The Infinite Loops Guide To... Decision-Making
“Once you make a decision, the Universe conspires to make it happen.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. Barry Ritholtz | Don’t Panic!
“I started on a trading desk and the most interesting thing I learned from the senior traders, one was a former Army ranger, one was a Navy SEAL, another was a Marine jungle combat instructor, and these guys used to tell stories, literal war stories about the prep they did before they would go on a mission. And they literally map out everything that happens. “What do you do if this goes wrong here?” There's a plan A, plan B, set plan C every step of the way.
But the thing that the SEAL had mentioned that I found so fascinating was, your gun jams in a firefight, what's your plan B? How do you deal with it? How much time do you take to try and fix it? When do you abandon the weapon? And what is your emotional state?
If your reaction is panic, you're going to get yourself killed and your teammates killed.
But if your reaction is, "Hey, mechanical things break. I have another sidearm, I have another piece. I could grab this weapon…"
Panic is when things go bad and you don't know what to do. But if you have a plan A, plan B, plan C and you are prepared for the emotionality of the moment, they just say, ‘We just do our jobs and keep moving towards the objective.’”
More from Barry: How To Live a Stress-Free Financial Life (EP.196)2. Anne-Laure Le Cunff | Your Curiosity Will Tell You If You Are Following Someone Else’s Script
“Most people listening to this will be familiar with the scripts of Silicon Valley. You work at a big tech company, you save a bit of money, you build your network. Then you quit and you start a startup. So I did that. Thinking at the time that I was finally making my own decisions, that it was what I really wanted to do. But not realizing that it was just yet another script of success that I was following because that's what success looked like around me and my environment.
It's only once that startup failed a couple of years after that that I found myself again in a liminal space of not knowing what I was supposed to do next, and where I finally allowed myself to really explore what it was I was actually curious about, if money was not part of the equation, if traditional success was not part of the equation. If nobody was watching, what was something that I was actually curious and excited about?
And for me, it had always been the brain. I had always been curious about the way we think and we feel and how that all works, and how that shapes our realities and our relationships. And so I went back to university to study neuroscience.”
More from Anne-Laure: Experiment Your Way to a Better Life (EP.259)3. Anthony Pompliano | Most of Your Decisions Don’t Matter
“80/20 is kind of the Pareto principle. All that I say in the book that I actually think it's like 95/5. It's not 20% of your decisions, it's less than five, maybe even one in 99 […]
And so we've done this in some of our businesses. At the end of the year we look back and we say, ‘If we only got to make two or three decisions, what were the two to three decisions that we made that led to most of the outcome?’
And one year, I mean this sounds insane, one year we looked at and we had a very good year, we made one decision with the balance sheet to invest some capital off of the balance sheet, and that drove 99% of the return for that year. And so we sat there and we said, we could have made that one decision and all just not worked the whole year and we would've had nearly the same outcome. That makes us dumb. Why would we spend all this time, energy, all this stuff, whatever? And so then going into the next year, we said to ourselves, ‘You can't say that every year it's going to repeat and you're not always going to make good decisions, but maybe we should actually change the way that we think about decision making and what's important.’ And you learn, right, and you kind of go from there.
And so I do think that understanding power laws is less about trying to replicate them all the time. And it may be about avoiding the big amount of decisions or actions that aren't going to have an outcome. So it's like less than it being a creative ‘Let's go find 20 more new power laws.’ Instead, maybe it's about, well, ‘Let's just reduce the 20 things we're doing down to two because we think one of these two is the power law.’ ”
More from Anthony: How to Live an Extraordinary Life (EP. 242)4. Derek Sivers | The Choice You Commit to is the Correct Choice
“If you're ever wondering what is the right decision, ‘Should I do this, or should I do that? Should I live here, or should I live there? Should I take this job or that job?’ that just the act of choosing one and wholeheartedly committing to it makes your choice the best choice. It is your commitment itself that can make any choice the right choice for you that you can [...] because they're all parallel worlds, you pick one, and by committing to it and making the best of it, it makes it the best choice.”
