Stop Overthinking: The 70% Rule to Beat Procrastination

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You've had a decision sitting on your desk for 2 weeks. You keep telling yourself you're just like gathering information. You're not. You're stalling. And while you stall, someone less qualified just did a worse version of your idea and they are about to eat your lunch. People like me. Here's the lesson history keeps screaming at us. Speed wins. Every time. And I am obsessed with it right now because I and my team are not moving fast enough. So today we're gonna talk about speed, the 3 laws that'll rewire how you make decisions, 5 moves that you can run Monday morning, and we're gonna show you the real-life proof from Instagram, Square, Amazon, the fastest companies in the world about how the operator almost always wins when they move faster. You do not have to be smarter. You don't have to have more money. You just need to move faster. So today you stop overthinking and you start moving. I'm Codie Sanchez and this is The Big Deal Podcast. Let's hurry up and go, huh? I have one quick ask though, before we dive in. If this kind of episode is useful for you, do me a personal favor and hit subscribe. It tells me what's landing and helps me make more of what actually helps you. And if you ever wanted to support what we do here at The Big Deal, this is the best way. So hit subscribe. Thank you so much. Let's dive in. All right. We've been taught that slow is safe. Like, you know the saying, measure twice, cut once. Good things take time. Patience is a virtue. All of that is true, I guess, somewhere, but almost none of it is true in business or in your career. To be clear, speed isn't the same as recklessness. Recklessness is like you go really fast, you ignore all the consequences. Speed is just compressing the distance between you and reality. And also, can we just stop comparing the two? Like, isn't that crazy? Why does our brain immediately go, but if I'm fast, I can't be good? That is so dumb. Usain Bolt, really fucking fast, really good. So when you move fast, it's not that you don't avoid mistakes, you just find 'em faster. So then you fix 'em faster, then you learn 'em faster. And it is a dangerous loop. When you move slowly and with too much care, you actually don't even see the future as fast as the person sitting next to you. And so like my real life story this AM, I got really frustrated that our newsletters were taking days to write at my company. So on Sunday I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do this live. And I set a time limit and I wrote 2 newsletters in under an hour using an agent that is better than most of what we write. And I did it because I was so fed up with the time we're wasting, just like mentally masturbating over nothing. And then I sent it to my newsletter writers— sorry guys— and I told them this is the new standard. Like, we should have a V1 in under an hour, and then we can have multiple shots on goal, like multiple trials of a newsletter. This idea of waiting days for something that is less than 3,000 words and basically Dead is over. That is why I'm doing this podcast today. It's for you, but it's also for me. It's also for my team and also for all of us to make more money. So I want you to think about it like this. Every decision you face has a shelf life. The information you have on it is super fresh right now, right? Your conviction strong today, the opportunity most available today. Every day you wait, 3 really scary things happen at the same time and they happen invisibly. One, your data ages, meaning like the context you're deciding in is already different tomorrow than it was today. So you think you're like gathering information, but actually you're watching that bread go stale. Number two, your conviction starts to erode. Like your certainty peaks at the moment you first see the problem clearly, right? And every time you re-review the option, like you give yourself little chances for doubt. By week 2 or 3, The decision actually feels harder than day 1 because your brain has literally beaten itself into a fog and given it lots of different options. And by 3, your window closes. Other people are moving, teams are shipping. So every day you wait, a competitor, a customer, or a market condition gets closer to making the decision for you. Not good. So what's the takeaway here? Is that you eat the fruit when it's the freshest. Moving quickly means going through the Overton window while your conviction is high and your data is relevant. So you run, you don't walk. Information doesn't age like wine, it ages like milk, which ain't good. So here's the tool that I use so you can steal it. I call it the decay question. For any major decision you put across your plate, ask yourself, is what I learn in the next 30 days worth more than what I lose by not starting? Answer, 9 times out of 10 is fucking no. For 90% of decisions, the honest answer is no. And the 10% where the answer is yes, you're dealing with a genuine one-way door and you should take your time. I'm gonna get to that in a minute. It's one of my favorite stories of all time, of all time from one of my favorite entrepreneurs. But I actually wanna take you back in time first to a guy by the