Kevin Yien: evaluation

Transcript context

…Hearing you describe this, it feels like, "Obviously yes, why aren't we doing this? How else can we get better if we're not reflecting back on the decisions we've made? And realizing, "Hey, I made a bunch of bad decisions, but I'm always so confident in my decision still, maybe shouldn't be. So I guess first of all, do you actually do this? How often do you do this? And is there an example of you learning something from your own decision log? Many. And many of them because it was a wrong decision. But yes, I do keep a decision log. I have a separate sort of practice where it's just a daily log, which is everyone wants the perfect note-taking system. To me, the best note-taking system is inspired by... What is it called? big ass text file, BATF. There's a funny blog post from 2001 on it, but it's just, you write everything that happens to you in a day in a bolded list and it's all in one big note. That way you can command F it, do whatever you want. The way that I keep track of it is I do a little hashtag decision and then write things down just as I think about them. And then I'll have a reminder to comb back through on some cadence. And so I'll first use a positive example, which is a funny one. So if you rewind to, I don't even know what year, but Shopify had just launched Shop app, their consumer application for what started as tracking your order when you bought something from a Shopify customer and then it's evolved into a full-blown Amazon competitor, where you can actually find merchants and buy things through it. When they first launched it though, I was like, "Oh my God, this is so brilliant. They have completely hijacked this specific loop for consumer buying behavior via this very unassuming thing, which is package tracking." And so that morning I was like, "Whatever, I'm going to quickly draw a diagram of this flywheel that I think Amazon owns today. I'm going to show how Shopify is slowly planting their little seed to take over this and how Shop app fits into it." I tweeted out. And then I don't know, that day there must have been 60 Shopify employees that followed me. I was like, "What the hell is this guy talking about?" And so funny enough, fast-forward, I've talked to some of the folks that worked on it and they're like, "Yeah, nailed it. Here's what we were thinking. Here's why." It's no longer secret sauce. But that was a really interesting example of both doing a decision log, putting my rationale down on paper. In this case, broadcasting it out, but then having that be a mechanism for it making its way back to me to actually better understand why did they make the decision versus what I thought, because the reasons were a little bit different, but the outcome was the same. So that's one interesting example. 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?…

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