How To Make Decisions

0:00 everyone Sam Evans here and in today's video I'm going to show you how to make a decision and how to choose you know the right path in the road and how to get what you want how to arrive at the place that you want to go and basically how to have a better life because if you think about it we were in life right now is nobody's doing but your own and basically your life at this moment is the sum total of your choices every single individual choice you made at every moment in every second of every day got you to where you are now right so basically our life is just the sum total of our choices how does one make a

0:47 choice through a decision and in this video I'm gonna show you how to make decisions that are good alright so let's get to it so I have basically broken this down into three parts and part one is called reduce load and part two is called think critically and part three is called apply mental models right so there's three parts and there's about a total of 22 things that we're going to cover now we're going to just go through them really snappy real quick and get it done and help you make some good decisions so let's start with part 1 which is reduce load so p1 whoops we've

1:35 already made a better decision p1 reduce load all right so the first part of making good decisions is to reduce the amount of them that you have to make right decisions require energy and energy is finite we only have so much of it and we can't really hack it or generate more of it energy is a very scarce resource and so we really the first step we want to do is just reduce the load right most people spend all of their energy making decisions that are useless and then when it comes to the critical decisions in their life

2:20 they have no energy left to actually think about things properly so they make really poor decisions because they've burnt all of their energy thinking about what socks to wear or what sandwich to eat for lunch or whether they said something dumb on the weekend right so how do we reduce the load well I've got five simple things the first one is to just make less decisions right and this is due to something called like decision fatigue so decision fatigue is basically like when you just don't have any more cognitive energy left to to decide like

3:06 what to do so you just either do nothing or you just default to something because you just can't be bothered anymore right now decision fatigue is real and what most people don't understand is that we use energy and we accumulate decision fatigue on the most mundane of things like what should I wear this morning what should I eat for lunch what should I eat for breakfast like where are my keys like all of this crap right so one of the best ways to reduce the load is just to make less decisions and to do that you just do less stuff and the best way to do less stuff is to

3:54 just do this stuff so most people they try to do more crap they're like y'all do that y'all do that and they're constantly looking for more things they're like what else can I do what else can I read who else can I talk to like how many more times can I go out how many more social media channels are there how many more like shows can i watch on Netflix what if I go on to like HBO as well as Netflix and then go on to more shows and then what other sport can I get into so I can watch more sports games right they actively go out recruiting and seeking and hunting for more stuff but if you want to reduce the load you have to do less stuff and what

4:40 that means is sacrifice right so put in here sacrifice now sacrifice is dangerous it's the it's probably one of the most powerful things there is and really successful people really know how to sacrifice I think a lot of this comes to playing chess or knowing how to play chess I played chess when I was younger and it really teaches you how to use sacrifice quite well like you know because it's not about losing a piece it's about winning the game and so you learn to sacrifice pawns and Knights you learn to sacrifice all sorts of pieces to win the game and the means I mean the

5:26 end justifies the means a lot of the time and so this kind of way of thinking and this way of sacrificing like at the small picture for the big picture is a really powerful thing to do and so most people are terrible at sacrifice and you know you're good at sacrifice when you actually say no more than you say yes so if someone asks you if you want to do something you just say I know and you just say no more than yes if you're a yes person and you say yes most of the time and you're actively looking for officer needs to say is then you suck at sacrifice right however you aren't really a master of sacrifice until you truly say no and get rid of things that

6:13 you just with every with every single like part of you want right so like it's not sacrifice when you don't really want to do the thing and you just say oh I sacrifice that that isn't sacrifice you sacrifices when you truly really want something and you enjoy it and you thoroughly want it badly and you say no you don't do it so for a lot of people who like partying or going out I mean it might be like partying just sacrificing that that's big right so do this stuff being the third one is to make one decision that what about God here

7:03 removes future decisions right now this is a powerful one so most people they wake up in the morning and then they're like oh what am I going to wear today so they walk over to their wardrobe and they just stand there and look at it and they're like well I could wear that well I could wear that what socks am I gonna wear Oh what have we go up here like they just go through a bunch of mindless crap and then you know they've they've burned a ton of cognitive computations on some trivial crap right so what you want to do is like just make one decision so I just wear the same clothes every day now I don't wear the exact same shirt and the exact same socks and underwear and

