Earn with you decisions, not with your time

The exponential returns in business are coming with your decisions, not earning for your time.

Earning based on time and effort is crucial for anyone who is looking forward to starting a business. I believe that currently there is no escape from that. And there shouldn’t be. Earning based on time and effort builds a deep understanding of conducting business, negotiation, building a product, marketing and sales. All of them are important. Within that period, you earn based on the time you give in. Your effort makes you money. It is valuable.

The same applies to all employees starting out their careers. Effort and time equals money.

There should be a new period after that. In this new period, you should earn with your decisions, not with your time and effort. Time and effort are limited resources. They are compounding, but they are limited. Decisions, on the other, have unlimited consequences. 

Imagine you are leading a billion dollar company. A unicorn. Imagine you have a competitor who is looking forward to taking your position. He or she is making 8 correct decisions out of 10. Pretty impressive. If you can make 9 correct decisions out of 10, 10% better performance, let's say, you shift a 100 million dollar loss or revenue. 

If you have 10% better decision making with any competitor you have, the compounding effect will naturally take you to the best positions of humanity. In order to have that 10% better performance, you should build your mental models, have deep understanding of your sector and intermediate understanding of other sectors, learn to speak and convince better, and most importantly, convince better.

If you make a decision, and if you believe that it is the right one, you should convince people of the correctness of this decision.

When you start earning with your decisions, you break the 24 hour limit. Your decisions become entities working for you, and your institution feels the effect, especially in financial terms.

In order to earn with your decisions, you should start deciding.

If you are a founder, you have to conduct decision making. No question about that. If you are an employee, there is a likelihood that your managers may know more than you about the business you are in. There is also a strong likelihood that they do not know as much as you do, and their mental models may be not sufficient enough to make important decisions. You may have that. They may have access to a larger information flow toward themselves, but you can still be a better decision maker.

Big companies get bigger if they move as a startup. Big companies got bigger because of the fact they listened to the decisions of starting level employees.

This is the Day 1 mentality of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

Let your business day always be Day 1.