name of Jim McKelvey in St. Louis in 2009 who almost sold a $2,000 piece of art at an art fair. The buyer was ready. He, he had the money, but McKelvey, the glassblower, he couldn't take it. You see, he was an artisan, not a shop with a full point of sale system. And at that time, that meant his customers had to pay in cash or walk away empty-handed. So he lost the sale. McKelvey was pissed, right? So he called his friend Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, who had interned for him actually as a teenager, to rant about this thousands lost. And Dorsey said, uh, why don't we just fix that? 3 weeks later, 3 weeks, people, they had a working credit card reader that plugged into an iPhone, and that simple product launched the company Square. After seeing all the success that Square had, Amazon, big baby Amazon, they launch a competitive, uh, product called, uh, like Amazon Local Register. It's a mobile credit card reader for small businesses and it had lower fees, so it was way cheaper. It's backed by $100 billion Bezos with the brightest minds in tech. And less than a year later, Amazon realized Square's lead was going to be impossible to catch up to, so it quietly shut down Amazon Local Register. What's the lesson? Square won because they pounced on the market years earlier when conviction was high. McKelvey missed his sale. Data was relevant. McKelvey had no way of accepting credit cards at that moment, and the window was open. There was no point-of-sale system options for a small sole proprietor. They moved fast, so they won. So if you're currently sitting on a decision about a changing market, maybe it's AI, a new competitor, a shift in your customer's behavior, you don't have more time than you think. You have less. In fact, I just got in a little scuffle with one of my team members about that this morning. I have a rule, it's called the 24-hour rule, and now I think it's even a shorter rule. It might be the 2-hour rule now. But the rule is when you meet with somebody that you want something from, you should overwhelm them with the speed at which you respond back after the meeting with something impressive. So we had just met with these investors and the investors that we met with were gonna give us millions of dollars in one of our companies. And I got pissed because it was Friday afternoon, Friday evening. Do you think we got that response out to them that day? Uh-uh-uh, we did not. So guess what happened? They beat us to it on Monday. And what happens when you do that? You show them that they move faster than you do. And I hate that. So I want you to be like Square. When you see an opportunity, don't hesitate, go. Like real life Slack that inspired this podcast today, My team said they would get back to me in a week. And this is, it's this, if you're on YouTube, you can see it right now. Also, hi YouTube, like and subscribe. I just sent this out to this team as I was reviewing what I wanted to talk to you guys about. And basically what it says here is, no, no, no, don't wait a week. Let's spin this up in 24 hours and see if anyone bites. If they do, we'll build it. Which basically means we don't have a product, we're not ready actually to launch this, but I wanna spin it up, see if we can get credit cards. And if we can't, we're gonna launch it and then we'll figure it out. We'll build the airplane on the way down. That's how you should work in this world today. Otherwise, you're, as the kids say, niggme, not gonna make it. And you know, it's not just these stories from me or Square. You know, this story is so good, I don't think it's told enough. So in 2010, there's this guy by the name of Kevin Systrom, and he had a dying check-in app called Burbn. Like, it wasn't gonna make it. It had like 100 users, half a million bucks of VC money in the bank, and a product that apparently nobody wanted. But when Systrom looked at the data, he noticed that users— there's 100 of them— loved Burbn's creative photo posting functions. So he pivoted. He got rid of check-ins and he kept the photos, and he rebranded his Instagram. Instagram launches in like October of 2010, and the response is insane. 18 months later, Facebook pays a billy for them, and only 13 employees are on the payroll at that time, which is wild. We have like 100 employees, just so you know. And sadly, I'm not quite a billion dollars yet. But here's the, here's the key takeaway. It's not just that they pivoted. People do that all the time. It's that they, they moved fast. Like every competitor in photo sharing was still running roadmap reviews while Instagram was live and growing. So Systrom didn't have better data than his competitors. He just acted while the data was still fresh. So don't let yourself get pulled into decision decay because decision decay is the why. So now you need 2 rules for the how, and I wanna steal these from like one of the best entrepreneurs of all time, whether you like him or hate him, it's the bald man himself, Jeff Bezos. And rule number 1 is the 70% rule. So in his shareholder letters, which are amazing, he has one in particular from 2016, and he talks about that most decisions should be made with 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90, you're too slow. And in most cases, slow