7:50 everything every day because they would be pretty unhygenic would smell pretty bad and so plus my wife wouldn't be very happy I might not have a wife so what I do instead is I just get the exact same t-shirt so I just have like six or seven of these in different colors right but they're the exact same damn shirt same size same brand same everything they're just some different colors and so when I wake up in the morning and I'm like what am I gonna wear well it just depends which one I grab right then I don't have to think about it the and then same with my shorts I have four pairs of the same shorts and then socks I basically have like ten of the same socks same with underwear they're all the same and I only have one pair of shoes well actually I got two one a

8:37 running shoes and the other ones are just like normal shoes that I wear every day so I don't really have to think about any of that stuff and then I just have two hats because my hair's long at the moment and one hats typically in the wash so whatever head isn't in the wash it's what I put on that's it I just so what I did instead of deciding what I'm gonna wear every day I make one decision one time that solves all decisions in the future right so you can wear the same clothes every day and if you think that gross will have multiple of the same thing and if you think that's boring have them in different colors but if that's still too boring for you right and you're someone some fashion astir or some crap then what you want to do is just like have a different outfit for a different day right so at

9:23 least you can plan this thing one time and get it done with right done now every time you go to make that decision it's just the same and you're not you're no longer deciding you're just you're just recurring the same thing that you did in one point in time right this is huge makes a ton of difference another one that humans suck at is food you know we need to eat food all the damn time and it's never going to change for the rest of your life you can have to eat like three meals a day right most people think what am I going to eat where am I going to get it from when should I get it all of these things and it's just total waste of time so again make one decision that removes all future decisions so I just get this thing called thistle thi stle dot Co and it's

10:13 a meal delivery it's really healthy healthier than I could make and healthier than I could get if I win out right and it has variety they change things around every week and it comes every day in its brick it's our lunch and dinner for six days a week right and it it changes around so I have lunch at the same time every day 12 o'clock I have dinner at the same time every day about seven o'clock and I just know what I'm gonna eat done so most people would probably on their food and what they're gonna wear they would have already burnt like probably like 20% of their of their days cognitive energy right it's just stupid make one decision that removes Sucher

10:58 ones then the fourth one have a simple personal life now this is big right so you've got to choose which side you want complexity on right you can't have complexity on both sides and what I mean by this is personal life and then like your thing right and your thing might be sports that might be art it might be photography it might be music or it might be business right for me it's business and building things and so there's a lot of complexity on this side

11:44 I'm always like in the middle of a lot of very complex difficult time consuming and all energy consuming things right that require every ounce of me to to even understand what's going on and so I can't have complexity in my personal life as well it just would not work right I met my limits a lot of the time just with this going on here in things nice and simple in my personal life so if all of a sudden I have a bunch of complexity and and over here in my personal life I'm screwed everything's going to go to and so how do you have a simple personal life well I see so many business people and entrepreneurs just get burned basically

12:32 the same way like a lot of professional athletes get burned and what they do is they start making some money and then their lifestyle just creeps in grows into this massive hungry beast that then consumes them all right so what a lot of professional athletes do is when they start making money they start buying cars and mansions and beach houses and throwing parties and doing the whole bunch of stupid and then basically behaving like it's always going to be really good like this and then all of a sudden it's not and then they're screwed because they need so much time energy and money to feed this thing right and it just ruins them and this is really stupid I see a lot of entrepreneurs do this too and what

13:17 you've got to be very careful with is you can't let the byproducts of your thing distract you from your thing right so if your thing is like basketball and you start making money from basketball you don't then start buying lots of things and going to lots of parties and start thinking you're really cool and doing all of these interviews and crap because what happens is then that distracts you from being the best basketball player you can be and that is the reason why all of these things are happening so if you get distracted by this it takes your energy and attention away from this and then this disappears and this disappears and you've got nothing right so it's totally stupid and

