You're Not Growing Fast Because You're Making Decisions Slowly | Ep 834
episodePreviously titled “You're Not Growing Fast Because You're Making Decisions Slowly | Ep 859” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
Transcript
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Why are you not growing fast enough?
You're not growing as fast as you want because you're not making decisions as fast as you need to. I heard this really great bit by Elon and it moved me enough to try and look at my own decision making process and audit it. And there's this great quote by Lee Iacocca, which is the speed of the boss is the speed of the team. And I think a lot of that comes down to your ability to make decisions quickly. and so right now i mean fundamentally a lot of what we do in entrepreneurship and even leadership within businesses is we're tasked with making decisions and it's one of these very amorphous topics that most people kind of like yawn at but like fundamentally at its core what business is this decision making right you have to make lots of little decisions throughout the day with varying levels of impact and i think
What common mistakes do entrepreneurs make in decision-making?
One of the big mistakes that I have made in my career that I try to remedy is making decisions too slowly or requiring too much data in order to make decisions. And the reality of it is that we often have to make decisions with incomplete data in kind of a world of changing variables and try and make our best shot. What I want to recommend or at least kind of talk through today is a different way of seeing it that has like really shifted my process. Before I dive in, think back to, you know, maybe your goals four quarters ago, right? So maybe you had some annual goals, maybe you had some, you know, quarterly goals that you wanted to hit, some monthly revenue numbers, some sales numbers, marketing numbers, lead numbers, etc. Now, if you can think back to what you were thinking about then, you probably are like, oh my God, if I looked at those quarterly objectives, they seem so out of date now as they should, right?
How can you improve your decision-making speed?
And likely a lot of variables have changed since you decided to make those goals. But what's interesting about it is that like, We probably, and you, if you're like me, probably belabored a long time over those goals and that planning. But what's been really interesting is that, like, the variables of the game change so rapidly that a lot of times, like, super long-term planning, I've become less and less a fan of. And what's resulted is just more of an emphasis on decisions that I need to make today. And I said at the very beginning that Elon had this really interesting frame, which is what I want to talk about, is when he was under the gun and it looked like Tesla could go bankrupt. And this was probably like 2022. And he had to get production to like 5,000 cars a week. And, you know, every single one of the engineers in his company said, there's no way we can get above 1,800.
And they were at like less than that at the time when he made the prediction. And it was supposed to be like a quarter or two. And it was an incredibly taxing time period in his life. And I think we can all kind of resonate with those kind of like gun against your head, like you have to figure it out. There's a story that Isaac Wolterson tells in the biography where Elon is on the floor and he says, listen, there are so many decisions that have to get made that I'm going to be making them on the spot and I'm going to get it right 80% of the time and I'm going to get it wrong 20% of the time. And then 20% of the time that I get it wrong, we can always fix it. And I think, and Bezos talks about this too. And the reason I'm bringing them up is I consider them like, you know, the all time goats of entrepreneurship, independent of whatever your political beliefs are, they're fucking amazing entrepreneurs. In the interview that Bezos gave with Lex Friedman, he talks about decision-making a lot.
And I bring this up because like, it's one of these topics, like I said, that no one really wants to talk about, but like the people who are at the very top talk almost exclusively about decision-making because obviously there's something important there is that they've made better decisions than other people have. And they've gotten disproportionate returns as a result.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why are you not growing fast enough?
0:00–0:54
2
What common mistakes do entrepreneurs make in decision-making?
0:54–1:51
3
How can you improve your decision-making speed?
1:51–4:02
4
What lessons can be learned from Elon Musk's decision-making?
4:02–6:04
5
What are the costs of indecision in business?
6:04–8:15
6
How to reduce fear in decision-making?
8:15–8:43
7
What is the impact of slow decisions on business growth?
8:43–12:15