is more expensive than wrong. And so why 70? Because in Bezos's eyes, the last 30% of the information is always really expensive to get, right? Like you're like, ah, when I have more of that, when I, when I can figure that all out. No, no, no. The first 70% comes fast, fast. So ask yourself, am I at 70%? If yes, move and then correct once you're in motion. The second one is called the door test. And I love this idea so much, I use it all the time. I think my husband actually introduced me to it first. He'll say to me, is this a one-way or a two-way door? What does that mean? Every decision is one of two types. A one-way door is reversible. Selling your company, firing a senior employee, committing capital you can't get back. Those deserve care. Like the door only opens one way. You can't go back through it. Does that make sense? Whereas like a two-way door is reversible. You walk through it, look around, and then you go, I don't like this place. Next bar, right? So that might be something like testing a price, hiring a new contractor, posting something publicly. The 2016 letter basically says you should make these moves fast by high judgment people and don't use a fucking committee. Committees are where dreams go to die. The smaller the group of people, the better. In fact, Shopify famously works in teams of 5. They say the best teams are all 5. And so they have like a 3,300, I believe,, R&D, research and development, uh, group. And even in there, they have teams of 5 inside of the 3,300s. So most organizations fall into something where they treat every decision like a one-way door. And you probably do this in your life too. You're like, well, I don't know, should I go to this event? I can't decide. It's like, what's the problem if you decide later? You know, oh, I don't know. You know, should my kids and I go on vacation here and there? I, I don't know. Can we make that? Is that like a life-changing decision or not? Like how many low-level decisions do we make every single day that we treat like one-way doors and they aren't. So do an audit tonight. Look at your 5 most stuck decisions. Probably at least 3 of them are two-way doors. So walk through, baby. Stop treating it like you can't go back. And the, the research is actually really on his side. Um, there's actually a really fascinating phenomenon. I believe it's called the Zeigarnik effect. I don't know. You guys tell me if I'm spelling that or saying that right on the internet. But this shows how unfinished tasks occupy disproportionate mental bandwidth. Like, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like, your brain hates that open loop that you're like, oh, did I— my mom's kind of famous for this one. Sorry, mom. She, every time we leave the house, I swear to Christ, I'm, I'm 39 years old. Every time we leave the house, she goes, did I unplug the curling iron? Did we shut the garage door? It's like, is looping every time. And those small decisions, they eat away at your cognitive power. So if you've been feeling foggy, scattered, and drained, look at your decisions and, and close those loops. And you know, while we're being honest about what's actually draining your cognitive performance, let's talk about the one thing that sits underneath all of it. The thing that makes the 70% rule possible, that makes fast, high conviction decisions feel natural instead of terrifying. Sleep, specifically deep sleep. That's why I'm obsessed with Eight Sleep and I use it. The Eight Sleep Pod is a smart cover that goes on your existing mattress. It heats or cools each side independently down to 55 degrees all night automatically. And as we move into spring and nights start heating up, this becomes the single biggest lever of your sleep quality, especially because I like it warm and my husband likes it like an icicle. I'm not okay with that. So for every degree your sleep environment rises above what your body optimally needs, you actually lose deep sleep. So the Pod eliminates that variable entirely. This is crazy, actually, but users see up to 34% more deep sleep fall asleep up to 44% faster, and have an HRV— I'm too fancy for that, but that basically means your heart rate— up 13% on average, which the doctors tell me is very good. And it tracks all of it: heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep stages. No wearable, nothing on your wrist, clinical-grade accuracy built directly into your bed. The AI behind it, Autopilot, learns your patterns and adjusts in real time. The Aston Martin F1 team uses it for athlete recovery. You know, just like me, we're pretty much the same. I mean, so does, you know, people much smarter than me, Andrew Huberman, Mark Zuckerberg. These are people who have optimized everything and they still made room for this. So you can use code DEAL at eightsleep.com/bigdeal for up to $350 off the pod. You get 30 days to try it at home, and if you don't like it, you can send it back. Go to eightsleep.com/bigdeal, code DEAL, because I'm pretty positive I've never had a single person on this pod who has ever bought this thing that sent it back. In fact, All of my friends wait for me to get the deal and then they buy it for them and all the beds in their house. So you're welcome. This is one of my favorite things for