Giving 100% Effort Doesn’t Mean Eating Lunch At Your Desk
“Jack, why don’t you give the answer in the meeting? Why do you wait until afterwards?” It was a familiar situation, James, Walter and I would leave the teleconference room, having just shared our strategy presentation, and I would gush my answers to all the questions the CEO had just asked us. The CEO was never asking easy questions like, “what’s the capital of India?” The questions were “where, why, and how should we enter a new emerging market?” I’d eaten at my desk for weeks working on this strategy, I knew the answers. But I told myself, “I’m not as experienced as these guys.”
I’d completely forgotten these episodes at Kraft Heinz until this week, when I watched a Masterclass episode from the writer David Sedaris, who said:
“Many people are happy to just give 10%, I just don’t know any of their names.”
For me, David Sedaris is talking about effort. But, 100% effort for me doesn’t always mean hard work and eating lunch at my desk, it means taking the risk to be wrong. At Kraft Heinz I’m not sure I took enough risks. I didn’t often have the courage to speak up when I could be wrong. Giving 10% at Kraft Heinz meant answering basic questions and speaking when being spoken to. Giving 100% meant speaking when you could be wrong and disagreeing with the CEO right there and then, no matter how scary and Brazilian he was.
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I suppose I co-founded Wildest Dream because I didn’t want an escape route. It’s hard to do a mediocre job when everything relies on just four people. With just a few of us, it’s pretty easy to see who messed up and as a new business, things go wrong all the time. Just recently I decided to run a bunch of adverts on Instagram that performed terribly, it was like watching our hard earned money getting eaten at a roulette table.
The challenge for us is that we used to work in large organisations where your name was one of many. The stakes might have been higher for the strategy decisions that I worked on at Kraft Heinz, but the responsibility was spread across at least ten people.
As a team, we’re becoming better at separating ourselves from the work. Telling ourselves that, “they’re just asking annoying questions because they want to make it better,” rather than, “he thinks I’m an idiot!” I have the longest to go with this, Pat and Liv are leagues ahead of me in having the stomach to have their work questioned and challenged. I still take it as a minor character assassination. I hope that writing about it here will reduce my deficiency.
What I’m slowly learning is that this discomfort isn’t a flaw to eliminate, it’s a signal. If feedback feels personal, it’s usually because the work is. And if the work is personal, then hiding from judgement is just another way of hiding from ownership.
In these last two months we’ve really been putting our money (and time) where our mouth is. Investing big time into the team, a new website, amazing content, advert upgrades, and London events. Each part of that has direct attribution to an individual. We’ve all made choices and worked hard in the last few months, making big promises about what this will all deliver.
Inevitably, 2026 will see a lot of failures at Wildest Dream. Things will go wrong and make us feel silly. But at least here at Wildest Dream, we’re all well beyond 10% effort and if looking silly is the price we have to pay for running to something we truly believe in, well then that’s worth it. Hopefully, one day we’ll even have a Masterclass.
If you’ve read all the way to the end, I’ll encourage you to follow these next few thoughts:
Where on a scale of ‘effort’ would you rate yourself right now? (note: it doesn’t have to be career related).
What does 100% look like?
What would +10% look like from where you are right now?
Deepen Your Curiosity
Check out David Sedaris on Masterclass.
My three learnings are:
(1) don’t over explain your position - let people judge you;
(2) take the mickey out of yourself
(3) stories are richer when there are complications - don’t feel like you have to simplify.
