Reshaping Your Mindset #8 — From Effort to Merit to ...
Why can a team work overtime for weeks and still get a cold shoulder? Because effort, merit and contribution are three different things: effort is what you p...
> TL;DR: Effort is what you put in, merit is what you deliver, contribution is how much better you make the other person inside their own organisation. Customers do not care how hard you worked — only whether the project ships on time. You have truly moved from executor to value co-creator when the other side gets promoted because of your work, and still sends you the contract after changing companies. Why Effort Never Earns Recognition Many managers share the same puzzle: the team works overtime for weeks, pours in enormous effort, and the customer is unmoved. Worse, the more they emphasise how hard they worked, the colder — even more irritated — the other side becomes. The root cause is that they blur three fundamentally different ideas: effort, merit and contribution. Three Levels of Value: Doing, Delivering, Adding Effort (what you do) — twelve-hour days, late nights, grinding away. The subject of that effort is you, and it represents input rather than output. Does the customer care? Frankly, no. The customer cares about one thing: will my project finish on time? Merit (what you deliver) — the project ships on time, quality holds, nothing slips through. This is what...
