Living in a place like Michigan, the way you shovel the first snowfall of the season is critical. Barring unseasonable warmth, this first shoveling determines your best-case-scenario.

Once you define the boundary line where the snow bank meets the pavement, there’s no going back. The boundary line freezes up over time, and makes a firm barrier. By the time the next snowfall comes, you can typically make the cleared area just slightly smaller than you did the first time, but you almost certainly can’t make it bigger without battling through a chunk of ice.

Your first performance decides your fate.

Same thing with shaving a beard or negotiating a sales price. Once you throw out a first boundary, you can only move in one direction. A beard can’t get wider unless you start from scratch, and you’ll almost never get more than what you ask for with your initial sales price.

In these types of situations, it’s worth the effort to figure out which way the boundary goes.

It only took me a year of a continually shrinking driveway to learn that my first shoveling effort needs to extend beyond the cement boundary, just like it’s generally accepted that you should ask for more than you really need in a negotiation.

-Brandon