14:03 it happens to everyone I see it it's the it's just this like disease that gets everybody and the key to it is to have a simple personal life like as your income expands don't increase your lifestyle like in the beginning yes sure increase your lifestyle because you know like me I was living in my parent's garage and I basically buy of course if I skip start to make some money I'm probably gonna get myself a place that isn't my parents garage right like by all means do that and if you're absolutely broke and eating like ramen noodles every day then by all means start eating some some proper food but at a certain point you don't really need to go further than that right and I did this early on in my career as

14:52 soon as I started making lots of money I started buying lots of I bought like tires I've had a boat and all of this crap and all of a sudden it just I realized that most of my time and energy and mental capacity was spent worrying about this crap that I owned and not focusing on my business which was actually the vehicle that produced the resources to even be able to do this stuff so we don't realized that I got rid of it all and then I just tried to make my life more simple and just more like plain right so no fancy clothes no fancy cars no fancy houses or mansions or any of that stuff right like I can live on about 20,000 bucks a month right

15:37 and a lot of you might think well that's a ton of money and yet is and it's like I'm not saying I live like poor or I'm really like I'm living like a monk or anything like that but compared to what a lot of entrepreneurs spend on them on their personal lives that's very small right so I take a lot of pride in trying to spend less personally the more money my company makes right it's like a little game to me and I actually get satisfaction from trying to make it more simple and more frugal and more cheap right that's actually enjoyable for me instead of trying to make it bigger and bigger and bigger because when you take that load

16:22 off you personally and when you simplify all of this then you've got a lot more mental space and mental capacity and you don't have as much worry and then you can take bigger risks with your company you can like because you don't need to keep paying these really consuming lifestyle costs every single month right and this is a big one a lot of billionaires do this a lot of billionaires drive Priuses and live in like houses that costs that they once bought for like 50 grand or that cost under a million bucks right a lot of billionaires live cheap and a lot of sales reps and real estate agents and people like borderline bankrupt have

17:08 really fancy frivolous personal lives right so that's a big one what else have we got oh there's another key piece to this one which is pretty big and I'll put it down here we'll call this like 4.1 or just call it yet 4.2 and it is a low maintenance partner now that might be boyfriend girlfriend wife husband whatever right now you want to have a low maintenance partner and this is I

17:54 don't think it's possible to be an entrepreneur at least a successful one if you have a high maintenance partner you're screwed you're done because business is so like to be really good at what you do it's complicated and it's demanding and you can't do that you can't figure your figure your way out through this maze of chaos and uncertainty when and you can't push the frontier of this thing if you've got someone that's bugging you and demanding you all the time right now this is so key and you probably know immediately with you ever low maintenance partner or not now if you don't have a low maintenance partner if you have a high maintenance partner I want to be clear I'm not saying leave them but you do

18:39 need to intervene you too need to sort this thing out because your your chances of success and are screwed unless you fix this one up right like people like people need to understand that loved isn't ownership right and high-maintenance people think that it's ownership they think that like because they're with you they own you and if you're doing something else then that is like the they're not owning you and then they it's it's totally messed up and it's psychologically up so you need to sort this thing out if someone truly does love you and if you truly love someone then you would want them to do and succeed at their dream right and you would want to help that and be a part of it right so this is very unhealthy and not

19:28 only psychologically not only in your relationship but in your life but also for your business or whatever it is you that you're doing right keep it simple now the fifth one is to limit surface area now what does that mean well you want to think of your your life as like a canvas right just imagine a canvas now the more surface area that you cover the more crap that you're going to catch right just imagine that life is like just this flying around of like paint going everywhere right now

20:14 how do you care how do you get less paint on you well you just have a smaller surface area right now this is how you basically reduce the load you have a small simple life and you do live stuff and you make you make less decisions and you suffer less decision fatigue by shrinking the canvas less surface area now how do you do that well it should be your goal and your intention to limit your surface area so think about all of the places that you go or that you exist that allow things to come at you right so if you just imagined yourself what I can do is just draw a picture of my typical uni six and

