The Decision Register, Newsletter Woes and An Audience of One

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
And I highly, highly recommend this, because again, judgment and decision making is the most important thing you can have.
People are terrible at actually honing that. They always say, oh yeah, I learned a lesson. Really, what? What was it? Did you write down what you were thinking then and what you've learned since? No, like, you know, we put very little effort into this.
So I have this list of questions that I sell. I have this document that I have, but I call it the decision register where I basically write down every major decision that I make. And so, for example, the very first one that I have in this list is from when I was 18 years old, it says quit pre-med. This was, I'm sorry, I was 20, 21 years old. So I'm a senior in college, I'm pre-med, I take the MCATs, but I decide not to go to med school.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
The most obvious, obviously good decision you've ever made.

**Shaan Puri** (0:57)
So then I have the, here's the column.

**Sam Parr** (0:59)
You'd be the worst doctor, you'd be the worst doctor.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
I'm like, we could fix this the obvious way, but let's try something, stick out your tongue.
We'll use that for your ACL. All right, so, and then I have the next column, it says, did it seem big in the moment? Because one learning was, a lot of the biggest decisions didn't actually seem big in the moment, but turned out to be an important decision.
And then I basically have like, I don't know, what was the one decisive reason, why? So if I boiled down like, not a long list of pros and cons, but like, what's the one thing that like, the main reason I made that decision? And then outcome and lesson learned. And so, I'll give you another example. Decision, sell to Twitch and not to Facebook. Those are the two final companies that had given us good offers, and we turned down more money from Facebook to take the Twitch offer. Did it seem big? Yeah, felt big in the moment. Why?
Because after six years of a startup, I was tired, and Facebook was looking at us like we were gonna save their kind of gaming initiative. They were looking at us to like make it happen, or I was like, Twitch has already won. I'm like, I can just cruise control when I'm here. Like, let me just go play for the winning team versus try to like take the underdog from the bottom of the league to the top in terms of this industry.
And then it's like one of the lessons learned is, I don't know what the other side was. So I know what I got out of it. So I think it was a good call. I'm happy with the decision, but you never know. And that's how a lot of these decisions go. So I have this decision register. Now, a version of it would be like, there's a bunch of investment decisions here. You know, like not buying Ethereum and Bitcoin when the smartest people I knew literally working in my office were doing it.
At the time didn't seem like a big decision. I just kind of overlooked it. I didn't even realize this was a big decision I was making. Seemed weird. I just kind of laughed at something because it seemed strange rather than leaning in and trying to understand why are you so excited about this? And like, hmm, could I place a small tester bet? So terrible decision, bad call.
And I didn't pay attention to a signal, which is what the nerds do on the weekend will probably all do in a few years. And this is what the nerds were doing on the weekend back then. They were really interested in cryptocurrencies. Okay, so anyways, I have this decision register. Now with it, I have a bunch of questions that I ask when I'm gonna make a decision. Let me pull that doc up real quick.

**Sam Parr** (3:18)
And you've been, is this a running document that you've had for 10 years?

**Shaan Puri** (3:21)
No, I started it like four or five years ago, but I back, I tried to go back and figure out like.

**Sam Parr** (3:28)
And it's like a Google doc.

**Shaan Puri** (3:29)
Just a Google doc, exactly. And I highly, highly recommend this, because again, judgment and decision making is the most important thing you can have.
People are terrible at actually honing that. They always say, oh yeah, I learned a lesson. Really, what? What was it? Did you write down what you were thinking then and what you've learned since? No, we put very little effort into this.