Resources Are Tools

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole”, Theodore Levitt.

It is easy to muddle a resource with a goal. However, we should keep in mind what the real purpose of what we are doing is.
Imagine you want to build a wood table, big enough to have a good number of friends come over for dinner. Your purpose is to handcraft an environment where you can share food with your friends and create stronger relationships with them.
What would you think if I told you I wanted to build that table and I already have 10 tons of wood stored and ready to be used for the table. Yet, we take that kind of behaviour as a badge of pride for other resources.
Take money as one example, having money solve problems, it buys you freedom of the day to day, of having to pay the rent, buy food and have a job you may not like. But is having billions in the bank the goal? I would think not, at least not as a healthy goal to have. Even if someone thinks having billions in the bank is the goal, I wonder how much of that is to be at the top of the Forbes list, to show others you are more successful. Billions in the bank seems an instance of Goodhart’s Law, in which the metric has become the goal.
A healthier approach, from my point of view, would be to know what you want out of the money you hoard and use it for that, not to pile up cash in a bank account.

On a completely different topic, let’s see the position of a product manager whose job is measured by releasing new shiny features. She could be hoarding new releases and being very proud of them, showing them off to everyone. But is that the goal? Is the goal to release features, or is it the goal to increase user satisfaction and drive business outcomes?

Once separate resources from objectives, you can start using those resources to meet the goals and not become a slave of a pile of wood.