Transcript
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Happy Saturday morning to you. I wanted to share with you something that's been a helpful framework on my mind lately, because as life has gotten more busy, a mantra I've been trying to hold is fewer moves, bolder strokes. Actually heard this from James Clear on a podcast. He did fewer moves, bolder strokes, meaning as time is more scarce and opportunity cost is higher, you want to be more careful about the moves you make, the cuts that you make, and be bolder in those moves. Meaning if you are going to make the move fully commit, do it to the the utmost, the best that you can possibly do it. So that's been helpful to me on its own. But along with that comes a lot of decision making. Because if you are going to make a move which may be investing in a project, hiring somebody, making some sort of resource allocation, you want to be very confident in that move, which can create a lot of anxiety and decision paralysis. How do I know that I'm actually doing the right thing here? And the honest answer is you don't. Like, you don't know that you're making the absolute theoretical best choice all the time. And that can be really scary, really confronting, really anxiety inducing to know I might not make the best choice here. A lot of people, when they are faced with a situation, they will just not make a choice at all. I'll just put off making that choice if I'm not sure what the right choice is. And that really slows you down. You know, I think just about every decision you make compounds in some way. And so there is an advantage to making a decision you have high conviction in sooner rather than later, because everything that comes after that decision is going to set you up for the next decision, the next decision. And again, the sooner you do this, the more of an outcome you get from these decisions over the course of your life. So what do we do when we don't know for sure that we're making the quote unquote, right decision? How do we press forward in that world? Something that another mantra of mine lately has been, don't worry about making the right decision. Make the decision right. Meaning whatever decision that you make, it's very unlikely that you will actually know for certain whether you made the right or wrong decision. So really what you can do is just resolve to say, I'm going to do everything in my power to make this the right decision. After I've made this decision, I'm going to give it my all. I'm going to do everything I can to make this the right decision. Don't make the right decision. Make the decision right because you can't run the counterfactual. You can't know for certain. There's this old proverb, it's a story where it's like a man buys a horse and his son rides the horse, falls off and breaks his leg. And you think, gosh, I should have never bought that horse. But because his son broke his leg when the country went to war and was bringing in soldiers, he was spared from going to war. So you think, okay, actually, it's a good thing that he broke his leg. Like, there's this. It's a story, it goes on and on for rounds and rounds where it's like, okay, at this turn, it feels like that was the wrong decision. But the second order consequence of that is actually the right decision. So you can never truly know whether you made the absolute right decision or not. Don't worry about making the right decision. Make the decision right. I'm thinking about that a lot these days. I'm listening to my gut, you know, I'm a very analytical person. But more and more, as I've had more life experience and more, you know, data, loosely, I find that my intuition has strengthened and generally leads me in the right direction. So I'm following my intuition more lately, deciding that the decision my intuition leads me to is the right one and giving that my all. I hope that helps you if you're in a similar circumstance. Timing matters a lot. Speed is an advantage. So if you find yourself procrastinating on an important decision and you're not going to get more data to make a better decision, make one make that decision right. I hope you have a great weekend. I'll talk to you on Tuesday.
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