For a long time, I made compromises in my life. If my girlfriend wanted to go on vacation in a foreign country and I wanted to stay home, we compromised to go to a country not too far away. Or maybe we went abroad but only stayed half the time she originally planned to.
The result is obvious: none of us were happy about this situation.
I also compromised in my professional life. I implemented a lot of code that did not need to be deployed in micro-services and did not need to be implemented on top of fancy frameworks. But I still did it, spent days learning how to use those frameworks because others told me “our teams always did it this way”. I wanted to please people and show I was a good soldier and was following the pack. Even if the end goal was suboptimal and these useless frameworks cost me days of debugging.
The reality is that compromise is a lose-lose situation.
Chris Voss says it very well in “Never Split the Difference”
“We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.”
Later in his book, Voss demonstrates with a simple example why compromise is everything but the right decision:
“To make my point on compromise, let me paint you an example: A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with his suit. But her husband doesn’t want to; he prefers brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise, they meet halfway. And, you guessed it, he wears one black and one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? No! In fact, that’s the worst possible outcome. Either of the two other outcomes – black or brown – would be better than the compromise.”
Compromises are what cheap self-help books promote and tell us to do. They tell us that it’s okay to not do what we want to have social peace or harmony. They tell us it’s better to save face than be happy and do what we really believe in.
I do not know a single great team who compromised on their core beliefs and values. And if they did, they would not have been taken seriously and would not have reached greatness. Great teams are driven by a vision, and they keep obsessing and focusing on iterating until the job is done. Jobs insisted on not shipping junk and never compromised on quality. Musk never compromised on technology and insisted on developing the core technology of Tesla cars in-house when the majority of car manufacturers use third-party vendors.
Great builders delivered products that define generations precisely because they had a vision and did not compromise.
Instead of compromises, we should aim to reach the truth and also recognize we may be wrong. When we face disagreement, we need to understand both sides of the coin and question our version of the truth. Our goal should never to be right, but to always get to the truth to do something good. Many times, we will understand that our assumptions and judgment were wrong. And at other times, taking a step back will make us realize the merit of your arguments and give us the rationale for pushing further.
We need to pick our battle and decide what really matters to us. When facing friction, either double down or let the other party have their way. But never fall to the trap of mediocrity and compromise.
Beautifully written.