Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Ethan’s three weeks on a name
Ethan is a product manager who’s starting a newsletter on the side.
He has spent three weeks on the newsletter’s name.
He has a list of forty names, a poll among friends, and a spreadsheet with pros and cons.
🧩 His struggle:
He treats every small choice as permanent, so each one takes him weeks.
At lunch, his manager tells him the real story of a founder
who had choices he could never undo,
and still built one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Some of his choices took months, and some took one email.
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📺 The show he said yes to in one email
Jeff Bezos started Amazon, the online store.
It is now worth about three trillion dollars.
One time, the team at Amazon Studios, the part of Amazon that makes films and shows, sent him a plan for a new TV show.
Jeff didn’t like it.
He wrote back with what was wrong with it.
It sounded boring.
It would be hard to make.
Amazon would not earn much from it.
The team read that and said they still wanted to make it.
Here is what a bad TV show actually costs.
You make one season, and if hardly anybody watches, you never make another one.
That is the whole price of being wrong.
Yes, Amazon loses some money, but the loss won’t sink the company or ruin its reputation.
So Jeff didn’t call a meeting, and he didn’t ask anyone to go away and study it.
The same day, he wrote one line back.
He said he still thought they were wrong, and they should make it anyway.
Being wrong here was cheap.
And the team wanted the show more than he did.
Now think about Amazon Prime instead.
People pay Amazon once a year, and after that everything they order ships free.
Millions of people had already paid.
If Prime turned out to be a mistake, Amazon could not quietly take it back.
So Prime got months of checking.
Jeff says his job on choices like Prime is to slow everybody down.
He gave the two kinds of choice names.
The TV show was a two-way door.
He walked through it, and if the show flopped he could walk straight back out and cancel it.
Prime was a one-way door.
He went through it once, in front of millions of paying customers, and there was no walking back.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Two-Door Decision
Jeff said yes to the TV show in one email,
and still gave Prime the months of checking it needed.
Before deciding anything, Jeff works out what it would cost to undo.
A bad TV show costs one season, so it got one email.
Prime could never be taken back, so it got months.
Jeff named the two kinds of choices himself, two-way doors and one-way doors.
This strategy is called The Two-Door Decision.
He wasn’t being reckless.
He worked out what being wrong would cost, and that told him how fast to move.
So you stop spending three weeks on a newsletter name.
You could change it any time.
Those weeks go into writing the issues instead.
Save the slow careful thinking for the choices you can never take back.
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🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Back to Ethan, who has spent three weeks choosing a name for a newsletter he hasn’t sent yet.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it everything he’s still deciding about the newsletter.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
You can change your newsletter’s name any time, so pick one tonight and start writing.
He picks the third name on his list before bed.
He leaves the logo for later.
That weekend, he writes his first issue.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Ethan has sent six issues, one every Sunday.
About two hundred first-time product managers read them.
He changed the name once, in week three, and nobody minded.
You’re probably treating a few choices as permanent right now.
Most of them can be changed next week.
If you can undo a choice, make it today, and save the long thinking for the choices you can’t undo.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below sorts everything you are deciding right now into two piles.
The ones you could undo, and the ones you could not.
🧰 What you’ll need
Everything you’re deciding right now, and how long each has been open
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. the newsletter name for three weeks, whether to try another platform, my price forever, whether to narrow my topic, and my logoWhat you’re worried about with each, and what you’ve already told people publicly
- e.g. that the name will look wrong later and that switching platforms later loses readers, and nothing is committed yet, not even the nameWhat’s really at stake if you get one wrong
- e.g. honestly, for most of them, an afternoon of work
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my notes, my to-do list, or my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume first-time product managers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Sort before you advise. For anything that can be undone, the answer is a decision today, not more analysis.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Everything I am currently deciding, and how long each has been open:
{e.g. the newsletter name for three weeks, whether to try another platform, my price forever, whether to narrow my topic, and my logo}
What I am worried about with each, and what I have already committed publicly:
{e.g. that the name will look wrong later and that switching platforms later loses readers, and nothing is committed yet, not even the name}
What is genuinely at stake if I get one wrong:
{e.g. honestly, for most of them, an afternoon of work}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Cannot be undone — the decisions I genuinely cannot walk back, what makes each permanent, and what I need before making each one.
2. Can be undone — everything else, with how I would undo each one and what that would cost.
3. Decide today — for everything in the second pile, a specific choice and the reason, made now rather than researched.
4. The real cost so far — what the open decisions have already cost me in weeks and in work not done.
Then tell me which decision I have been treating as permanent that is not permanent at all.