Your next best move
Learn from the past, but leave it there.
“[F]ocusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities.”
Shane Parrish writes to more than 1 million people every week. Geez.
In his latest book, Clear Thinking, he’s teaching about how to make better decisions. This is one quote from early in the book, but it’s stuck with me because every day in business we’re making decisions about what comes next.
Those decisions are often weighed down by what came before.
Thanks for being here with me. These emails are hand-written and AI spell-checked.
Hopefully they read kind of like a friend at a bar is sharing something he’s been noodling on before and after having had a few sips of beer.
These aren’t meant to be deep dives, but they often spark ideas that lead me off to explore some topics in more depth.
If there’s anything you read here that’s helpful, wrong, strange, you’d like to hear more about, or is just straight ridiculous, please hit reply and let me know. Or leave a comment.
Appreciate you.
Learn the lessons, keep moving
If we only thought about where we’re standing right now and what our next best move is, without ever considering our past decisions and how they’ve impacted us, I don’t think we’d be very successful.
"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."
~Charlie Munger
Our ability to make good decisions now rests a lot on having had skin in the game. Learning what works and what doesn’t work in certain situations. Making stupid moves. Getting beat up, but standing back up.
Goals and next best moves
I’m writing in the context of building a business. Understanding what we want that business to be is critical when thinking about our next best moves.
Goals are like flags planted somewhere off in the distance. Maybe you call it your North Star or your OKR. Whatever it is, it’s how you orient what comes next.
The next best move should put you closer to that flag. Or it should set you up so that two, three, four moves down the track you can make huge gains.
Having the confidence to make the move
I love the Charlie Munger quote because it’s such a great razor for decision-making. “Is this stupid?” is a pretty funny question to ask about any decision.
Decisions can be stupid for a number of reasons. Trying to do something too big, may be stupid. Trying to do something you just can’t do, may be stupid.
When we’re thinking about the next best move, we need to look at what we’re capable of, stretch it a bit, and have the confidence to make it happen.
Sunk costs and pushing on
About six months ago, we made a decision to sponsor a conference that was set to take place in October 2026. We just found out that the business behind the conference has gone out of business.
Not just gone out of business, but gone into receivership. Potentially taking our money with it.
Now it sucks to lose money for seemingly no good reason. And my first reaction was to go into scramble mode, try to claw it back. But thankfully, little Shane Parrish was sitting on my shoulder telling me to focus on the next move instead.
There is still hope that we get our money back or that the sponsorship is parlayed into a different event. But as of today, it’s a sunk cost. And the more time I spend dwelling on that, the less time I spend doing the work to grow the business.
Wrapping up
Like anything in life, running a business boils down to a series of decisions. It’s important to know how we got where we are right now. To learn from good and bad decisions we’ve already made.
That’s how we know if what we’re about to do is stupid. Ha.
It seems like a simple quote: “[F]ocusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities.”
But if you look at where you’re standing today and you look up, you’ll realize that the possibilities are endless, and that’s pretty dope.
To your next move,
Peter