A while back, I remember painting a few rooms in my house and the grueling amount of time it was taking me. I think I spent about eight hours working on a specific section on my house. The next day, I had one other person help me and, logically, having one other person with me, I assumed I would be twice as fast – this wasn’t the case. What I came to find was that I wasn’t only twice as fast, I was even faster. What took me 8 hours alone the day before, we got done in three hours, and accomplished much more in less than a full day’s work.
This phenomenon is something that is described as SYNERGY!
Synergy has become one of my favorite words as of lately. I tend to go through phases of different words and quotes that are motivating me at the moment. Synergy, no doubt, is a very powerful consequence of when a few big or small things come together and produce something much greater than each thing individually.
If I can put it this way, 1+1+1=10.
If health is your goal, one person might say just walk every day. Another person might suggest eating smaller portions and choosing healthier options. You might also hear that lowering your stress level will contribute to your wellbeing. And the list can go on, but none of these things in it, of themselves, are that impactful. Of course, something is better than nothing, but if you started to combine those habits and take small steps towards multiple efforts to enhance your health, your chance of succeeding would dramatically increase. The combination of these efforts and the exponential results is synergy.
Let’s talk about career and financial goals. Growing up, we hear that education is the key to a good job or making lots of money, but how many people do we know that seem to be professional students, without anything to show for it? Too many, if you ask me. Relying solely on education is not going to be the end all, be all for you achieving your desired goals. I’m going to step out on a limb and say that nothing in it of itself will bring you the desired results by just doing that one thing, rather, multiple factors will need to be implemented to achieve greater results than even you thought were possible.
Creating synergy in your finances and career/business:
- Education
- Experience
- Network
- Quality of Service
- Value
If we were all in a room together, I would imagine we could come up with quite a few more, but my point is still the same: if you implemented any one of these above individually, on their own, they would probably not yield the result you are looking for. But if you combine them, the returns are compounded.
Really, when it comes to synergy, I’m talking about multiple small steps in the right direction that will yield major results. Not many people consider the reverse. Pick an area of life where people have a risk of failing, and take a moment to consider the small backwards steps that someone could take that eventually lead to a larger failure, with lasting consequences. Maybe it isn’t one area in particular that is to blame, but combined, negative synergy took place that magnified small, negative steps that otherwise seemed insignificant into things much more consequential and long-lasting.
I’m going to suggest you start generating synergy towards the financial and personal goals you have in your life. We discount the value of that small step when looking at that big mountain, and neglect to walk. We also disregard the severity of the backwards steps we take in our lives. It’s hard to imagine that one plus one plus one can equal 10, but synergy is a phenomenon that I encourage you to first of all, acknowledge, and then apply.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
― Aristotle