On Retardmaxxing

CLI

[Retardmaxxing; Break up with Whoever you need to; Collect Information; Have Faith in Yourself to Deal with the Consequences; Ripping Asymmetry; Tail Risk & One Way Doors; If]

Thesis: You've already made your next hard decision, you just haven't taken the action yet.

[Retardmaxxing]

Chances are, there is some 'big decision' you need to make right now.

Chances are, you're thoughtfully analyzing it, talking about it with trusted people, and really trying to get it right.

Chances are, you already know what decision you need to make.

Chances are, you're just mentally masturbating over it and delaying actually making it far longer than you need to.

To get the outcome you want in life, hard work is very important. Call me old school, but I believe it is necessary.

At the same time, though, it's also necessary to make some particular hard decisions. Even if you are working like an absolute animal, not making these decisions will be massive roadblocks to getting what you want.

And making them, even if your choice is imperfect, will let you move further and faster than you ever have before.

Enter Retardmaxxing, an oft repeated phrase in startup circles and probably elsewhere now, too (but I wouldn't know).

It's a call to stop over thinking and start doing. It’s a call to make the decision that you know you have to.

Yes, there will be consequences. Some will be good, some will be bad. But you're already enduring consequences by wasting your life trying to make up your mind.

[Break up with Whoever you need to]

By the end of college, one of the hardest decision I ever made was parting ways with a business partner of 4 years.

Really, though, it was a decision I could've made sooner. My first reservations in the relationship came up 28 months before we ended it.

This is an obscene amount of time to spend making a decision, especially one that is so important.*

12 months before it was over, my reservations became very strong. Then, I did the right thing and started collecting the information I would need to make a decision.

After 2 months, I’m sure I had enough info to make the right decision. Regardless, I spent another 10 months over analyzing it, talking to people about it, going back and forth on it, and generally being half in and half out.

Those 10 months were so much worse than the moment in which I finally firmly asserted myself and the outcome I was going to get. And they were made much worse by a few attempts in which I was goaded out of the decision I had already told myself I was committed to.

If I didn’t have that one moment of acting with absolute decisiveness, every day that passed would’ve been far worse than that instant.

To be clear, I don't look back and actively regret the time this all took; the experience has made me a lot more decisive today. When I had a similar situation not long after, it took only 3 months between being fairly certain there was a problem, collecting information, and acting decisively to initiate the end.

Still a lot of time, but a massive improvement.

Now, my time scale for similar decisions about all sorts of relationships and hard decisions, depending on the severity and complexity, are more often at the scale of weeks or days, not months. And, in some cases, the time between resolving to take action and actually taking that action has been as short as a couple of hours.

To some extent, I'm sure I'm a better decision maker. But, way more important than that, I've accepted the fact that I will make mistakes, there will be consequences, but I will be okay.

_{*It may sound counter intuitive; while the important decisions should be made thoughtfully, they should also be made quickly, because they are often the ones blocking the outcome you want. That’s why they’re important!}

[Collect Information]

I would be willing to bet that you already have enough information to make your decision, and you're just not making it.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that you're missing something.

If that's the case, then go collect whatever missing information you need to make the decision, ASAP.

When Jack & I were trying to sell a software product to retail investors, we weren't sure if we were going in the right direction, but it felt very wrong. Still, we weren't sure.

So Jack did something very simple to solve it. He called our best users and tried to get them to pay, literally even just $1.

They wouldn't! At the same time, we had a guy venmo us $50 to customize the offering for a sales use case.

If that information doesn't make the decision that needs to be made obvious, I don't know what would!

Still, we were in a bigger organization by startup standards (5 decision makers) and it took nearly a month to jettison the original value prop and move on to the next thing.

Looking back at the opportunity cost, that month of indecision was expensive month!

To be crystal clear, collecting the information needed to make the decision took less than an hour. The rest of the time was nonsense debates and talks of ‘derisking.’

Now, I'd scream at myself, "Derisking what?!" We had no revenue, 1000 free 'users' who weren't paying us and basically didn't use it, and the damn thing was costing money to run and engineering time to maintain!

The easy part was collecting the information needed to make the right decision. The long, drawn out part was actually making the damn decision.

[Have Faith in Yourself to Deal with the Consequences]

Whenever you go to make a 'big' decision, your brain is flooded with thoughts of the consequences. Three classes of big ones are:

1. What if so and so doesn't like it?

2. What if this very unlikely but kind of bad thing happens?

3. What if this good thing happens and we have to deal with it?

The same thing is true about all 3 of these classes of consequences: yes, they might happen, but no, it's not as bad as you think.

The first one is a given; of course somebody won't like your decision! 

