Everything Is a Bet

Everything is a bet. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you start making smarter bets.

Here's why embracing uncertainty isn't just smart—it's necessary:

Trial and Error Beats the Best Research

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, one of my favourite authors and thinkers argues that in complex systems you can't predict outcomes with precision. Instead, you should expose yourself to situations where small bets can lead to significant rewards, and failures are limited in their impact. Simple trial and error over time tends to beat every other strategy.

Taleb calls it antifragility—the idea that not only can you be resilient to shocks and volatility, you can benefit from it. By allowing failure, you become stronger. Each stumble is feedback, a new learning.

Consider the world of investing. High-powered hedge funds employ armies of PhDs armed with complex algorithms and predictive models. They pour millions into trying to forecast market movements. Yet, time and again, they get blindsided by events their models didn't anticipate—black swans that wipe out gains overnight.

Meanwhile, index fund investors who follow a simple, trial and error approach outperform these sophisticated funds over the long haul. Their strategy isn't flashy, in fact it's remarkably simple. It doesn't rely on predicting the unpredictable; it focuses on adapting to reality as it unfolds.

The lesson here is straightforward: adaptability beats elaborate strategy. Trial and error is flexible. It adapts on the fly. When you make small, calculated bets, you're not risking everything. You're gaining insights that no amount of theoretical modeling and research could provide.

Building Products Is Not a Science

There is no magic formula for success in building a product. If only it were that simple. The truth is messier. Sometimes it's being first to market with a groundbreaking new idea or technology. Sometimes it's great marketing. Sometimes it's more attractive pricing. Sometimes it's just better execution to disrupt an existing market.

Take Nokia, for example—the pride of my home country Finland. 🇫🇮

They dominated mobile phones but missed the smartphone revolution. Why? They treated product development like a science, shipping calculated improvements backed up by market research with each new model. But building products is more art than science. It's about gut feeling, timing, and yeah, a bit of luck.

Develop Taste

It's not enough for a product to function and have useful features; it has to feel right. That means sweating the details others overlook. It means deeply caring about the product from start to finish.

Taste isn't just about aesthetics; it's about creating something people love. Apple's obsession with design and user experience set them apart because they understood this deeply.

Taste isn't innate—it's developed. You don't just wake up one day with great taste. It's created through experience—by immersing yourself in your craft, by building. Each project, each line of code, each design tweak sharpens your sense of what works and what doesn't.

Developing good taste is the ultimate form of professional pride. It's what allows you to move faster than others and make decisions with intuition.

Yet, the idea of taste is often seen as controversial when building products. Where's the market research? Where are the numbers?

Be Data-Informed, Not Data-Driven

Data is useful, but let's not kid ourselves – it's easy to manipulate. Cherry-picked numbers and fancy charts can convince nearly anyone of anything. The strategy consulting industry are masters at this: making executives feel they're being data-driven when really the consultants are brought in to make whoever pays for them look good, and back their decisions with impressive research and presentations.

Way too frequently data is only used as a tool to back up whatever decision you would have made anyways. Not to say this is done on purpose–it's just very difficult for us humans not to be biased towards our own preferences. This is confirmation bias, and even people doing actual science aren't immune to it.

Data tells you what's happening now, not what could happen next. It lacks context and can't predict breakthroughs. Good data helps inform your decisions, sure, but don't let it shackle you. Balance it with taste, vision, and a willingness to defy the numbers when your intuition tells you to.

Steve Jobs nailed it: "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." If Apple had been data-driven, the iPhone would never have existed.

Heuristics Are Powerful

Heuristics or rules of thumb help you make decisions without drowning in analysis. The Pareto Principle is a classic: 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. Focus on what counts.

Heuristics are the survival tools we develop over time, forged through countless trials and errors. They don't pretend to predict the unpredictable; instead, they offer robust strategies for navigating chaos.

The most powerful heuristics are the ones you craft yourself. They're born from your unique experiences—your wins, your screw-ups, the patterns only you can see. Over time, these personalized rules become your competitive advantage.

Here are some of my own heuristics:

• Show Don't Tell
• Every Week is Quality Week
• Unblock others first
• The Keeper Test
• Simplicity is worth fighting for
• Imposing a process is the last resort
• Everything is a Bet

When faced with countless options, heuristics cut through the noise. They're not infallible, but they keep you moving. Be aware of their limits, though. They can introduce biases if you're not careful. Use them as guides, not strict laws.

It's Important to Do Things Fast

Speed matters. When you're moving quickly, you focus on what's essential. There's no time for unnecessary fluff.

You learn more per unit of time because you're making contact with reality more frequently. Each iteration, each release, gives you immediate feedback. You're not theorizing in a vacuum; you're engaging with real users and real-world problems.

The market doesn't reward the perfect—it rewards the first to make an impact. Google sat on their AI research while OpenAI shipped a consumer product that changed the world overnight with ChatGPT.

Shipping fast isn't about lowering standards; it's about focusing on what truly matters and getting it into users' hands. Research and data can be helpful, but ultimately leaders need to trust their own experience, heuristics and taste to make a bet and align everyone behind a vision and deliver.

Slow is fake. It's an illusion of safety that keeps you from confronting the truths you need to hear. While you're stuck researching, planning and tweaking, the world moves on without you.