Ep 682 | Be Like Bezos - Make the Call at 70%

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. We all crave certainty, especially high performers. We crave certainty. We want all the facts, we want all the data, We want the proof, and we want to do that before we make any sort of move. But in, in business and in life, waiting for 100% clarity is often just a polite way of kicking the can, of stalling. Jeff Bezos once said, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases you're probably being slow. I, uh, read that line in one of Bezos's, uh, Amazon shareholder letters. I think it was from 2017, and it really resonated with me because it really describes how a lot of us, myself included, can talk ourselves out of progress while we're still doing the research, while we're still while we're still researching. So I wanna talk about what Bezos really meant and how it applies to your business and your life and why the fastest way forward isn't knowing more, it's actually deciding sooner. So as I mentioned, Bezos wrote this 70% rule, if you wanna call it that, in his 2017 shareholder letter to the Amazon shareholders. And he was describing how decisions inside Amazon were slowing down as, as the company had really scaled and grew. In other words, there were too many meetings and there was too much analysis, and he realized that most business choices are what he called two-way doors. We talked about this two-way door concept many, many episodes ago, and I want to revisit it here today. In a two-way door sort of business choice, you can walk through that door, test, learn, and if it doesn't work, you can actually walk back out. In other words, those decisions are reversible. Most decisions, again, as, as Bezos said, were these two-way doors. So for those waiting for perfect information, perfect information doesn't make you smarter. It actually makes you slower, because in a world that rewards speed slow decision-making can be rather fatal. The best leaders, the best entrepreneurs, they operate with what we're going to call here decision velocity. Decision velocity. And that's the speed at which the best leaders out there and entrepreneurs, where they can assess, act, and then adjust. If you think about Amazon's early years, you don't have to know a ton about Amazon, but if you're listening to the No Days Off podcast, you probably know enough. About their early years. They, they launched products, they tested features, they began to expand categories, and most of what they did didn't work right away. But I'll tell you what Amazon did better than most— it certainly did better than their competitors— was they learned faster. They were willing to swing and then learn and then walk out the two-way door, iterate, and come back with something stronger. Their speed created learning, and learning created more accuracy, and the accuracy compounded and led to the Amazon we know of today. By acting with 70% of the information, you trade a little short-term uncertainty for a lot of long-term momentum. Now, I think this, this shows up in a number of places in business. For example, in hiring, you'll never ever ever have all of the information to guarantee success in a hire. You might know 70% of what you need to know about a candidate, and I think Bezos would say, yes, you want to do research, but you don't want to stall and stall and stall. If you can get the 70%, make the call, and if it's wrong, be sure to fix it fast. I think in hiring specifically, Yes, we should be hiring slow, and many of us do that, but firing fast in the event it's not working, that would be a two-way door sort of scenario. In pricing of a service or a product, you'll never know the perfect rate to charge for, say, rent or the perfect service fee. So, what you do is you launch, you watch the response, and then you adjust and you do so quickly. In acquisitions, you may never know every variable about a deal. So you do your due, your, your diligence, and you get to a point of 70% conviction and you make a move. Because indecision has a cost. And while you wait for more data, someone else is probably collecting more experience. Now, there is an exception here, okay? And if I'm talking about two-way doors, I gotta talk about the one-way doors because Bezos warned about this one type of decision that doesn't fit the 70% rule, and that's the one-way door. These are the really big irreversible choices. For example, you decide to sell a business. That's a one-way door. You're not getting that business back. You sign a long-term lease. That's a one-way door. If you sign a long-term lease and quickly realize it's not right for you, You're in a tough spot. You take on major debt. I don't know. I mean, you— that's a one-way door in that you take on that debt, you're not immediately extinguishing that debt. So for those decisions, you do have to move slower. You may have to get to 90% or even 100% of all the information you wish you could have. But recognize these one-way doors, these are the minority. Most of what crosses your desk every day is in fact reversible. So you can test and learn and iterate. And the faster you decide, the faster you tend to improve. So as we're talking around this, I think it leads to a mindset shift, a mindset shift around maybe really more so trusting your judgment. If you wait for perfect clarity, then you're signaling, signaling that you don't trust yourself to adjust if you're wrong. I think high performers aren't people who are always right, and that, that's a misunderstanding many observers may have. High performers are not people who are always right. They're people who recover fast when, when maybe the decision was wrong. And I think that's the hidden advantage of 70% decision-making. It forces you to get better at course correction. So, you stop needing to be perfect all the time and you start really pushing to be a bit more adaptive. So, when I look at the best business operators that I know, the ones that I think are scaling pretty fast, they all really kind of live by this whether they know it or not. Some of them may say, "I just, I trust my gut." And I would maybe qualify that statement. What I think that means is, they are operating or they execute with a certain percentage of understanding of all the information, and they're doing it a little faster than their competitors. In real estate, I've watched, watched a lot of real estate team leaders make fast 70% decisions on new hires or new, new services or new markets, and they didn't always nail it, but they learned faster than the teams who overanalyzed every single move. In contrast, I've seen other real estate team owners still evaluating their CRM options while the competition was already 6 months or 12 months into the decision and had better data, and as a result, better client conversion. I think that's the difference between what I would call movement and momentum. So I think that as we've run through this, we got to talk about how to apply it. I think first, what I would consider doing is start labeling your decisions, recognizing whether they're Type 1 or Type 2, whether they're one-way doors or they're two-way doors. If they're Type 1, one-way doors, then you go slow and you get full clarity. If they're Type 2, two-way doors, right? Then you could decide fast and act on this 70% concept and then adjust. So, start labeling your decisions. Once you're able to do that, determine Type 1 versus Type 2, then build a feedback loop, which really would tell you if you realize you've made a bad call, okay, I've made the bad call, I have that feedback, now I fix it fast. There's no shame, there's no analysis spiral, you just get in the, get into action. Momentum is gonna be more valuable than perfection in this situation. So, recognize that every day you delay a reversible decision, you're paying what I'm gonna call an invisible tax. And that invisible tax is lost time, lost opportunities, lost data. You're not protecting yourself from risk, you're actually guaranteeing stagnation. The best business operators, the best leaders don't wait for the perfect answer. They make the best decision available, they move and they course correct. I think that's one way that you absolutely win over time. So, as we wrap up today, couple action items. Number 1, I want you to audit those, those pending decisions. Maybe write down the 5 biggest open decisions that you have in your life or your business right now, then label each one as a one-way or two-way door, a type 1 or a type 2 decision. Then number 2, act on the two-way doors immediately. If it's reversible, make the call within 24 hours. Take the leap. Number 3, I would say review that decision, review your decision speed every single week. Track how long it takes you to decide and then challenge yourself to begin to shorten that cycle. I'm not saying sacrifice information, but recognize that 70% may be enough to take action. And then number 4, and most importantly in my opinion, once you understand this concept, build this adjustment or correction muscle. When you get one wrong, no big deal, fix it fast. Don't punish yourself, just learn and move on. Remember that perfect information is a myth and that progress really belongs to the decisive. That's all I have for you today in the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.