One of my absolute favourite books on business strategy is Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney and Jim Collins.
I was re-reading it yesterday and this quote from the intro struck me:
If business leaders fail to make choices—fanatical, obsessive, focused, disciplined choices—to build for the long term, and succumb instead to grasping as much as they can in the short term, they will build mediocre companies.
The reality is, we make trade-offs in our businesses whether we’re intentional about them or not. If we don’t make them, they happen to us.
There’s no right answer for everyone—it just depends on what you want to build and whether you’re willing to make the necessary trade-offs to get there.