What I learned from Steven Bartlett in Bali

Last week I watched Steven Bartlett speak live here at Nuanu in Bali.

A futuristic creative city built into nature, founded by Roger Hamilton (read his book “The Millionaire Masterplan”).

During Steven Bartlett’s talked he dropped something that completely flipped how I think about business metrics.

Most entrepreneurs optimize for revenue or success.
The Diary Of A CEO optimizes for experiments.

He said that his most important metric in his business is his “rate of failure and experimentation”

Think about it.

Your brain naturally wants certainty. It wants to consume content, research competitors, and "figure it out" before acting.

But that's exactly what keeps you stuck.

Because as he said on Friday’s talk: movement is information.

In a world moving this fast, standing still is the riskiest move you can make.
If you're in a jungle and you're standing still, you're going to get killed.

Every day you spend thinking your way to a decision is a day you could have gotten real data from the market.

Here’s his decision making framework which I find super valuable:

If you're 50% certain, do it. Run the experiment and test your hypothesis.
Because 100% certainty only exists in hindsight.

Most decisions are reversible anyway.
But procrastination is a cost that compounds daily.

So here's the new KPI I’m going to start tracking as per Steven Bartlett’s recomendation:

How many experiments did I run this week?

Not how many worked.
How many you tried.

Because there’s a direct correlation between success and failure.

We all need to up our failure rate a little bit. Myself included.

So if I can summarize his talk on stage in one sentence it would be this:

What is a hypothesis that I want to test and how can I experiment as fast as possible to get feedback, because feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power.

I hope that was as insightful to you as it was for me.

Optimize for experiments
Chris "The Systemizer" Punt

P.S. The reason Bartlett's team can experiment fast is because their systems can actually support rapid testing and everything is being tracked (including failures).

If your systems are holding back your business from scaling and you’d like help mapping out exactly what those operational bottlenecks are and the systems & automations you need to buy back your time, then reply “Audit” for a FREE Systems Audit and I’ll send you more details.