Impact: Doing the Most with the Least

I had a great conversation with a friend and the topic of “impact” came up. Of course, I shared that I want to have a life of impact, make impact on the world, then my friend asked me:

How do you define impact?

Woah - that caught me off guard.

I use the word impact so much in different contexts that basically, “impact” is a generic term for me.

This made me think, no, feel into what I want the word impact to mean for me.

This is my current definition:

Impact - doing the most with the least.

The words “most” and “least” are vague and they are on purpose. In different contexts for impact, I want to add modifiers after them, such as:

Impact - doing the most good with the least effort.

Or for work:

Impact - getting the most results with the least resources.

There’s a maximizing and a minimizing. The question is what. In choosing what to maximize and minimize, there has to be a trade off.

In other words, it can’t be all maximizing.

Getting more results with least resources, well, that forces me to think about the resources available and results from those. How are they balancing out? Can one go up and the other go down?

Yes, this is every manager’s dream - yet, there has to be a trade off.

By balancing these values, I force myself to define them in a crystal clear manner, to the point that I can measure them.

• What do I count as a result?
• How do I measure a “resource”? Team members? Person hours? Happiness?

Impact is important to me - life is short and having great impact is part of my mission as its the foundation to the legacy I want to leave.

“Impact - doing the most with the least”