sleep that exists in the world. Just ask husband Chris. Okay, so I actually wanna also talk about a second study. So the 2000 Columbia Jam experiment. So what is this? It's fascinating. Two psychologists set up two jam booths at a grocery store. One booth, and you know, jam, like jam, jelly. One booth had 24 varieties of jam, then the other has 6 varieties of jam. The 24-jam booth pulled in way more traffic. Whoa, look at all these things. But only 3% of people who tasted it actually bought. The 6-jam booth, well, 30% of the people who walked up, they bought. That's 10 times higher. And that proves that analysis paralysis is real. And measurable. So when you keep every option open, your conversion rate on actually executing collapses. Moving fast forces you to cut options. Cutting options is how you reach action. So the research all kind of comes together on one conclusion: commit to constraints. Like, if you can just reduce your choices and make those decisions, watch how your life improves. And I can tell you firsthand, cuz I do it too. There's also still maybe one lingering barrier, perfection. And the objection I hear the most is something along the lines, and tell me if you feel this or you can write in the comments what your objection is to moving fast, "If I move fast, quality suffers," right? That's actually what we call a false dichotomy. Two things do not need to be true. So let's reframe that. Quality and speed aren't opposites. Perfection and speed are. Quality means the output works. Your customer's happy, the dinner's good enough, you know, the outfit's good enough, the workout's good enough, the problem's solved, you've moved forward. I think a lot of times we just get obsessed with perfection and like, can we have zero flaws? I don't know, I've never met that. No typos, every edge case handled, every stakeholder signed off. That's unreasonable. Quality is your goal. Perfection is the trap you have to avoid on the way to it. And I really like to think about it like that. Like, imagine like you're walking down a path and as you go on the path, at the end of the path, you can see your goal. And in the middle of the path is a giant cavernous black hole that says perfection on it. And if you get too close to that thing, it's just gonna grab you. But if you skirt the edges, You won't be perfect, you won't stay perfectly on the path, you'll maybe get a little lost, but you'll get back on the goal and you'll stay forward momentum. And so the worst entrepreneurs, I think, try to ship at 100% and end up shipping at 40% 6 months later 'cause they never had real data to work against. And I think in this world we're in today, this is more true than ever. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel like I have less inputs. Like there's less content I can watch, there's less distractions, everything's more. More of everything. And so I, I think you have to start narrowing down. And I love this line by Reid Hoffman. He said, um, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late. You know, it's funny 'cause I was trying to think about example stories for this one and I was actually, what I came to, I cannot think of a single time in which I shipped a product and it was perfect. Like ever. I've been, what, entrepreneurship for 15, 16 years. By now, I've never shipped a perfect product. I've probably always been too early. I'm notorious for always underpricing things, not overpricing them or appropriately pricing them. And when I started Contrarian Thinking, I offered a lifetime membership to something that required my time every single week. And I think I charged people like $499 for it, for a lifetime of access. What was I thinking? And I remember people still get mad, like, I had lifetime access. I was like, I had to close that whole product line because that thing made so little sense. But that little thing that made no sense, that was way underpriced, got me to where I am today. So here's 5 moves you can make to increase your speed and get the win and not let those little mistakes stop you. Okay, you ready for the 5? Okay. 1, end every meeting with a decision or a deletion. If the meeting didn't produce one or the other, it was therapy. That's not a meeting. If the next meeting can't produce ether, cancel it. Just don't even have the meeting. Okay? Two, 24-hour rule. You already heard me talk about this a little bit, but every decision that's a two-way door, any reversible decision in your life gets made within 24 hours of being surfaced. New vendor, bam, tomorrow. New test, run it tomorrow. The shot clock of 24 hours forces clarity. I'm considering making it faster. 24 hours may be too slow. In today's world. But let's chill out for right now. We'll start with 24. 