21:00 stick figure right so imagine this is you now you want to think about you on any typical day and you want to watch the inputs that come to you like what are all these things that come to you demanding your time your attention your energy how do these things get at you right there's gonna be things coming now there might be notifications they might be emails they might be phone calls they might be texts they might be whatsapp messages oh my god this so much stuff these days that allow people to come and with you right and then this physical mail that stuff can come at you then these people that knock on your door then there's people that call your home line if you have one of those there's so much stuff that comes at you

21:46 every social media channel basically has dims and doesn't allow you to turn the diems off so that's all coming at you notifications is coming at you you've got them on your browser you've got them on your phone you've got them in your inbox you probably have like five inboxes you've probably got seven bank accounts that are all sending you notifications and you've probably got four PayPal accounts you've probably got two venmo accounts you've probably got like a P o box and your normal home address and publish the mail still being sent to like your old address that's getting forwarded to your new address right this is this is what a lot of people probably have now that is a lot of surface area that's a lot of coming at you and you want to limit that so the best way is just to eliminate so you don't need that you don't need that you don't need

22:32 that you just keep going through and just stripping it right so for example I don't tell anyone what my phone number is unless I absolutely have to and I phone number is nowhere it's not on the footer of my emails I don't have business cards and I don't like I don't tell anyone my phone number so basically no one has my phone number other than the people that that should have it and even still if they call me I don't answer my phone in fact my phones typically on airplane mode and it's in my drawer so even if they did call me it would just ring to voicemail and then if you call my voicemail then it says hi you've reached Sam I'm not available right now please leave a message saying who you are what you're calling about and what you want

23:18 basically right and then if they don't leave a message or if they leave a vague me so just delete it right and then I don't tell anyone my email address either right you restrict the stuff limit the surface area people who have footers at the bottom of their email that tell them like every different way to get in touch with them including fax landline and personal phone and all this crap it's crazy right and then I don't have whatsapp I don't use Skype I don't use diems on any channel right like go ahead and send me a DM somewhere and watch what happens right I don't do any of this in fact really the only channel we have at my company is slack so if

24:05 someone wants to contact you they use slack so my wife has a slack account so she can message me on sec so did my parents my family they still use slack too because it's not healthy to have so many different channels that people can contact you on you want to tell people the best one to get you on right that way you can actually help them and be the most service so my parents no message then ones that my sisters know my wife knows and so does my team right and then that's a way to limit surface area right and if someone tries to get me to download whatsapp to message them I'll be like no not doing that right just see me an email or if someone wants to message me on like Facebook then I

24:50 just won't reply right and if it is one of my friends I'll say look I don't check Facebook but see me an email to this email address right limit the surface area also like if you go out a lot like to parties and socializing and all others that's expanding the surface area you're just laying stretching the canvas to catch more stuff right limit it now that's part one and if you do these things you'll have a reduced load and that's at the beginning now you've actually got some sanity now you've got some energy left over to actually do something with right so this isn't even really how to make a decision this is just making sure that you've got

25:36 the stuff required to actually make a decision which is energy and sane in mind all right so that's p1 now let's go to p2 now p2 also known as part two is called think critically now thinking critically so you want to do your own analysis and you don't want to default to what everyone else is doing right these most people in the world when they need to make a decision they just look at what everyone else is doing and then they just mimic them

26:22 right it's craziness like if everyone's doing it doesn't mean you should do it it's actually kind of a warning sign now you need to be able to do your own analysis and think critically and to do this it's very cognitively demanding and the reason why most people I think just copy other people it's because they don't ever need damn energy left so they just mimic so this is why this is part one to make sure that you've got the stuff energy required to think critically so the first part or the first one of think critically is to do your own analysis don't do don't just

27:08 copy crowd right if everyone's doing something doesn't mean you should do it first and foremost right if you want to achieve anything right it's gonna come from doing something abnormal right I am honestly astonished that people haven't figured this one out if you look back through history everyone that's ever done anything great basically didn't copy anyone else but yet everyone's still copying everyone else what's really funny is that like some people try to copy me by copying exactly what I do and I'm like man this person doesn't get it to actually copy me you would do something different because that is what

