WORDS MATTER
The Most Important Word
(You get as many guesses as you want!)
Whether you are strategizing about your career or business or life, your success depends on including many factors in your thinking and planning. We tend to be comfortable with a world that is clear, simple, manageable and predictable, but the world is in fact complex and mysterious. If we reduce that complexity too much, we will miss parts of the net of reality that must be captured in our strategic thinking.
One way that we attempt to reduce complexity is to engage in either/or thinking and to view our decisions in the form of binary forced choices, as in
- Should I pursue success OR satisfaction in my job
- Should I do what I want OR what my boss wants?
- Should I be understanding OR tough in my relationships?
- Should I prioritize my career OR my family?
- Should I pursue money OR meaning in my life?
These either/or questions are useful to the degree that they constrain and define a limited set of options for consideration, but they will let us down by suggesting that we only need to deal with one pole of the question. While it requires less mental effort to do one thing OR another (and we are all looking for ways to reduce the strain on our brain!), the world in its complexity requires us to think about and manage multiple priorities at once.
And the answer is …
This brings us to that most important word: AND.
When engaging in career and business and life planning, we should resist the temptation to take the mentally easy way to planning (I only need to do A or B or C…) and enlarge our view of reality to capture ALL the drivers of our success and satisfaction. We can do this by replacing the word OR with the word AND, as in
- I will pursue success AND satisfaction in my job
- I will find a way to do what I want AND what my boss wants
- I will be understanding AND tough in my relationships as the situation requires
- I will prioritize my career AND my family
- I will pursue money AND meaning in my life
Of course, framing your strategic challenge in this more multi-focal and integrated fashion raises the bar in terms of creativity and innovation and intellectual horsepower. Finding a path to doing both one thing AND another requires more mental heavy lifting than doing one thing OR another.
Since we must manage the complexity of both our selves AND the world around us in order to attain happiness and success, this broader and deeper level of strategic thinking will generate large returns on the investment of your precious resources of time and energy.
