If you haven’t read this Wall Street Journal article, Warren Buffet’s Formula For Success: One Good Decision Every Five Years, it is worth your time to read.
Basically, it is Buffett’s analysis of his own track record making decisions over the past 60 years, and it is very revealing.
Buffett’s realization is that it is a lot harder than it seems to tell if a decision is going to be a winner when you make it, yet our brains fool us into remembering our good decisions and forgetting our bad ones. This confirmation bias means we are naturally convinced our decision-making is – a lot – better than it really is.
Indeed, Buffett credits his success to just 12 decisions over 60 years, admitting that most of the other decisions were kind of average at best.
If you think about all of this, it is both humbling and potentially merits a change in behavior as to how your approach your business.
Ironically, I wrote an article on (almost) this decision-making subject in 2021. And Daniel Kahneman’s latest impressive book, Noise, is all about decisions as well.
As a real estate player, you make many decisions. These include where to invest, what markets to be in, what asset class to focus on, whether to develop a niche, who you want to hire, who you want to fire, who you want to do business with, who you lend to, who you borrow from, who you invest with, whether to build or buy or improve, whether to take high risks for high rewards or be more conservative and…..this sentence could go on for quite a bit longer couldn’t it?
If you are the ‘boss’ of your organization or a division or initiative in your organization, you are the one who either makes the decisions or approves them. And if you are a good leader, you will own your decisions, both good ones and not good ones.
So if you knew that in one hundred investment/business decisions, say, ten would be fantastic, about eighty would be average, but nothing special, and ten would be major bummers, would you do things differently?
The most obvious theory would be to be much more cautious. If using the math above, 90% of your investment decisions will be bad or average; perhaps you should be more cautious to try to improve the odds that you will hit the 10% that are winners. Being – too honest -- with yourself, would this work? I mean, if you agonized over your 100 decisions more, could you really change those percentages? I doubt it very much. So that plan probably won’t work.
Does this mean that there is nothing that can be done and this article by me, if accurate, is merely a depressing statement of the meaninglessness of life and the pointlessness of investing if it is all luck anyway and your decisions will mostly be bad or average ones…..?
The answer is not at all