Decision Making

“When I'm gonna make a decision, the first thing I wanna do is put my pessimist hat on to make sure I'm not gonna be out of the game. But then my optimist hat says, where are the chances to lead? Where are the chances to create value here? But if you're fully a…”

“Politics exist because people are trying to understand and make effective decisions. That, that's what I've seen. And when those decisions are obscure, there's a lot of jockeying to figure out how to get them made in your favor.”

“A lot of decision making as an owner level thinker, making a lot of hard decisions with incomplete information, versus as a task level thinker, you don't have to make hard decisions, and you usually have very complete information. And as a project level thinke…”

“You can't wait to have all of the information available to make decisions, right? And oftentimes you won't find out if the decision is correct or not until you've made it, tried it, and then iterated really quickly”

“Generally people are making decisions based on the knowledge they have, and I think generally that is not the right thing to do because what, the biggest mistake you make is from making a decision based on the knowledge you don't have.”

“If I have to make a big decision about something, I will lift and then I will sleep. Before I decide anything, and then when I wake up, it's usually the same decision I came to before that. But I promise myself that I will exhaust my nervous energy, I will sle…”

“Particularly if you're senior, if you say, I think this is gonna take three months to launch, and I was thinking four weeks, you're never gonna hear four weeks from me. Ever. But if we get those opinions independently, you will actually hear that I think it's …”

“Learning that you can trust your emotions actually is the core of how you regulate your emotions and how you make good decisions, because you can use your energy around, okay, what do I do next, instead of all the energy of, like, trying to figure out what's g…”

“If they are avoiding feeling a certain way, let's say that they don't enjoy feeling conflict or anger, then they will make decisions subconsciously to avoid feeling that way. And it becomes, you know, a huge bias and a huge problem because people make decision…”

“Having people feel bought in, but actually keeping decision making to a relatively Narrow group, because I think one of my learnings is that really good decision-making doesn't actually scale very well.”

“There's tendencies for people when they get to a stressful moment to hold their breath, which then tenses their body, which then, you know, doesn't allow them to make the proper decision.”

“How do I find the smartest people I know who disagree with me and are willing to disagree with each other but really care about your outcome? You learn a tremendous amount and that raises one's probability of being right.”

“Essentially what it does, if you, when you build culture, it helps democratize decision-making across the business. It builds a framework to enable people to make decisions without having to go up and ask other people.”

“Look, one of the difficult things about making decisions is it reduces opportunity in the short term, but that's the only thing that really creates great opportunity in the long term. So if you don't make decisions, you try to live too much in a kind of a limi…”

“How do you evaluate their decision making? You run them through a scenario, see what choices they make, find out what their rationale is, find out the reasons that they're picking one thing over another, and use that to determine if you think that their mental…”

“Your one technique that's worked very well for me is you start with what action would need to be executed to be effective. And then you back plan and figure out how long it would take to implement that action. And so that's your decision point. You must make t…”

“And that's to your point of sometimes not making a decision is making a decision. It's creating an outcome, but avoiding responsibility for it. And it's pretty common in bureaucracies where people are not incentivized to take risk. Where people tend to be puni…”

“Whatever the margin of error would be between one decision or the other is far smaller than whatever the opportunity costs of not having it done. And moved on to the next thing are.”

“One thing I learned was every day is much easier than four days a week. You might think four days a week is easier because it's less often, but every day removes the most difficult thing about life is choosing and every day removes choice.”

“And I think it's important as a company owner to remove yourself from as much of the decision making as possible so that you can build a team that doesn't need you.”

“We often think we're making very large decisions in life, right? But none of these, except if it's a medical situation you know, are really irreversible, right? So we're making us a large number of small decisions, and we should really think of it that way”

“Giving yourself the time to roll ideas around as long as they need to be rolled around and not feel the premature need for closure.”

“And the reason you haven't paid a choice now is because neither of them are that good. If one of them was awesome, you'd have already made the choice.”

“When you're running around a thousand miles an hour and everybody's working 12 to 14 hours a day, there's no real time to mentor people either. There's no real time to walk through decisions or judgments and try to learn from other people.”

“Uncertainty, luck, hidden information, all of the stuff that makes our judgment so subjective, that untethers the quality of outcomes from the quality of decisions, that I can feel having this influence on the way I make decisions.”

“The goal of a really good group meeting is not to agree. And we think that the goal is agreement. We think that everybody has to walk out of that room on the same page. The goal of a great group meeting, rather, should be to inform, which is very different. So…”

“Whatever makes you take the necessary actions Is the perspective that helps you? I'm never aiming for reality. I'm trying to make decisions usually based on finding the perspective that helps me take actions.”

“Because it's very rare that you're going to get to that much certainty and there's diminishing returns as you collect more data. And very often what happens is once you get to kind of a tipping point, it's not so much the quality of your decision is going to g…”

“So it actually behooves you to actually make lots of decisions and do lots of actions In order to get the world to give you the data back so that you actually can find out how the world would respond if you did certain things.”

“There is no skill called decision making. There's no skill called problem solving. It's all contextual.”

“What I found is cognitive biases are sort of great for explaining why we make mistakes in hindsight, but they're not necessarily really good for preventing or anticipating mistakes in the future, because what happens is any reasonably intelligent person sits d…”

“Every single seller has this strange tension between saying that they're irrelevant to the business. They're not needed at all. And when you dig in, they're making all the decisions.”

“I think it's a more frustrating kind of uncertainty where it's actually not necessary, but the thing that's sort of limited is your, is essentially the cost of obtaining further information, reducing that uncertainty. And so you're left in this sort of dissati…”

“I went from thinking, you know, I'm right, to asking myself, how do I know I'm right? In other words, how do I triangulate? It gave me the humility I needed To balance with my audacity.”

“We never have perfect information. And the way that we get from not making a decision to making a decision is we use our emotions. So emotions are a really important part of the decision-making process.”

“Good and evil, if you think about it, is a very, very good way Of simplifying that whole area of decision making, where if you simply decide that a certain group is good and other groups are evil, everything else gets massively simplified.”

“So your mental model's job is basically to blind you. It's to blind you to 99.9999% of all the pertinent reality data that could possibly be salient to a decision so that you're paying attention to an extremely narrow stream of information. That's the purpose …”