Built on Intuition

Welcome to ReWork, a podcast by 37 signals

about the better way to work and run your business.

I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37 signals team joined

by the co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer-Hanson.

If you've listened to this podcast at all,

you have clearly heard us talk a lot about intuition.

David, you use the words gut computer, Jason,

you're often just like you have a feel for something,

but I thought we would talk a little bit this week

about how you develop that,

how you learn to trust yourself in business

to just be able to trust your gut

or even know that your gut is talking to you.

So I'm just gonna open it up there.

David, maybe you start,

you talk a lot about your gut computer.

Have you always heard your gut computer talking to you?

I think I have, but it was certainly not as well-fed

as it is now because I've just lived longer,

I've tried more things, I've experimented with more stuff,

but do you know what?

We started working together, Jason and I,

when I was what, 22, 23, something like that,

I didn't know everything, I'm still doing everything,

but I knew half or less than what I know now.

And I think the approach hasn't changed that much

in terms of letting intuition guide, letting the gut guide,

where are we gonna go and what we're gonna try.

And I think some of that comes from just deciding

through some degree to have some confidence

in your own magic fingers,

and that the only way to really figure out

what something is going to be like is to do it.

And accepting that while you can learn a lot of things

from other people's experiences,

and I mean, I was a ferocious reader of software methodology,

writing, for example, when I thought,

I wanted to do things with software,

but I didn't know that I was gonna be a programmer quite yet.

I thought, well, maybe I'll sit at some other branch

on this trunk here, and therefore,

just try to absorb as much as possible.

How can I read everything there is to read

at least the main classics in my field?

How can I find a handful of individuals

who are doing really cool stuff that I really like

that I'm simply just gonna try to emulate,

I'm just gonna try to copy,

I'm just gonna try to do their motions

until they become natural,

and I can give it my own spin.

I mean, there's a whole body of literature

on the notion of the beginner's mindset,

and it's basically an echo of that,

that you start with a great humility

over the fact that you don't know everything,

you try to absorb everything in,

but then the way you turn those absorptions into results

is through action.

I have seen, and I think Jason had a write up at one point,

about affliction, where you think like,

no, I just need to read like seven more blog posts

about how to start a business.

If I just read a little bit more about how to do this,

if I read a little bit more about that,

then I'll be ready.

That is a false errand.

You're not gonna be able to convert any of that input

into knowledge without passing through action.

That's actually the magic bit here.

The magic bit is that you try to apply some of these things,

and you'll quickly realize that a bunch of shit

you read in blog posts or heard on a podcast

wasn't actually something that worked for you.

And that's not because the advice necessary is wrong,

it's just because why I work in different industry,

I work at a different time,

my constraints are different, I'm in a different place,

I'm a different person than the people talking,

and that's the filtering process, right?

Like that's sort of the digestive to stay in the metaphor here

of what informs your gut and what turns your gut

into this powerful computer that actually can analyze things

and spit out good results that get you somewhere good.

Practically, I think you just need to make a lot of decisions.

I mean, decisions then follow through,

but like you gotta make some calls.

And if you only make three big decisions a year,

it's gonna take you 30 years to train your intuition,

your gut, if you make 30 or 300 decisions a year,

you're gonna get there faster, you're gonna feel things out,

and you're gonna know you're a quarter of a market

and make any sense, they aren't gonna work, it doesn't matter.

You wanna make these things small enough

that you can throw them away if they don't pan out,

but you've gotta practice, that's the practice,

is like making decisions and making things smaller

and smaller and smaller so they don't feel like

there's this huge gravity behind everything,

and if you get it wrong, it's your screwed, it's over.

So I would just say make a lot of small decisions along the way

and the smaller the better, actually,

especially when you're getting started,

you don't wanna be paralyzed by this big decision

that's gonna make a break everything.

And that's ultimately how you train it,

you train it, it's like doing reps, it's no different, right?

It's intuition, it's a collection of decisions,

some you come from them, you find them somehow through you

or whatever, you don't even know what influences you,

but you've gotta do the reps, you gotta get the reps in,

I think that's the only way to really begin to train

this thing that you don't really even totally understand,

but you have, everyone has it,

everyone's got one of these things,

and you get to know it by making decisions.

