First Things First

By: Tyler Dietrich, President of Nussbaum Technology

Stephen Covey wrote a sentence that’s followed me around for years: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

It’s easy to nod at. It’s hard to live.

Most of what pulls us off course at work and at home isn’t bad. It’s just second things dressed up as first things — urgent enough to feel important, interesting enough to feel productive, polite enough to feel necessary. The discipline of being purpose-driven isn’t really about knowing what your purpose is. It’s about what you choose when something else is competing for your time.

I’ve been thinking about this at three altitudes lately.

At my desk, building a product.

Every week I get a new idea. So does the team. So do our customers. Some of them are brilliant. Most of them aren’t bad — they’re just not the main thing yet.

The job of a product manager — the real job, underneath the spreadsheets and the roadmap — is to keep the vision visible enough that good ideas have to earn their way in. We’ve parked features we genuinely believe in. We’ve deferred concepts our team is excited about. We’ve said “not yet” to customers we respect. Not because those things are wrong, but because BidRight has one main thing right now: be a tool carriers can actually run their pricing business on. Everything else has to wait its turn.

Saying “not yet” is harder than saying “no.” A no is final. A not-yet is a discipline.

At the company level.

Zoom out and the same principle holds. Nussbaum Technology is a small team with a clear job. Every week the world hands us reasons to drift — a flashier price point we could charge, a feature that would demo better, a market we could chase. Most of those would feel like growth in the moment. Most of them would also pull us off the thing we’re actually here to do.

This is the same discipline that’s been running through Nussbaum Transportation for decades. A trucking company that says yes to every load is a trucking company without an identity. The carriers I respect most are the ones who know what they don’t haul. The companies I want to build like are the ones who know what they’re not building.

Purpose-driven isn’t a yes to everything good. It’s a yes to the main thing and a not-yet to almost everything else.

At home.

This is where the principle stops being clever and starts having real consequences.

Work always presents urgent things. Home presents important things that often don’t feel urgent — until they’re missed. Covey called it the difference between urgent and important. The trap is that urgent things shout and important things whisper. A deadline shouts. A kid asking you to come outside and play whispers. An “important” email after hours shouts. A friend who’s struggling and won’t say so whispers.

I’m not writing this as someone who’s figured it out. I’m writing it as someone who’s noticed that the same discipline I use to protect a product roadmap is the discipline I have to use to protect a Sunday, a bedtime, a conversation that doesn’t have an agenda. Faith, family, the slow important things — they don’t get loud when you neglect them. They just quietly become smaller in your life until one day you realize the main thing stopped being the main thing and you didn’t notice when it happened.

If I can defer a product feature to protect a vision, I can defer another project to protect a dinner. The mechanics are the same. The stakes aren’t.

Back to what’s written on the wall.

Nussbaum’s vision is to create positive impact with every interaction. I’ve worked here long enough to know that sentence is lived throughout the day. Whether at work or at home.

You can’t have positive impact with an interaction you’re not actually in. And you can’t be in an interaction if your attention is somewhere else, chasing the second thing.

So, the discipline is small and daily. Decide what the main thing is. Protect it. Let the other things wait their turn or fall away entirely. Do it at your desk. Do it in your meetings. Do it at the dinner table.

The vision isn’t passive. It’s a series of small no’s that protect the yes.

That’s what first things first means to me. And the older I get, the more I believe it’s difficult, but worth it.