3, kill one recurring meeting in your life this week. Pick the weak one, the one where everyone shows up with nothing and leaves with nothing. Kill it. Send a note instead. If nobody asks for it back after 2 weeks, it's proof you made the right decision. Also on this one, be pissed if somebody wastes your time or your team's time. I had a meeting this week where a guy was supposed to come with a bunch of ideas. One of my members is located in the UK. The guy stayed up until like 9 or 10 at night UK time to be at this meeting. And the guy who was supposed to come with all the ideas didn't come with ideas fully flushed at all. Now, for me, it was like 3 or 4, I don't know time differences, but it was during my workday. So like I could have just been like, okay, well, whatever. But I said, you know, I said, please access the meeting to this guy. And I said, did you guys think those ideas were fully fleshed out? The team said no. I go, Christian, do you feel like you wasted your Friday night or was this useful for you? And he said, no, this wasn't very useful for me. And I said, I'm so sorry. It's totally unacceptable that we should take away your time. Somebody else didn't prep so that you had to waste your day. Not okay. And so that was the feedback we gave him. We said, if you're going to do that again, please pick another company because this isn't gonna roll here and I value my team's time. I want these motherfuckers to work hard, but I don't want them to have to work harder than they need to, like ever. I don't want them to waste their time. That's just mean. And so think about where in your life can you do the exact same thing? Kill time vampires. 4, write the press release first. I love this. Before you build anything new or pursue a new idea, write a faux press release. Like, what does it do? Why does the customer care? How is it different? If it's not compelling, duh, should we build it? This is gonna compress months of planning into an afternoon. And then step 5, maybe the most important, disagree and commit. Your team does not need consensus. Not everybody has to agree. It needs commitment. It needs commitment. Anybody can disagree publicly and push back hard. That's okay. But there will be a moment where you'll have to say, we are moving through this. And so at our company, we say disagree but commit. So full effort, no sabotage. This single cultural move will triple your speed. Just one other example from this weekend, cuz I was apparently on a fucking roll this weekend. Um, tell me if you guys want a podcast on this. I'm kind of obsessing on it. Tell me in the comments and I'll, I'll do a different one. But I really don't like when people think small. I think it's like the single reason why most people don't live a big, beautiful life is that they have like these self-constraint. It's almost like you put yourself in a coffin and don't realize that the walls of the coffin are made of paper. Like, okay, you just break out of that bitch. And so this weekend we had one of those moments where a team member basically was like, well, I think we should do X instead of Y. And the X was a small move. It was the safe play. And I won't out 'em 'cause, you know, this is a great employee, but I basically had to write, I wrote a strongly worded email. And the email just said like, we need to think big when we talk to vendors. And if you're not gonna think big yet, or you're not ready to, or I haven't prepared you to think big yet, or you don't understand thinking big, that's my fault. Not yours, that I haven't rubbed that off on you yet. But if you can't think big, don't talk to vendors. Just don't talk to them. Hand them off to me or the other members of the team that get it. And when you get it, you can talk to them again. But like, do not play small on my dime. And the payoff here is gonna be big, you guys. Every competitor you have is slower than they should be. And speed is like sitting there free, untouched, available to anybody willing to pick it up. And I, I want you to obsess on this so much that I do these workshops at Contrarian Thinking all about speed. They're called Growth Accelerator Workshops. And we think about how can we collapse 12 months of work into 72 hours? How can we collapse 4 months of results into 72 hours? On average, we find anywhere from $4 to $7 million in, uh, hidden money inside of business owners' own business during the event. It's max 100 people here with me in Austin. If you haven't come to one and you own a business, I wanna invite you out. It is probably my favorite event that we throw in person because it's a workshop. It's not just a speech. So if this is interesting for you, link in the description below. We only do these 4 times a year, so get on the waitlist for one of them. Because the truth is you don't need a perfect idea, a perfect product, or a perfect solution. You need a faster clock. Like, enough cycles with a fast clock allows you to bury the slow operator. Not beat them. And in the game of business, it is a war between winning and losing. So here's your homework. Pick one decision tonight, something reversible, something you've been sitting on longer than a week. Run the decay question on it. Is what you'll learn in the next 30 days worth what you'll lose? For most of them, let's be honest, look me right in the windows to my soul and tell me, the answer is no, right? We gotta decide before the sun comes up tomorrow. You'll learn more from being wrong in 24 hours than from being perfect in 24 weeks. Winners move fast. You're a winner, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Thank you for spending your time with me. I'll see you next week on The Big Deal Podcast. And if you got a slow-ass friend, send them a link to this, or employee, I'll yell at them for you.