The Power of Choosing Your Priority

Do you want to be more productive? Then do only the task you committed to doing — nothing else. It sounds simple, but that’s exactly where almost everyone goes wrong.

Agribusiness companies, big or small, love to say they have multiple “priorities.” But the word itself reveals the mistake: priority comes from priori — meaning what comes first. And there can only be one.

The problem is that choosing hurts. It means giving things up. It means saying no to projects that even look promising. But if you can’t make that decision, how can you expect your team to know where to go?

In practice, it works like this: take your list of five projects and cross out four. Keep only the one that, if it succeeds, makes the others irrelevant. That is the project worthy of all your energy, time, and resources.

In the field, this may mean focusing on a single validation trial before thinking about dozens of new formulations. For a salesperson, it might mean dedicating effort to one strategic client instead of spreading yourself thin across fifty small ones. For an agtech founder, it may be one well-tested MVP before creating a bunch of features that only confuse things.

Real prioritization requires trade-offs. It will hurt. And that pain is a sign you’re doing it right. Ask yourself: “If we only do this, and it multiplies our results by 2x or 5x, why should we care about anything else?” If the answer is clear, you’ve found your north.

So choose one thing. Go deep. Forget the rest. When your team sees exactly where you want to go, execution will flow — as if the path opens on its own.