And one of the things I see quite often

is the hesitation of actually getting started

on something real.

This is why when we wrote our first book,

it was literally called Getting Real.

It was this concept, like, start making something,

don't sit around just talking about it,

don't just write a bunch of things down, make grand plans,

no, start moving, start implementing, start building,

and again, it's not that the first thing you're gonna build

is gonna be the most amazing thing ever,

or it is, by the way, when I look at the history

of Thursday and the signals,

like, Basecamp was not exactly the first thing,

but like the second or third thing, right?

Quite early, we actually hit upon the best idea

this company has ever had.

We encountered that not that long after we started working

together, not that long after plowing

into making things for ourselves, right?

So, the point is, you gotta get real,

you gotta start making those decisions

and the way you start making those decisions

is that you work on the, as we often refer to it,

the epicenter of the idea, the epicenter of the app,

the epicenter of the business,

the, not the around stuff, not all the other things

that you could set up, but worry about it.

Do you know what?

You're gonna figure all that out

if you get an epicenter correct enough

that anyone gives a damn.

That is currently, I mean, probably always was,

but in this moment, the short supply.

There is an endless supply now of capabilities.

Nothing costs anything to get started.

You can sign up for a Stripe account in two seconds,

connect that to some biped coded app,

and now your business doing SaaS,

if you think that that's the thing you wanna do, right?

Like, all of the hurdles and obstacles

that Jason and I faced when we were walking uphill

in both directions and our bare feet in the snow,

in 2003, those things don't exist anymore,

but now you have the other challenge, right?

How do you make anyone give a damn

when everything is happening

and maximum velocity all of the time, right?

All sorts are probably that it's not the first strike

that's gonna do it, and you just,

you gotta get to making more stuff, making more epicenters,

making more things you put in front of people,

finding out what resonates,

and then finding a way to put your spin on it, right?

But making things, not thinking about things,

not reading more things, not doing all the other stuff,

you can do that on the side, right?

But you gotta, in the center of things, is you doing stuff,

you making decisions, you implementing things, you building.

Okay, so on that note of making decisions

and getting better at making decisions

because you're making a lot of decisions,

I get the impression just like an outsider perspective,

the two of you decide pretty quickly.

Like you don't mull, again, outside perspective.

It doesn't feel like you guys mull things over

or debate about things for long extended periods of time,

which is how I imagine a lot of companies are

about making decisions whether they're big or small,

like it involves a lot of back and forth and time

and talking about it.

I don't get the impression that you guys are like that.

You're just like, either yes, no.

We're doing it, we're not doing it.

It seems like a pretty quick process.

Is that a true and accurate observation

or am I totally off base?

I think it's pretty accurate.

I think there's occasionally something

that's a really big deal.

I think part of the reason why we don't take a long time

is that most things aren't really a big deal.

There are occasional really big deals

that we need to mull over and think through

and usually it's like, well, let's sleep on it

over this weekend and let's talk about it next week.

It's not like let's put something on the schedule

for three months from now or something like that.

It's still relatively quick,

but it may require a few conversations,

a few discussions, a few debates,

and then we kind of find our way there.

But most things just aren't those things.

And blowing up something small into something big

is a big problem for a lot of people, I think.

It's a big problem for all the companies.

They take too long to decide things

that don't really matter anyway.

So realizing that most things

probably don't matter that much anyway

is a good way to get going through things

and to make quick calls and go,

if we made the wrong call,

we'll make a different call three days from now.

It doesn't really matter that much.

That's the idea of chunking things

into small and small and smaller bits

that are almost throw away decisions

in the sense you still want to make them.

And they're important at some level

and collectively the pile of them is important.

But any one decision is not that big of a deal.

You want to get to the place where you can do that.

That's how you can make quick calls and move on.

And then also you want to be able to move fast

through the things that you do to see if they work.

That's the other thing.

You want to make a decision

and then you want to build the thing

so you can decide whether or not it works

rather than debate it in the abstract for three months.

And then finally they could call

and then find out it doesn't work in the real world.

So this is all about getting to something real

like David was saying as soon as you possibly can.

