Explicitly Permitting Others to Share Their Honest Opinions and Critical Feedback | All The Hacks
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | So improve the quality of your decisions
00:00:07.520 | as much as possible.
00:00:10.200 | Try to write things down that you're deciding about.
00:00:14.640 | Get other people, trusted advisors,
00:00:18.280 | particularly people who have different points of view
00:00:19.920 | with you are really important.
00:00:22.440 | Here's a really important one.
00:00:23.640 | You have to give permission.
00:00:26.520 | So when we're trying to seek information from other people,
00:00:31.520 | we think that permission is implied
00:00:33.760 | for them to say whatever to us,
00:00:35.560 | but we have to actually offer that permission
00:00:38.780 | and they have to be willing to give it to us.
00:00:40.960 | So I'm sure this has happened to you.
00:00:45.400 | You like fire someone
00:00:47.160 | or you break up with somebody or whatever.
00:00:49.920 | And as soon as you do that,
00:00:52.040 | you have a whole bunch of friends who say,
00:00:54.000 | "Oh, I'm so glad you did that.
00:00:55.240 | I thought you should have done that like six months ago."
00:00:58.400 | Has that one happened to you?
00:01:00.440 | - That one hasn't 'cause my wife and I started dating,
00:01:03.360 | oh gosh, 2004.
00:01:04.440 | So it's been a long time since I've had that conversation.
00:01:08.040 | I'm sure it has, but boy, has it been a while.
00:01:10.200 | - But like, or you fire someone or you quit your job
00:01:13.000 | or whatever. - Yeah, for sure.
00:01:15.440 | - And people say,
00:01:16.280 | "I bet you might've said it to somebody when they break up.
00:01:19.240 | Like, oh, I'm so happy 'cause really,
00:01:21.200 | wish you would've done that sooner."
00:01:23.000 | So this is like a really common thing that happens.
00:01:27.040 | You know, "Oh, I'm so happy you quit your job.
00:01:31.040 | Like, you were so miserable every single day.
00:01:32.800 | I knew you should have done that like a long time ago."
00:01:35.520 | And your thought when people say that to you is,
00:01:38.560 | "Okay, but like, why didn't you tell me?"
00:01:40.600 | And the answer is because
00:01:42.920 | there wasn't any explicit permission given.
00:01:45.880 | So in order to really find out what somebody thinks,
00:01:49.040 | you have to give them permission to say what they think.
00:01:51.920 | - Yeah, I saw this so much in venture capital
00:01:54.240 | that I would be in meetings with other venture investors
00:01:57.400 | and they'd give feedback to founders saying,
00:01:59.200 | "Oh, like, I think it's like pretty good,
00:02:01.760 | but it's not a good fit."
00:02:02.720 | And then after they'd turn to me and be like,
00:02:04.000 | "God, that company's horrible. It's terrible."
00:02:06.160 | I was like, "We should have just told him that."
00:02:08.800 | - That's right.
00:02:09.640 | - And I think everyone feels bad telling them that.
00:02:12.880 | And now every time someone asks me
00:02:14.880 | for feedback on their startup, I'm like,
00:02:16.040 | "How honest do you want me to be?
00:02:17.600 | Like, do you want me to tell you to quit?"
00:02:20.440 | So I guess if you're on the other side,
00:02:21.800 | you can also invite someone to invite you
00:02:25.840 | to be more honest and give critical feedback.
00:02:28.880 | - Yeah, so I actually do that with my friends.
00:02:30.680 | I'm like, "Are we having a conversation
00:02:33.120 | where you want advice
00:02:34.040 | or where you're just offloading, like, your emotion?"
00:02:39.040 | 'Cause I wanna know, right?
00:02:41.160 | Because sometimes they don't really want your advice.
00:02:44.120 | So I think that's really important.
00:02:45.520 | I mean, I think that's just really important.
00:02:47.280 | I think Ron Conway, who founded SV Angel,
00:02:52.280 | is such a good example of doing this really well,
00:02:55.720 | like being a very good decision coach to somebody.
00:02:58.360 | So he would actually tell the companies
00:03:00.480 | what he thought of them.
00:03:02.000 | But he would sit down and he'd basically say like,
00:03:04.920 | "I think we can admit this isn't working."
00:03:07.640 | As opposed to, "Eh, it seems pretty good.
00:03:09.960 | Just keep going."
00:03:13.280 | He'd be like, "Look, it's not working."
00:03:15.520 | And invariably the founders would push back on him
00:03:19.520 | and say, "No, but I know we can turn it around."
00:03:21.240 | So it wasn't so much disagreement that it wasn't working,
00:03:23.240 | 'cause I think everybody knows
00:03:24.280 | when things aren't working very well,
00:03:25.960 | but it was always, "No, but we can turn it around."
00:03:28.200 | So he was trying to coach them into letting go, right?
00:03:33.200 | And founders are gritty by nature.
00:03:36.280 | Of course they don't wanna let go.
00:03:38.040 | So when they said, "No, but I think I can turn it around,"
00:03:41.240 | his tactic was not to disagree with them,
00:03:44.280 | which I think would have just caused a rift,
00:03:46.280 | but to say, "Okay, tell me exactly
00:03:51.240 | what turning it around looks like."
00:03:53.040 | So like, let's think about the next two months, right?
00:03:58.080 | So you're saying you're gonna turn this around.
00:04:00.400 | What exactly does that look like?
