. 

And the challenge with this is, I like to think of it as a treadmill. You're running on a treadmill and you can keep turning up the pace and the speed of that treadmill, but you're actually not getting any further because as soon as you obtain that next set of resources you move up the speed and there's something else that you need. And it's this never-ending game that you can't win because there's always gonna be someone who has more. 

Meanwhile, you're just waiting. I mean, how many times do people say: "If I only had more time, more money, more information," then they can do all these things. So you're not making progress toward your goals, and your goals have become all about acquiring more resources.

I've always been amused by those studies that find that people tend to be happier making $50,000 when their colleagues earn $25,000 than making $75,000 when their colleagues earn $100,000. That makes no logical sense, and yet I think we can all relate.

It makes no logical sense from an objective perspective, but if you think of humans as meaning-making creatures, a lot of the way we make meaning is relative to other people. So what our standing is is very much based off of what other people's standing is.

Aside from contributing to dissatisfaction, you warn that too much chasing can cause us to overlook the value of what we already have going for us, whether material resources or brilliant colleagues.

Right, because the problem with chasing is it gives us a very narrow vision of what our future should be. And that future is all based off of things that we can count and things we can accumulate. So we lose sight of what it is we're actually trying to get out of our lives and what we're trying to get out of our careers. And over time that becomes really corrosive, because it links our self-worth based off of how much we have and how much we keep getting and it develops this very unhealthy dependence that if we want to be able to achieve a little more at work or be a little more satisfied at home, it has to come with a corresponding increase in resources. And that's a very dangerous way of living and working.

Most of us have experienced the benefits of physical stretching. It makes us more flexible. How does that translate into the type of stretching that you're advocating?

So just like physical stretching, the type of stretching I'm advocating is very much a set of skills you can get better with and learn over time through practice. But when I talk about stretching, it's really about how we think and how we use all of the resources that we need to accomplish our goals, whether it be time, money, information, connections, relationships, physical products and so on. And it's about taking those resources and more creatively engaging with them. 

Too often, what happens is we overestimate the amount of resources we need to achieve our goals. But I think even more importantly we underestimate the versatility of what we already have right in front of us. In part because we're so distracted from trying to chase more, we don't see the abundance we could already make with what's right around us. 

You say one of the benefits of flexibility is that it leaves us better able to soldier on if we lose resources. Why is it harder for companies that have become accustomed to having everything to realign in tough times?

Well, the reality is that most economic cycles are very cyclical. And when you build your business around the foundation that "we're going to acquire as many resources as possible," that is all well and good until someone stops writing the blank checks. 

And I know this firsthand. I was in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, and it was really exciting to be there. As venture capitalists kept writing checks, we had lots of parties, we were promised all these wonderful and terrific perks. But what happens is they eventually stop writing the checks, and you're left with a model that's not flexible and sustainable because the only way it was able to achieve success is because it was sucking in more and more resources. 

So what happens to organizations that go down this path of chasing is: When the good times stop rolling, they're left with unsustainable businesses and they can't adapt because so much of their progress has been based off of trying to acquire as much as they can. So they're not versatile, and they have a hard time changing with the times.

This Q&A was condensed from a recent episode of Think. You can listen to the full episode at Krys Boyd can be contacted at

Scott Sonenshein is a professor of management at Rice University in Houston and the author of Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less -- and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined. Email: scotts@

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