And then you can really look at it for real

and make a decision whether this was as worth doing or not.

But before that it's all abstract.

So you want to kind of not spend a lot of time

in the abstract, you want to spend more time

in the real thing and then you'll really know for sure.

And I think part of that is having the humility

of accepting that nobody knows anything.

Nobody knows anything and very, very few people

are able to successfully repeatedly analyze themselves

into a great decision.

They sit down and like you're all conscious about it

either they write reports

or they run a lot of statistical analysis

and sometimes that has a place to inform things

somewhat in some ways, but it's just dwarfed by reality.

Dwarfed by the notion of seeing what happens

and going, do you know what?

We don't know.

We're not going to know regardless of however long

we talk about this, however much analysis

we apply to the problem, however much data we pull,

however many customers we may even talk to,

the customer's going to basically give us a bunch of bullshit

until we ask those customers, hey, all right, would you pay?

Where's the credit card, right?

So there you get flawed information.

The statistical analysis,

let me give you answers about the data you already have,

which is a tiny percentage of all the data

that exists in the world, your ability to debate

your way through this may uncover some angles

on some decisions.

I think both days and I do enjoy a rigorous debate,

but usually it's a debate of taste or opinions

about something real like how a feature

is supposed to be screwed together,

less so about what the market is going to do,

what a customer is going to do,

what's going to happen in two years, all of that stuff,

we have enough humility, which may sound strange

when here's otherwise talking about

quite arrogant here about things,

enough humility to accept that you know on,

we, like everyone else, just don't know very many things

and the only source of truth that can tell us things

that are real is reality,

is throwing things against that bouncy wall

and seeing what comes back and what gets accelerated.

And I've seen this time and again,

and also to different domains.

One of them, for example, is like what goes viral?

What strikes sort of just a right cord with the audience?

What blog post blows up?

What little clip from a podcast goes somewhere?

What even kind of just projects that we write up about,

I've used this example before,

but when we originally wrote about the,

getting out of the cloud thing,

it was a throw away 12-minute post.

I just quickly hammered into my hay world,

hit send, barely proofread it,

posted it on LinkedIn,

and millions and millions and millions of people saw that, right?

I didn't know I had had a similar experience going the other way,

many times in the past where I thought like,

oh my God, this is so good.

I mean, I'm just typing here and I'm like,

oh, these are such as a pearl.

It's like the wisdom I'm putting into this piece of writing

is incredible.

And then I'll post it and like total crickets.

No one gives a fuck, I've spent much longer than 12 minutes

on a piece, on a video, on a project,

and no one gives a damn, right?

And then you just see things explode on stuff

you didn't think was gonna go anywhere.

So the only way to kind of harness that is to keep badding, right?

This is one of the things both with the writing and the podcast

and everything else that we do is you know what?

If you want to occasionally break through

and leave a mark somewhere, oh my God,

you just gotta keep throwing.

You do not know.

You do not know what's gonna resonate.

You do not know what's gonna work.

Get better at throwing.

And then you realize by the time you've thrown,

for example, on HeyWorld,

I've written 500 blog posts almost,

I think I've let it for 92 or something right now,

over less than five years,

that's almost a post every three days, right?

You actually get better at this stuff.

It gets easier.

Your arm gets stronger.

You have a better eye for which way to throw

and you improve your odds from maybe a 2% chance

of getting a viral thing that ganners people's attention

to a 3.5% chance of doing that.

Major progress.

So it's the reps, like all this boils down to that,

but different ways of putting in different ways

of getting that message across,

because I think it is very counter,

well, I don't even know if it's counter-intuitive.

It's very difficult for people to internalize that.

That's why we're having this discussion, right?

We've been saying this for literally 20 years

in 700 different ways.

You gotta make decisions.

You gotta get to the episode and you gotta try things.

And people go like, yeah, yeah.

And then they go back into a three month analysis

on what their pricing model should be.

Yeah.

Yeah, two more things on that.

Yeah.

And after everything David said,

like you're still at the whim of the algorithm.

Like if the algorithm decides to show it to the right people,

then maybe you got lucky.

