Prioritization

You could've been anywhere in the world But you're here with me

-Jay-Z -- Izzo (H.O.V.A.)

We prioritize our relationships. We prioritize our work. Our life is a series of prioritizations.

Even when one says they don’t prioritize, they’re lying. If you “don’t prioritize”, it could mean you prioritize what’s in front of you at any given moment. Or maybe you prioritize your gut instinct. Even if you prioritize doing every action at random, that’s still a priority. It’s what you prioritize. Whatever you’re doing, you prioritize. 

It’s similar to trying to not have an ego. The people who say they don’t have an ego tend to have an awfully big ego about “not having an ego.” You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Good news is that priorities are healthy. They give us direction and drive. There are entire communities that study prioritization. They’re called productivity blogs.

It’s helpful to understand the study of productivity… to an extent. At some point, you may study productivity to the point of spending all your time thinking about being productive vs actually building. It’s like developers refactoring instead of actually building products. The refactoring becomes a priority instead of the end goal of building the product itself. Most productivity tips are tricks to get yourself to do things you wouldn’t naturally prioritize. 

A company has priorities. The macro priorities are set by management, and the micro priorities are derived from the macro priorities. One of the jobs of leaders is to decide on these priorities. They decide what they think is in the best long term interest of the company.

When building a venture backed startup, the founders should be striving to build a multi-billion dollar company, or they shouldn’t bother. The economics of VC funds only work out when they invest in companies that are aiming for the fences. The founders need to have priorities aligned with the investors. This is one of the many reasons serial entrepreneurs are the best people to back. To the serial entrepreneur with past successes, a small win wouldn’t make a material impact on their life, but a big win would. Thus, the incentives of the founders and investors are aligned.

Investors want to find teams who will do anything to succeed. They want to find teams with a chip on their shoulder. Teams who want to prove themselves. 

Higher than company priorities are life priorities. There are always opportunity costs. We have macro priorities like starting a family or building community. Then it goes all the way down to our micro priorities of what we want to accomplish this month, this week, this day, this morning, this hour, this call, this meeting. 

It’s important to stop every once in a while. Zoom out. And check if our micro priorities are helping us fulfill our macro priorities.