Of all the business platitudes that I’ve seen over the years, the hardest one to actually do is probably “focus means saying no to good ideas”.
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There are variations to this that make it harder. Like: “I don’t have money and I need money so I’m going to do this extremely low leverage thing like charging people for access to my time, or starting this project that has high time maintenance cost.”
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And “I run a small business and I need to make payroll so I’m going to say yes to this product opportunity that has questionable returns and is going to lock up 40% of my engineering resources for the next 8 months and 20% forever (yay maintenance + support costs!)
Also: I think this is one of those platitudes where it’s really easy to say, but then the way it’s expressed is so idiosyncratic and specific to the business situation that you really need to tell stories in order to drive the lesson home.
I’ll … probably write up a blog post.
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Have not been an operator yet, but I hate being forced to make suboptimal decisions.
I think that kind of situation would drive me mad.
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