So like there's so much substrate here

that you don't control and you don't know what's gonna happen.

And this week it might be this way

and they might be tuning it a different way

that one week you've got that banger thing

and it doesn't matter anymore

because they're testing something, like who knows?

You just don't know that's why you gotta keep making this stuff

and you can't just take that one big swing, really.

The other thing is that everyone's typically

in search of certainty, which is I think why people

are afraid of trusting their gut.

Because gut is, it's very definition uncertain.

I mean, you might feel it, but like you can't prove it.

You can't justify it to anybody

because there's no data or evidence or research wherever.

So people will spend weeks, months, oftentimes asking,

putting together surveys, putting together data,

making the case, months and months of making the case,

which is still abstract because it's still,

you're asking people to imagine an answer

that you're asking them if they don't actually

have that answer naturally.

So they weren't ready to just answer a survey.

You just gave them one.

Now they gotta come up with answers.

These are still abstractions.

So you can spend three months looking for certainty,

backing it up with abstract data that feels real

but still abstract or you can make the thing

in six weeks, four weeks, three weeks, whatever,

put it out there and find out for real

if there's something there.

And then you can maybe take three swings

within those three months and you'll end up

at a much better place because you'll have some real stuff,

real feedback from the real market, real people,

then you will just imagining what the right things to do

is going to be and then trying to do that thing then.

Then having one swing at that one moment

when a million other variables were play

where the ground is shifting and you don't even know it

and then you just like the odds are so infinitesimally small

to begin with and then you're laying it all

on some other one's certainty.

It's just typically a pretty bad formula, I think.

So you're better off just making things as fast as you can

as often as you can, getting better at those things,

putting them out there and there's gonna be a magic moment.

Maybe when enough things align that it works out

but you won't be able to predict that.

I also think that saying trust your gut

or just like I have this feeling

seems a little woo-woo to people, like I'm into that

but I think there's some people who are like,

that just doesn't feel real to your point

or like doesn't seem measurable,

like that's not a real thing that we do in business.

It's funny, it's like, okay, yeah, you're right.

And then you're like, well, if you really break it down,

what is all this data and all these surveys

and all these questions?

Well, you're asking other people for their gut reaction.

So you're building on a thousand other guts

because again, most of these questions when they're asked

or the research when it's done, it's still abstract.

It's still someone having to dream up and spit out

and regurgitate something in a moment

when they weren't naturally going to do that.

So they're still just reaching deep

to find something to tell you,

which is kind of their gut reaction.

So what's more woo-woo?

Like a thousand guts that you don't know

or maybe your own perspective based on the experience

that you've had and you're running the show

and you're making a call.

Like maybe they're both loose and they probably are.

They both are loose.

But I'd rather sort of trust something

I maybe know a little bit more than to say that

because it's someone else's

and there's many of them that those are the right ones.

That's at least my quick take on that.

Okay, let's talk about this decision-making,

trusting yourself when it comes

to product development.

We're obviously working on a new version of Basecamp.

We've talked about that a bit.

I know you guys have recently been going through

the entire product, David kind of showing you

some of the things that have been designed.

Tell me how your gut computers are aligning.

Do you guys always think the same things

about the design and how things are working

or are you sometimes like,

my gut computer says this and yours says this

and now we have to make a decision

or compromise together about it.

We definitely have different computers,

which is important.

You want to have different computers.

I just wrote about this recently.

The only way to polish something is with friction.

You can't polish something unless there's friction.

That's exactly what polish is.

It's grit and it can be big grit, small grit,

combinations of grit, different grit at different times.

But you've got to have friction to polish something

and that's why you want different perspectives

and it can be frustrating at times

and all the things, but this is all what it is.

This is like how you kind of smooth this thing out.

So I'll take a swing at something.

I'll get to a place where I really feel good about it.

I'll show David sometimes you'll feel good about it.

Sometimes you won't.

Sometimes I'll bring up points that I agree with.

Sometimes I'll bring up points I disagree with.

Sometimes I'll bring up points I initially disagree with

and I sit with and I agree with.

That's the process and the process is like,

here's the work, here's what we've done.

Here's the thing.

Again, it's not abstract.

