Learn a few techniques that will prevent you from making a bad decision.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about avoiding making bad decisions. Making bad decisions should be avoided at all costs because it will set you back in terms of money, time, and even worse, your reputation. In life you don’t want to focus on making great decisions, you want to focus on avoiding making bad decisions. If you do this, you’ll make it far in life. You can spend a lifetime of doing everything right, but one bad decision can take it all away. So that’s we need to focus on making good decisions.
We have a lot of biases that have to deal with and self-awareness and keeping your ego in check is what’s going to crucial. There are 25 different cognitive biases that people have to overcome and the thing is we have 7 different biases happening all at once. For example, we chase money because we can use that money to get friendships and help with our status, but in order to get that paycheck we work in a job that we don’t enjoy but tolerate it because we like money, eventually we become more and more upset at work but don’t want to change anything because we’ve gotten comfortable and don’t want to try something new because we fear the unknown. There are many different biases that are keeping people stuck in this story. I remember I was working at the Pentagon and I did not like it at all after a couple of months but I wanted to stick it out because I was getting a paycheck, I had benefits, and I didn’t really know what else to do. It is really easy to follow this pattern because it is stable but for me, it was causing me a lot of stress and thankfully I heard the upside of quitting episode by freakonomics to help start thinking that I can change my ways. Luckily for me, I had my GI bill to pay for my schooling once I quit 8 months later and I had savings.
I can’t imagine where my life would be if I didn’t make the decision to leave. I definitely would not be doing this podcast now. It was a great decision on my part but it was a roller coaster to start my own business, huge learning curve and lots of bad mistakes but they were learning opportunities. Thinking back now, the worst thing I could of done for myself is stayed in the Federal Government. I probably would have had a heart attack by now, I guess every time I don’t like something, I try to figure how can I be less miserable. A good way to think about life is, what can I do today to continue to stay miserable. Instead of asking how can I make things better or how to have a good day, taking the opposite approach can open so many more doors, because I don’t want to be miserable. It sucks and I want to avoid it as much as possible. I’ll be miserable if it means I’ll reach a bigger goal, but if there is a better way to do things without having to go through it, I’ll do that. When you start a business, one of the key things you have to do is focus on marketing and this can be a miserable experience. I’ve called about 50 people in one day many of times trying to secure business opportunities and it’s not fun but it is what’s required for me to reach my goal.
I just take the perspective, that with each phone call I’m one more call away from getting what I want and that it’s going to end. And it’s only for two hours a day and I can focus on other things. In life, it is perserverence that is 75% of success. So you have to avoid making the bad decision of quitting too soon.
Having self-awareness is also going to be to avoiding bad decisions. We shouldn’t fool ourselves, and that’s the easiest thing to do. I feel like taking a personality test can help with self-awaress because it literally tells your weaknesses and strengths. I’m very logical as person and displaying emotions is something that I don’t enjoy but I know is important because people make decisions on emotion and not logic so I have to be more in tune with my emotional side. Meditating helps because for me it slows things down and I’m able to read situations better. Meditating is going to be like muscle that needs to be trained, but will be extremely helpful when it is strong enough. Just knowing the 25 cognitative biases will also be helpful because when I’m in a situation, I can be like oh that’s happening to me right now.
Sometimes, life just requires experience for you to avoid making bad decisions because we don’t want to listen. I know I was told to do many things when it came to my business that I should of done, but I didn’t because I was trying to be comfortable like practicing my overcoming objections. It’s uncomfortable to role play but it is so helpful when you do it and you have to continue to do it because you will get rusty and it can cost you. I love to read books and listen to podcasts because I can learn from others on how not to make mistakes. They might say, hey I did it this way and it was a mistake so now I can go I should probably avoid doing that. Always try to learn from other people’s mistakes first, then you can try your own if you need too.
So to recap, to avoid making bad mistakes you’re going to need to have self-awareness, you know your weaknesses and strengths, then you’re going to need to be humble, so you don’t let your ego from taking over and doing the wrong thing, and you’re going to need wisdom so you can see patterns that happening and make the right decision. Interesting the word decision comes from to Latin word de which means of and caedere which means cut off. So when you’re making decisions, you deciding what you’re cutting off from your life. That thing could be good or bad that you cutaway, just try to focus on cutting away as much as the bad choices from you life as possible.
Thanks for listening today’s episode.
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