00:04:01.880 | And try to figure out what those benchmarks are.
00:04:04.800 | Now he would sit down and do that with the founder
00:04:06.720 | so that the founder now owned that
00:04:09.120 | sort of along with Ron Conway.
00:04:11.280 | And this is a really good trick for decision-making
00:04:13.440 | is that often your decision-making is at its worst
00:04:16.520 | when you're trying to make the decision right then,
00:04:18.600 | like when you're actually facing the decision down.
00:04:20.840 | And this is something that really improves decision quality
00:04:23.080 | is to think in advance.
00:04:24.760 | As much as possible, do advanced planning on your decisions.
00:04:27.400 | It's much more efficient.
00:04:28.640 | It creates much better decisions.
00:04:29.920 | So that's essentially what he's doing in this moment.
00:04:32.240 | He's saying, "Let's think about two months ago,
00:04:34.040 | two months from now, rather.
00:04:35.640 | So we're gonna think about two months from now
00:04:37.800 | or three months from now, the end of the next quarter.
00:04:41.040 | Let's think about what this is gonna look like
00:04:42.800 | when you've turned it around."
00:04:44.120 | And then basically just set a set of benchmarks.
00:04:47.680 | And then in three months, you can sit down with them
00:04:49.880 | and say, "But you haven't hit them."
00:04:52.520 | And we agreed that that's what it looked like.
00:04:54.160 | And that actually makes those decisions a lot cleaner.
00:04:57.120 | And you can do that
00:04:58.440 | with your personal decisions as well, right?
00:05:00.400 | Like if you ever, we're all in these situations
00:05:02.440 | like you have a relationship where it's not,
00:05:04.960 | it's just not going well,
00:05:06.520 | but you feel like you can turn it around.
00:05:08.360 | You feel like you have so much time invested
00:05:10.280 | and you do love the person, but you're like unhappy,
00:05:12.760 | but you know, you can make it change.
00:05:15.760 | There's kind of two things to do is not,
00:05:18.400 | don't face the decision down right then, figure out,
00:05:21.520 | but what does change look like?
00:05:23.120 | So at that moment, say,
00:05:26.560 | "How long am I willing to tolerate the status quo,
00:05:30.000 | the way that the relationship is right now or worse?
00:05:34.200 | What do I need to do, do I think,
00:05:36.280 | in order to turn this around?"
00:05:37.720 | And then however long that is
00:05:39.520 | that you're willing to tolerate the status quo,
00:05:41.920 | figure out at the end of that time period,
00:05:44.240 | say it's six months,
00:05:45.520 | what does change look like?
00:05:47.360 | What will it look like
00:05:49.480 | when things have actually turned around here?
00:05:51.840 | You can do this for a job, right?
00:05:53.920 | A job that you're miserable in.
00:05:55.240 | What do I need to do?
00:05:56.160 | What will it look like that it's actually turned around?
00:05:58.200 | What will have changed?
00:05:59.720 | And the reason that you need to do that
00:06:01.520 | is because when you're actually facing down the decision,
00:06:04.400 | that's when you're most likely
00:06:05.640 | to be rationalizing things away.
00:06:07.600 | That's when your forecasts are gonna be really inaccurate.
00:06:10.680 | That's when the things that you want to be true of the world
00:06:14.280 | are going to influence your actions the most.
00:06:17.920 | It's when everything kind of goes to crap.
00:06:21.400 | And the way that I try to sort of put it to people
00:06:23.560 | to get them to understand this
00:06:24.680 | is that you can say all you want
00:06:26.720 | that you don't wanna eat sugar,
00:06:27.800 | but when there's a cupcake right in front of you,
00:06:29.600 | it's really hard to say no.
00:06:31.640 | And that's true, not just of like cupcakes or pizza
00:06:34.280 | or whatever that are sitting right in front of you.
00:06:37.600 | It's also true like when you're facing a breakup
00:06:41.840 | or you're facing having to fire an employee, which isn't fun,
00:06:46.600 | or you're facing wanting to quit your job, right?
00:06:51.160 | Or break up with a friend or whatever.
00:06:54.480 | These things are very hard to do
00:06:56.240 | because it's that moment where we're worried
00:06:58.360 | about all the time we've put into something,
00:07:00.120 | whether it's that moment where you go from
00:07:03.800 | in a state of failing to having failed.
00:07:07.560 | Because as long as you keep going,
00:07:09.120 | you might turn it around and not have to actually
00:07:11.760 | sort of put that failure on the books.
00:07:16.120 | You know, like if you buy a stock and you bought it at 50
00:07:18.440 | and it goes to 30, as long as you hold,
00:07:20.320 | you could get back to 50.
00:07:22.080 | - Yeah, but selling now is kind of accepting that.
00:07:25.200 | - It's accepting that, and that's really hard for us.
00:07:27.760 | So that's why we want to think about both.
00:07:31.400 | How do we ask for permission for people to tell us the truth?
00:07:36.400 | How do we explicitly ask people if they want the truth?
00:07:42.160 | Right, so we need to have both of those things going on.
00:07:45.120 | And then how do we also figure out
00:07:47.320 | how the person can receive the truth?
00:07:50.040 | And that's true whether we're coaching somebody else
00:07:53.040 | or we're thinking about how we can do this for ourselves.
00:07:55.760 | And one of the best ways for us to receive the truth
00:07:58.880 | is for us to think about the truth
00:08:00.320 | is something in the future.