The Decision Strategist

If you are like me, you have a million different things you are interested in, but you never pursue any of them to completion. I float from one project to another as it grabs my interest. This is great for generating ideas, and I think remaining curious is an essential aspect of enjoying life. It’s not so good for bringing projects to fruition.

The typical process goes something like this:

1. Get excited about an idea.
2. Research the idea compulsively to the detriment of other aspects of my life.
3. Work on the project in all of my spare time (and some not spare time).
4. Get disrupted, reach something I can’t figure out, or have to deal with real life.
5. Become discouraged and try to force myself to work on the project.
6. After a few weeks of doing nothing, get excited about a new idea.

It’s a vicious cycle not unlike the problem-solving cycle.

I seem to be doing well on my current project decyder though. I think the difference is due to momentum. How am I creating momentum? Here are three major ways:

The Decision Strategist

This blog is peripheral to decyder, but keeps me thinking about how decision making works in the real world, an idea that is directly relevant to decyder. Though writing for The Decision Strategist takes up a significant amount of time, it keeps me involved and provides an important alternative when I’m sick of working on decyder.

Public Deadlines

The Ycombinator application is due October 11th. I’d like to get a demo of decyder working before then, so I have a very real deadline. Deadlines are great, but hard to enforce without some kind of public commitment.

Making Progress

Making progress is key to building momentum. With past projects I’ve spent an excessive amount of time brainstorming and planning. These are fun activities that get my imagination going, but don’t produce much else. Eventually I lose interest.

This time I decided to basically wing it. Thoughts from Paul Graham, Steve Pavlina, Seth Godin, and others seem to coincide on the value of execution over imagination, so I try and keep my planning to a minimum.

The upshot is that I am accomplishing my goals and feeling less overwhelmed. Instead of having a huge list of tasks, I have only the next few steps. This keeps my goals small and as they say, the thousand mile journey begins with a single step.

Good luck to all of you who are struggling to bring your ideas to life.

-zot

Popularity: 12%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

As I currently run a one man business with no revenue, this is a slightly ludicrous post, but the typical list is a little boring and repetitive. Instead of just repeating that, I’m using decision making errors as the basis for this list of strategies:

1. Be Nimble. Decision making takes time. The bigger a company, the more time it takes. I’d say the relationship is exponential. If as a single owner a given decision takes you T minutes, then it probably takes a bigger company T^N, where N is the number of people working in management (I would absolutely love to research this. Anyone have any ideas how?). A small business can utilize decision making techniques to make smart decisions quickly.
2. Act Obliquely. Capitalize on the confirmation and status quo biases to strike in their blind spots. If a big company is a market leader, their success leads them to overestimate their own importance. Utilize their position as the status quo to position your own company as the alternative.
3. Be Different. Big companies fall prey to risk aversion and conformity. They can’t innovate well because innovation requires risk. Since big companies reward based on success rather than creativity, employees are only motivated to take tried and true approaches. As a small company you can quickly try out new tactics and can them if they don’t work. Don’t be afraid to take risks.
4. Sweat The Small Things. Because big companies have lots of resources, they are referencing a much larger budget when they look at small losses or excesses. As a result they tend to ignore the small costs. As a small business, you feel each penny more acutely and can minimize costs much more effectively.
5. Be Realistic. While excessive optimism is almost necessary for an entrepreneur, don’t let it cloud your judgment. Conversely, Let the self-confidence of the big business lead them down roads that you know won’t work.
6. Use Metaphor. Since much of human thought occurs as metaphor, develop metaphors for your business and your competitors and use those metaphors when communicating with customers and business contacts. Describing big business as a ‘lumbering bull’ while your own business is a ‘cheetah’ is an obvious one, but what other clever metaphors can you come up with?
7. Keep Lean and Specify Your Targets. The endowment effect is when people value things they own more than they would if they didn’t own them. Keep lean by resisting that temptation and exploit the endowment effect in big companies by determining what is valuable and target it (hint: it’s probably not what the big companies are targeting).
8. Cut Sunk Costs. Evaluate opportunities from the point of view of what they will earn in the future. Explicitly remove previous time and money spent on a project from it’s valuation. Big companies will have the same tendency to do this as you will, but you can cut things more quickly and easily.
9. Capitalize on the If-Then Fallacy. People don’t check that an if statement is followed by an appropriate then statement. Use this to create intuitive arguments in favor of your business by beginning with if statements that everyone will accept. Be careful not to abuse this though. Lying or manipulating will backfire, but phrasing can be very positive.

Just for reference, here’s the list you’d usually find:

1. Find a Niche.
2. Focus on Customer Service.
3. Develop Long Term Customer Relationships.
4. Increase Employee Retention.
5. Pursue Professional Excellence.

Not bad suggestions, just a little limited. There are a lot of ways to compete. What strategies do you use?

