People judge the average of your achievements, not the cumulative

Overblown Implications Effect:

“We think people judge us by a single success or failure, but they don’t. If you mess up one meal no one thinks you're a bad chef, and if you have one great idea no one thinks you're a genius. People just aren't thinking about you that much.”

Don’t confuse the activity with the results.

This argument, however, misses the key point that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more re

Focusing on one outcome to the detriment of all else.

Smart, ambitious executives want to become better at everything. Does this remind you of your firm? Do you sit in meetings where you make long lists of products and processes to improve? The sad news is, of course, that any attempt to get better at everything virtually guarantees mediocrity—exhausted mediocrity at that. By spreading scarce resource