Disagree and Commit, Words of Wisdom from Jeff Bezos - TDBS 19 April 2017

Welcome back everyone. It is April 18th, 2017. No, 19th. Stuffed it up already. Doesn't matter. Nonetheless, day 78 of the Daniel Bourke Show. Thank you all so much for tuning in, whether it's on YouTube or the audio form of this show. Originally started out as a podcast, but now we're sort of merging it into two different platforms, YouTube and audio. And I'm having a great time. It's amazing. If you're ever thinking about trying out your own podcast or YouTube series, give it a go. It's highly rewarding. I've got hardly any views or listens, but just the sheer act of creating something is incredibly fun to me. So, what have I been up to today? Well, I started out the morning, I did some writing, I answered a few questions on Quora as usual, and then I studied some Python using the Learning Python the Hard Way book. And that was, that was basically it. And then I started, me and my brother, every Wednesday, my littlest brother Sam, who's still in high school, we get together and we learn. He works with me on a Wednesday, so I teach him some skills. What did we learn today? We're learning computer science from Harvard. There's a course called CS50, which is free online, and we've been studying that the last couple weeks, and every, every week we just build upon a little bit of knowledge every time we get together. And he had the option when it was at his high school on Wednesdays, he has the option of going to work with some sort of business or some sort of employer to get some skills from there, or some other outlet. And I put my hand up when mum was looking for somewhere to send him and said, hey, why doesn't he spend the day with me on Wednesdays? And we have phenomenal time together. I get to bond with my little brother. He's— I'm 8 years older than him, but yet I've learned so much from him. And we both get to learn some incredible skills. So we're practicing computer science together at the moment, and which is great because I'm learning programming and he's— he's not— the programming is not really taught at his school, but I think it's a valuable skill to learn nonetheless. And And it's not so much programming that I'm trying to teach him. I'm trying to learn myself as well as teach him or help him to learn is the art of problem solving. And I feel that is very underrated as a skill. And problem solving, you may think, "Oh yeah, I problem solve all the time." But for me, I've had trouble in the past looking at something, breaking it down into different stages and thinking about what is the best way to solve this. And that's, I think, learning how to program has taught me a lot about that. Working, doing fitness and nutrition, sure, it has some problem-solving capabilities, but learning how to program, when you see something, you're like, "Oh, I wonder how I could do this," and then breaking it down step by step, I think it's a really beneficial skill to— they complement each other. So programming and problem-solving go hand in hand. And then after that, I went and donated blood. As you can probably see here on my arm, it's a little bit sore, but every, what is it, 3 months or so I can donate whole blood, and every month or so I can donate plasma. I'm an O negative blood type, which means I can donate to, to babies or to victims of car accidents where they don't know what the blood type is that they need. So essentially my blood type is the universal donor. And why did I start? Well, to be honest, I started when I was working at Apple and they had this thing called blood donation leave, whereas you would get paid to go and donate blood. And I'm like, yeah, I've been meaning to give back to the community for a long time and I'm going to get paid to do it. So I have no excuses. But that's, that's literally what got me started. If I, if there was no incentive to go do it, I probably wouldn't have gone to do it. And so I'm grateful to have that incentive to begin with. That at least got me started. And now I've set it up, now that I've left Apple, I wanted to keep giving back because the Red Cross in Australia have a great system where if your blood gets used with a patient, they will text you saying, "Hey, your blood was used today." And they won't— obviously don't give any patient details, but just say, "Thank you for your donation, it was used today." And even though I know it would get used anyway, just having that reminder sort of makes me like realize, hey, what up, this simple act of me going and giving 5 minutes of my time, which is literally all it took once the needle was in, it takes 5 minutes to give whole blood every 3 months, I can save 3 lives. And if that's the only way I give back to the community, well, that's better than doing nothing. So that's my way of giving back at the moment. Well, one of my main ways. Other ways are answering questions and things like that, but giving blood, if you've never tried it before, Why not? Because from all the times I've given it, nothing, nothing's bad. Nothing bad has happened. If you're afraid of needles, well, maybe it's not for you, but if you don't mind them, save some lives. So what else was I doing today? I recently finished reading Jeff Bezos, who's the CEO and founder of Amazon, if you've ever heard of him, his letter to customers and shareholders. Oh no, Employees, shareholders— well, it's a public letter, so I can access it, and I'm a customer of Amazon. So I'm guessing it's just a letter to the company, to the employees, to the shareholders, and there were some very valuable insights in there. And he starts the letter off by saying he works in a building called Day One, and when they changed buildings, he renamed the building he moved to Day One as well. Well, he started off working in a building called Day One, moved over to a building called Day One on purpose. Reason being is because he starts the letter off in saying, every day is day one at Amazon. And I, I love that saying. He said that day two at big companies is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline. And I totally agree. I mean, look, look how big Amazon is a comp— as a company is over the past 2 decades. 1997 is when the first letter that he, he sent out to shareholders was, and I'll get to that in a second. But a company that big, how easy could they fall behind, right? A big company's, uh, historically moves slow, but Jeff Bezos isn't about that. The way he runs Amazon is he wants to— he wants— he gives the power to his employees to make High quality, high velocity decisions. And I wrote down some points here from the letter like that, that really, I know, resonated with me because Amazon is a company that I look up to and I, I'm into tech. So all of the big tech companies I look up to— Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, all those I look up to. Tesla, Tesla, SpaceX, anything Elon Musk is involved in actually. Love those. But in terms of decision-making, Bezos writes, if you end up making a decision by saying you've worn me down and so I'm going to side with you, that is a terrible way of making decisions. So, essentially, if someone has continually battled with you and eventually your decision is, yeah, okay, you've tried enough, like, you've worn me down, I'll agree. That is a terrible— like, in his mind, that's a terrible way of making