A Letter from Chris Suarez

WINNING AT ALL COSTS

There’s an exhausting undercurrent in the world that flows through business and entrepreneurialism. It is a mindset of winning at all costs. It is easy to adopt this - after all you are a driven human being. You set goals. You knock them down. You are willing to make sacrifices for what matters to you.

And we all love to win. Why play the game if not to win? But nothing in life is free. There is a cost to everything - and that includes a cost for winning.

“At all costs” by definition is an expression we use for implying that something must be done, “however difficult it is or however much damage it causes; no matter what, without fail, and in spite of everything.” Nothing else matters.

When shopping for a new pair of shoes, a new dress, or a coat, very few of us walk into the store, grab what we want, and head to the cashier. We don’t swipe our card, head home, and then ask ourselves how much the shoes or dress or coat cost. No, we walk into the store with a budget in mind, or at least check the price tag of what we like before heading to the check-out line.

We very rarely would buy those shoes at all costs or at any price. And that is because we have weighed in our mind what those shoes are worth to us. We gauge the cost against the money that we have. We compare it to the value of other shoes. Or we think about how many hours we have to work in order to buy those shoes.

It’s even more important when buying something more substantial or of more consequence. When shopping for a car or a house for instance, If we don’t establish a price cap of what we are willing to spend, we could find ourselves overextending and overpaying. We can put ourselves in a precarious situation financially as we look to win the bidding war for that house at all costs.

Well the risk is even greater when building a business, investing our energy into our work, or committing to win at what we do. We can’t begin an undertaking or a project or a career with the mindset of winning at all costs. We will quickly find out the costs are just too great. In fact, not only are the costs too great, but the infrastructure of what we are building can be weak.

When winning at all costs, we throw out rules, and frameworks, and principals that we need in order to make good decisions and build solid foundations. We stop counting the costs or the sacrifices because we are so laser focused on the win.

Winning in business is often linked to size. And so we look to grow at all costs. But bigger is not always better. As the chase begins the costs add up.

We trade our potential profit - for top line revenue.

We trade our time and lifestyle - for awards and first place trophies.

We trade our real relationships - for the admiration and recognition of strangers.

We trade our potential personal impact - for purely size.

Remember that any sacrifice we make in order to win is a statement to the world that the goal you are looking to win at is more important to you than what you chose to sacrifice. That is in effect what a sacrifice is. It’s a personal vote in the column of importance.

What are you voting for right now? We convince ourselves perhaps that this is just a phase of the business. That it requires more energy right now. That we need to make sacrifices right now, in the short term. But again, short term frenzied intensity is nothing when compared to long-term strategic consistency. Anything worth anything does require sacrifice. Just ensure that those sacrifices are strategic, pre-agreed to, and weighed.

When training for a marathon, doing inconsistently intense long runs will not improve your personal performance, your eventual results, or your body’s capacity. It feels like you are winning, and yet the actual costs on your body are great. Such is the case with our business.

Now in business, this goes both ways. If you say your goal matters and that winning is important to you, but something always comes before it, then the goal is the cost. You are paying for the chill morning, the day off, or your avoidance of activity with your future goal. In effect, you choose the break and you pay for that break with the goal you no longer will reach.

Winning at all costs leads to a guaranteed case of “buyer’s remorse”.

So sit down. Count the costs.

Define what winning looks like and what it means to you.

Refine the purpose of the game you want to win.

Budget the sacrifices, the time, the energy, and the hard and soft costs.

Then play all-in. There will be costs to win. Just don’t win at all costs.