Impact and placement - success factors in the training area, and in life
In this article, I want to share a few thoughts on the prerequisites for success. Let me illustrate these prerequisites in a somewhat archaic way and first explain how to successfully blow up a target with a mortar grenade.
I performed my military service in the Austrian Armed Forces (Österreichisches Bundesheer) between late Summer 1999 and Spring 2000. I was assigned to a so-called heavy company, and trained on the medium and heavy grenade launcher. The former has a caliber of 81 mm and, dismounted, can be carried by a group. The latter has a caliber of 120 mm, and its weight requires to pull it by a truck.
Data-based targeting
A mortar is a steep-fire weapon. This means that – unlike a rifle, for example – you do not aim directly at the target. Instead, you work abstractly by adjusting the direction and angle of inclination and using more or less propellant. This ensures that the explosive grenade – after a steep climb and then a steep descent – ultimately strikes precisely at the intended point.
These adjustment values are the result of a calculation based on the coordinates of the selected impact point. Its coordinates are supplied, via radio, by the observers (Beobachter). This is a team of specialists trained to move around in the mountains at any time of year while not being seen by anyone. Naturally, they are in a location completely different from that of the mortars, typically at a higher point from which they have a good view of the target.
Success factors
All this effort is made to, you guessed it, get the mortar grenade as close to the target as possible.
This placement is the second of two essential factors that lead us to success. The first, more obvious factor is the effect itself. However, as a soldier at the grenade launcher, you don’t have to think too much about this, as you simply take it – in the form of the mortar grenade – from your backpack or the loading area of the truck.
I think the exciting thing is that it’s always about both. It is not enough to have something that (or be someone who) has a great effect: that works, is useful, and delivers. It’s just as important to put that something (or yourself) where the function can take place and the benefit can be accessed – as opposed to the many other places where it really makes no fucking difference whether the thing, or you, just delivered a breakthrough performance or not.
Impact is a necessary condition, and placement is also a necessary condition. This means that if one is not fulfilled, the other can be the best performance in the world – the result is still zero. This is brutal, and important to know – I personally realized it far too late.
Effect is product development – placement is marketing, sales and distribution. Impact is your talent, your education and your resulting skills – placement is the right place in the right company where you can fully apply all of this. Effect is your extremely well-written book, written with heart and soul, with everything in it – placement is getting it bought and possibly even read. Effect is your personality and charm, and what you’ve become over the years – placement is finding someone and talking to her, and eventually getting into a relationship where all of that is seen.
Or not: every inventor whose device never made it to an appreciative user can tell you a thing or two about it. The same goes for every capable employee who works in the wrong department at the wrong company, and every single person whose handsome body and winning spirit has never been seen by a (suitable) member of the opposite sex.
Effect is yesterday, placement is now
Not only in the examples given, but also in many other cases, the work on the effect is something longer-term: it has to be built up, developed and established in the time before the placement (hours in the fitness center; personality development). The effect is something you have successfully prepared and now carry with you – or you find in the back of an Army truck.
Placement, on the other hand, happens in the now. It follows on from this preparation – and where exactly I should place the prepared effect sometimes only emerges from the preparation of the effect.
Perhaps there are effect people and placement people. If that is the case, I am certainly the former. In my adult life, I have come up with a hundred products, some of which I actually developed to some extent. Some of those could have been useful, but when it came to making these things known and reaching the right users with them, I – quite literally – did not deliver.
And perhaps everything is moving in exactly this direction. While in today’s world it is becoming easier and easier to design, build and test new things, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to arouse genuine interest in them, or to get undivided attention in the first place. Because today’s world is on the one hand full of new possibilities and helpful tools – and on the other hand one that is loud and crowded, and in which the people around us have hardly anything left of their (commercialized) attention.
To summarize, there are two fundamental questions (well, groups of questions) that you can ask yourself from time to time. Both relate to your professional and private life. In both cases, several answers are possible. It’s the same topic, viewed from the two opposite sides.
- What is the best effect I have to offer – and am I using it in the right place? What would be a better place to use them? What would be different if I used it in a more appropriate place?
- Where do I need to perform and make an impact? Am I performing at my best in this position? And if not, how can I achieve this? Or, alternatively, what would it mean to withdraw from this position?
I wish for you to create something AND to bring it to where it is seen and appreciated; for you to develop valuable skills AND find people and tasks where you can actually put them to use.