What's stopping you from getting things done?
And he declared "put it on the blockchain!!"
The one week break from sessions felt like a lifetime. It was strange not seeing the students last weekend, especially given how fast and intense the first 4 weeks have been!
Getting Stuff Done
How often do you spend time dreading a task or trying something new? I know for me, it's more often than I like to admit. Sometimes it's due to fear or lack of courage, other times it's a lack of motivation. And sometimes, I just don't know where to start. These challenges aren't unique to you or me, we all face them to some degree. What matters is how you choose to overcome those hurdles, if at all.
Our mindset of the week was Bias for Action.
I like to think about this as getting shit done. Are you the type of person who sits around planning and thinking or someone who gets things done? What separates these two people is those who have done things got started. They've taken the first step. That’s it.
If you have a bias for action, you're doing things. You aren't researching and waiting for perfect information; it doesn't exist! This isn't to say you're impatient and rushing into things, but you understand that action produces information. In his podcast interview with Invest Like the Best, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, "It doesn't even matter what you do as long as you do something, because that's my other favourite quote, is 'action produces information.'1
A helpful heuristic when thinking about decisions is to ask yourself is this decision reversible? This helps you gauge how much time you should spend deliberating a decision. This technique comes from Amazon's Day One culture.
Another tool we use at Amazon to assist in making high-quality, high velocity decisions is a mental model we call one-way and two-way doors. A one-way door decision is one that has significant and often irrevocable consequences—building a fulfillment or data center is an example of a decision that requires a lot of capital expenditure, planning, resources, and thus requires deep and careful analysis. A two-way door decision, on the other hand, is one that has limited and reversible consequences: A/B testing a feature on a site detail page or a mobile app is a basic but elegant example of a reversible decision.
When you step back and look at the decisions you make, you may find that the most of them are two-way door decisions. When we see a two-way door decision, and have enough evidence and reason to believe it could provide a benefit for customers, we simply walk through it. You want to encourage your leaders and employees to act with only about 70% of the data they wish they had—waiting for 90% or more means you are likely moving too slow. And with the ability to easily reverse two-way door decisions, you lower the cost of failure and are able to learn valuable lessons that you can apply in your next innovation.
Here's the tricky part though: we can all read this and intuitively get it. Of course. People who start things, do things. Yeah yeah Steven, water is wet. But if we know this, why aren't more of us taking action?
As students discussed in the session this past weekend, there are a lot of reasons. Fear, indecision, inertia. One of the biggest insights I've had in my life is that it's one thing to understand something yet it's another to truly know it. As I quoted from Derek Sivers last week, “If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
Instead, we need to trick our brain into getting started. It's not enough to know that action produces information and that motivation follows action if we can never take action. Instead we want to do a headfake on our brain. There's been hundreds of books written about motivation so I won't try to summarize those. Instead I'll share three tactics that were shared by students in our session:
The 2-minute rule: Only commit to doing something for two minutes. Often this lower of the action threshold will help you actually get started. Write for two minutes? Yeah I can do that. Run for two minutes? Easy! Most of the time you'll end up doing far more than two minutes of that activity, but if not, you still got two minutes in. That's a start and gives you somewhere to build from. And that brings us to our next one.
30% > 0%: We tend to think in absolutes: right or wrong, left or right, complete or incomplete. But there's 99%+ of progress between 0 and 100. And when you start, even for two minutes, you're making progress. 30% > 0% says that while you might not fully finish the thing, that's okay. You've made progress. This is another great way to lower the bar for action.
3-2-1: This last one has a bit more to do with courage, a topic for next week, but is equally relevant for today's mindset. We often require courage to get started on something new. By counting down from 3-2-1, you trick yourself into thinking you have to do it. It still requires action, but you're ceding control from yourself and when you want to start, to the clock. I used this one to get out of my warm bed this morning 😂.
The best trick though is the one that applies to almost every other skill. Imagine you are someone with a bias for action. What would you do? Great, now do that thing.
I’ve got a secret for you: a bias for action is the spark to the jet fuel that is a Figure It Out mindset. If you combine the two, you’re unstoppable. I have full confidence you’ll be able to figure it out.
Tech of the Week: Blockchain
Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs. You've probably heard these buzzwords before. You might have even heard of the blockchain, but these things are all different. And what you might not know is the potential blockchain has to transform industries.
But before I get into that, I want to talk about the session. Instead of just talking about blockchain, students rolled up their sleeves and got to work building 🛠. We can't just talk about Bias for Action and then not actually do something!
Over the course of an hour, students were tasked with creating their own NFT on OpenSea. That is pretty much how much direction they got, and in pairs they needed to #FigureItOut. As an added challenge they had the opportunity to create their own ERC20 tokens. This one was much more challenging and required a bigger flex of their FIO muscles.
It was fun to see the amount of progress students were able to make, often surprising themselves. I especially liked the NFTs that were created using AI-art services like DallE2 or StableDiffusion, building upon some of the things we talked about in Session 4. None of them were able to predict that this is something we would do or that it would have even been possible without much more knowledge. Many were excited and curious enough to try to finish after the session was over.
There are so many things we want to do that we build up in our heads as impossible, but just by getting started we start to see what it's going to take and start to build that motivation to see it through to completion.
Following the activities, students researched and discussed how blockchain will impact the future in industries like travel, healthcare, cybersecurity, and real estate. There's more to blockchain than just cryptocurrency and the technology is just getting started. If you’re curious, here are a few interesting companies:
RoofStock allows people to buy and sell real estate in a web3 manner. Ownership is established, tracked, and traded on the blockchain along with blockchain-based financing available. This house just closed last weekend.
Nori is bringing transparency to the carbon removal market by minting verified carbon removal certificates as NFTs. This allows companies to easily track and transparently share their carbon removal.
Chronicled started as a way to track pharmaceuticals through the blockchain, but has since evolved to create a shared network among all players along the supply chain. This can help automate pricing, regulatory requirements, and contracts through the use of smart contracts.
Within just an hour students were able to create their own NFTs and list them and even get started building their own tokens.
What's something you've been waiting to do and how can you take action today, even in the smallest way?
✌🏼
PS: I wrote this email during a new weekly coworking session I host with some of my TKS students.
Read more about how action produces information in this great post by my friend Cedric