What Unconscious Trade-Offs Are You Making? And What Are They Costing You?
“How much did your last 1,000 long-distance calls cost you?”
Juan Enríquez Cabot, Mexican-American academic, businessman, author, and speaker.
Strategy requires making choices. It’s an exercise in trade-offs. It requires prioritizing one thing over another and saying “no” to more things than you say “yes.”
The same is true for life. It also requires making choices, setting priorities, saying “no,” and making trade-offs.
But what happens when you no longer need to make trade-offs?
That’s one of the questions that Juan Enriquez, best-selling author and TED All-Star, posed during his speech “An Uncertain, Scary, Exciting Future.” To illustrate his point, he took us back to the late 20th century when we used to pay for long-distance calls. In the 1970s, long-distance (state-to-state) calls cost a minimum of $3.50 per minute (in 2020 dollars). In the 1980s as industry competition increased, phone companies started offering discounted rates for evening and late-night calls.
I remember my mom talking to my grandma in Pennsylvania for an hour each week and my grandma in California for two hours each month. Assuming those were the only interstate calls made (they weren’t), at a discounted rate of $1.25/minute, those five calls cost $450 in 2020 dollars.
That’s more than 3x what I currently pay for unlimited calls and text.
We used to trade off money, frequency, convenience, and quality simply to stay in touch with family and friends. Now we don’t.
But we’re still making trade-offs.
There are ALWAYS trade-offs
No one likes trade-offs. We’d much rather have everything than just one thing. After all, if you have (or do) everything then when things change, you’re prepared. You’re safe.
But “all of the above” is not an option.
My mom would have been stuck on the phone for hours every day talking to my grandmas if long-distance calls were free. But, because we couldn’t afford the financial trade-off required for daily multi-hour, long-distance calls, my mom was free to live her life untethered from the kitchen phone.
Now, the financial and physical trade-offs of long-distance calls have gone away but we’re still tethered to our phones. Instead, we’re trading away our attention and energy, data and privacy, even our mental well-being for the “convenience” of always being connected and accessible.
What trade-offs are you making (because you ARE making them)?
Look at your business strategy, your team, your daily calendar. What are you trading off? What will you stop doing so that you can invest more in starting or accelerating something else?
If you’re like most executives, you can’t answer those two questions because you choose “all of the above.”
But you did make trade-offs. You’re trading off time spent with friends and family and your physical and mental well-being to do more with less. You’re trading off your business’ future to maximize today’s profits.
There are always trade-offs. The ones you proactively and consciously choose are always better than the ones that creep up on you, promising “all of the above” while taking the things you’d never knowingly give up.
