Framework Friday: Easy Choices, Hard Life. Hard Choices, Easy Life.

It's actually a quote and it's, Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. By this guy, Jersey Gregoric. 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, 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 2 years of really trying to make the hard choice. And I found that it always results in an easier life, um, that the road to 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, um, it just never does. So for me, you know, the, and then 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 gotta immediately fire that person, make a hard decision. Uh, and that applies to so many different parts of business.

Uh, I like that. I'll give one, one, uh, personal experience caveat with that. Recently in the past 2 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? This 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, you know, cut the cord, I'm gonna do this one thing and I'll know within 2 weeks, 3 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, in like that function of the company. And so that's my only caveat with that one. But I'll also add, um, 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— you just literally can't decide. You should just simply say, which one is harder? Because your brain is naturally discounting the, 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, 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, the one that's, that's that's harder is actually a much better choice. And your brain is just trying to sandbag it and weigh it down because it, it wants to avoid that, that struggle. So that's another useful one. 'Cause 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, um, I went down this rabbit hole of like, how do you make a tough decision? 'Cause 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 6 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. Um, so I'm really trying to lean into that. Um, the other one that I've been finding really interesting lately, um, 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, um, let's say you go to someone and you say, hey, um, you know, This business model is terrible. Uh, you shouldn't do it. It's doomed in 5 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. Um, and this can apply to anything effectively. It's people will not do things that are, uh, 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, um, 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. They're 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 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, uh, not do.

Yeah, the, the thing you said, uh, at the beginning is sort of like the Innovator's Dilemma too, right? It's like, um, 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 Innovator's Dilemma, 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. Yeah, screw that. We're gonna do it this new way. And the, you know, the big company's like, sort of like, screw that. What do you mean? How, how could you screw that? That's, that's the way the world is. And so you could sort of, and then you could, 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, I've been thinking about this a lot, right? You look at DALL·E and you go, okay, in 5 years, will you be able to type into DALL·E, 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 over-index 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, all your knowledge is based on the past. You don't know what's coming. And I don't think that someone who owned, um, I'm reading like a great, um, uh, book about, um, news, 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. Uh, that's a great point. I think it's also true with investments. If you, um, like, if you're invested in something, you know, when new information comes to light, you sort of have to recalculate from scratch. Do— would I— 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, um, 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, you earn 'em, and now like, you know, 50% of your stock portfolio is in this one company. And like, you probably wouldn't have 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, ah, inertia, right? Like, you know, 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, um, uh, to, to like sort of rid yourself of them so you don't make the same mistakes everybody else does.

So, um, there's two really amazing things that people should go and study if you want to. I spent a couple of years actually just reading and rereading books on psychology to try and hammer this stuff into my brain. The, my favorite book on it is Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's amazing. It just kind of goes through all of the kind of thinking traps we get into. Um, and you know, it's anchor bias, um, and, uh, you know, um, comparison and, you know, all these, all these kinds of ways that you trick yourself. Um, 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, um, 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.