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One day, when my son was two years old I got a call from a friend of mine that needed to meet me right away. But there was a problem. At that time, my wife was out meeting a client, and our nanny had gone home early. So I had no choice but to bring the little one with me. The other problem was that he was still wearing his pajamas. For some reason I had this weird idea that taking him out in his PJs wasn’t acceptable. What ensued was a very long and draining battle to get him out of his PJs and into his day clothes. The battle lasted over half an hour and left both of use exhausted. About a week later, the same situation presented itself: I had my son with me (yes, wearing his PJs) and I had to leave the house in a hurry and bring him with me.

Now, my first instinct was to reach for an outfit and get ready for another “battle”. But before I could reach him, a thought came rushing into my mind: “I have two things that I’m trying to accomplish: 1) Get him out of his PJs and dressed and 2) Get out of the house with him ASAP. Now, which one of these two is the most important? In that instant, I finally understood the true meaning behind the saying: “Pick your battles.”

Budget	Schedule
Features	Quality

Now, you might be wondering how does this story relate to startups. Simple: In every startup there will always be multiple things that need to be done, and in our entrepreneurial OCD minds (lets face it, most entrepreneurs are!) they all seem equally urgent. Most of our first reactions will be similar too: how do I get them all done at the same time? Then we’ll proceed to flip out, stress and waste incredible amounts of time and energy trying to figure it out. This is ludicrous, because rarely, if ever are we in situations that will require us to complete all the tasks in parallel.

If you take an honest look, you will realized that the need to get it all done-right-now is more like a beautiful mirage than an actual helpful oasis. Look closer…closer… and you will see that there will most likely be one truly important task that needs to happen right at this very moment (in my case, it was leaving the house!). Usually a good way to find out which task is most important is by asking: Which of this task, if it doesn’t get done now, will keep me from completing the other ones?

In my current startup, most of our done-right-now tasks fall into one of these categories: 1) Budget 2) Schedule 3) Features or 4) Quality.

Like most all other startups out there, we want to hit high marks in all these categories. We wan to: Be well under budget (our investors will love us for this). Hit our release date (our investors AND users will love us for this). Have the most features (the only way to crush our competition…. NOT!). Have no bugs in the system (just like the other “startup” up in Redmond). And we want all this to happen by the time we release our Beta MVP.

But we are a small team (Mr. Smith and I) and know that this is far from realistic. So we had to make some decisions. For us, being self-funded, it was a no brainer. We had (and still do) to be within our budget. That was and still is our most important decision driving point. We know that if we run out of the little cash that we have for our venture that non of the other three points will matter. Sure, we still want to have our cake and eat it too, but that’s just not realistic. And nothing teaches you better the definition of reality than self-funding and bootstrapping your own startup.

So, being on budget became our do-it-now driver. Because, if we don’t pick this battle first, then we’ll never get to the other ones (i.e. delivering on schedule, features, quality). And, as any good General will tell you: winning a battle doesn’t win the war. You need to win all the battles (or at least the bigger, most important ones) to win the war. So start by winning the first battle. But choose which one to fight first you must, so do that carefully. Also, remember that it is the aggregate of multiple successful battles that bring the desired outcome. And, picking which battle to fight first doesn’t mean that the other ones don’t need to be fought. You will need to be able to extract multiple victories across multiple fronts in order to be ultimately triumphant!

Truly successful startups aren’t successful because they’ve launched a great product. Launching a great product is the end result, a visual manifestation of a company that has already become successful at mastering the art of “picking the right battles in the right order”.

Which battle will you pick next?