The Urgency Trap Is Real

Clearly, investing in Ukrainian-language magazines in 2007 was a bad decision. Launching three titles within 12 months in an unproven market was catastrophic. It very nearly killed our company. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the bottom fell out of the Ukrainian economy. GDP contracted by a whopping 15%. The ad market dropped 85%. It felt apocalyptic. Every day on the way to work, I would look at the exchange kiosks showing the Ukrainian currency crashing in value. When I arrived at the office, there would be a series of excruciating decisions to make. We closed all of the new brands we launched since our IPO. At one point, I had to fire 150 people in a day, not because they had failed us, but because we, blinded by hubris and stupidity, had failed them. The real tragedy was that if we had been more methodical, the cash from our IPO would likely have sustained us through the crisis. In fact, having cash when very few others did would have put us in a great position. But we were sure we were on to the next big thing. We felt a profound sense of urgency to beat everyone else to the punch and moved forward at breakneck speed. I wish I could say I learned my lesson then, but I didn’t. The same pattern persisted. I would get excited by an idea, convince myself I was onto something important, and rush to move forward. What I learned over time is that we are incredibly poor judges of our own ideas. We need to take a Bayesian approach, moving forward steadily, iterating and testing as we go. The truth is that every idea is wrong. Some are off by a little, and some are off by a lot, but they are all wrong. The key is not to come up with the “right” ideas, but to make them less wrong over time.