No matter what it is, there is a way to criticize it. When I had my second business break up, some people agreed that it was absolutely necessary and encouraged me to do it. On the other hand, others decided that their lawyers wanted to be pen pals with my lawyers and some people won't even talk to me anymore!

Still, I know firmly that I did the right thing. And, I know that there is no situation in which you can make a decision that everyone will agree with, so stop trying.

For the second thing, it's hardly ever as bad or likely as you think. When we doubled BirdDog's price, we thought, "what if win rate goes down and people stop buying from us?" Well, that didn't happen; counter intuitively, it went up! But even if it did go down, oh well… we just could've lowered prices again!

And the last one is actually laughable a lot of the time. You're literally talking yourself out of success. These are what one of my mentors calls calls champagne problems.

"What if someone copies are startup because we tell people about it?"

This happened to us! It's flattering. It means someone thinks we have a good idea. It means the market is taking note. It also means they'll be doing marketing for our concept. And, it means they're a copy cat and damned to stay a few steps behind, or they wouldn't need to copy!

[Ripping Asymmetry]

Our smallest client became our biggest client in 2 week because of one decision.

Jack and I have integrated with a vendor in our space so our data is available in their platform. Nobody was using it, so Jack considered giving them an offer we started giving to some of our bigger clients - reduce the frequency of signals by 15x, and reduce the price by 10x. (Great trade for us)

I had some objections, one was probably in each of the three categories above. Stuff like monthly monitoring isn't as valuable as every other day, what if they don't like it, what if they don't think it's useful.

One of them was even 'what if they scale usage too fast and we can't keep up?'

What kind of dumb fucking objection is that? I was literally saying "What if it goes TOO well?"

We have a unit profitable business. If it goes that well that inherently means we have the money to scale it up.

All businesses that are doing well have growing pains. You pray for it, don't fear it. It’s your job to stay on top of it and add what’s needed to keep up.

And to be clear, we've already made this customer aware of this concern at the start of our engagement; they know our scale and our resources and where we might have to pause adding more usage from them to keep the service stable for our other clients.

Instead of wasting 3 days on this conversation and decision, I threw out all the objections at once in a 15 minute conversation. All Jack had to say, bless his heart, was, "Their customer isn’t using it right now. Real worst case is they still don't use it and give up."

And that's correct. They could've kept on not using it.

But we made the hard, scary decision, and now they're paying us more money than any other client.

[Tail Risk & One Way Doors]

While we're talking about consequences, I need to throw in a note here: if you're introducing a significant probability that something truly bad happens, like you go bankrupt or die or put your loved ones in danger… yeah, you should fucking think about it a bit more.

But that's not what this post is about--this post is about the fact that the vast majority of risk you deal with in the modern world is NOTHING like this kind of risk you're acting like it is.

For some reason, our anxiety levels around the possibility of someone not liking us are the same as what they should be about the possibility of losing an arm. And our anxiety levels about living at our parents’ house for 6 months are what they should be if you're risking marooning your wife and kids in a violent wilderness for 6 years.

Most of the things you are worried about really aren't that deep. Take a deep breath, and stop acting like they are.

And on the other hand, you might think the decision you're about to make is a one way door you can't go back through. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the time, its not. You're not revoking US citizenship; quitting your job doesn't mean you can never get another job ever again.

And when it is a one way door, like walking away from a relationship, if you're really spending this much time debating if you're going to leave, why would you want to stay on that side of the one way door, anyways? Either leave, or change your perception and stop fretting about it. If you do neither, staying will only cause you both pain.

You're letting fear and analysis paralysis stop you from doing what you know you need to do. You can analyze something forever and ever. Or, you can just do it and see what happens.

This is the spirit of Retardmaxxing: take a deep breath and do the thing you really know you need to do. The cost of inaction is so often higher than the cost of being wrong.

I write this every single Sunday with my human fingers, no ai allowed. Topics usually include startups, the ai bubble, critical thinking, and becoming the person you want to be. Subscribe if you want to read more.

[If]

I know, I know, it's so hard to do that thing you know you should do.

I'm going to be sad, though, if while reading this post you resolved to do something and then don't actually do it.

So why don't you just do it now? The faster you do it, the faster you can move on to the next thing.

Making these kinds of decision is a muscle, and having that muscle is a very, very freeing feeling

I’ll leave with some parting one liners:

• If you handle one excuse, then a second, then a third, you’re not handling rational excuses; you just are making excuses.

• “In life, we chose our regrets.” - Christopher Hitchens quoting someone else

• You've already made your next hard decision, you just haven't taken the action yet.

• Literally every line of if by Rudyard Kipling

Live Deeply,