Have you considered the alternative?

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1092 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Diya Jolly.

Here’s the upgrade:

Not all decisions are created equal, but upgraded thinking compares every choice against the best opportunity in front of you.

Here’s the story:

Diya Jolly wanted to be in the C-Suite. At the top. She could see where she wanted to go, and she could also see the gap between who she was and who she needed to become. She has an MBA from Harvard. After consulting with McKinsey, she landed a dream job as a product manager at Microsoft and brought live TV experience to Xbox. Then she had the opportunity to be a product lead that reported directly to the CEO, but not at Microsoft. So she made a decision most people would never make. She took a lower position. Then she did it again. And again. Four times she stepped back in rank. Four times she accepted a pay cut. Four times she gave up the thing people could see — the status, the salary, the title on the business card — for the thing that would actually matter.

She left Microsoft to a company no one knew called Freewill. No one still knows of it. It was eventually bought by Comcast. After Freewill she went to Google as Vice President of Product Management for YouTube’s Monetization between 2011-2019. She was responsible for growing YouTube revenue from $1.5B to $10B. Then she had the opportunity to enter the C-Suite, so she left Google for Okta, a software company, leading a team of 400. Finally, after quadrupling growth at Okta she has pivoted again to a New Zealand-based software company called Xero leading a team of 2500 people. Most people would have stayed put and called it wisdom. She called it a trade-off. John Maxwell calls this the Law of Trade-Offs. You have to give up to grow up. The next level always costs you something from the current one. The question isn’t whether you’ll make a trade-off. The question is whether you’ll make the best one.

It’s your alternatives that matter most. Charlie Munger spent a lifetime teaching that question: Are you making your decision over the best decision? That is opportunity cost. He said, “Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs — in other words, it’s your alternatives that matter. That’s how we make all of our decisions.” Not all decisions. Your best decision — the one right in front of you that you keep walking past because the current one feels safe enough. Not just in investing — in everything. In career decisions, in relationships, in how you spend your morning. Every choice you make is also a choice to give something up. The cost isn’t just what you sacrifice to go forward. The cost is what you miss by your decision. Even if you don’t do anything, that seeming non-decision is a decision too. John Maxwell asks: Will you just go through this change, or will you grow through it? The answer lives in your alternatives. The better story to tell yourself is, “I consider the cost of the decisions I make.”

Tell me a story of a trade-off that changed everything for you to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s the best trade-off you ever made?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, at fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at www.fromchad.com.