More from Derek: How to Become a Picasso (EP.186) | Just Do The Thing (EP. 186)5. George Mack | Don’t Be the Midwit
“And I think the ultimate midwit razor or filtering process is to just always try and avoid being the genius, because that's the mistake the Midwit makes is, he thinks he's the guy on the right. And unless you've got some Tesla level of IQ, and even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful, certainly not for a midwit like myself.
As a recovering midwit, going through of like, ‘Well, how can I dumb this down? What is the dumbest version of this?’ Because if I can't dumb this down where it's super simple of ‘calories in calories out’, or ‘if feeling bad, good night's sleep’ [...] If I can make it appeal to the idiot, therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well.”
More from George: The Game of Life (EP.195) | Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology (EP.114)6. Dr. Pippa Malmgren | Buckle-In
“So what I learned is that when this chaos happens, buckle your seatbelt and be grateful because this is the education that money cannot buy. You cannot learn this in a classroom. You can only learn it by being chucked into the deep end of a catastrophe. I'm not saying we want more catastrophes, we don't, but if you have the chance to be in the front line of one, and it's your job to get us through it, then instead of going, ‘Oh, my God, this is terrible. How are we ever going to handle this?’ just be like, ‘Great, and thank you for giving me this privileged position to be here where I can observe how things really work.’ So it's a blessing. It's not a disaster in other words. That mindset, that attitude changes how you handle it. It really does.”
More from Dr.Malmgren: Why Leadership Has Gone Wrong (EP.167)7. Mark Daniel | Stop Overcomplicating Things
“Marriage, health, building a business, building a great portfolio. All of those things are quite simple and quite hard. Whenever I find myself trying to overcomplicate something, it's usually because I know what the answer is. I don't want to accept what the answer is, because it's going to require me to sweat. It is always the guy who's out of shape who's asking about push-up variations in the gym. It's always the guy who can't do one push up, he's like, ‘But do I put my hands here? And then do I do a jumping push-up? Or do I do underhand?’ It's like, ‘No. Just keep going until you can't anymore’ and I think that that tends to be correct in every stream of your life that's worth developing. You just have to do the simple, hard thing 90% of the days each year and then do it for 10 years and then look up and see where you're at, and that tends to work out pretty well.”
More from Mark: How to Find a Kaleidoscopic Alien (EP.254)8. Tiago Forte | Use Your Envy
“A few years ago, I started noticing that was actually a very pure signal. It was such an honest signal, it can't be faked. You know, a lot of times your desires and your goals and your dreams come from somewhere else in a bad way. They come from your parents or society's expectations or a fear that you have. And those can be more or less useful. But envy, you can't fake envy. Envy is really telling you what is missing in your life. I think then you can act on it. You can decide to just accept that part of your life. That's one option. Or you can make a plan to change it.”
More from Tiago: Unlocking the Power of the Annual Review (EP.267)9. Chuck Beames | Do Something Else
“I think it's important that people have a hobby or a diversion that takes their brain out of the details of what they're doing and does something different, because when they come back, then it's almost like a little mini holiday for their brain and they can come back to those problems and they can all of a sudden see them in a slightly different light. And so whatever it is, I just happen to like cabinet making. And a lot of that is because growing up, that was a thing. Shop class was a big deal when I was growing up as a kid, and I was particularly good at it. So I really took to it.”
More from Chuck: The Second Space Race (EP.269)10. Natasha Joukovsky | Tear Down Your Walls
“Success generally rests on disarming the very cognitive defense mechanisms designed to protect one's fragile psyche […] Our brains are self-protective devices and ironically, you need to tear down your cognitive protection in order to access the type of truth that makes for really good art. The kind of art that when you encounter it, you think, 'Oh my gosh, that's so true and nobody wants to admit it.’”
More from Natasha: On Recursion, Status Games & Manufactured Nonchalance (EP.268)Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Money, Agency, Getting Sh*t Done, Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.