Action produces Information
acting towards a new way of thing > thinking towards a new way of acting
- Sometimes the only way you can reduce uncertainty is to move forward. The work you do informs the next work you do.
- You learn more from shipping a failure than you do working in isolation trying to prevent said failure.
- You can make better decisions by having a bias towards action and adjusting to new
- The best entrepreneurs aren't the ones with the best decision making models, they are the ones with a good mix of bias towards action and adjusting to new information.
- This philosophy is one of the driving factors behind encouraging new startups to take a minimum viable product approach.
- "Test & Learn" > "Plan & Implement"
as Richard Pascale observes in Surfing the Edge of Chaos, “Adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.”
Examples
- This digital garden works as an example. Often times I write notes which want to link out to other pages that don't yet exist. This gives me a clue on where to go next.
- Publishing an article and receiving critical feedback helps you better understand the idea, and clarify your thinking.
- Trying to sell a product will tell you if you can sell it or not better than market research can.
- You end up with higher quality software if you build and solve problems along the way, instead of overcomplicating it by solving imaginary problems that may not exist.
" It doesn’t even matter what you do as long as you do something, because that’s my other favourite quote, is “action produces information.” So at a certain point, you got to stop pontificating about this stuff and just try something, anything. You’re going to be embarrassed by the V1 until you go out there and you create. That’s part of the product development process, is just dramatically scaling back kind of the ambition and the feature set and everything to rapidly iterate and prototype these things, but go do anything. The first thing you try is almost guaranteed not to work. So don’t give up, just go try the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. That’s the only way that new products and companies ever get created in the world. You got to put a lot of shots on goal to get one to eventually work."