A good friend of mine, Ray August Derges entered us into a business competition in our final year of University.  Biz Wiz was the game; it was $5 each to play and every day for a week you had to make decisions regarding the business.  We had participated in one Biz Wiz before so this time we thought we’d beat the system by being smarter with our decisions.  How did we go about being smarter with our decisions?   We didn’t make any, we did nothing.  Not once did we login and make the decisions we were supposed to.

The result?

We finished 4^th overall.  Not bad for a $10 investment and no personal time whatsoever.

By this point you’re probably thinking we weren’t smart at all about Biz Wiz and we just wasted our $10.

WRONG, and you’ve got some nerve buddy.

The winning team spent close to an hour a day discussing which decisions to make.  Even the other teams that did worse than us still spent upwards of half an hour each day deliberating over what to do with their hypothetical company.  We weren’t having any of that.

At the absolute minimum of ten minutes per day (the time it would take logging in and making our selections) we saved atleast fifty minutes each, of our lives to do something else.

You’re right, we could have put in the effort and tried harder and attempted to crack the top three, but would have it paid off?  If we put in the effort we also could have made the wrong decisions and made ourselves worse off.  To move three spots we would have had to invest, at the bare minimum of two hours each of our own personal time and still risk being worse off.

If you can’t see a cut and dry reason to put in the effort, sometimes doing nothing at all is the best thing to do.  At least you’ll have more time to do something that actually matters to you.

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Tagged as: bizwiz, do nothing, Ray Derges, Strategy

About the Author

Hi, I'm Jeph. I love helping people make smarter business decisions. I consult, speak, facilitate and do project work on new marketing strategies (It's a cross between word-of-mouth and social media). I'm currently a working on a brand new marketing company and freelancing with a few special clients. The marketing industry is changing very rapidly and the only way to stay on top of it is by a philosophy of continuous learning. Do you have an information strategy? Are you learning faster than the world is changing? If not, we should talk. Follow me @JephMaystruck

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