3 Simple Rules to Make Tough Tradeoffs Easier and See Better Results
Last week, I decided to switch my newsletter from a weekly email to fortnightly, aka every other week, aka every two weeks, aka (if you're masochistic in your word choices) biweekly.
Why is "biweekly" the word chosen by people who enjoy pain? I mean, just look at this mess:
"Hey Jay, how often should we meet? Oh, 'biweekly,' you say? What's that mean?"
"Every two weeks."
"Oh, thanks, got it."
"Also twice a week."
"I'm... I'm sorry, what?"
"Yes."
"Which is it?"
"Precisely."
(Welcome to English, two drink minimum.)
So yes, we're fortnightly now. That's the choice I've made for this newsletter from here on out, for two reasons: (1) I'm finding ways both here and on Unthinkable to invest more time and energy into discovering and developing better stories to share with you, and (2) I'm also developing new educational programs, such as small working groups of B2B creators and marketers, which will require my time. I'd like to keep adding more value to you, but to do that, I have to step off the weekly hamster wheel.
Thus, I made a tradeoff.
Incidentally, the idea of "tradeoffs" is the subject of this week's email.
(I said "incidentally," but actually...)
My subject today wasn't incidental. It was intentional. Which is the lone way we should make tradeoffs, by the way: intentionally.
Unfortunately, spotting tradeoffs can be a bit elusive, just as making them can often feel difficult and/or unintentional. This often leads to unintended consequences in our work and plenty of turmoil in our minds. (Cracks knuckles.) Let's dive into this morass of morale-mauling mayhem, shall we?
* * *
Tradeoffs have been on my mind awhile thanks to a common refrain I've heard from clients of mine -- B2B brands who hire me to develop and occasionally host their shows.
The common refrain is this:
"We have a no jerks policy."
I've heard that about a team's hiring practices and about their selection of guests for their podcasts. The thing is, that's not actually a tradeoff. It's just a choice -- and an easy one at that.
We tend to conflate "tradeoff" with "choice," but tradeoffs are a very specific kind of choice, defined by one very specific characteristic: the options being weighed are all desirable, but they're also incompatible.
It's not desirable to hire or interview jerks -- unless you extend the explanation to say, "We want to build a world-class team (or podcast) full of kind, caring people." NOW jerks poses a problem. Because if that jerk is a top-performer in their current job and interviews for YOUR team, what do you do? They could take your results to the next level ... but send your culture crashing. So you make the tradeoff. Or maybe they're famous and have a massive audience and tons of credibility -- all of which could benefit your podcast. Do you interview the jerk? Maybe not. Maybe you make the tradeoff.
By definition, both options might be desirable, but they're also incompatible. You have to pick.
According to the dictionary, a tradeoff is defined by that one characteristic:
Let's examine some anti-examples. The following choices are NOT tradeoffs, at least at first glance:
French fries or onion rings?
Blue or yellow?
Quantity or quality?
I want both fries and onion rings, and lemme tell you what, those things are VERY compatible together. Yes, indeed. There's no tradeoff to be made here. BOTH, PLZ!
Blue and yellow go well together, too, so if I can't pick one, maybe I try both... or blend them together to make green. (Then add purple. And orange. And pink. And red. And every color I can get my paws on, until it's just a gloppy mess of brackish brown.)
(I spend a lot of time painting with a toddler.)
As for choosing quantity or quality? This is that oh-so-common and oh-so-NOT-a-tradeoff tradeoff that we discuss endlessly in our work. Set aside the fact that quantity often leads to quality (practice and repetition leads to improvement). Set that aside. Whereas fries and onion rings are both greasy goodness on the side of your burger (same category) and blue and yellow are both colors (same category), quantity and quality are NOT part of the same category or trait.
HOW MUCH of something is different than HOW GOOD is that something? Volume is objective. I published five pieces. Quality is subjective. It's often determined by how close it resembles the spec, the anticipated or ordered scope of work. It's also defined by the audience. Is it preferred by others compared to other options like it?
Quantity and quality are not opposing forces. Both are their own spectra. (This is turning into the "fun with words" edition of PF, so I have to take a moment to appreciate how damn awesome the plural of "spectrum" is. Spectra. Like a superhero whose powers allow them to move between different personality extremes. Or something.)
Anyway, quantity and quality are each their own spectra, answering different things. Where they begin to feel like a tradeoff... is when you introduce even more variables to the equation. You start to weigh additional factors in the decision, like your time and budget and skills and external expectations of you and other various stressors from your work.
