Kevin Yien: commitment

Transcript context

…It's an amazing story. You doing this explains why you've been so successful. I could see how this all connects now. I think for a lot of people, they would want to build this habit. Clearly there's a lot of value here, but they just don't because they got a lot of other things going on or it's just like this new thing they have to start doing. Is there anything that helped you adopt this practice of this daily log/decision log that you think might be helpful to folks to motivate them to give this a shot? This is probably just general advice on building any habit, which is start small and just force yourself to do it. And there's that old saying around, how do you start running as a hobby? You don't do it by saying, "I'm going to run a mile every day. " You do it by putting your sneakers at the foot of your bed unless you take your shoes off inside, then you put it at the front door, you have your shorts ready to go and you're like, "I commit to putting on my shorts. And if I decide after getting dressed to go run, that I still don't want to go run. Okay, fine." But you build up to that thing. I think decision logs are the lightest weight thing possible. And so you can start super easy by saying, "You know what? Every Sunday morning I'm going to scroll through Twitter, I'm going to check out Hacker News, whatever it is, I'm going to see something interesting and I'm going to make a bet. I'm going to place my decision on this thing." Write it down, and then set a calendar invite in X weeks, X months to see what plays out. And that's all it is, right? 10 minutes once a week, super easy. And then over time you can crank it up. And then eventually you're just constantly writing these decisions down and then it's like feeding its way back into you. It becomes second nature. And you're touching on something that there's been a little bit of talk on this podcast and newsletter post about this idea of to get better product sense and product taste and also just decision making this case, one of the best strategies is to simulate other people's decisions and simulate what they're thinking through and predict what they're going to do, which is what you're describing here.…

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