Why We’re So Indecisive And How To Make Smart Decisions

Why We’re So Indecisive And How To Make Smart Decisions

Weighing Options

When we’re indecisive, we often look at the opportunity cost, which is the benefit you forfeit when you choose one course of action over another. Think pros/cons list. This gets us nowhere.

Why so indecisive?

We’re so indecisive because we’re trying to do an opportunity cost analysis, but we’re refusing to assign a monetary value to intangible things like our time, energy, passion, happiness, effort.

The pros/cons list is flawed in our world of yin and yang. For every pro you write, you can also think of a con for it. The weight in a pros/cons list, then, cannot be determined by the number of items on each side; it must be determined by the weight of all the items added up on each side. And that requires you to assign a monetary value to each.*

To be decisive, measure the collective weight of the pros against the collective weight of the cons.

You don’t make a diet decision based on the number of things you eat vs the number of things you don’t eat. You make a diet decision based on the number on the scale.

 

Stay Positive & Weight Over Quantity

*Certainly you can use some other weight measurement. But, hey, nothing is much easier to understand than money.

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Grunting

Grunting

Performance Grunting (benefits of grunting)

Science and verbal agreements by athletes shows over and over again that grunting improves performance. It releases tension, sets a rhythm, intimidates opponents, etc,. Tony Horton even mentions the benefit of grunting while lifting weights in one of his P90X videos.

If it works in sports performance, don’t you think it would work in any other performance?

What if the writing version of grunting is heavy pen pressure or fierce scribbles or crumpling pages? What if the theater version of grunting is a snuffing remark of the character you are acting as or clenching fists in the blackbox? What if the marketing version of grunting is heavy typing or a verbal “Ahhhh!”?

Don’t resist the grunt. Leverage it.

 

Stay Positive & APORGHAERJG;KJCGP[AE8YG-[AJGALKJG;ADYHFG9-8

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Assorted Links

1) Learning more about creativity and innovation from LEGO (read)

2) The most useful business advice you’ll ever get from Paul Jarvis (read)

3) Six theory of change pitfalls to avoid (read)

4) 5 lessons from the best social media book you’ve never read (read)

5) The best butter knife ever and 9 other brilliant redesigns (read/see)

6) Tough questions (short read, also find how to repair macbook charger cords on his blog)

Expectations Have More Weight Than Promises

Weighing Expectation & Promise

I caught this article on Atlantic this morning. It’s all about making promises. Essentially, when you break a promise, you hurt feelings and disappoint the person(s) you made a promise to.

Obvious.

However, when you exceed a promise, when you go above and beyond what you promise you will do, it’s not much more rewarding than simply meeting the promise.

The research behind it makes me skeptical of businesses making promise’s to their customers and clients. If a PR agency promises they can increase a Twitter following by 500 in a week, and end up increasing it by 1,200, the client merely sees that the agency do what it promises, not that it can do more than it promises. There’s no guarantee they can do that again next week.

Alas, we arrive at the scale, weighing promises against expectations.*

Perhaps it’s not just safer to say “this is what you can expect” instead of “this is what we can promise,” but it’s more beneficial, rewarding, and likely to result in a remarkable experience.

The motto goes “exceed expectations.” You never hear, “exceed promises.”

 

Stay Positive & What Do You Expect?

*Dan Ariely touches on this in his book predictably irrational and his blog.

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Feedback Frequency

Here’s a tip you can keep in consideration next time you’re self-evaluating yourself after just starting a new project or venture.

Feedback

If you’re just starting out, trying something for the first time, if you really are a noob, then be sure to take the learning curve into account when you self-evaluate.

Critiques, improvements, self-assessments are simply a distraction when you’re first learning something. It’s a distraction because it takes real effort, focus and energy to assess yourself; attention and spirit better put toward playful progress.

In other words, when you’re told to “play around first,” take it seriously. The playing, that is. Instead of so much feedback, why not seek out the feedbag?

 

Stay Positive & You Don’t Always Need Feedback To Advance

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Unnoticed Celebrities

Unnoticed Celebrities

I'm A Celebrity, Go Away

You’re one of them. Me too.

What does the noticed celebrity artist have that you don’t?

You may say “a following” or “venture capital” but both are snub excuses because you have the same resources that any celebrity has or had at one point to build a tribe and acquire funding.

Drake needed Lil Wayne to lift him up. What’s stopping you from reaching out, asking for help, finding a mentor?

All of these businesses needed capital. What’s stopping you from making pitches, asking for sponsorships, finding a partner?

How you become a celebrity, an expert, an artist isn’t that difficult to figure out. Following through with all the hows is the difficult part.

 

Stay Positive & Just Like Them, You Can Do It

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Just One Thing I Love About The Web

Endless Staircase, Fear

Anything is possible.

From backpacking in an inhabited (by humans) jungle for two weeks to breaking a world record, we can find blogs and YouTube videos to prove they’re possible. Didn’t think a certain web design or mouse contraption could be developed? The Internet tells us otherwise.

It’s a brilliant, but scary thing.

While it shows us the endless possibilities of anything and everything, it also pulls the curtain from which we so often hide behind.

We can’t use “it’s never been done” as an excuse anymore. In fact, we can’t really believe in impossible anymore either. As cliché as it is, the web is proving that if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. Scarily, it reminds us that if we don’t make it happen, someone will.

The world and the web is a scary place. I guess that’s what I love about it.

 

Stay Positive & Run At Fear, Not Away

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