All endeavor requires compromise

You can't always get what you want, nor should you

“People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”

–Dwight Eisenhower

All endeavor requires compromise. That’s the pill, here’s what’s hard to swallow.

Compromise sometimes results in “mediocre” results. The word mediocre is used as a slur, but it comes from two Latin terms: medius (“middle”) and ocris (“jagged mountain”).

Halfway up the mountain isn't the best view, but there's a reason folks don't climb Mount Everest in city-sized groups. This is the tax on the bounty earned through collaboration.

Compromise is the shadow side of unity, and unity is harder than it sounds. Unity is when you bring your adversary closer to harmonize different voices and abilities. Unity is rejecting arbitrary binaries and embracing the messy world of in-between.

The middle of the road isn’t optimal, but it’s where people come together. When you embrace compromise as part of your mountaineering toolkit, everyone gets a better view.