I just listened to this great podcast episode with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of Hubspot. In it, he talks about how to know how much time to devote to a decision or action.
One of the mistakes people make around decisions, and Amazon has written about this, I’ll give you my take on it, is that the calories you spend on a decision should be proportional to the consequences of that decision, pure and simple. He calls them one-way doors versus two-way doors, which is a binary heuristic, which is, I love the elegance and simplicity of that. I’m taking it one level further, which is, it literally should be proportional. It’s like, okay, if you have a really, really big decision that’s going to be expensive to change, really, really, but a lot of calories making that decision, you may still get it wrong, but it’s worth it. And it’s not just around decisions, around activities and bets and things that you’re going to do is that the calories you spend should be proportional to the outcomes and what you’re seeking and the value of it.
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