decisions. And I agree too. That's like if you're in a relationship or you're constantly wearing your partner down and eventually they just side with you because they're sick of having you nag them all the time. And so, as he said, he doesn't want— he wants to get rid of the "you've worn me down" process. He said if there's conflict, escalate it quickly. Take it higher quickly. Don't let it— don't let it— I don't know. Marinate, for a lack of a better word, marinate for a long time and get worse over time and just eventually become, okay, you've worn me down, so you win this one. He's— what was it? Effectively, he says something, I disagree but commit. So, for example, he had a— the Amazon video team or the Amazon media team, I can't remember the exact name, came to him and pitched a show idea and he disagreed for it for a long time, but he's like, okay, I need to trust my team. They've done so many good things. Even though I disagree, I need to just have some action and we could sit here all day and argue. And so he wrote back, I disagree, but commit to it. And that's his saying, I disagree, but commit. I want to start using that. 'Cause you're never going to agree with everything in life, especially with close relationships, with unclosed relationships, whether it be work, personal, family, et cetera, et cetera. And oftentimes those disagreements, I've had them in the past, they can just stay around for a ridiculously long time. And what comes of them? Nothing, right? You end up bickering with each other and the one who has the most stamina in the end, the one who can argue their point the longest, ends up winning. That's a terrible scenario. So, make decisions even if you disagree, but still commit, because that way you keep the ball rolling forward. And you can do that in your own life, even if you sort of I don't know, maybe even though something may look good now to do now, will it look good in the future, right? And that's another point that he brings up. Um, if you fight external trends, you're probably fighting the future. Use them as your tailwinds. So what does he do? He talks about this in terms of machine learning and artificial intelligence in Amazon. So instead of fighting those trends and, and trying to use something different, Time has gone off, but that's all right. We'll wrap this up. Instead of fighting the external trends that are happening, so there are a lot of people that sort of go, oh yeah, machine learning, artificial intelligence isn't the way of the future. But in a lot of cases it is. If you look at the big companies of the world, they're, they're all going, they're all backing it. So sure, it may not be the be-all and end-all in the next 20 years, but after that it's gonna It's just going to keep growing extensively— exponentially, sorry. So, rather than fighting them, use them as your tailwind. And that's what I'm trying to do right now. I'm getting involved in learning, and I'm not saying I'm right, but this is just what I'm— this is my best intuition. I'm using my best judgment over what I've read, what I've learned, what I've heard from some of the world's smartest people, in my opinion, smartest and successful, that If I want to, I don't know, be involved in this world, I need to be learning programming, I need to be learning machine learning, I need to be learning artificial intelligence because that's where technology is going. That's where the world, world is going in one way or another. And I'm using the big trends. I'm not going against them. I could easily go against them and say, nah, that's not it, and focus on some other skill, but I'm following these trends because, I don't know, every time I do, every time I learn something new, I feel like it's— I'm going in the right direction. Because an article will come out the next day and I'll be like, oh, this, this, this is happening in the world of deep learning and machine learning. I'm like, wow, I'm actually involved in this world now. And what's one more, one more point I can finish off? Oh yeah, he included a letter from 1997, which was the first letter he sent to shareholders. And in that letter, it said that it was still day one at Amazon despite their massive profits and massive increase in turnover over the past few years— over the past 12 months, sorry. And that message has remained true throughout the entire life of Amazon. It's still only a young company, and it's had amazing growth. And I look up to, like, Jeff Bezos because he's the founder and he's the CEO. He stayed there from the start. Like, it's his His whole life is invested in that. And I think there's something fundamental to learn from that. Learn from the greats. That's what I've been trying to do over the past 18 months and my whole life really is that learn from people who you look up to and mimic what they're doing. And so, if I just follow his decision-making principles, well, maybe some of my decisions will shape my life in a direction similar to his. Of course, it's not going to be exactly the same, but that's the beauty of life, right? Everything is different. And actually, I'm going to finish on one more. So, make decisions with 70% of the information you think you need. When you wait for 90%, it's too late. And how many times— I've done this so many times in the past. When— before I started trying to make my podcast, before I started making YouTube videos, I would wait until the perfect time. Well, there's never going to be a perfect time, right? So, but this is everything that Jeff talks about is, is comes down to this really. There's never a perfect time. So just act fast, uh, not necessarily fail fast, make high-quality decisions and make them at a high velocity, right? So, but always, always plan for the long term. So what I like to think about is in the long term, have a massive amount of patience. So if you got a goal, like, be as patient as possible. Work at it for 67 years to get there. But in the short term, act really quick. And that's how I'm trying to do now. I sort of— every day I don't have really events on my calendar. I get up in the morning and I choose on— I write on the whiteboard what I want to do for that day, and I have my massive goal in my mind, what are the best steps I can take towards that? And that's, I don't know, that to me is working for me at the moment, I think. But who knows? It's all an adventure. It's all an experiment, right? So what's my challenge? Daily challenge. Let's think of one. So if you have a current disagreement or let's just say you have a current disagreement or you have one in the next, say, 24, 48 hours with someone. How can you disagree but commit to something? So, bypass the disagreement, leave it in the past and just move on. How can you disagree with someone but commit? And if you have a choice, like say it's your partner, I've read this so many times from some smart people in relationships. If you have a choice of being right or nice, just be nice, right? Being right all the time— I say right a lot. Being right all the time isn't necessary. I mean, sure, it's great. It's a great boost to the ego, but for me, I'd rather be nice. So try out being nice instead of right for once. But thank you all so much for listening. I hope you're having an amazing day. Whatever you're doing, tell someone you love them, and I'll catch you tomorrow. It's day 79. Catch you later.