27:55 I'm trying to do so if I eat my strategy is to do something different and do my own analysis and not copy other people so then if someone comes along and copies me and actually thinks they're doing what I'm doing they're not they've totally missed it and the funniest part is they think they're actually copying right so do your own analysis don't just copy the crowd now in the beginning imitation like typically imitation comes before creativity right or creation so don't get me wrong when you're just getting started your best bet is to often just kind of learn from others and try to copy their patterns and try to master their ways first before you have the ability to go and create because first

28:40 you have to learn the building blocks and once you learn the building blocks and you learn the common patterns then you can start to think of new ways to pattern those blocks right and that's when you can truly start to make leaps and bounds but first imitation often comes so starting off by copying templates and learning from people this is pretty good but if you really want to push things and if you really want to like find new levels and really push the frontier then you need to do your own analysis and really you should do your own analysis always and sometimes if that means just copying the person who you think is best to copy at least you did your own analysis most people never do their own analysis right now another

29:28 one or one example I can give you to explain this is my Minimum Viable whedon in VW so when I got married and here's a photo here mvw stands for Minimum Viable wedding so when I proposed to my wife and then we were thinking are we gonna have a wedding at first my wife was like yes we should and I was like okay well we should you should get a wedding planner because there's gonna be a lot of work and so she got one and then she realized that she had to talk to the wedding planner a lot and it was very demanding like the amount of there was mostly just the attention and the energy

30:14 that this beast required to actually have a have a day where people got some alcohol and some food and got to wear like some clothes that were a bit fancier than normal right so I we we that happened she was like I don't really know if I want to duel with us this is really draining and I was like well I definitely don't want to do all of that that looks really draining so then we thought well should we even have a wedding and we decided to basically well I did like an analysis I did my own critical thinking and the process I went through was well why but what things are important right asking why is a key thing and really we looked at all of the components of a wedding so we took a wedding which is something and

31:00 then we broke it out until its constituent parts like its the different parts that come together to form this hole that we call wedding and the things we basically looked at all of them and we were like which ones do we think available in which ones do we think of waste right now the dress we were like okay yeah the dress makes sense and in the ring yeah the ring makes sense the ring you know you're gonna have all you're gonna wear for like a long time and then the the the photos right and then the location and then we thought but what about like all the alcohol all the food all the catering all of that crap and then what about organizing all of those people and trying to get them

31:46 into their place we're like no that's not really their important right so we really just took these things that we thought were important and we got a good ring wear a good dress and we went to a great location Queenstown in New Zealand and I rented a helicopter so that we could go like in a helicopter and land on top of some different mountains and then we got a really good wedding photographer to come along with us right and we basically just spent the day dry fly around landing on mountains and getting cool photos like this and then we went out to a nice place for dinner Edd's some nice wine and that was our minimum viable wedding now this is not just copying the crowd copying the crowd is like gotta get a venue go to

32:33 and buy these people but ever an invite got it all of this crap like we didn't do any that we thought critically about it were like which things may since for us which things don't and we we did it that way it took way less time it was really easy to do and I actually think we got more reward from it and more pleasure from it then a typical wedding right now there might not be the same for you you might value other things than what I value right there isn't one best way for everything it depends on you in your situation so this is what I'm getting at think critically and don't just copy the crowd right and I gave my minimum viable wedding as an example a third one would be well that's actually a an example but I'll put that

33:20 as number two then the third one is apply core values or core principles all right now having core principles is a very helpful thing to have because ahead of time you make you make like these decisions about how you want to live your life and what things you value and what things you don't once you do it one time and then you just stay with integrity from those principles and you stay like true to those principles for for the rest your life right so taking

34:05 some time to really define your principles and the mission that you're on in the goal that you want is extremely powerful so here is basically what hours are at consulting comm right so you can see the mission to click to the plea educate every human on earth and then you can see the principles right so what like for example student obsessed what's best for the students is what's best for everyone all right and then high standards great just isn't good enough long term thinking lean and frugal right constraints breed resourcefulness do more with less like the scientific reason from first principles use data test and iterate right question deeper thing ask why and

