In this solo YouTube talk, George Kao explains a common cognitive bias that makes immediate ideas feel urgent and important, and argues that giving decisions distance creates perspective. He distinguishes between high‑stakes choices—such as major pivots or offers that are hard to recover from—where taking time to reflect is essential, and low‑stakes experiments like publishing content, testing offers, or launching webpages, which are easy for audiences to forget and therefore should be acted on quickly. Kao reassures solopreneurs that mistakes in these low‑cost experiments are not catastrophic; the audience moves on rapidly, allowing creators to iterate, learn, and improve without lingering fear of failure.
Chapters
Working more lightly in a way to know this. Yes, we have soul alignment and intuition about things, but we also very importantly are human beings that have organic brains that have certain biases about our own work. And the bias that we tend to have— this is the core bias that I hope you'll remember— whatever comes to us in the moment automatically feels more important and sometimes more urgent than if we gave it distance, right? And so if we gave it distance, it tends to— oftentimes we come back to it and go, ah, there's not much juice to this. Okay, now, the intuitive thing is that, oh, so you should give everything distance. Distance creates perspective. I like to say distance creates perspective. The problem is, of course, when it comes to offers and experimentation, if you allow yourself the distance, And then you let the juice run out, and you look at it later, and you go, meh, I guess it's not worth posting or publishing. That's a problem as well. I like to say that distance creates perspective is helpful. Well, certainly when it comes to your inner criticism, okay, your inner critic, you know, seems really real in the moment. But if you just let it sit aside for, you know, until after lunch, you know, until after a nap, you're much more, you have much more perspective. But also when it comes to like, oh my gosh, I'm going to completely pivot now to something else, right? Like choices that are hard to recover from or take a lot of effort to recover from, you need to give it distance, right? Yeah. something— you might lose something that's hard to gain back. Okay, but choices that are easy to recover from— and a lot of solopreneurs don't know this— you know what's easy to recover from? Quickly putting out a— well, all— every piece of content you put out there is easy to recover from. You might think it's a big deal because you said something really important or said something that was scary to you, And actually nobody cared about it, or people maybe even gave you some pushback on it. But it's surprisingly easy to recover from because if the next 3 to 5 pieces of content they agree with, they have already forgotten what you did 6 pieces ago because they're not only reading your things, they're not going, I have to keep 6 things in mind. No, they're reading between your 6 or 7 pieces, they have already looked at thousands of other things. They've long forgotten. So content is easy to recover from. The other thing that's easy to recover from is a bad offer or a bad webpage. It's easy to recover from because you just have to put out the next thing and they've already forgotten what you put out, you know, 2 weeks ago. Because they've seen hundreds in those 2 weeks of other possible— they landed on other websites and other, you know, pictures and everything, everything they've seen. And this is where I think a lot of us solopreneurs don't realize it. We think everything is hard to recover from because it's hard to recover because we take it so seriously ourselves, right? We put out a bad offer Nobody bought. And then we like, oh no, right? But nobody cared. Like people just moved on and then they'll just look at your next thing. And like tomorrow, if you put out a different thing tomorrow, they're like, oh cool, what is that? Oh, not relevant to me. Scroll. If it's not relevant, they scroll. If it's relevant, they look. And if they, if it's not relevant, it's fine because tomorrow you can come up with something totally different and they'll look again. They'll go, oh, it is relevant this time. Or it's not relevant again. They'll just keep scrolling. No big deal.
