Weekly Drop(💧) #1

Hi friends,

Welcome to my weekly drop #1. My goal with this is to share summary of the things I learned through books, podcasts or learning from conversations I hope to have with some of you.
I still do not have a format decided and would appreciate to hear your thoughts on what you would like to see here.

Let’s do this. 🚀

Stop trying to finish stuff

I wrote my first post of this newsletter on Wednesday. In the post I share my perspective on why trying to finish stuff is not good for us and what is a better forward.
You can read it here

What I was reading : Thinking In Bets

After reading this book, the last thing I expected was to have a huge interest In learning how to play poker. I will try to look for as many resources as possible to learn to play and figure out ways to put some trip wires in place to prevent me from going to deep on this and start gambling 😅.

Poker and gambling aside, this book has a lot of insights and actionable feedback on how you can become a better thinker and decision maker.
Here are a few take aways that I found interesting and straight forward enough to apply right away:

1. Learn the difference between outcomes that originated from your own skill vs luck
   Not everything that happens to us is a direct result from our actions. Sometimes we are just lucky to be at the right place and the right time. When I look back at my own career so far, I can think about things that pointed me in the right direction but I cannot attribute my outcomes to one specific thing.

2. Best Outcomes ≠ Best decisions
   Understand that: Just because you made a good decision it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to have the best result.

3. Learn to not ignore the least probable outcomes
   We think that Best decisions = Best outcomes because we are biased to consider only the extremities of the possible outcomes spectrum. It is correct or wrong, it will happen or it will not.
   
   An actionable way to change this thinking is to choose a range and pick a value on that range when talking about a decision or a bet.
   
   Eg: If you pick a range from 1 to 10 or 0 to a 100%. Change your way of talking about things from: “I am sure it will rain heavily this afternoon” to saying things like: “I think that there is a 60% chance of heavy rains this afternoon”.
   
   This is a more realistic way of modelling reality and it saves you from feeling bad when things you claimed to be so sure would happen do not end up happening at all.

4. Practice Backcasting and pre-mortem
   Armed with the knowledge of the different possible outcomes you can:

   • Learn to do backcasting: Start with the most desirable outcome and think back about the things you can do to maximize the possibility of it happening.

   • Learn to do pre mortem: A pre mortem is like back casting but instead of starting with the desirable outcome you start with the least desirable ones. Think about things that could go wrong and what you can do about them. This exercise will help you be a bit easier on yourself and don’t blame others when thing do not go well. If you tried your best and all you could, there is no point in blaming others.

There are other interesting things on this book and I totally encourage you to check it out if you would like to learn more about the topic of making better decisions.

Interesting sentence: “Duct tape is everywhere, you just don’t see it”

I came across this sentence while reading a book and I can’t stop thinking about it.

It is a simple concept that the more you think about, the more it blows your mind.

Once start trying to see things with these lens, two things will happen:
1. You will realize that things are less complex than what they appear to be from the outside.
2. Knowing that things are simple, you will realize that those are things that you can do too.

Think about the food delivery services. Doordash and Uber eats are probably the ones that come to your mind. While these two are public companies with very sophisticated systems now, they were not always like this and they too duct-taped themselves all the way up to the top.

In the beginning they were pretty bare bones with:

1. A place to let users contact them (Flyer with phone number or a simple webform.).

2. A place to keep track of all the orders(A spreadsheet).

3. Manually calling all the restaurants to make orders.

4. Drive around to pick up the orders and deliver to the customers.

From the customer perspective, all they see is a place to ask what they want, receive and pay for their meals a few minutes later.

From the company perspective, specially on the early days there is a lot of duct tape used to connect the different parts required to provide a seamless service experience.

In this example, the duct tape could be how these founders made the orders and paid for them calling each restaurant one by one and paying for the meals with their own cash before delivering the food.

If you have tried to cover a pipe hole with a duct tape before, you will remember that it only worked up to some point but at least it gave you some time to evaluate the problem and think of an appropriate solution.

It is the same thing for this example. It probably only worked for the first 100 customers but it allowed them to validate if they were solving the right problem and gain valuable information of how to solve the problem for the next 1000 customers.

I focused on the food delivery service example but I recommend you think about what ever business you admire and care about. Think where they have or had duct tapes in the past that allowed them to get where they are.

Lastly, try to look at the things you are working on through these lens too. What are the things you can duct tape together to solve a problem of the people you care about in the next few hours?

Always remember, most of the people you are working for will not notice or even care about these duct tapes as long as you help them solve what ever the problem they have.

Treat of the week

Looking to blow some steam off or simply have a good time with your friends/team?
Try out https://backyard.co/ and create a virtual game session. My team at Shopify decided to try it out for our weekly water cooler and I loved it.
So far, my favourite game is Doodle. The goal of the game is to guess the word of the thing the person is doodling.

That’s it for now.

Once again thank you for your attention ❤️

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If you found this interesting and worth sharing with a friend why no do it ?