If you could have one extra hour in your day, what would you do with it?
Empty your todo list?
Spend more time with family/friends?
Have some alone time (e.g. on a hobby, meditation, …)?
Join another meeting?
Do strategic planning?
Something entirely different?
Whatever it is in your case, a great question to ask is whether one of the hours on your current schedule would be better spent re-purposed to that cause.
It’s Friday night. You’re standing at a crossroads.
Left, there’s a party waiting for you. Right, there’s a relaxing walk through the park waiting for you. Straight on, there’s work waiting for you.
Which path do you choose?
The crucial aspect here is that there probably isn’t a right or wrong choice. It could even be that every choice is just as good as the other.
The more important aspect is that decisions like these, decisions for which there is no right or wrong answer, are an opportunity to find out what matters most to you.
Decisions like these are an opportunity to define who you want to be. By making them consciously, you get to decide what matters most to you.
So, which path do you choose?
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had this to say during a company wide town hall about the Joe Rogan controversy:
“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”
The crucial word in this statement is “if”. It’s a choice. In many ways. You choose your goals (what Ek calls “ambition”), and you choose the conditions which you are not going to sacrifice to reach the goal (in other words: the price you’re willing to pay to reach the goal).
For Spotify, the ambition Ek is speaking of is named later in the meeting (emphasis mine):
“So I think ultimately, this really comes down to two things. First, do we believe in our mission: 50 million creators and 1 billion users? And finally, are we willing to consistently enforce our policies on even the loudest and most popular voices on the platform? And I’m telling you, I believe both.”
Their mission is “50 million creators and 1 billion users”. That’s the goal they’re trying to reach. That’s the ambition that motivates the company. Together with the first quote, it’s clear that the policies are a servant to this mission. They are designed so that they get out of the way of reaching the mission as much as possible. For example, the policies ensure legality, not pride.
That is a valid stance and Spotify is free to choose that stance.
But the takeaway here is that it is a choice. Spotify can choose to have different policies, e.g. policies that ensure that they would be proud of any content that’s on Spotify.
Spotify can also choose to have a different mission, e.g. related to the quality of the content, the kind of content, the kind of relationship they have with their customer, or a vast number of completely different takes.
They choose to make their ambition purely about numbers. As a price to achieve this mission, they choose to accept to be associated with content that many will “not be proud to be associated with”.
Fact: The glass is half full.
Which is the same as half empty.
The more relevant question is what conclusions do we draw from the fact?
These can be rather different depending on your take regarding half empty or half full, e.g. because they imply a different sense of urgency.
The thing is that arguing rationally based on facts can be just as frustrating as arguing emotionally when we don’t agree on the meaning of the facts. Even more so … because everyone is so deeply convinced that their take is right. After all, the facts prove them right. It really is a factual argument: “But the glass is half empty! You can’t deny that!”
Why then does the other party, based on the facts, arrive at a different conclusion? And how come they are just as convinced of their conclusion?
The problem is that facts are just facts and the argument is not about the facts. It’s about what the facts mean. It’s informed by our experiences and expectations. It’s influenced by our values and principles.
And this means, that it only masks as a rational discussion unless we agree on these things. It’s a rational discussion relative to our values and principles. Only when we agree about these will a rational argument lead to the same conclusion for all participants.
Are you clear about the values that influence the meaning of a fact to you?