This is where I want to bring back the idea I set aside earlier: quantity leads to quality. Say you can only publish a basic type of blog post at the volume expected of you. Maybe that's three times per week. Won't you get better at those specific types of posts, the more you do it? Consider that you could never increase your time spent writing them, but because of the practice you're getting over time, and the improvements in your skills as a result of both those pieces and other stuff you're doing/experiencing in life, and because of all kinds of little efficiencies you can discover to make the rote stuff easier to thus free up incremental bits of time to write better, within the same total number of hours allotted ... because of ALL of that, you'll write three much higher-quality pieces a year from now than you could today. Just by forcing yourself to repeat the same thing the same way over and over again.)
Another way to look at it: Think of your favorite writer. If you hired them to write the same number of posts YOU are expected to write, in the same number of hours ... wouldn't theirs be higher quality?
Quantity and quality are not absolute or natural opposites. It's only when we start to consider other, external factors and variables in our decisions ... which, of course we do. That's our reality. It's messy. We can't NOT think about our own skills or resources or metrics or stakeholders AND ALSO have those thoughts affect our decisions. But this is crucial to embrace: there are no absolutes when we make choices. Not really. Tradeoffs are often positioned as A or B, but it's far more contextual.
And that means we need to consider our own context every time we make a tradeoff.
I have three simple rules for doing so. But first, let's revisit the things that were NOT tradeoffs before and add a few more variables to illustrate the importance of contextual choices.
* * *
Fries and onion rings aren't incompatible. That's not a tradeoff ... unless you're being asked to choose one side dish at your local burger joint. That new variable or specific context alters the choice. It's now a tradeoff. You can't have both.
Blue and yellow aren't incompatible ... unless you only have enough money for one can of paint at the store. You'll have to pick one. Or maybe you're designing a new logo, and your designer says that both colors together would be a mistake. You have to pick one. (Sidenote: Please pick one. Please, dear Lord, pick ONE. Listen to your designers and any creative you work with. They know better. They truly, madly, deeply do.)
(And if you got that reference, we just became best friends.)
The tricky part about tradeoffs is that you can't simply tell someone else the options and have them tell you what to do. They need more details from your specific situation. Which means YOU need to understand the details that make your situation specific. That's the only way to stop making choices based on false absolutes and generalizations. What's the best practice? Wrong question. What's the best approach FOR YOU? Tradeoffs must be made in context.
So the question becomes: how?
My 3 Rules for Contextualizing Tradeoffs
1. Mission Above All
My mission is to help you make what matters most -- to your career, company, and community.
That "why" matters more than the "how." The why won't change. The how changes every so often. Parts of my "how" include:
bring better storytelling to B2B (i.e. my grandest aspiration-slash-delusion: be the Anthony Bourdain of B2B storytelling)
help others question best practices and hone their intuition
help others grow their businesses and leave their legacies by making resonance as learnable and desirable a craft as the current obsession with reach
teach B2B creators and marketers to elevate their creativity
celebrate and demystify refreshing creativity
Then there's my "what." This is the project-level. This newsletter. My podcast. My books. My social media. My client work, developing and/or hosting podcasts and docuseries for brands.
And, soon, more educational and collaborative projects to serve you better.
The "what" is the part that changes most often. I care about the "what" the least, because it's the how and the why that determines my success. So I will gladly make the tradeoff to stop talking as much about "questioning best practices and honing your intuition" (the subject of my first book, Break the Wheel) in order to make room for the next exploration into resonance, which is currently ongoing.
I'd also willingly stop being an independent creator and move in-house or join a collective or network if I thought doing so would help me serve the mission better. I'd make that tough tradeoff by weighing its effects on the mission, more so than on the method (the how) and much more so than the projects (the what).
Thus, making a tradeoff might get easier if we use our personal, professional missions as a decision-making filter. Although all options being weighed may be desirable, they're incompatible. That's why it's a tradeoff, not simply a choice. So the mission can be used as a filter. Some things get through the filter because they advance the march towards that mission, while other things get stuck in the filter. You're sad to see them stuck, but you're able to move forward towards the mountain peak with greater clarity and speed.
Your mission (or, if it's easier to help you craft it, call it your aspiration) can be the first approach to making tradeoffs.
2. Lean Into Your Unfair Advantage
I worked as VP of Content and Community at a venture capital firm, NextView, for three years. One of the most enduring lessons I learned from the partners and their conversations with entrepreneurs was a simple question we should ask ourselves and others:
"What's your unfair advantage?"
