Choose Your Battles or Never Walk By A Mistake?

How many times have we heard, nodding our assent, "choose your battles"?  How many times have we offered it as advice ourselves?  I'm not sure when the phrase came into vogue, but it has been the rallying cry for inaction for a long time, long enough to insinuated itself on the behavioral habits, or lack of, for anything too tough to deal.  It kind of makes you think that whoever did come up with it had given up.  Honestly, I had not even thought about too deeply myself, believing rightly or wrongly that one should deal with the most important matters, and leaving the crumbs to tackle another day.  Logically, morally, behaviorally and ethically, it makes sense.  It is a kind of triage.  Help the most badly wounded first.  Why worry about a minor thing when the major ones need attention?  

You know how it goes:  Frazzled mother of three, let's call her Lorena, juggles work, home and kids.  Something comes up with child #6, let's call him Danny.  Lorena has to be at work at 8:30.  All these kids have to be at the bus stop by 8:00.  Breakfast made, backpacks filled and arranged, equal bathroom time for the kids, and meanwhile Danny is writing "Cubs Suck" on the dew-covered windows of the family sedan.  With everything Lorena has to do, she decides to prioritize and not deal with what Danny is doing.  She is picking her battle.              

Choosing battles simply means to be selective about the problems, arguments and confrontations you choose to get involved in.  Instead of fighting every problem you decide to deal only with those things that matter.  

When you choose your battle you:

1.  Evaluate the problem 

2.  Assess whether the benefits of tackling it outweigh the costs and

3.  Decide if you engage or abandon the fight


Opting to tackle situations in this light you are making a decision that: 

1.  Not everything is important.  "Cubs Suck" in the greater scheme of things is fairly irrelevant.  While it may be true, Lorena will alienate half the people who see her in the family sedan and could cause some hard feelings around town.

2.  The payoff does not outweigh the cost.  While Danny's mischievous writing exercise may seem pressing, there are other more important things that need to be accomplished.

3.  You have limited time and energy.  Lorena has just so much time to get everyone ready, clothed and fed and off to school so she can get to her work.  

"Choose your battles wisely.  After all, life isn't measured by how many times you stood up to fight.  It's not winning battles that makes you happy, but it's how many times you turned away and chose to look into a better direction.  Life is too short to spend it on warring.  Fight only the most, most, most important ones, and let the rest go."  C. Joybelle C. 

It seems like a good time of the year at its beginning to proffer a different view.  I read an article by Jeremy Anderburg and his assertion is that we should never let little things slide.  He used this anecdote as an example:

General Ann Dunwoody was walking down the street when she saw a soldier in uniform walking with his hands in his pockets. Anyone who’s spent time in the military knows that this is a big no-no. Dunwoody could have literally walked by the mistake and not addressed it. It’s something small, it wasn’t impacting anyone at the time, and the kid probably just forgot. It wasn’t anything overtly heinous. As a general, though, she knew that if she didn’t correct the error, she would be, by the sin of omission, setting a new lower standard for that soldier. So rather than letting it slide, she approached him, kindly addressed the problem (rather than yelling at and demeaning the young guy), and reinforced the ideas of discipline and attention to detail.

Dunwoody used the phrase, "Never walk by a mistake" to reference this approach.  Anderburg's article explained how this would be incorporated in each individuals lifestyle.

Firstly as a consumer.  We all have our stories about customer relations.  A screwed up order at McDonalds but we just go on home because it would be too much trouble to go all the way back and get it fixed.  Or the Wal-Mart bill that added an extra buck on an item that was on sale.  

We don't confront these problems head on because we don't like confrontations.  We'll take the hit because the inconvenience is just too much and the food is getting cold, and any number of reasons we whisper to ourselves.  But in actuality, you are doing everyone a disservice:  we impact the quality of the establishment and the work ethic of the individual who made the mistake. 

Thirdly, you reduce your wealth.  Yeah, what's a buck, huh?  John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest people in the world was known for going over personal bills and making sure he wasn't getting ripped off.  

The theory goes, never walk by a customer relations mistake: you improve the business, the worker and yourself. 

Secondly, as a Manager.  This has to do with what we tell ourselves is OK when we know in reality it may not be either at work or in areas where we lead.  We fudge as bosses, and employees and as friends.  Another area is as a parent.  When we let our kids get by with something and we let it go, we do our kids no service.  Letting them get by not putting dishes away as instructed or shoveling the walks correctly and letting it slip by.  Small slip-ups tend to either repeat themselves or they tend to remain as mistakes.  You can't fix them until you confront them.   Chevy decided not to install a $1 plastic insert into the ignition of some of its Cruzes and Cobalts in 2005.  They "walked by their mistake" which resulted in 22 crashes and 6 deaths.      

The last area it impacts our lives is with Ourselves.  You paint a room and slip up and leave it there instead of fixing it.  You are doing an electrical job and don't hook up all the wires correctly, especially that pesky grounding wire.  I don't want to belabor this point, we all know the times we have told each other that its good enough.  My buddy Mike J who helped me with some work on my first house, a boxcar in G-Burg, finished up and jokingly said, "Good enough for this dump."  He said it as a joke, but we all have instances when we have told ourselves a job is OK when it could have been better.  

Personally, I'm not pushing for one style or the other.  I have used both and see the value of using them as modes of personal conduct. At Papa's Daycare we dip our toes in both waters, depending on the day, the circumstances, and the level of energy.  The second modality, Never Walk By A Mistake, has more to do, as I see it with personal discipline.  If we do things in that arena we will become more disciplined but we may risk becoming myopic.  On the other hand if we Choose Our Battles, we may observe that the filtering system leaves some battles unengaged that should be.  I suspect Lorena came up with the best plan.  Just something to think about as we begin 2018.  Happy New Year.