This past Christmas, I had a decision to make.
A few days before the holiday, I drove 6.5 hours to visit my mother after she suffered an injury and needed immediate care.
My plan was simple: get her situated before my sister arrived to take care of her over Christmas, then get home in time to spend Christmas with my wife and kids.
In other words, I had competing priorities and was convinced I could honor both.
The Problem With “Both”
When circumstances changed and my mother needed more help than I anticipated, I hit the wall: I had to choose.
The decision itself wasn’t complicated, but it became dramatically easier once I . My mother’s care became priority #1; everything else adjusted around that.
Here’s what I realized: I had been chasing a logistics solution instead of a clarity solution.
I kept asking, “How can I do both?” instead of, “Which one matters more right now?”
Once I answered that question, my decision became clear. Not easy. But clear.
We do this constantly in business, too, with competing priorities.
The Business Version
Years ago, my father-in-law invented the Relief Band, a drug-free device for nausea suppression. Brilliant product. Multiple potential markets.
The company identified four customer segments: pregnant women with morning sickness, post-op patients, chemotherapy patients, and people with motion sickness. All four segments became priorities.
Translation: they refused to choose.
The result was diluted focus and scattered resources. No segment received the concentrated effort required to build a strong position. They never forced themselves to ask the harder question: which segment has the most potential to anchor market leadership?
Think about Amazon’s early days. They didn’t start with “sell everything to everyone.” They started with books.
Not because nothing else mattered, but because they chose where to focus first.
Every company has limited resources.
When we say everything is a priority, we’re really saying we haven’t done the work to decide what matters most.
I’ve made the same mistake. At my software company, we declared higher education our priority market for the quarter. We announced it. We “committed” to it.
Then we ran a few half-hearted campaigns while still chasing anyone with a pulse. We never truly said no to other industries; we just stacked “higher ed focus” on top of everything else.
So what was the real priority?
What “Both” Really Means
When we insist on keeping multiple priorities, we’re not being strategic. We’re avoiding a decision.
We tell ourselves we’re being thorough, keeping options open, maximizing opportunities.
What we’re actually doing is dodging the hard work of deciding what matters more.
Because deciding requires answering uncomfortable questions:
- What matters more: being with my family on Christmas morning, or being with my mother when she needs me?
- What matters more: building market share in higher education, or hitting this quarter’s revenue target?
- What matters more: owning the chemotherapy patient segment for the Relief Band, or the motion sickness market?
These are not easy questions. They demand real trade-offs and the confidence to live with the consequences.
So we avoid them. We keep both on the list and convince ourselves we can make it work. But without making that decision, we can’t fully commit to anything. We get half-efforts everywhere instead of full effort anywhere.
The problem is not that we don’t know the right answer in some hidden, magical way.
The problem is that we haven’t done the work to choose.
The Decision We Haven’t Made
In that Christmas moment, there wasn’t some secret clarity I hadn’t accessed yet. I had to sit with the real question: what matters more to me right now, my mother’s care, or being home for Christmas morning?
Not what should matter. Not what matters in general. What matters more in this specific situation.
Once I answered that honestly, the decision became clear.
The same thing applied at my software company: What matters more, building the higher education market, or hitting this quarter’s revenue target?
If hitting the quarterly number mattered more, then we should have named that and chased every opportunity. But then higher education is not the priority.
If building higher ed mattered more, then we needed to say no to chasing deals outside that strategy, even if it meant missing the quarterly target.
We never answered that question. So, we couldn’t commit.
Lack of commitment rarely comes from ignorance. It usually comes from refusing to decide what matters more.
Try This
The next time you’re staring at competing priorities, pause and ask:
- What matters more right now…this or that?
Not what should matter in theory. Not what you wish mattered. What actually matters more in this specific situation.
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you’re probably getting closer to the truth.
Because once you decide what matters more, the path forward becomes clearer. Not easier. But clearer.
You can’t have two #1s. One of them is #2. The real question is whether you’re willing to do the work to find out which is which.
Before You Go
If competing priorities are slowing your business down, reach out. At Forge & Fathom, the work is helping companies decide where their focus and energy should actually go.
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