Guy Reams (00:01.166)
Today is day 192, long delays are never clever. So one of my favorite, I have lots of favorite Sun Tzu quotes. So if you don't know Sun Tzu, there's a book out that was attributed to him called The Art of War. And this book is very Machiavellian in its approach, like this is how you win war. But you can compare war to,
life. Because honestly, trying to get what you want out of life can sometimes be viewed as a battle. Because you really are battling forces, right? Like if I just want to live a life that I want, my dreams and desires, you're really battling with what other people want as well. So, or if you're in business, you're trying to grow sales or whatever, you're in a constant state of battle with your competitors.
That sort of thing. Now, I know some will look at this as a negative thing. Like you don't want to consider this war, but if you look at it from that perspective, then the Sun Tzu art of war principles can be really powerful and impactful. One of them was, and this one's really rather deep. It was, you know, though that we, here's what it says, though we have heard of stupid haste and war,
cleverness has never been associated with long delays. So the idea is that sometimes in war, generals will make really stupid decisions and they'll make big mistakes and everybody will point to that and say, how could that guy be so stupid? Yet, they would never call somebody who takes an extremely long delay clever for taking the delay. And time and time again, you'll see this both in sports and in life.
Watch a sporting event where a coach makes a stupid split second decision. People will call them stupid. But wait till you see a coach that takes forever to make a decision. You'll never see a coach that takes a long time in their decision making process make it to a high level in a coach. As we've discovered, making fast decisions is far more important.
Guy Reams (02:27.374)
than prolonging the decision making process. I've learned this over time. When I was a young man, I felt like I had to make every decision perfect. Two out of two. For every two decisions I made, I wanted about 100%. But as I've gotten older, I would rather make six out of 10 good decisions. So even though four of them would be mistakes, six of them would be good. So no matter how you stretch it, six is always going to be better than two.
So as I've gotten older, I've learned, make decisions quickly. Do not let something prolong out. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't make, you shouldn't carefully consider things before you make a decision, but you definitely wanna shortcut the time it takes for you to make that decision. If you're prolonging decisions simply out of indecisiveness or fear of failure, that's the problem. Nobody will ever call you,
a good name for being one of those people that delay out a process. In fact,
Time and time again, people have forgiven me for making a mistake, but they would never forgive me for being one that prolongs or delays. People that hold up the process because of indecisiveness are always looked at worse than those who make decisive decisions. In fact, I've read some books on battlefield tactics.
and soldiers in a battle always trust the lieutenant or the platoon leader or whatever that makes fast decisions. They tend to trust that person more than the person is completely indecisive. So excessive hand wringing does not look good. In fact, it doesn't even, it doesn't play well and it doesn't look good. Rapid decision making always looks good and exudes confidence, right?
Guy Reams (04:28.558)
So I would rather err on the side of making mistakes than on the side of caution. So whoever made that phrase err on the side of caution, not a good idea. Err on the side of mistakes. Because I would rather have a string of decent decisions than having one really good decision. Because...
We learn from our mistakes, we grow, and we get through things faster when we're making quick decisions. We think that by being precise and taking our time to weigh all the variables will produce better results. But in reality, you end up producing fewer results because you just can't get through things fast enough. Throughout my career, I've seen countless people spend way too much time building the perfect mousetrap,
only to find that people moved on and that mousetrap is no longer needed when they're done. This happens all the time when people are engineering the perfect operation and nobody's able to actually use it because by the time they're done, the business has already moved on from there. I think I would rather be labeled as a person making a stupid mistake than to be characterized as a person that cannot get things done. Winners make mistakes.
losers never make enough mistake, never make enough decisions to make a mistake. So instead of standing around hoping and waiting for the perfect solution, perhaps you should just go ahead and jump in. And I think that's really the lesson behind this thing of Sun Tzu. The battlefield commander that makes decisions quick and decisively will always outperform
battlefield commander that takes forever to make a decision.