Hippie CEO Life #44 - Buy Only What You Can Afford to Maintain

February 10, 2023

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

―Kurt Vonnegut

At 33 Sticks, we are often hired by companies to “fix our analytics.” This is a pretty loaded term but what they mean is that they have hired good people, they bought software to collect and process data, they have a vision for using the data to create business value, but then something happed that derailed everything. They often hire us because they need help figuring out what that “something” is that is causing their analytics program to fail to create value.

After completing a thorough investigation, a primary contributing factor, that is present in almost every one of these situations, is lack of maintenance.

As humans, we get super excited to buy things and build things but there are very few among us who actually invest in, let alone enjoy, maintaining the things we buy, the things we build. And so without a proper investment in maintenance, even the most well built things start to fall apart.

While we are discussing this in the framework of business analytics, this holds true not only for every area of business but every area of life. Take a few minutes today and think through the past 2 years, how many things did you buy that you haven’t kept up or maintained?

Sometimes this happens because we lose interest but more often than not, this happens because we buy more than we can afford to maintain. Perhaps we can’t afford the parts and materials needed to maintain the thing we bought but more often we can’t afford the time, we’ve got so many other things going on that we simply don’t have the time to maintain the things we bought.

As a business owner, i get it, i see the shiny new products and think, “we just have to have them!” but i have learned that less is more and putting a focus on only buying the things we can afford (time, money, etc.) to maintain has created a high degree of focus, intent, deliberate action, and success.

Regardless if you are building an analytics practice, a business, a team, a product, a personal brand, a hobby, realize that you will go much further, have much more success, by doing more with less and buying only what you can afford to maintain.

✌🏼💛