Framework Friday: Easy Choices, Hard Life. Hard Choices, Easy Life.

this is framework friday special guest andrew wilkinson joining andrew i wanted to hear from you because i think you like frameworks just as much as i do is there a framework that you've been using or has like stood out to you as particularly useful lately it's actually a quote and it's easy choices hard life hard choices easy life by this guy jersey greg i think tim ferris famously shared this quote years ago and it always sticks with me and it most recently has been on my mind and if it's one of those things where you will often find a situation where you know what the right thing to do is so let's say an employee you know just not working out or there's a difficult decision that needs to be made and naturally the thing to do is to delay it or to try and make it work and i have really shifted over the last two years of really trying to make the hard choice and i found that it always results in an easier life that the road to that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that when i try and make it work with someone or i try and make a business work it just never does so for me you know the and then the other piece of that framework is if i ever think should i fire this person that means i absolutely should because you never think about a superstar and go should i fire them you go oh my god i'd be lost without them so if you have that thought you gotta immediately fire that person make a hard decision and that applies to so many different parts of business i like that i'll give one one personal experience caveat with that recently in the past two years there's been a couple people that we were like should we fire this person and i had the same mentality as you like once the question comes up you know it's obvious right this sort of like if it's not a hell yes it's a no type of approach to people on your team especially on a small team but the one caveat was have i given this person clarity on what their role is and what's expected what winning looks like and what i found was that in a couple circumstances i didn't give them a clear role and i didn't give them clarity on what i needed what was winning in this role and once we did that we said okay before we just make you know cut the cord i'm gonna do this one thing and i'll know within two weeks three weeks from that from this point on if that was correct and that actually turned somebody who was we were about to fire them into basically like a star driver in in like that function of the company and so that's my only caveat with that one but i'll also add one of the like takeaways from the easy choices hard life hard choices easy life thing is when you think too ops here when you're trying to weigh a decision should i do a or b and you're trying to weigh a or b a or you can't so you just literally you can't decide you should just simply say which one is harder because your brain is naturally discounting the the hard one and and making it seem like oh these are about equal because the difficulty is something that you're taking into consideration and your brain wants to avoid difficulty it wants to avoid the short term pain or struggle that might come so what looks to be equal two equal choices are not actually equal at all the the one that's that's harder is actually a much better choice and your brain is just trying to sand back it weigh it down because it it wants to avoid that that struggle so that's another useful one because i had a situation recently where was a or b air i just couldn't decide for the life of me and then i went down this rabbit hole of like how do you make a tough decision because i was like normally i'm very very decisive normally it's pretty easy this one was so difficult and when i went down this rabbit i like okay what is the world's philosophy on this that was one that really helped me which was your your brain is not accurately pricing the two decisions correctly it puts a huge tax on the one that's difficult and that's why it seems equal but that tax is not real it's just the brain trying to like you know punish you for short term pain i can find this client full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or doing databases hubspot grow better i love that and that exactly it's pushing through and doing the hard thing and there's been so many times where chris and i you know let's say that we're doing a hire and we've been doing the hiring process for six months and we haven't found the candidate and we have someone that we think is like a b or a c but we're exhausted at the end of it the right thing to do is to actually continue the process and do the hard thing and do more phone calls and stuff but it's so easy to get fatigued and choose the wrong person and every time i do that it's always a colossal failure so i'm really trying to lean into that the other one that i've been finding really interesting lately so there's this great quote by opt sinclair never expect a man to understand something that is paycheck depends on him not understanding so effectively let's say you go to someone and you say hey you know this business model is terrible you shouldn't do it it's doomed in five years but if they're making a ton of money doing it and it rewards them it will be very difficult cognitive for them to face that painful truth and this can apply to anything effectively it's people will not do things that are that don't benefit them or they're not incentivized to do in some way so here's an example so we own a whole bunch of different agencies and the logical thing when you