Like when we're looking at something,

we're looking at something that's been built

and we always try to make sure we're looking

at something that's been built.

Otherwise, you get what's called

this illusion of agreement or illusion of disagreement,

which is when someone's describing something

and you have to imagine

that the other person's imagining what you're imagining

and they can see very clearly what you have in your head

and you can see what they have in their head

and you feel like you totally get it.

That can happen sometimes.

It depends what it is,

but the more complicated thing it is

that the more room there is further to be disagreement

that you don't actually see,

you assume you're both on the same page.

So I'm always trying to get to something real to show

and you're always putting your like,

delicate ego out there.

You know, like, well, here's this thing I made.

I'm proud of it.

What do you think?

Yeah. You know, that's the friction.

Like, that's, it's important.

So, you know, I think you need to have that

and you can't be afraid of the feedback.

You may disagree, you may agree,

you may agree later, you may disagree later,

but it's all part of the polishing process

and I think it's incredibly important.

I think designing something in pure isolation,

you can do it, but it's actually quite hard to,

it probably won't turn out quite as well

in some cases it can.

Certainly can, you know,

this is all the variability in the world.

Like, there's always cases when it was perfectly done

by some hermit on an island somewhere.

Like, but I think that I've found it

to be very useful to get some friction involved

and then figure out like what the best way

to do this actually is.

Yeah.

I think this is also one of the key benefits

and enjoyment of working with other people.

If you do not have the friction

and everyone's like, yeah, that's amazing.

Every single time to everything that you put out there,

do you know what, you could just hire a parrot?

They could tell you, you could teach that parrot,

that's amazing, right?

Like, we kind of just came up with a bunch of parrots

that can say that very well.

I mean, this whole thing that AI is blowing,

smoke up your ass 24, seven,

I think is actually a lot of parroting.

I think they can be steered in a better direction,

but right now there's a lot of parroting going on

and humans have, at their best,

attendancy to be better than that.

Jason, you just wrote about that recently

where if you want a real argument with someone,

if you want to provoke that friction,

right now at least it's easier to do so with humans.

And I also think it's more just more satisfying.

It's part of that exchange, part of like,

all right, let's get all these computers,

all these got computers in a room

and like we'll start calculating together

on a real piece of work in front of us

because I'd say what I found over the years,

the most ferocious debates that Jason and I have had

that felt perhaps the least productive

was when we were the furthest away

from the concrete app design,

the concrete feature that's running.

It was when we were extrapolating things,

when we were speculating about whether

our imaginary customers in our heads,

what they would respond to,

what they want out of the system.

And then as we get more and more honed in on something real,

I find that those, the frictions still going on there,

we're still throwing suggestions back and forth,

but you can just can see like,

oh, the pieces are starting to fit better.

Like they still need a little punch here,

a little punch there, or like now they're clicking in

versus when you're just discussing these abstract ideas

and you're discussing your imaginary customers

in your respective heads.

I can just, these unrefined blocks

is meeting and banging against each other.

And you know, at some times that can spark

some interesting ideas and some interesting directions,

but I've also found that quite often

that's where things can get a little more spicy

without making the dish any better.

And then I get, yeah, that's a waste of time.

So what it'll often happen, at least for me,

when I find myself in that territory,

which Jason or anyone else at the company,

is having that meta-cognition to realizing,

do you know what?

I'm getting emotionally attached to some argument

about the shit I made up in my head.

That seems like a bad use of time.

So how do we dispel that?

Let's get more real.

Let's build a little more stuff.

Let's just try it.

I mean, I think I've gotten better at that over the years

of just accepting, you know what?

I don't necessarily think this is the right path to go down.

I'm totally willing to try it.

We should try most things, right?

I've now seen myself be wrong quite often.

And a lot of times in aggregate over 20 plus years,

they're going like, you know what?

Yeah, I don't think this is right,

but we'll know either way if we put something

in front of customers.

So let's just that be the referee.

I don't have to be the final referee on everything.

And I think once you get to that realization

and actually having that confidence in yourself saying,

you know what, I have a lot of some opinions

about an awful many things.

But occasionally they're wrong,

and what I just want is something great.

