Most choices in life are mutually exclusive. For example:

• Marrying or not?

Bear in mind, the same can be phrased in the negative:

• By staying single, you are also choosing not to get married.

Insidiously mutually exclusive choices

Other types of choices offer the illusion of being mutually exclusive, but are not.

This is especially insiduous, in businesss:

• By saying “yes” to something, you must also say “no” to a million other things.
• i.e. Designs must be made deliberately, lest your product descends into a convoluted mess: being neither here, not there. e.g. e.g luke-warm beer: ugh! You’d spit it out. Either be hot or cold, but not in-between. I’ve heard Steve jobs say similar.
• Compromises, or decisions by committee lead to horrendous outcomes: because the goals are mixed serving no-one fully. This is why I will always prefer a benevolent dictator for life, who makes deliberate choices, i.e. someone who carefully weighs pros and cons vs. a peanut gallery whose caprice / tantrums charts the course for a ship.

For example, focus and a clear goal is what makes es-build great - it is an extremely fast bundler. It’s goal? There’s only one: bundling at speed. And it is designed for that. As a result, the complexity the bedevilled webpack is reduced by an order of magnitude, along with the maintainability of the code, without sacrificing it’s raison de’tre.

Take for example the apocryphal car designed by Homer Simpson:

Summary

• In most cases, you cannot do two things at once.
• Pick your goal deliberately, and let your actions prosecute and focus on that goal fully.