What’s the difference between doing your best and falling short? That might sound like the opening of a dad joke, but it’s not!
Recently a client shared with us that they were falling short on an issue and they felt terrible about it.
The situation was this: Feedback from their constituents suggested that their website needed to support multiple languages. They ran the numbers and they just did not have the budget to do a multi-language site correctly. Their fear was that using an AI-based translation would send an equally bad message, because the output is often awkward and inaccurate.
Seeing limitations as failure happens more often than we realize. It’s another result of being too close to our work. By focusing so much on what we’re doing and not why we’re doing it, we lose perspective.
As you may know, we named our newsletter Focal Point, because we believe that focus and message are intrinsically aligned. Every decision we make should be done under the lens of:
- Will the outcome bring us closer to realizing the vision of why we exist?
- Are there other actions we can take that will bring us closer faster or more easily?
- Does it align with how we have decided to pursue that vision?
Learn more about the Whys and Hows of your focus and message here.
In this situation, we suggested that our client share the truth with a message along the lines of, “We would like nothing more than to provide a robust multi-language site. However, we take managing the money entrusted to us very seriously and simply do not have the resources to do so right now. We will keep multi-language in mind as we build out our future budgets.”
Taking what we do seriously is extremely important but so too is transparency in messaging. In fact, sharing struggles, limitations, and disappointments often makes us more relatable, which, in turn, makes us more believable and our messages more compelling.
So, continue to do your best and know that more often than not, that is enough.
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