Nov 11, 2016
Rafe Furst, graduate from Stanford in computer science, has seen his share of swings in the tech and business world, having been involved with startups since the mid 1990’s. He’s also an avid poker player, both in private games and public tournaments, once winning a World Series of Poker Championship. He’s raised millions for charitable causes over the years and is currently a pioneer in Quantitative Venture Capital, a nascent field based on the convergence of equity crowdfunding, complexity economics and securities law reform.
I asked Rafe to be on the
podcast because of an intriguing question he asked me during our
first phone conversation. I was telling him about the 7 Habits of
the Whole Life Challenge, and he posed a question, “What if there
were an 8th Habit that you inadvertently built in without knowing
it - the habit of good decision making?” I needed to know
more...
Inherent to the WLC as well as pretty much anything in your life is the necessity to make decisions. Some are easy, every day, almost automatic - habitual. Others are clear, obvious choices that have far-reaching implications for your life. The place that people get tweaked is when they mix up evaluating the quality of the decision with the outcome or result. Good decisions can lead to undesirable outcomes. An example from poker - you can make every right decision and still lose a hand. You can also make every right decision in a given evening a still lose all your money. It’s the trap that a novice player falls into - looking at the result (I lost all my money), and questioning your decisions (I must have made bad ones). Instead, Rafe looks at his success over the long term, knowing that if he continues to make good decisions (regardless of the immediate outcome), he will eventually get the outcome he wants.
Do you see the parallel to health and fitness? Wow… it hit me like a brick in the forehead. People start making good decisions each day… and if they don’t see the result they expect relatively quickly (losing weight, fitting into clothes, dropping dress sizes, achieving a certain score or time for a workout), they judge their decisions as bad or wrong and quit. Or, they achieve the result they expected and quickly forget that they need to continue to make the good decisions that got them there (the yo-yo diet syndrome).