The Growth Booth

3 Steps To Navigating 10,000+ Decisions/Year | The Growth Booth #35

September 06, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 35
The Growth Booth
3 Steps To Navigating 10,000+ Decisions/Year | The Growth Booth #35
Show Notes Transcript

Did you know that an average Brit makes 770,000 decisions in a lifetime but lives to regret about 20% of them? 

Welcome to the 35th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

In this episode of The Growth Booth, Aidan talks about how to navigate decision-making, with THREE simple steps you can incorporate into your daily life–a handy process that works equally well for small everyday choices and major, life-changing dilemmas. 

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:10 How Often Do We Make Decisions?

02:35 The Butterfly Effect

05:15 How To Navigate Important Decisions

06:37 The First Step

07:30 The Second Step

09:13 The Third Step

11:50 Episode Sponsor

12:19 Mark Confer's framework

16:08 Captain Sully

19:21 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.
 

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Welcome to The Growth Booth. This is episode number 35, where today I want to talk about decision-making. Now, we make decisions all the time, literally all the time. In fact, a study showed that people in the UK make an average of 770,000 decisions in their life, which works out to be around about 10,000 decisions a year. I think even that probably comes out on the low side when you consider that we make decisions about the most minute things that we do on a daily basis, like “What type of tea should I have?” “Should I have a cup of Earl Grey tea or a cup of green tea?” and many other decisions as well.

A lot of these decisions are sort of conscious, and you are aware that you're making them, and others are almost unconscious or they happen in your subconscious. You don't even know that you're making the decision. They just happen. Now, the same study that showed that Brits make over 770,000 decisions in their life also showed that the average person regrets something like 17%, almost 20% of the decisions that they make. The number was 143,000 from memory. If people are making a lot of decisions that they ultimately end up regretting, then you can think that it would be beneficial to have some kind of a framework, at least for the most important decisions in your life.

Now, in saying that, sometimes you don't know what the most important decision is, because a tiny little decision or a tiny little event can go on to have huge repercussions. You may have heard of The Butterfly Effect. The effect or the theory goes that a butterfly flapping its wings could result in a tornado or a mega storm somewhere else in the world. Now, that same effect or that same principle is true in lots of areas in life. When you're making decisions, it's really important that you think them through in a strategic manner. You're not going to think through every single decision that you need to make, but for the most important decisions, it would be good to at least have some kind of a framework through which to approach them.

Decisions can be influenced by lots and lots of different things. It could be as simple as the time of the day or psychological factors, maybe your perception at a moment in time, or an intention that you've got, maybe an emotion or motivation that you're experiencing, or a belief system or cultural or societal patterns or expectations, lifestyle, capacity, capability, and so much more. And as I mentioned earlier, decisions can be conscious or they can be unconscious. They can be small, or they can be absolutely huge, life-changing. The small choices can really lead to big consequences.

I mentioned the butterfly flapping its wings. There's a really interesting study on how this theory came about from a geophysicist from the MIT University, the Michigan Institute of Technology. It's amazing how this guy, this scientist, came up or recognized the fact that a tiny, little, almost immeasurable event like a butterfly flapping its wings could result in a significant weather pattern months from now or years from now. It really is amazing. If you look for Daniel Rothman’s butterfly effect, you'll be able to find an article that he wrote or a summary of what his studies were about and some of the experiences that he did. Really mind-blowing stuff, especially when you take the idea and apply it to something like your own life or business.

Now, 65% of decisions that we're making today are more complex than they were a couple of years ago. And this is partly to do because there are more stakeholders, there are more options available as well, and this level of complexity is just unsustainable. What I want to talk about in the show here today is how to navigate important decisions and share a three-step, very pragmatic approach, I think, to making decisions. Now, recently, I was faced with the decision of selling a property that I own or keeping it. The reason I had to make this decision was that I found out that the property had some significant damage. It was no longer a weather-type property. This is a building in which I own an apartment in Auckland in New Zealand. Now, to give you a little bit of a backstory, I bought this property in cash for around about $200,000 or $250,000 maybe a decade ago. And if I sell it, I would end up selling it and making about $150,000 less than what I bought it for.  I'd be able to sell it for $50,000, maybe $75,000, something like that. If I keep it, I will be facing a hefty repair bill of $150,000. The amount that I stand to lose in selling their property versus what I paid for it is around $150,000 to repair costs that are around about the same.