34:52 hold nothing sacred in the pursuit of truth so I use these all the time even when it comes to my damn wedding I'm basically questioning everything and being scientific and I don't really care at all about being conventional and I would always prefer to be on the side of lean and frugal rather than like extravagant and stupid right so these are very very very helpful I highly recommend you take the time to write down like five to ten principles that you really believe in because when it comes to making a decision you can do your analysis and look at all of your different options like we could do this we could do that we could do that if we did that we would

35:38 be sacrificing this if we did that it would be good for this but bad for that and you've got all of these different options all of these different possible paths and then you're like which one should we choose well it's it basically comes down to which thing is which core pieces are most important and most valuable to us or to our company or to our relationship or to us as an individual right and you're forever screwed if you don't actually know what's valuable for you because then you can never make a decision because there's no decisions that are good for everyone always permanently forever like different people value different things and they're trying to achieve different things right so this is a huge hack for

36:25 making decisions and you can never really grow and scale a big company without principles in a clearly defined mission because if you don't have a clearly defined mission then once you get a lot of people you can't communicate with all of them all the time and they all need to be rolling in pointing in the same direction right direction and alignment is hugely important and if you don't have that clearly defined everyone's going to start spawning out in different directions some directions are going to be the inverse of others everything's going to start contradicting itself it's going to get convoluted and it's going to just blow up in self destruct right also people are going to start making decisions in different ways in meetings some people are going to think that profit is more important

37:12 than the customer they're like screw those customers let's just charge them a lot more right because we can make more money than more money for us someone might think that way a lot of people think that way I see it every day but that's why having something like this is important because if if making a lot more money or doing what's best for the student are options then I'll always side with what's best for the student all right and so debt that way when you grow a company in a team everyone knows which one to choose when they approach like that fork in the road very powerful now another one is to look number four is to look at decision patterns now

38:08 decision patterns is something that a very powerful and a lot of people don't know how to spot them see a lot of people are very bad at pattern recognition they only see things as they are they don't see that when they see something like this whiteboard or this listen all this number three they're just like oh that's a white border that's number three they don't look at the space in between the things right some people look at the objects and some people look at relationships between the objects and the best way is to look at both look at the relationships between the things and the things because sometimes you can spot a pattern of objects and sometimes you can spot a pattern of relationships right or a pattern of relationships in objects and

38:55 this allows you to be way better at pattern recognition so for example with my minimum viable wedding I approached a fork in a road where there was two paths one was very complex and the other one well basically there was like three three basic paths one was have a complex wedding because that's what everyone does and the other one was to have no wedding at all seemed a bit extreme and then the other one it was to come up with some new thing right some new species some new breed of weeding right and then I thought well we are else have I seen this pattern right where it's convention nothing or new mix and I was like oh

39:40 look I remember the Lean Startup where they talk which is a book I read by Eric Ries and they talked about this concept of the MVP which means Minimum Viable Product right and basically what they're talking about in that book is how a lot of startups believe they need to build this big fancy deluxe extravagant product for it to add any value to people and it's basically a death march that people go on and it requires huge amounts of energy resources and everything and it doesn't really add that much value and it often ends in failure and then he talks about the Lean Startup which is basically where you come up with the MVP or Minimum Viable

40:25 Product where you look at really the what the user wants and then you look at the product that you want to build and then you think which things are really important for the user and which things aren't what's value what's waste and you start stripping it out right you start stripping it back until it's down to something very minimum it's not nothing it's not something extravagant it's whatever is the Minimum Viable that is what the pattern in there is and so when it came to my wedding I thought huh I could just apply that instead of MVP mvw Minimum Viable wedding just did the same analysis ran the same pattern on it and came up with a different thing and I've done this with lots of stuff I just run

41:11 the same pattern we've got Minimum Viable process in our company right we think oh this would be perfect process or like this would be the perfect system but this would be MVP like Minimum Viable process in my course where I teach people consoling calm the courses we have we teach people how to come up with a service or a product and we teach the Minimum Viable Service Minimum Viable Product we teach this too and then when it comes to coming up with a course we show people in up level consulting which is one of our courses how to make the ultimate course and we talk about MVC Minimum Viable cause right so I learned this pattern once and it's basically a decision-making pattern I learned it once but instead of