For a founder, that might mean some kind of legal advantage, like a patent, or distribution advantage, like a big personal audience on social media or via email. It might mean some kind of technical insight and ability that would be hard to replicate at a competitor company.
For us as creators and marketers, we might look to our own skills and those on the team. Let's say I wanted to do more social video, for instance. I could script everything, but an unfair advantage that I possess is my four-year run as a professional public speaker. The amount of rehearsal and stage time I amassed in that four year period, combined with my love for performance and the prior decades of being a total showboat on camera (I have the home videos to prove it) all add up to one unfair advantage: I can fire up a camera with little more than a simple prompt and seem both natural and polished. I don't need a script or much practice to nail what I'm trying to say.
As a result, I can do stuff like this without much time needed at all. I have an unfair advantage to producing video. Now here's the real key to this "unfair advantage" thing: we all have them, but we rarely take the time to identify them.
If pressed, I would have admitted that, sure, I think I'm better than the average bear on camera. It comes easy to me, partly as a result of my personality, partly as a result of my practice. But until I finally admitted to myself, "Yanno what? I can use this proactively to create better work," I wasn't really wielding my unfair advantage.
I made a tradeoff: to stop worrying about the script quite as much (in my videos, and yes, in my mostly-scripted podcast too) in order to move faster and produce more multimedia work. I would LIKE both things: beautifully scripted videos AND more videos. But given my time constraints, those two things were incompatible. So I picked the avenue that allowed me to use my unfair advantage
So what's yours? We all have them. Can you use your unfair advantage to make a tradeoff that's weighing on you now? Which option would allow you to lean INTO it, alone or with a team if you have one?
3. Make Reversible Tradeoffs Quickly
After literal months of debating in my head whether or not to make this newsletter fortnightly instead of weekly, when I finally made the decision, I felt like I could breathe again. It's a suffocating feeling to wait or endlessly debate a tradeoff. I was THISCLOSE to buying a shirt that read "Hold on while I overthink this." Because I was. But half the battle with tradeoffs is simply to get BEYOND the decision so you can get BACK to the work and the learning.
The best part of this? Most tradeoffs are reversible. Most decision we make don't decide the fate of our world or our work for months or years to come. If something is easily reversible, and you find yourself agonizing over the decision, just ... pick something. Use #1 and #2 above if helpful. Or just flip a coin. The more time you spend weighing a reversible decision, the less time you spend learning what actually works.
Do you focus on Twitter or Instagram? Just pick one. You can reverse later.
Do you go with fries or onion rings? Just pick one. You'll probably make this same choice again next month.
Do you publish the newsletter every week or every-other-week? Just pick one. Try it for awhile. See how it suits you. You can always change in the future.
* * *
I'm on the other side of a tradeoff that weighed on me for far too long, consuming too much of my time and, worse, my emotional energy. And I gotta say: I. Feel. Great.
Tradeoffs are tough, I get it. All options being weighed are desirable. But they're incompatible. It's "a balancing of factors all of which are not attainable at the same time."
In our journey to do exceptional, deeply resonant work, we'll face a whole heck of a lot of these kinds of decisions along the way. More often than we realize, the barrier to progress is simply the inability to MAKE the tradeoff. But once we do, it feels invigorating, like we can breathe again.
Today, I'm more excited than ever to write to you in this space, and I'm more excited (and bullish) about my overall body of work and future projects -- all of which will be able to serve you BETTER because of this tradeoff. The worst part about tradeoffs, I think, is the deliberation.
To shorten that deliberation period, consider your mission. What do you most aspire to do or build or change in the world?
Consider your unfair advantage. Have you identified yours? Which option would most allow you to use it?
Consider the consequences. Is this reversible? If you say no, double-check that assumption. Most decisions really are. What if you simply made a decision and moved forward? What might you measure to ensure you learn and become more informed about the efficacy of your decision, so you can revisit the tradeoff down the road and decide whether or not to reverse it? (And if you forget to revisit, well ... that's a sign it wasn't as critical a tradeoff as you initially thought.)
In any tradeoff, you can have one but not the other, even if you want both.
You can turn left or right.
You can stand FOR something, but that means you'll be against other things.
You can resonate deeply with some, but not all.
As for this newsletter? It's fortnightly now, not weekly. That's the tradeoff I made. It's fortnightly, and I'm saying "fortnightly" and not "biweekly," darn it.
Because you can do something every other week, but not twice a week. You just can't. By definition, you can't.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to contact the editor of the dictionary. They forgot to listen to ... themselves.