Now, you might look at that and think, how am I going to approach that? The first step is to recognize the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. This is true for any important decision that you may need to make in your life. This is what I keep going back to. In that case, I recognized that where I optimally wanted to be was to have a property that provided me with passive income, that was not a headache, that was going to look after itself and ultimately be a hassle-free investment to give me solid and reliable returns. That was the first thing that I needed to recognize the gap between where I am today and where I want to be or where I ultimately desire to be in the future. With that property, there was a clear gap. Right now, I'm facing a $150,000 repair bill or selling it at a significant loss versus what I bought it for.

The second step is to collect information and analyze a problem any time you're facing an important decision, by gathering data, you can help give yourself the tools. Not the tools, but the resources to be able to fully analyze it and make sure that you're understanding different parts of the problem and what the potential implications are one way or another. In my case of this problem, a building that I was an owner of, a Property of Auckland in New Zealand. I spoke to the building manager. I read through the Body Corporate Minute, which basically explained the conversations that have been had, and the analysis that had been done by experts. I looked into my own experience having owned and continuing to own a large number of properties around the world and having experienced things like water tightness or just different types of problems in the past and how those had sort of panned out. Having looked at all of this information and having looked back in the memory bank as well, how different things have gone in the past, I basically came to the conclusion that it may cost much more than $150,000 to fix the problem. It might not be something that could fix in just a few years. It could take over a decade. The ramifications of that or the result of that would be that I may end up spending far more money than what is currently being estimated. And I could have this monkey on my back, this burden, for a long, long time.

The third step then is to define or think about alternative solutions. Is there something that I'm not seeing here? Is there another way that I could approach this? Maybe it's not just a case of holding onto the property and paying the repair bill and waiting for it to get back on track. Maybe there's the option of the entire building being sold to be demolished and a new building to be built. There was actually an alternative that I looked at, but I soon realized that the value of the cost of demolition would make it very hard for someone to then go and build a brand-new building in its place and make a decent profit there. This is just one example of trying to think outside the box there and looking at different potential solutions to the problem. I also looked at if I did sell, and let's say I was able to sell this for $50,000, $70,000, or something like that, given that I would have just sold it for $150,000 less than what I purchased it for, how would I use that money? Would I buy another property? I don't think I'd buy another property because that wouldn't give me much money to buy a property. I could leverage that money and buy another property so I could get lending. I currently own this property outright. However, is that going to be the best result for me? The stock market at the moment is an interesting point. You never know if it's going to drop more, shoot back up, but I'm a long-term player in the stock market, so I feel like if I did take any proceeds from a sale and put them in the stock market, I'll probably be in a much better position in a few years’ time.

And that's ultimately what I think I'll probably do. I'll probably sell the property, and certainly, right now I can have it listed and see what kind of demand there is out there, and I might be able to get a quick sale. If I can do that, then I can quickly put that money into the stock market and focus on having a healthy return versus having a decade of headache and hassle and going back and forth and actually repairing a building and everything that entails. We'll see how all of this is involved. But I thought it was an interesting story, at least to share with you, because it's very current in what I'm going through, and it's something that you might be able to relate to in your own life or your own business to some degree or scale.

There are lots of personal examples that I could share with you as well, and we can save those for another day. But right now, the important thing is just to think about those three steps I mentioned, which is recognizing the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be to collect information and analyze that information so that you can make a more informed decision and also define alternative solutions. But this is not really where all of this ends because there is a framework that has been put together by Matthew Confer, and he's got a Ted Talk around what this is all about. I really like it because it breaks down the process into a series of steps that you can use yourself.

The first step is to challenge the constraints. I like to think about this one as thinking outside the box, not just accepting what the constraints are. Before you jump into a problem, is there a way that you can think bigger about this, think differently about this, and come at it from a different angle? Maybe there is.

The second lesson is to contemplate failure or to ask yourself and really think hard about this, “What's the worst that could happen? What's the worst that could happen?” In my case of selling that property, the worst that could happen is I get the cash and I put it into something else. I'm not going to be in debt. However, the worst that could happen in holding onto the property may be that there's not a $150,000 repair bill, there's a $500,000 repair bill, or who knows what. “What are my risks, and what are my rewards?” and really think that through.

Now, there's an interesting story that Confer shares in his TEDx Talk, and you may have heard about this one. It's about the cobra snakes and the way that the British government dealt with them during the colonization of India. Now, what the British government decided to do was to offer a cash bounty for killing these venomous snakes, especially in and around the city of Delhi, to try to reduce the snake population. It was reduced. It started to get reduced until some imaginative people saw a business opportunity and actually started breeding the cobras so that they could get the cash bounty. The government promptly shut down the scheme when that came into being. And the breeders then released the cobras that they've been breeding out to the wild. What ultimately happened was the wild cobra situation ended up so much worse than it originally was. You might sometimes hear the story or hear of the cobra effect, and that's what it was all about. Now, if the British government had spent more time contemplating worst-case scenarios, they may have been able to imagine this one or build some rules around it to make sure that this particular risk was mitigated.