And we will see what's great

if we try to go one way or the other way.

And then next time, as we've talked about in the past two,

Jason and I will trade, like, all right.

Jason really cares about how this one is made.

Like I just had some feedback on it,

but I'm not that attached to it, you go with it, right?

And other times I'm going to be like,

over my fucking dead body.

Now, thankfully most of the time,

we're not at an evil level of intensity

on a given feature like I can remember maybe like three times

in 25 years of work together where I felt like,

oh my God, we're within like 1% of intensity

about caring about an outcome of something one way or the other.

Get further away from that or calibrate your sensibility

more to that when you work with other people and like,

Jason Pierce, like, 7% more than me about this.

He can have that one.

You know, I was actually, and we're more thing if you don't mind.

I think this is one of the interesting things

about the AI age that we're in right now

is beside the fact that it's amazing

for all these other reasons.

I think one of the reasons that attracts people

who are working on stuff

is they don't have to deal with other humans.

I'm not sure a lot of great things

are going to come from that process.

You can move faster.

It can do a lot of work for you,

but also it doesn't disagree very often.

You can easily push it wherever you want it to go.

It'll do whatever you essentially want it to do.

And I think there's a real appeal to that

for a lot of people because I think in their normal day to day,

they have to butt heads with human beings.

And then my butt heads with a boss they don't like

and a coworker they can't stand.

And this is such a relief to just have nothing in your way.

But I don't think that leads to necessarily

building something better.

It might lead to building something faster.

It might lead to being able to do more

than you could do by yourself.

But I think there will be something lost

if you are just trying to find the least disagreeable path.

And that is actually currently what's going on in AI also.

In addition to the fact that it's fantastic,

but it doesn't disagree enough.

And I think there's this false sense of comfort

that comes with that because you know,

well, I can delegate all this work.

I can ask this thing to help me.

And it's just going to say, yes, the whole damn way through.

And there's a pleasure in that.

And there's oftentimes that can be wonderful.

But I do think when push comes to shove,

you actually want some friction in the system

that is hard to push against.

Like, AI can disagree with you sort of,

but you can steamroll it very easily.

It's much harder to do that when someone's going to stand

their ground and they're a human and you have to work with them

and they have a personality and they're all the time

and they have opinions and they have experience.

It's a lot hardest to roll over somebody that way.

And I think it's good when people are in your way a little bit.

So anyway, that's just another little bit of an aside.

That's a very good point.

I'm going to direct you guys to 37signals.com slash books.

We talked about getting real in this episode.

We don't really talk about that book very often.

It's a very first book.

So you can find all of those books at 37signals.com slash books.

This has been an episode. 20 years old.

20 years. This year.

So she actually find out what month we published that

and then celebrate 20 years of getting real.

It was 2006.

Actually, it's the only book that I haven't read, to be honest.

Oh, me to go and dig that out.

So we are best one.

Home assignment.

Yeah. You think it's your best one.

Is it your favorite one?

Well, I think it's the purest one.

Really?

I'm just like a sucker for purity.

Like the first version of things to me is always like the best

in a lot of ways.

It's also the shortest.

It's very short and it's very pure.

It came from a time where we didn't have a publisher.

So we sell published it, which also means like it's exactly

what we wanted to put out there.

There was no, like it needs to be a little bit thicker

because you need to be able to sell it.

Is none of those things.

It was like our first initial ideas

and probably the most accurate iteration of our thoughts.

You know, if I had to give out a book and probably re-work

or it doesn't have to be crazy at work,

like if I said like read one thing really

because it's more substance there,

but I think getting real is the purest work we've ever done

and also it's short.

And it's a good reminder, like it's just,

there's barely anything in it

and that's kind of all it needed to be.

Okay, well, I'm gonna make it a homework assignment.

Maybe that'll give us some new episodes

to related to getting real.

We'll pull out some things from the archives.

This is the introduction of 37 signals.

You can find show notes and transcripts on our website

at 37signals.com slash podcast full of video episodes

on YouTube.

And if you have a question for Jason or David

about a better way to work in on your business

or getting real, leave us a voice mail.

You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question

or send us a mail to re-work at 37signals.com.