33: The Good, The Quick, and The Cheap | But You Can Only Pick Two

You've got a "Good" card in your hand, I've got a card in my hand, and there is still one card face down in the deck. Do you pick from my hand or Go Fish? Luckily, we have much more control over how we accomplish our tasks, but when we want things to be good, we need to understand the implications of our next decision. In this installment of The Monday Experience, Brian dives into a lesson that has served him well and helps to illuminate difficult decisions.

Pick Two

There are millions of little decisions to make when accomplishing a big task, but those decisions change fundamentally when we've chosen a certain path. That path is controlled by picking two of three options: good, quick, and/or cheap. Any which-way you pair these up will lead to different outcomes and different efforts. None are inherently bad, but some are likely better than others.

When you sit down to start a new project, do you think: I don't care what crap I come up with, I just want it to be quick and cheap? Be honest... hardly ever. The problem with quick and cheap, whether it's a personal project or the food we put into our bodies, is that it's only quick and cheap now. Down the road we will end up paying for it later; a quick and cheap project (maybe the fastest and most inexpensive contractors to do work on your house) will degrade or wear off quickly and you'll end up spending more money to do it all over again.

It is our prerogative to choose whichever combination suits our needs, but using this idealism as a means to breakdown any project. When you are frustrated by the cost, consider the alternatives and the repercussions of the alternatives. When you are frustrated by the time and effort, consider the implications of sacrificing quick for either "good" or "cheap". Sometimes all the planning in the world won't yield the outcomes we want, but you'll be far more prepared for variations and deviations when you've considered what it might mean to sacrifice X for Y.