A Technique for Making Better Decisions

What’s up, all you beautiful people? We are in Austin, Texas, speaking at one of my very good friend Josh Ruzin’s mastermind event here with some incredible people getting into multifamily investing. Yesterday I spoke on a couple different topics, and I want to share with you one of the questions that came up in that presentation, which I thought was really interesting, and I think it’s something a lot of people get confused about. So we’re specifically talking about improving our abilities as a decision maker, how that’s one of the most important skills as an entrepreneur, as an investor. Quality of your thoughts dictate the quality of your decisions, which when applied with leverage, can have massive outsized potential impact. And so we want to be continually improving our capacity for making good decisions. And so I shared a couple of tips, a couple of ideas that go into this idea of how do we improve at this thing. And what’s so interesting about decision making is that each of us makes 10,000 or so, 70,000, I think, is what they report. 70,000 decisions in a single day.

That’s a lot of decisions. But despite the fact that we make so many decisions in a day, we’re not necessarily getting any better at the act of making a big decision. Our judgment isn’t necessarily improving, despite the sheer quantity of repetitions we’re putting in. The way that I think about. This is similar to typing. If you think about the fact that you probably have been typing for the last decade on a keyboard, right? If you think about how fast of a typist you were at the very beginning, you were probably a little bit of a chickenpecker, and then maybe you learned some techniques, you improved, and you had this rapid improvement curve, and then you hit the certain plateau, most likely this upper limit, to what your technique and the practice that you put in could yield results. And since that time, you have probably not gotten any faster as a typist or any more accurate as a typist. Just think about this like, are you better at typing on a keyboard today than you were yesterday or last week, or last month or last year? Probably not, despite the fact that you put in so many more reps.

So why is that? Well, it’s because reps alone isn’t enough. That’s not how we improve at something. The way that you improve is that you do the thing, you reflect on it, then you iterate on it. And that’s the key. If we just keep doing repetitions, we’re not necessarily going to improve. And the question that this gentleman had was, well, what about muscle memory? We do a thing, we get better at that. So does that kind of fly in the face of this idea that repetitions alone isn’t going to work? And the idea is simple is that whatever technique you adopt, let’s say you’re learning how to play basketball as a kid and you have a foundationally inferior technical shot. It’s not technically sound.

Well, even with that technically unsound shot, you can still put the ball in the hoop. It’s not impossible. We know plenty of people, myself included. We don’t have technically sound golf swings or tennis swings or basketball strokes, right? But we can still do the thing. And so the repetitions make us better at doing the thing in the way that we’re doing it, but it’s an inferior way. So let’s say I only put the ball in the hole 30% of the time with my inferior technique, I can improve. I can improve that inferior technique, and maybe I now putting the ball in the hole 40% of the time. However, if I had a technically sound jump shot, maybe I could put the ball in the hole 60% of the time, right? Maybe I’m pushing up against the upper limit of what my foundationally insecure technique can yield.

And that’s the important thing here, is that practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent. And so if you want to improve at anything in life, whether that’s your ability to make decisions or get better at a skill like copywriting or public speaking, it’s not enough just to do the thing over and over and over and over again. We must do the thing, then reflect on the results of that thing, and then iterate on it, come up with a new hypothesis and say, okay, if I do it this way next time, if I make this tweak, it will yield a better result. It’s only through that iterative process that we actually improve. And so don’t just take it for granted that if I just do the thing a lot, I’m going to get better. You will get better at doing it in that inferior way, but that might not be the optimal way long term. So I wanted to share that with you because I think it’s something that is very easy to overlook as we’re on our journeys. We just start putting in the reps mindlessly.

I think mindless reps are the absolute worst types of reps. Intention is the key component here. If you actually want to improve at something, if you want to get better at it, you must express intention. So that’s going to do for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you. We’ll see you hopefully back when we get to Minnesota. But if I don’t see you until then, stay hyper focused.