41:56 thinking that only applies to products in startups no I took that and I applied it everywhere I basically took a pattern and extrapolated it out over everything and used it as a model for making decisions and this is what you want to start doing you want to start analyzing decisions that people make and companies make and you can look back in time often it's best to look back in time because then you can see the future because the futures today and you can really judge whether those decisions were good or not looking at decisions people make today isn't very helpful because like you've got to wait for the future to occur for for you to really know whether that was smart or not so I like looking at history for this and what I'm looking for is common patterns now obviously I

42:44 might not be in the same niche I might not be in the same country that time like the 1900s or whatever like that time isn't now things have changed technology is different people's tastes and culture everything has changed but that doesn't mean that I can't use those patterns from the past for decisions today right and you want to kind of build a library in your mind of different patterns right and when you build this library of different patterns then whenever it comes to a decision when you're thinking critically and you've got energy to do so because you've done less stuff then you can start taking this situation and seeing what it would look like on different patterns from these different libraries

43:31 in your mind and you're basically projecting it out on that pattern projecting it out on that one projecting it out on that one projecting it out on that one and you're like oh that that one that one makes sense right now you need to build this library or these libraries in your mind so that you can call them when you're making decisions in life that is why it's important to like analyze things like I don't just analyze my own decisions I analyze other people's decisions and then I wait I don't make a I don't think like oh that was a bad decision or that was a good decision I wait for time to tell me right because my opinion isn't fact like it might be but only time is going to tell us whether it was fact or opinion and so I like to wait for time

44:18 to be the judge and the decider of that and then I start connecting these things like and seeing what patterns are bad and what patterns are good and when you know what patterns are bad you stay away from them you like all this looks like a bad pattern right for example having a extravagant lifestyle right we've seen so many instances of this bad pattern that I don't know how people can actually apply this pattern and be blind to it it's everywhere it's blatant like look at Mike Tyson dude was crushing it making a killing he bought Tyee Board of damn tiger he did all sorts of crazy and it didn't really go too well for him right a lot of athletes end up

45:05 broke and then once they're at the top of their game a lot of entrepreneurs I've seen like this pattern of massive demanding hungry lifestyle and being extravagant doesn't end well ok what is the inverse of this pattern right we know that's a bad pattern anti-pattern we shouldn't do it but what's the inverse because often when we know what's bad the inverse of that is good so we try it so we flip it and then what about a simple personal life well a lot of people who have simple personal lives they're extremely successful like you've got Warren Buffett who has very simple life the Google founders Larry Page Sergey Brin they have a Prius right a lot of successful people in all sorts of

45:51 domains over all eras of time in history had simple lives and that was a good thing so you see what we've done there like we've built up a library of just a pattern an anti-pattern and a positive pattern for how to have how to have a lifestyle right simple and frugal is good extravagant and ridiculous is bad and now we've got something and then the MVP pattern right you hopefully you can start to see what I'm doing here and don't ever think that this one thing can only be applied for that one thing a lot of people will see how like Warren Buffett lives and be like oh that just works for like Warren Buffett and that was just because he's over an Omaha like

46:36 and then they'd be like they just dismiss it well that's only because he's old right that's silly you want to look at multiple instances you can't tell much from a singular instance but once you look at a range of instances in a range of different industries over a range of different areas of time then you can start to see the patterns right if it's true across all of these different variables then you know what an anti-pattern and a good pattern is right and you can't really argue with that now let's go to part three - ebony space yep p3 and this is called apply mental models which we've started to get into a

47:23 little bit so applying mental models is basically different patterns right now I'm gonna give you some of them because these take like time to get and you have to really be looking at good good things and studying good things to be able to accumulate good things right so I'm just gonna give you a whole bunch of them which will help you a lot and these are like some of the best of all time that I've found from looking at a lot of stuff all right probably done probably been in business for like 30,000 hours or something just quite a lot of time crammed into about nine years and that from that I'm gonna show you some of the

