龙虎新风云国粤双语:準備做出壞決定

我最近想很多計畫、做決定和實行。喔好吧，我總是想很多這類的事情，但我一直都是刻意想這些事情的。

You’ve no doubt heard someone – maybe me or Seth or other tributes to failure – encourage you to fail fast and fail often if you want to be a successful changemaker or entrepreneur. Fear of failure keeps so many people from actually starting the projects that’ll lead to them succeeding. It ends up being a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

你對此完全沒有疑惑，也許我或Seth或其他因素，都是促使你很快失敗甚至當你想成為改革者或是企業家時常常失敗的元兇。對失敗的恐懼讓許多人裏足不前縱使最後是成功的，而這最後都是終結在那名為自我滿足的預言上。

It’s become more obvious to me that counsel also covers making bad decisions. It’s not just that you have to embrace making a good decision and having the failure come up in the execution, but, rather, you have to be prepared to make bad decisions in the first place.

對我而言，協議更是意味著做出壞決定。這不止是你必須做出好決定而已，還有就是實行上的失敗，但，儘管如此你當下還是要有可能會做出壞決定的準備。

Here’s the bottom-line: if you’re not making bad decisions, you’re not making enough decisions.

這裡是最低界線；如果你沒做出壞決定，那麼你就是沒做過夠多的決定。

Part of the changemaking journey is learning to make decisions with incomplete information, time, and resources. What it takes practice to see is that, most of the time, more of those items actually don’t help the decision get made. Usually, more information, time, and resources makes it harder to make the decisions that need to be made.

部份轉捩點是學習在情報、時間和資源不足的情況下做出決定。多半讓決定付諸實行時，多餘的時間和資源事實上無法讓決定成立的。通常過多的訊息、時間和資源反而才是阻撓決定的絆腳石。

There’s a big gap between the inputs – information, time, and resources – to your decision-making process and the output of that process. More experienced entrepreneurs jump that gap quicker and usually with better success, and, in the times when they make bad decisions, they know how to tuck and roll and keep their eyes forward.

在情報、時間和資源等對於做決定成立的因素與結果之間，存在著很大的鴻溝。越是經驗豐富的企業家越是快速跨越隔閡並獲得成功，甚至，在下壞決定前懸崖勒馬。他們知道怎樣亡羊補牢，並時時刻刻瞻仰未來。

What many of us fail to think about is that, as your business or project gains momentum, you’ll have to make more decisions precisely because its scope and visibility grows. If you haven’t worked your way through learning to make good decisions and recovering from bad ones when it’s small, it’s going to be much, much harder to make those decisions when people are watching and the decisions have a bigger impact.

大多數我們都不會想到這一點的理由，是因為每當你的工作和計畫變多時，你就必須做出更多準確的決定，只因其範圍和視野變寬廣了。假使你還沒學會怎麼從小計畫開始下好決定和從失敗中學習的話，那麼當所有人都在看你的決定和這決定很重大時，你也就更難以做出明智的判斷了。

At the same time that you’re disadvantaged by experience, perspective, and resources, you’re blessed by having a safer sandbox to make bad decisions. Would you rather make a bad decision when there are three people involved who know or when there are 300,000?

你在缺乏經驗、眼光與資源的同時，你也被賦予做出壞決定的可能性。你會願意在三個人或是所有都知道你將做出壞決定的時候還堅持己見嗎？

As much as we may not like it, we’re hard-wired to learn more from mistakes than we are from successes. A corollary to that is that we only learn to become successful by failing. Hence the “fail fast, fail often” thing.

也許我們不喜歡失敗，但無可置否地是我們卻從失敗中學得更多。一則推論提到失敗是成功之母，也就是所謂「很快失敗、常常失敗」。

Just in case this is all too theoretical, I’ll make it clear that you’ll:

為了不讓你覺得是陳腔濫調，我先澄清幾點：

■Hire the wrong teammate and then have to let them go

找幾個不適任的人並且放任他們自己去執行

■Start using the wrong tech solutions over and over again as you learn which ones actually work

開始不斷嘗試錯的方案，直到找出哪個才是真正解決問題的方法。

■Ally with the wrong partner and get burned

與不適合的夥伴工作，然後氣急敗壞

■Market a product, service, or event that no one – or almost no one – buys

為產品、服務和活動規劃市場─即使沒人貨是很少人會買。

■Talk to a big name and look like a fool

誇大其辭，當自己是傻瓜。

■Give a talk that doesn’t land

演說一場無意義演說

■Create what feels like 99 pieces of crap for 1 masterpiece

創造一個像是由99個廢物組成的曠世鉅作

■Pay the wrong amount for taxes and have a bright, sunny, and cheerful mid-April day go dark very quickly.

支付錯誤的稅金，並使心情在每好的四月中旬的日子裡迅速沮喪。

■Start a nine-month campaign and find out three months into it that it’s the wrong campaign

開始為為期9個月的競賽努力。花3個月的心力全心投入這錯誤的競賽當中。

■[Insert whatever consequence of a bad decision that most stings you]

插手一個整死你的壞決定造成的後果。

It’s not a rosy picture, I know, but I’d rather tell you the whole truth rather than just the pretty sides. Through my years of advising people, I’ve learned that the uglier truths that aren’t being shared cause more suffering and inaction because it’s so easy for people to assume that the inconvenient truths that are challenging them are doing so just because they’re inadequate or stupid. It’s not just you.

這不是個美麗的前景，我知道，但我寧可告訴你事實而不是只有說出光明的一面。根據多年我觀察人的經驗，沒有公諸於世的醜陋事實只會帶來更多痛苦，因為對人來說不便說出口的事實是造成他們痛苦的原由，而這也是可想而知的事；只因他們能力不足或是於笨，而那並不應該是你才對！

I’m obviously not encouraging you to willfully make bad decisions, nor am I encouraging you to not endeavor to get better at it. It just so happens that to get better at it, you have to be prepared to make some bad decisions.

再次聲明我不是鼓勵你做壞決定，或是叫你不要學著做好決定。這些意外常發生在你學會做出好決定之前，所以你必須有會做出壞決定的準備。

In the end, it can be hard to tell what’s a “bad” decision and what’s a “good” decision. In one slice of time or one perspective, things appear one way. In a later slice of time or different perspective, they appear a different way. “Never count a man happy until the end of his days,” the Greeks used to say, and the same truth applies here.

最後，決定的好壞如何判斷也許很難。一時之間或是一個面向之下，事情只會呈現一個面貌。而卻在之後或是不同的面向下，才展現出不同的面貌。希臘人常說：「永遠不要在最後一刻來臨前，就覺得一個男人是開心的」〈意即：不要妄下定論〉，在做決定時也是一樣的！

Think about a decision you’re stalled on right now. Do you need more inputs or do you just need to jump the gap already? Get real and get it done.

多想想自己正在決定的事物。你是否需要更多資訊參考，或是你只需要撇清不確定因素就好？弄清楚這一切，並且做出決定吧！