own all these agencies is to say hey big agency you should refer your smaller leads to the smaller agency and so you know we kind of introduced everyone and we're not gonna force them to but we figured you know they would get it they're like oh they're part of the family will refer the leads over here and i just did a call with one of the smaller agency guys and he's like man i'm not getting any leads what's going on and i realized that for these guys there's no reason to do it right they might get a little referral fee or something that we've structured but it actually will not make a difference to their bonus and on the downside if they refer the work they could lose the person that might come back to them for future work or if it goes badly that person might email them and say hey i can't believe you referred that me to this agency they sucked or whatever it is and so i've just realized time and time again people will not do what they're incentivized to not do yeah the the thing you said at the beginning is sort like the innovator dilemma too right like a company that success depends on the world being a certain way is gonna have a huge blind spot to the change in that that scenario and this is like why for the innovator dilemma it's like you would assume that the big company whose domain expertise is in this area they'll be the ones to invent that future and it's almost never them that invent that future it's some ups start who sees the world a little differently and says oh yeah all that stuff that's the old way you yeah screw that we're gonna do it this new way and the you know the big companies is like sort like screw that what do you mean how why how could you screw that that's that's the way the world is and so you can sort of and then you could can you use that to your benefit so like for you for example what would be your blind spots like basically what would you not see because your paycheck depends on it developing a certain way and i've been thinking about this a lot right you look at dolly and you go okay in five years will you be able to type into dolly build me a website that looks like this and then it comes back and you say oh more creative or make the logo bigger or do this will design still be a thing right and i've always been rewarded by not over these things in the near term and just trucking on but i've been thinking about that i think about some of our other businesses and how it can be disrupted and i don't wanna over index on that but i always try to remember that i have this crazy per reverse cognitive bias where you know what is the great quote it's like all forecasts are based on the past right or all all your knowledge is based on the past you don't know what's coming and i don't think that someone who owned i'm reading like a great book about news the newspaper industry right now and all the guys that own newspapers in nineteen ninety eight like they all thought oh we're good forever this is the the best possible business we have a monopoly it's okay to pay twenty times earnings to buy a paper and you know look how that turned out you could not have predicted craigslist classified disruption etcetera and so yeah people are just incapable of seeing these things in themselves yeah that's a great point that's a great point i think it's also true with investments if you like if you're invested in something you know when new information comes to light you sort of have to recalculate from scratch do would i if i didn't have this investment today would i invest the same amount of money in the thing and people would be surprised how often the answer is no that you would not put that same amount of investment in this thing and it happens even at a small scale with like employee stock options or whatever it's like you get stock options or rs to use in a company you you earn them and now like you know fifty percent of your stock portfolios in this one company and look you probably wouldn't have if you just i just gave you that amount of money you wouldn't about fifty percent of this company but you'll leave it there right because inertia right like you know it's it is it is that way so let's let it continue to be that way and so i think one of the best things you could do is train your brain like train yourself to get rid of some of these biases and blind spots and just know that by default they're there you're not special you're not going to just not have them you're gonna have them unless you proactively fight against the gravity to tend to like sort of rid yourself of them so you don't make the same mistakes everybody else does so there's two really amazing things that people should go and study if you wanna i spent a couple years actually just reading and reread books on psychology to try and hammer this stuff into my brain the my favorite book on it is influenced by robert cl den it's amazing it just kind of goes through all of the kind of thinking traps we get into and you know it's anchor bias and you know comparison and you know all these all these kind of ways that you trick yourself and then the other great one is the psychology of human mis judgment by charlie mu which is a speech he gave at harvard if you just google it on youtube you'll find it there and just i listened to that in the car over and over and over again and now i see it everywhere totally alright alright this is great thanks for joining the framework fridays and yeah if you if you like this tweet at andrew and tweet me andrew your handles is what a wilkinson out on twitter yeah a wilkinson cool and i'm sean vp on twitter alright see you