Great ROI From Mindset Shifts

I came across this example from investing: Someone who earns an 8% return on their investments but has a modest lifestyle will feel richer than someone who earns a 12% return but allows lifestyle inflation to erase all those gains. Given how hard it is to eke out even modest outperformance compared to the broad market, it is therefore wise to first look for ways to eliminate unnecessary spending. The effective ROI of the more content investor is, in the end, much higher.

There's generally applicable wisdom in this: There's only so much "efficiency" you can squeeze out of yourself or your team. When you reach the point where you start to believe that you might have to burn millions of dollars on AI coding agents running in loops or swarms or whatever the next buzzword is, ask if you wouldn't be content with a much more modest pace that, in turn, is much easier to achieve? Don't let the hypers shame you into crazy and expensive workflows that seem over the top, especially if there are much lower-hanging fruit to pick, like removing unnecessary meetings, reducing handoffs, and decreasing ad-hoc interruptions. You know, boring stuff that gives you productivity for free.

As always, you'll want to look at the whole picture, and when gains in one area start becoming elusive, look elsewhere.