My First Million - Framework Friday: Easy Choices, Hard Life. Hard Choices, Easy Life.

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Episode #387: Shaan Puri (@shaanvp) and Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) discuss the idea that making hard choices, doing hard things, can actually make life easier. ----- Links: * Influence, Robert Cialdini * Charlie Munger, "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" speech * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: Show Notes: (05:20) - Do the hard thing (06:00) - What are your blindspots ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

This is 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 has stood out to you as particularly useful lately? It's actually a quote. And it's easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life by this guy, Jersey Gregorick. I think Tim Ferriss famously shared this quote years ago. And it always sticks with me. and it most recently has been on my mind. And it's one of those things where 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. 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, and the other piece of that framework is 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've 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 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? They're 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 cut the court, I'm going to do this one thing. And I'll know within two weeks, three weeks 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 like that function of the company. And so that's my only caveat with that one. But I'll also add 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 literally, you can't decide. You should just simply say which one is harder because your brain is naturally discounting the hard one and then making it seem like, oh, these are about equal. because the difficulty is something that you're taking into consideration, 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, two equal choices are not actually equal at all. The one that's harder is actually a much better choice. And your brain is just trying to sandbag it and weigh it down because it wants to avoid 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 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, I'm 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 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't 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. So I'm really trying to lean into that. The other one that I've been finding really interesting lately, So there's this great quote by Upton Sinclair,

Never expect a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding. So effectively, let's say you go to someone and you say, hey, you know, this business model is terrible. 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, 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. 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 realized that for these guys, there's no reason to do it, right? They might get a little referral fee or something that we've structured, but it actually will not make a difference to 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 thing you said at the beginning is sort of like the innovator's dilemma too, right? It's like 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 is a lemma, 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. Screw that. We're going to do it this new way. And the big company's sort of like, screw that. What do you mean? How could you screw that?

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? The world being a certain way. And 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 a 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 and how they can be disrupted. And I don't want to overindex 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 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 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 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, et cetera. And so, yeah, people are just incapable of. seeing these things in themselves. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. I think it's also true with investments. If you, like, if you're invested in something, you know, when new information comes to

light, you sort of have to recalculate from scratch. 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, 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 and you earn them. And not like, you know, 50% of your stock portfolio is in this one company.

And like you probably wouldn't have if you just, if I just gave you that amount of money, you wouldn't have put 50% in this company, but you'll leave it there. Right. Because, uh, 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, to like sort of rid yourself of them so you don't make the same mistakes everybody else does. So there's two really amazing things that people should go and study. I spent a couple of 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 Sealdini. It's amazing. It just kind of goes through all of the kind of thinking traps we get into. And, you know, it's anchor bias 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, 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 was great. Thanks for joining the Framework Fridays. And yeah, if you, if you like this, tweet at Andrew and 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 you.