After sitting in as the audience member on many talks and listening to a lot of Q&A’s from experts both live and digitally, I’ve noticed that many people end up asking the same question. Not just the same questions, but the same type of questions, usually in the format of: what’s more important? this or that?

What’s more important passion or hardwork?

What’s more important product or marketing?

What’s more important? idea or execution?

find new opportunities vs capitalizing on current opportunities?

charisma vs authenticity?

what’s currently working vs. future trends and predictions?

The answer varies. Sometimes the answer is heavily in favor of one, sometimes its the other. If its a question posed in a forum, a Facebook status or a Youtube comment, a debate will soon follow.

Guys, we’ve already spent years listening to people’s opinions on these matters. What’s more important ...the idea or the execution of the idea? The answer is both, let’s move on. I’m not ranting on these types of questions, I’m just surprised that people are still asking these types of questions after they’ve heard different people give different answers to the same question for years.

To be fair, you might ask me, how can you say its both, sometimes it’s one or the other. And well, you’re right. It is sometimes one or the other, but we get so caught-up on on trying to maximize our actions for one or the other that we get stuck. So, my opinion is that if you have the question of “is one more important than the other”, you run through that question mentally and you feel like the answer is likely both; then it will save you a lot of time to just assume so.

You’d do well if you worked on both things at the same time maintaining a one-to-one ratio and basically putting equal effort on both fronts.

There will be a time when its more lucrative to maintain an unbalanced ratio and put more effort into one. But I think you should only do so when you recognize the timing and the context strategically.

For example, let’s go back to the product or marketing question. If you recognize that timing is a big factor, then you’d want to put more efforts into marketing during a boom economy and more efforts into product when the economy is down. The reason why is that during an economic boom, more people are willing to spend money and you should maximize revenue — when it’s down, materials and labor are cheaper so you can do more R&D.

This is just one contextual factor, and there could be a million situations and factors that impact what’s more important. But in the end, having good balance means maintaining awareness of the ratio of effort and strategically choosing to put focus toward one or the other. If you don’t know where to strategically put focus to, then just assume both and move on.