Investment thesis for life

When I saw Reid Hoffman speak to a small group at StartX, he stated that he used an investment thesis for everything he does. An investment thesis helps investors set up goals and metrics for their investments. It determines whether the investment is on track for success.

Reid then revisits his thesis to measure how he’s doing. If a project he’s working on is still inline with his original goals, he’ll continue working on it. If he determines the project is not doing what he originally intended, he abandons it.

I can only remember a single time in my life where I’ve made a new year’s resolution. Although, I make resolutions all the time. I don’t wait to advance myself only once a year. I’d rather be constantly changing and bettering myself. Sebastian Marshall tries to improve himself 1% per day.

You shouldn’t be focusing on things because they’re new. There are two reasons for new year’s resolutions not sticking. You aren’t serious about them or you don’t have enough practice implementing change in your life. We should continually practice changing ourselves. We need to invest in making ourselves better. We need to continue with personal investments which propel us forward. If we practice changing ourselves often, we will get better at doing it. But, we need to measure. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Measuring the performance of resolutions is smart. You can use measurements to understand if you should continue with the resolution. But, how do you know you should abandon a resolution? This is where Reid Hoffman’s life investment thesis is interesting.

By writing down the intended goal and metric before beginning a resolution, you have a way of understanding whether you should continue, double-down, or abandon the change.

Make sure that you give yourself enough time to see changes before abandoning ideas. Make sure you aren’t just stuck in a dip. Once you realize an idea is bad, abandon it fast.

Why not attempt a change once a month? or once a week? How many more things could you do if you attempted to make changes in your life more than once a year?

What do you think? Do you think having an investment thesis for everything in your life is a good or bad idea?

Originally published at bretthard.in on January 14, 2013.