Thought Tweet #471 Better to be stuck on sticky problems than to be burned by fire-fighting.

The Thinking Behind The Tweet

In business, we need to save our brainpower for innovative and creative work. When we fire-fight those daily fires, we remove our ability to excel at problem-solving and opportunity-capturing. This is especially so if our ongoing fires generate emotional heat, which they often do. When we fight fires we get burned at least 2 ways: (1) we burn energy in our brains that could be used to fuel better-caliber thinking and (2) we burn time that could be spent on better-caliber work or other important activity. This is confirmed by the 80/20 Rule. It is at the root of ancient wisdom, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".