How to improve your life: make better decisions.
If you take better decisions, you improve your life. How to take better decisions:
- Improve your data
- Focus on what is Important (with Frameworks)
- Get other brains involved
Improve your Data
Feelings are not a good guide in complex decisions. Only evidence and the perspectives of people who have gone through similar decisions is good data for your decisions. Everyone has an opinion, not all opinions have value.
What data are you putting in front of you as you begin the process of deciding?
Focus on what is Important
The famed Eisenhower prioritization matrix has two axis:
- level of importance,
- level of urgency.
This gives 4 states:
- important & urgent
- Important & not urgent
- Not important & not urgent
- Not important & urgent
Zone 4 is deadly.
Stay out of Zone 4. Zone 2 requires the greatest discipline, and has the greatest long term payback.
You have to know where you are going. If you don’t have goals, you’ll drift into shit you don’t enjoy doing. You’ll not build anything. You’re headed down a dead end.
What are your lifetime goals? Do you have them written down? Who do you want to be when you are older?
Imagination is the greatest human talent. It is vital to use your imagination to visualize your desired future. An architect doesn’t begin to build until the house is finished (on paper).
Get other brains involved
I was with the Arbinger Institute last week.
The biggest problem with human beings: Self Delusion.
We have such a huge need to see ourselves as being right, that we will ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Mastermind groups, peer advisory groups (EO, YPO, Vistage), mentors and coaches are vital to hold a mirror up to you and call out flawed thinking processes.
The person we find it easiest to lie to: ourselves.
Be careful. The question is not whether you are deceiving yourself, the question is where are you deceiving yourself.
How do you take decisions?
What do you do well? What do you not do so well?