Second business day of the year, a rented conference room in the Pearl, and a slide titled 2024 Priorities with forty-one bullets on it. I counted them twice because I did not believe the first count. Somebody had reduced the font to eight point so they would all fit.
The client asked what I thought. I asked which three of the forty-one would still matter in December if the other thirty-eight never happened.
Long pause. The good kind.
Every January does this. The calendar flips and the planning ritual demands output, so teams produce a list, and a list feels like a plan because it is long and it is new and it has owners next to it. But a list of things you intend to do is not a direction. It is an inventory of appetite.
Activity is the cheapest thing a brand can produce, which is exactly why January mistakes it for progress.
Direction is expensive because direction requires subtraction, and subtraction requires telling someone in the room that their thing is not the thing. Nobody wants to do that in the first week of the year. Everyone is still being nice. So the deck absorbs every request, ships with a name for everything and a reason for nothing, and by March the team is busy in nine directions and moving in none.
Here is the test I use, and it is not complicated. One, can you say what you are choosing not to do this year, out loud, in a sentence? Two, does the plan cost something to follow, meaning would a reasonable executive object to it? Three, would a customer be able to feel the difference by summer?
Patagonia can answer all three, and has been answering them the same way for decades. Liquid Death built an entire company on the single decision to make water behave like something else, and everything downstream of that is just execution. Salt & Straw adds flavors constantly, which looks like activity until you notice that the underlying direction, treat ice cream like a collaboration with Oregon, has never moved once.
Direction is expensive because direction requires subtraction, and subtraction requires telling someone in the room that their thing is not the thing.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I have also been the person quietly adding a bullet so my team would look busy in Q1. The pressure is real. The reward for volume is immediate and the reward for focus arrives late, if it arrives at a moment when anyone remembers you argued for it.
I came home and found Truffles asleep on the printed deck and Barnaby working on the corner of it with real commitment. Forty-one priorities, and the cats had already identified which page mattered. It was the one with nothing on it.