I feel like I’ve made a number of good decisions over the past 5 years. Until recently however, understanding how I arrived at these was not that clear to me. This post was an attempt to uncover commonalities in my decision making process that could help support reproducibility going forward.
We review what led to bad decisions, but not what led to good ones
High achievers seem to spend a significant amount of time planning for what’s to come and comparatively little energy on analysing past events. Despite trying to optimise decisions at every new junction in life, I’ve never consciously taken the time to review the sequence of steps that led to important past decisions. This is less true for when we make poor choices, but following a good decision, we’re typically less likely to dissect the preceding processes and understand the events that led to the desired outcome.
Why is this top of mind right now? Starting a company feels like one constant stream of decisions, most of which are within entirely new territory. Uncovering a reliable process in an attempt feel more anchored during times of uncertainty seems like a valuable exercise.
Dissecting my good decisions to date
To understand this better, I recently wrote down the 10 best decisions I believe I have made over the last few years, covering both personal choices (e.g., moving to France, managing diabetes through a keto diet, investing time in language learning) and professional ones (e.g., starting X26, transitioning to a PM role within QuantumBlack, identifying the right problem to build a company around) to spot any recurring patterns that I can lean into going forwards.
“Conversations will change your life.”
A wise friend
The cycle of Thoughtful Execution
I realised that pretty much every good decision I had made, in both life and business, followed a similar pattern. I’m thinking of this as the cycle of ‘Thoughtful Execution’:
- Consume: Take in high quality information, which could be in the form of conversations with great people, podcasts, books. Pay attention to what makes you excited, curious, surprised or nervous.
- Reflect: Spend dedicated time thinking about these themes and what it could mean for your life or work (often through journalling or discussions). Build an understanding of what it would look like to take action on these ideas.
- Execute: Pull the trigger and commit to this for some time. Commitment is key, as often there is no substitute for real-world experience in being able to fully evaluate the merits of a given decision.
- Iterate: Create time to review what is working and what is not. Accept that both you and the world are changing, and what was a good decision previously may no longer be serving you. An 80/20 mindset is helpful here to understand what aspects of a decision are having the most impact, and an awareness of sunken cost bias is key.
Applying thoughtful execution to my current startup:
The steps above are so applicable to the learning journey in an early stage startup. In order to lean into this process as much as possible, some of the key questions I’m asking myself are as follows:
Consume: What are the highest quality sources of information I can access?
- Avoiding noise in customer research: We’ve spent a lot of time speaking to customers, but occasionally the signal to noise ratio is very low because the person we’re talking to doesn’t exactly fit our ICP (ideal customer profile). We’re realising the need to bring more discipline here.
- Learning from the best: I’m fortunate to currently be part of the Y Combinator programme, which provides a great opportunity to tap into the wisdom of those who have gone before us. Concretely, we are trying to: (1) Write down areas where we have knowledge gaps, (2) Figure out who in our network could be a great source of insight, (3) Go and have a conversation with them.
Reflect: How do I ensure I have time to think?
Creating dedicated time to think and reflect is so important. In the last month, everything seems to have been geared heavily towards execution and, consequently, I’ve not prioritised ‘thinking time’. I do however believe strongly that 1 hour of quality reflection can save many hours of execution. Going forward, the plan is to block time each Sunday evening to ask a few key questions:
- Backwards looking: What has been the most valuable use of time this past week, and how can we do more of that?
- Forwards looking: What outcome would make this coming week amazing, and what 1 – 2 time investments have the best chance of getting us there?
- Out-the-box thinking: What are 10 ideas for experiments we could try this coming week (the wilder the better)?
Execute: When should I start executing?
Building a startup feels like a constant cycle of learn, build, test. Having a bias towards action is important, yet, as someone who loves to plan and think, this has not always come naturally to me in the past. The question I am asking is: In what areas are we overplanning, and what would it look like to take action today?
Iterate: Where is sunken cost preventing us from seeing clearly?
- The key risk in ‘iteration’ is falling victim to sunken cost bias and ignoring new, valuable insights that may contradict your existing focus.
- One exercise I find helpful here is to move the focus away from yourself: If I was advising someone else (e.g., another founder/startup) what would I recommend them do in this situation, based on everything I know to date?
Stillness & Scale 