My kids teach me a lot and one of the things they most recently taught me is that when there are battles to be fought, make sure they are worth it. If you spend all your energy on battles that don’t matter, you won’t have any fight left in you when the battles that matter most come up.
This can relate to personal and business both. Personally, I could argue and debate with my kids till the cows come home about the importance of learning good habits through keeping their rooms organized. But if I fight with them day after day, week after week about it, I won’t have the energy to fight through the challenges they are sure to put me through as a parent later. There may be a future issue that could be much more life-changing if only I had the extra energy, I could have put some additional effort into making sure they learned the lessons earlier.
Same goes for business. So many times, it can be easy to push boulders up hills trying to make a difference in your revenue, your culture, your impact on an industry. You can spend so much time, money, energy and resources on this one task, that when the world changes, you don’t have the energy (or time, money and resources) to take on the challenge of adapting to new standards or expectations.
In the end, it’s important to know what you are fighting for and working towards. While every challenge deserves at least the time to consider it’s importance in the bigger picture, we need to decide if it is worth the energy. And never do we want to drain ourselves so much that we don’t have the will to push through the life-changing challenges that are sure to come.