How to Make One Better Decision Each Day
Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring, spoke on campus at Stanford University in 2009. He said that whether you run a dry cleaner or a tech company, if you could just make one better decision each day, you would end up dominating your industry.That sounds right, but how do you do that? Three pointers from great entrepreneurs:
Don’t go for Perfect. You’ll Just Stall. Dan Sullivan, founder of the Strategic Coach Program, says perfection and procrastination are two sides of the same coin. His solution? Go for 80%. Other than brain surgery and nuclear weapons, 80% is great for your first effort, and when your second effort takes on the remaining 20% of the challenge using the same 80% idea, you are now at 96% of your ultimate goal.
No Decision is Final. Jim Camp, author of Start With No, points out that every decision you make will lead to another decision, and another. When you realize this, it is easier to make the first decision today.
See Your Decisions as Experiments, Not Personal Indictments. What I love about interviewing incredible entrepreneurs like Dick Costolo, now CEO of Twitter, is their ability to view decisions dispassionately. Dick tells entrepreneurs in How They Did It that when he built Feedburner (since sold to Google), their business model was like going to the doctor. “Better like this or like this? A or B? B or C? Oh, C’s doing better than B. Let’s do more C.” Dick tinkers with decisions, constantly working to improve rather than judging himself by occasional setbacks.
Back to you – you have a decision to make today, don’t you? What’s it gonna be?
**Robert Jordan is a Forbes.com contributor. View the original posting of this article on Forbes.com.