We want the result, but not what it costs to get there

There is a sentence I have heard many times in my work: it didn't work.

At first I took it literally. Then I started asking myself what, exactly, had not worked: the plan, the execution, the starting conditions, the amount of time we had given it, or whether at some point we had simply stopped doing the very things the plan required.

The question interests me because over the years I have realized that the phenomenon has nothing to do with marketing alone. We say we want something, then that thing presents the bill, and that is when we discover how much we really wanted it.

The result is always more pleasant than the process

We want to get in shape, grow a company, earn more, have more time, learn a language, improve a relationship, change jobs, write a book or become good at something. These desires are perfectly real; the problem is that we tend to imagine them already completed.

We see the result and much less of its logistics. Being fit without ever being hungry; growing a business without taking risks; earning more without taking on more responsibility; having more time without giving up anything that currently fills it; learning without going through the stage in which we are bad at it; having a better relationship without facing conversations we would rather avoid.

We would like the result purified of the conditions that make it possible.

I have often seen this in my work with authority. Someone wanted to become a reference point in their industry, but did not want to put themselves out there, spend time studying, produce in-depth material, wait, or risk saying something and discovering that someone disagreed. They wanted the authority, but much less the conditions through which authority is built.

I like this example precisely because it works perfectly outside marketing too: we would like to be regarded as the person we will become once the journey is complete, preferably skipping the part where we have to prove it.

Growing, as long as nothing changes

Perhaps I have seen it even more clearly inside companies. “We want to grow.” Then growth arrives in the form of new problems: you need to hire someone, delegate, spend money, change processes, accept that what worked with five people no longer works with twenty, give up control over some things and make decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes you even have to part ways with someone you started with.

At that point growth no longer looks like the mental picture we had built. We thought it mainly meant more revenue and had not included everything else in the calculation. So we retreat, not because we didn't want to grow — we genuinely did — but because we wanted a kind of growth that changed nothing. Which is a fairly difficult contradiction to resolve.

The same thing happens with cost. We want something done well and then discover that doing it well requires more money, time or energy than we imagined. At that point we try to keep the result unchanged while reducing everything that is supposed to produce it: more quality with less expertise, more speed with fewer people, more results with less investment, more care with less time.

Efficiency exists, of course, and doing more with fewer resources is one of the engines of progress. But there is a point at which we are no longer eliminating waste: we are eliminating pieces of the result.

The version we can tolerate

This may be the dynamic I find most fascinating. We make a decision when we are clear-headed, then execution begins and we start negotiating with ourselves.

Let's do it, but smaller. Let's do it, but without that part. Let's do it, but later. Let's do it while avoiding the step that makes me uncomfortable.

In the end we implement a version of the original choice so reduced that it keeps the name but not the logic. Then we look at the mediocre result and say it didn't work. Sometimes that is true; other times we never really tried what we had decided to do. We tried the version we were able to tolerate.

There is a psychological cost that almost never appears in business plans. Growing, changing a habit, improving: all of these things force us to change the image we have of ourselves too. If I start training seriously, I have to stop telling myself that “I don't have time.” If I want to become better, I have to pass through the period in which I see with painful precision just how far I still have to go. If I want to delegate, I have to accept that someone else will do some things differently from me. If I want a more honest relationship, I may discover that I am part of the problem too.

Many transformations become difficult precisely when they stop requiring tools and start requiring a revision of ourselves.

The comfort of an external cause

This is where one of the things we do best enters the picture: finding an explanation outside ourselves. The consultant, the market, metabolism, the boss, the employee, the algorithm, the government, the family, bad timing.

Sometimes they really are responsible. That is precisely what makes the mechanism so effective: convenient explanations are almost never completely false; they contain something true. The problem begins when that true part allows us to avoid looking at everything else.

Taking responsibility ourselves does not mean absolving other people; it means refusing to let other people's responsibilities become a way of abandoning our own.

Impatience works in a similar way. At the beginning of a journey we are often reasonable: we know it will take time, accept that results will not be immediate and understand the progression. Then two weeks pass, a month, six months, and that knowledge disappears. We stop judging the process against the timeline we had considered realistic and start judging it against the irritation of not having arrived yet.

Impatience has a curious ability: it rewrites the contract we made with ourselves after the fact.

And then there is luck

This is the part that ruins every motivational article: you can do everything right and lose; you can do many things badly and win. You can meet the right person, get sick at the worst possible moment, find yourself inside a market that changes, receive an opportunity you did not particularly deserve or lose one you did.

Luck exists. Chance exists. Starting conditions exist. Acknowledging that does not take anything away from responsibility; on the contrary, it makes responsibility more adult. Being responsible does not mean believing you control everything. It means taking serious care of the part you can control while knowing that it is not the whole picture.

There is one final possibility we tend to neglect: we may discover that we no longer want to pay that price. And that is fine.

Maybe we really did want to grow the company and then realized we prefer a smaller, freer life. Maybe we wanted that career and saw up close how the people who achieved it live. Maybe we wanted to reach a certain physical condition and discovered that it required a level of sacrifice we have no interest in sustaining.

Changing the goal does not necessarily mean failing. What matters is not telling ourselves something was impossible when we simply decided — legitimately — that the price was no longer worth the result. Those are two very different stories.

Write down the price too

Perhaps we should do this exercise more often. When we say we want something, write beside it what it will probably require: not only money, but time, boredom, risk, exposure, failures, sacrifice, uncertainty, repetition, the possibility of discovering that we are not yet good enough, and even the possibility of doing all of this and still not making it.

Then look at both columns: the result on one side, the price on the other.

And finally ask ourselves the complete question. Not only “do I want it?”, but: if the full price had been written down from the beginning, would I still want it?