Ryan Holiday

When are you thinking about the things that you would say in the meeting?

In the shower.

Yeah.

At night when you're supposed to be sleeping.

When are you doing the work that makes having those meetings worthwhile?

The actual decision making and forecasting and understanding and reflect all the things you have to do.

That's the job.

And then like the meeting is talking about it.

But like people's lives are built around the managing side of things and not the making thinking big picture side of things.

Well, at some point in Amazon, the meeting culture got out of control and they sort of switched things.

I talk about this in the book.

There's a famous shareholder letter where Jeff Bezos talks about this policy where basically, like, if you wanted to call a meeting, you had to spend the preceding couple of days writing a two to three page memo about what the meeting was about.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And what we were supposed to be thinking about.

And the idea was like, you start the meeting, everyone sits down, reads the memo, and then the meeting's pretty short because all the arguments have been laid out on the page.

And now we're just deciding, right?

Yeah, smart.

That's wisdom, right?

The wisdom is sitting down, learning about the problem or the issue, laying out all the options, and then making a cogent argument about what should or shouldn't be done.