Popularity: 16%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Social networks are extremely important, not just in keeping us connected with people and encouraging communication and interaction, but for influencing what kinds of decisions we make.

So far we’ve talked in terms of personal decisions, but the influence of the people you spend time with are a huge factor in everything from deciding what to do with your life to which car to buy.

The Situationist has an article describing recent research that found a tremendously strong link between social networks and obesity. From the perspective of social networks, obesity, much like drug use and memes in general, spreads like a disease through groups of people.

Be careful who your friends are

This isn’t really a new idea. We’ve known for quite a while that who you spend time with affects how you turn up. Especially growing up, your peer group has a stronger effect on who you are than your parents.

There are a million different methods for breaking bad habits, all focused on changing how you should behave. But these methods neglect the importance of your social group.

Entrepreneurs

Why is Silicon Valley such a strong attraction for startups? The costs are huge and it’s packed with a bunch of people at least some of which are probably trying to do the exact same thing you are.

There is benefit in terms of access to venture capitalists and skilled workers, but the real benefit seems like the simple fact that you are surrounded by people all trying to start a company. Everyone talks about it all the time, and it encourages you to think and work even harder on your own idea.

Obesity

The same is true for obesity. No matter how many diets or motivational techniques you use, if you are eating meals with friends and family that want big portions of bad food, you will have a really hard time saying no yourself.

I’ve noticed that this is particularly true in relationships. There is something special about sharing an indulgence with the person you love. If normally you never consider ice cream, you might walk by an ice cream store with your partner and think about the two of you eating ice cream together and laughing in the sun…and it’s all over.

So what is to be done?

Change who you spend time with

What do you think of when you look at the people you spend time with? What bad habits do they have that you are trying to avoid? What good habits do they have that you value?

Try to find some people who you admire and want to learn from. These are the people you should be spending time with.

It is very hard to consciously change your social group, especially for negative reasons. Still, changing your friends can have a very real impact on your ability to make changes in yourself. There are at least two ways to make things a little easier:

• Make incremental changes. If you have weight problems don’t start spending all your time with marathon runners. This will probably just demoralize you. Instead, find people who are more active than you, but perhaps not fitness nuts. As you progress, you can move to a new and even better group.
• Don’t actively reject old friends. In fact, they may accompany you as you move to a different lifestyle. Instead, focus on the people you admire and want to spend time with. As you spend more and more time with these people, you will spend less with your old group, but important people from your old group will maintain contact.

It may seem harsh to suggest getting rid of social groups, but in a very real way the people you spend time with are either encouraging you to be better or holding you back. And if they are holding you back, how much is the relationship really worth?

-zot.

Popularity: 9%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This post is a bit of a tangent from decision making, but it has relevance:

I haven’t registered my business, don’t have a working prototype, and have no idea whether what I’m trying to do is a good idea, but I already see three mistakes I’ve made while starting my business:

1. Waiting to long. It has taken me at least four years start implementing some of my business ideas. Why did I wait so long? Mainly because of…
2. Too much planning. Even though I mostly agree that plans are useless, I still plan too much. It’s perversely fun to sit there with a business plan and write out what you are going to do. But it’s even more fun to actually do it. How many business plans have I written only to lose interest because I wasn’t making any progress (hint: it’s more than 3)? This just makes it worse because I…
3. Haven’t quit my day job. To be honest, I am still making this mistake. But my day job is really pretty good and I’m don’t actually have a product to launch yet. Still, I wonder how much I’m sacrificing?

I’m sure I’ll have many more to report soon enough.

However, I’ve also done at least three things right:

1. Read entrepreneur’s writing. Not only does it help to get me motivated, it stimulates ideas and solutions to problems.
2. Starting The Decision Strategist. This blog is only obliquely related to what I’m trying to do, it gets me thinking, forces me to put in some time, and ensures that the idea is always at the forefront of my mind. I was worried that writing would take time away from programming, but I think it is actually motivating me to work more.
3. Pursued funding. Not that I have received any, but the need to have a working prototype to present to potential investors, and having a deadline for that presentation, has really forced me to work on something that I might not have otherwise.

In short, everything that I’ve done that has committed me to getting something done has been helpful, even if it added more work, but everything I’ve done to give myself more time or provide a cushion has hindered my progress.

Paul Graham says to do the hard things first. It keeps you interested and ensures that you get something done. I think he’s right, but in the beginning everything is hard, and the most helpful thing I’ve done is make commitments to my business so that I have to get things done (and I don’t mean promises to myself, I mean commitments that other people are aware of).

Most of us have a dream we’ve been talking about doing but haven’t ever done. In the decision on whether or not to start on it today, it’s almost always easier to do it tomorrow. Commitments shift that balance so that you come home wanting to make it happen every day. It works for quitting bad habits, Alcoholics Anonymous, dieting, and other things that our long-term self wants that our short-term self isn’t as interested in.

-zot

Popularity: 8%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.