One decision you make can make a thousand decisions for you
Your work day is littered with questions. Should we price the product at X or Y? Should we bundle 6 or 9 services? Should we target doctors or academics? A hundred questions emerge every day out of the rubble of yesterday’s choices.
You are swamped! How you wish you had to make fewer decisions! Let me suggest something to you that offers you a way off this hamster wheel.
For that, a story about Slack I heard from Merci Victoria Grace, their ex-Head of Growth.
In 2015, when just a year and a bit old, it wasn’t clear to Slack what kind of communication platform it was. Employees would ask “Have you seen Discord?” New joinees would come with tons of ideas for the social use case of Slack. There was a lot of chatter (comparisons, suggestions, questions) around social use cases that Merci had to field.
How did Merci and the founding team at Slack solve the problem? By making it clear what Slack was. They said: This is a tool for work.
Merci says that this positioning made a thousand small decisions ‘instant and obvious’.
Around that time, there was an internal push for a block feature on Slack. With this framing of Slack as a communication platform for work, the perils of allowing blocking became obvious. When would you block someone–when someone is harassing you? Or you want to exclude someone from an important conversation?
Business runs on collaboration. If you’ve to block someone at work, the problem is much deeper than a messaging app can solve.
The lesson I want you to take from this example does not stop at work. It comes home with you. In 𝘈𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘤 𝘏𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘴, James Clear talks up the clarifying power of identity-based habits. ‘The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first,’ he says.
Are you a non-smoker or someone trying to quit? Are you a giver or a taker? It makes a big difference that you know who you are when the situation arises.
Your self-image is like a product’s positioning. Teenagers and youth live through years of doubt because they’re figuring their positioning out. But once they’re clear about who they are, so many nagging questions about what to do every day answer themselves.
If you find yourself fielding a hundred burning questions every day at work or outside, you just need to answer that one question you’ve not yet asked yourself.
