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Starting and building

Duan Yongping

The stop-doing list

Duan Yongping (Contemporary · 1961–) — The stop-doing list.

Starting and buildingModernThe stop-doing list

What actually happened?

In 2006 he won the auction for a charity lunch with Warren Buffett, bidding six hundred and twenty thousand dollars. What he says he took away was not a stock. It was a subtraction: an account of what a person will simply not do, held to long enough that it stops having to be argued each time. He has said as much about his own record — that it went well not because he knew what to do, but because he knew a great many things not to do.

Do the right thing, then do the thing right

The order is the whole point. Doing a thing right is a question of skill and can be learned slowly. Doing the right thing is a question of choice, and once that choice is wrong, more effort makes the result worse. Direction is the sign; execution is only the magnitude.

A team polishing the wrong product to a superb finish has built a motorway to the wrong destination. The better the road, the larger the loss.

The moment you find it is wrong, stop

Whatever it costs to stop today is the smallest cost available, because today's cost is fixed and known while the cost of continuing compounds and is not. The severity of the rule is that it deletes the most comfortable option in business, which is to watch it another quarter.

Every quarter a wrong direction survives pulls in another cohort, another budget and a few more public promises. The cut in three months is twice as thick.

Dare to be last

When a category first appears nobody knows whether the demand is real or where the holes are, and the pioneers answer with their own money. Enter once the answers are visible and build it better. The condition is brutal: on entry day your version has to be visibly better, or late is only late.

Music players, smartphones, electric cars — in each category the eventual winner was not the inventor.

A stop-doing list is more reliable than a to-do list

What you should do is uncertain and keeps moving. What you should not do follows from your principles and holds for years. The list also saves judgement: when something on it arrives there is nothing to argue about and no meeting to hold.

Write your three no matter how profitable, never rules. Half your future opportunity reviews will end in ten seconds.

How do I use it today?

This week find one thing you know is wrong and are still doing, and stop it. You do not need a replacement lined up first. Stopping the wrong thing is a separate action from finding the right one, and it is the one that gets postponed.

Deep read

Do the right thing, then do the thing rightThe two halves have an orderFind it is wrong and stop today; any cost is the smallestDare to be lastCome first from behindDo not fire the first shot. Fire the accurate one

Read alongside

Warren BuffettDuan Yongping is Buffett's most serious Chinese student, but he moved the moat from investing to operating: Buffett buys the company that has one, Duan builds one by entering last and building better. Peter ThielThiel says be first into a category nobody believes in; Duan says be last into one somebody else has already proved. Both are refusals to fight in a crowd, from opposite ends. Jensen HuangOpposite entries into a new category. Huang goes in before it exists and pays for a decade; Duan waits until somebody else has proved it and then builds the better version.

Further

Warren Buffett Kazuo Inamori Jensen Huang Chu Shijian Andy Grove Kevin Kelly Konosuke Matsushita Zhang Yiming Peter Lynch

Lines to keep

However large the cost of stopping today, it is the smallest one.

I know a great many things not to do.