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Kind: captions Language: en foreign [Music] this is uh 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 uh has like stood out to you as particularly useful lately it’s actually a quote um and it’s easy choices hard life hard choices Easy Life by this guy Jersey Greg Rick I think Tim Ferriss uh famously shared this quote years ago and it always sticks with me and it most recently uh has been on my mind and it’s it’s one of those things where um you will often find a situation where you know what the right thing to do is so let’s say an employee is 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 um that the road 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 the other piece of that framework is if 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 got to 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 uh 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 you know cut the cord I’m going to 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 um one of the like takeaways from the easy choices hard life hard choices Easy Life thing is when you think two options 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 B you can’t just you just literally you can’t decide you should just simply say which one is harder because your brain is naturally discounting the uh 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 um 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 to equal choices are not actually equal at all the um the one that’s that’s harder is actually a much better choice and your brain is just trying to sandbag it weigh it down because it wants to avoid that that struggle so that’s another useful one because I had a situation recently Where I Was A or B A or B I just couldn’t decide for the life of me and then um 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 Hole like okay what is the world’s philosophy on this that was one that really helped me which was your brain is not accurately pricing the two decisions 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 info 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 dueling 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 um so I’m really trying to lean into that um the other one that I’ve been finding really interesting lately um so there’s this great quote by Upton Sinclair never expect a man to understand something that is paycheck depends on him not understanding so effectively um let’s say you go to someone and you say hey um you know this business model is terrible uh 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 cognitively 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 um you know we kind of introduced everyone and we’re not going to force them to but we figured you know they would get it they’re like oh they’re part of the family we’ll 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 realize that for these guys there’s no reason to do it right they might get a little referral healthy or something that we’ve structured but it actually will not make a difference 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 uh at the beginning is sort of like the innovator’s Dilemma too right it’s like um a company that’s success depends on the world being a certain way is going to have a huge blind spot to the change in that that scenario and this is like why for the innovators 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 invents that future it’s some upstart who sees the world a little differently and says oh yeah all that stuff that’s the old way yeah screw that we’re gonna do it this new way and the you know the big companies like sort of like screw that what do you mean how how could you screw that that’s that’s the way the world is and so you can sort of and then you can 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 won’t be a certain way and I 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 away 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 overestimating 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 now that can be disrupted and I don’t want to over index on that but I always try and remember that I have this crazy perverse 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 um news the newspaper industry right now and all the guys that own newspapers in 1998 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 20 times earnings to buy a paper and you know look how that turned out you could not have predicted Craigslist classified disruption Etc and so yeah people are just incapable of seeing these things in themselves yeah that’s a great Point uh that’s a great point I think it’s also true with Investments if you um 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 um 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 rsus in a company you you earn them and not like you know 50 of your stock portfolio is in this one company and I’m like you probably wouldn’t have if you just I just gave you that amount of money you wouldn’t put 50 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 going to have them unless you proactively fight against the gravity to um to like sort of rid yourself of them so you don’t make the same mistakes everybody else does so um there’s two really amazing things that people should go and study if you want to I spent a couple years actually just reading and rereading books on psychology to try and Hammer this stuff into my brain my favorite book on it is influenced by Robert cialdini it’s amazing it just kind of goes through all of the kind of thinking traps we get into um and you know it’s anchor bias um 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 misjudgment by Charlie Munger which is a speech he gave at Harvard if you just Google it on YouTube um 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 all right this is great uh thanks for joining the framework Fridays and uh yeah if you if you like this tweet at uh Andrew and uh tweet at me Andrew your handle is what a Wilkinson on Twitter yeah a Wilkinson cool and I’m Sean VP on Twitter all right see ya