December 13, 2017

The importance of deciding

Virtually all of the big challenges I see people grappling with stem from not having a clear, high level, strategic focus for their business.

Put simply, they haven’t “filled in the blanks” in the following statement:

I help TARGET MARKET with EXPENSIVE PROBLEM.

Because of this lack of clarity, they end up experimenting a variety of tactics from a variety of different strategies that were meant to achieve a variety of different objectives.

So of course, the tactics don’t work. They just pull the person in a million different directions at once.

It’s like trying to get to London, Paris, and NYC at the same time. It helps a LOT to decide where you want to go before you start going. 🙂

I admit that it’s extremely tempting to skip the hard work of deciding “what you want to be when you grow up”. You want to leave your options open. Doing otherwise triggers a billion-ish years of loss aversion buried in your lizard brain.

But c’mon... the irony of devs “leaping before they look” is hard to ignore. I mean... who among us hasn’t ROFL’d at:

“Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.”

😆

No matter the context, executing a bunch of arbitrary tactics in absence of a clear strategy is a frustrating waste of time for everyone involved.

Yours,

—J

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