That's the second lesson, is to contemplate failure and what's the worst that could happen. And then the third is to sanity check the basics. And sometimes the tiniest details can be things that ultimately result in massive failure or massive success. You may have heard the story about the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft, and it was a huge failure. The reason it was a huge failure is that some people on the team were using metric measurements and some were using imperial measurements. It sounds so basic that rocket scientists, genuine rocket scientists, and mathematical wizards would make such a silly error, but they made that error, and that ultimately resulted in the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft.

Now, there's a very famous example where I think these three lessons from Confer have been used really well and we can sort of reverse engineer them after the fact that this has all happened. You may have heard of a movie, I think it's called Captain Sully or something along those lines. But anyway, in January 2009, an aircraft took off, I think it took off from La Guardia, New York, but it took off from somewhere in that area. And shortly after takeoff, the plane started making a horrible noise and the pilot wondered what had happened. It turns out that he had struck a flock of geese and it was causing the engines to shut down. Now, the air traffic controller asked the pilot, “Which runway do you want to land at?” He could land at LaGuardia or he could land at Teterboro. Then the pilot processed the information that he had and ultimately said that he was going to land on the Hudson. Now, the Hudson River is off midtown Manhattan and an emergency landing was made in the Hudson because the captain of the plane figured out, in his opinion, he would not make it to the runway. He wasn't high enough to be able to make it to either of the runways that had been offered to him. He thought that the safest approach was to land on the Hudson River. And he got to this by, first of all, thinking outside the box, and challenging the constraints. It's not that there are only two places you can land the plane. There are other places. There are two conventional places that were perhaps quite close that he could have potentially, although I think later, they agreed that he probably wouldn't have made it, but could have potentially landed the plane. But there weren’t just two places. There were actually other places as well, including the Hudson River. The second lesson that he worked on there was the premortem, or considering what's the worst that could happen, and thinking about the viability of actually landing in the water, what are the chances that the plane would actually float and contemplate other results of doing that? Would there be other potential failures that would be even worse? And then the third lesson was to check all the basics, and this included checking the epsilon and the altitude to ensure that a safe landing on the Hudson was possible.

Then when the plane actually landed on the Hudson, the pilot walked up and down the aisle to make sure that he was the last one that exited the plane, and that there were no remaining passengers on board. That ultimately led to 155 people surviving, which is probably quite unlikely. It could have been an absolutely terrible disaster if he had tried to land at one of the other nearby airports but hadn't made it to the airport because then he wouldn't have been landing on an open surface that could have been crashing into buildings or God knows what. I think that's a really great story and recaptures the essence of, first of all, challenging the constraints and thinking outside the box, that's lesson number one. Contemplating failure and asking yourself, “What's the worst that could happen here?” and then sanity-checking the basics.

As we wrap this episode up, if you've got something that's overwhelming you or if you feel out of your depth, something that you might want to do, in addition to trying to apply some of the lessons that we've been discussing here today is to talk to someone and ideally someone with past experience. But if you don't have someone or you don't know someone with past experience, maybe you can hire help. Or even if you can't hire help or you don't know someone with past experience, then just the fact of talking about it can bring ideas out into your consciousness. Sometimes I find that when I talk about a challenging situation with someone, it helps me process and see the situation in a new light.  I think that's a really easy thing that you can do by sleeping on it. Sometimes I get hit with, “Oh my God, I've got to make this big decision. What am I going to do?” and I start processing all of the information and working through this framework that we've been discussing here today and then I just go away and sleep on it, get some time away. While you're sleeping on something like this, your brain doesn't just stop working, it gives you a chance to sort of step back and get some clarity. Because sometimes when you're asked to make a decision, you can sort of imagine they are in amongst the forest and you're trying to navigate which way you need to go, when the easiest way to navigate would be if you could put yourself above the forest, then you could see the full terrain. By stepping back a little bit and giving yourself a little bit of space, sometimes that becomes so much easier. I find that on a personal level, that certainly works for me. Getting a good night's sleep and then coming at it again in the morning is oftentimes a really good way to approach a challenging situation and challenging problem.

I hope you found this episode useful today and I hope that it helps you make better decisions in your business and if nothing else, gives you an awareness that we are making literally thousands and thousands of decisions every year, hundreds of thousands of decisions in our lives. And sometimes it's the smaller decisions that can have the biggest repercussions. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next episode!