48:09 best mental models I got I got how many of them I think there is like eight or something like that so let's get started mental model one now this is really a cool thing that you need for every mental model and everything and that's just defining goal right this is so important you can't do anything without knowing what your goal is right the goal I refer to it is like you'll pull out a star and the reason I call it that is because you know in days of old when you were out at sea on a ship and you didn't have GPS and all this crap that we've got today you would look to the sky and spot the North Star Polaris star and you would use that to

48:56 calibrate we were going so that you could like you know what you knew where you were in time and space and how to get to where you were going right so you can see I took that pattern from like a ship you know like in days of old and applied it to golds right so you need a pie or a star it's the only way to know whether you're going in the right direction or not or actually what you're trying to do so have a goal and then the second one is to think long term now long term some people I often talk I'm talking about long term and short term and then I realized that the whole time I was talking about it the person I was talking to was thinking that long term was like six months when I say long term

49:43 I'm thinking ten twenty thirty years right short term I'm thinking one year short term is a year long term is ten twenty thirty years right now the longer term you think the better the decisions you will make right long term thinking is just a pillar of success no matter who you look at that this is a pattern right people who think short-term they end up like obese infused their skin fuses to their couch and they have to get craned out right doesn't end well bad pattern but thinking long term this goes quite well right so you want to think long term the longer term you think the better and your mission that you should define here

50:30 should be long-term right companies that have set very long-term missions did the ones that do the best now three what have we got here project decision options project vectors options right so what you want to do once you've got your goal and I'll draw this down here with a different color so let's say here's goal and here is now and you were here now and you want goal right well what you

51:16 want to start doing and goal should be long term is when if you've got to make a decision the first thing you want to do is kind of project out these different vectors and see like see how far or how close they will take you to your goal right now some of them might be better in the short term but worse in the long term and some of them might take you a long way but in a slightly different course right you've got to look at all of the different options that you have when you're making a decision to see where it's going to go and you want to kind of project them out like this that is like a good first step now you can't even do this until you know what your goal is

52:01 you also can't do it until you're completely honest with where you are right now right you have to be totally honest with yourself about your current situation and what you have an inventory and then you have to be clear and decisive about this long-term goal and then that you start to map these things out all right now what else have we got then you want to calculate the half-life of decisions alright now I took this pattern from chemistry right this isn't

52:48 even I'd never heard anyone else use it in the in the context of decision making but I borrowed that pattern and used to here so in chemistry you talk about a half-life of something like you know the half-life of caffeine might be six hours that means you ingest some caffeine it has some kind of effect and you for like six hours and then it fades right so I that that's a half life everything has like a half-life and when it comes to decisions they have like a half-life 2 if you think about it so if every day I wake up and I think what am I going to wear today what is the half-life of their decision it's 24 hours I'm gonna have to make it again and again again so but what is the what is the half-life of a decision where I decide to wear the

53:35 same thing like in every day that half-life is about like years it could be 10 years 20 years so with the same amount of energy I made a decision that lasted 20 years whereas with the same amount of energy someone made a decision that lasts 24 hours right that is analyzing the half-life of a decision so that's one great mental model the other one is food like if you think every day at lunch and dinner what am I going to eat and then you go into a research like R&D process that lasts an hour probably an argument with your partner but what are we gonna don't know I don't know I don't know now it's domestic now it goes into tomorrow like this happens right so

54:21 really really really stupid you want to look at and be like I can't do this every damn day right this is stupid I'm not gonna spend an hour every day of my life quarreling about some matter that's gonna into my mouth I need to come up with this longer term solution so you come up with a meal delivery thing like this or kotha I told you I was using I have to think about it once sold four years right and it's also better for my health better for everything and it saves money too because it's cheaper then even going to the supermarket and buying my own stuff right so it's better financially it's better for me health-wise it's better for my relationship it's better for everyone I'm around it's better for everything right so it's a great decision and it was only using the same

55:08 amount of energy and time that a lot of people spend to make a decision about what meal they're going to eat once right half life then another one would be second-order consequences now note on this half-life 1 you typically have dividends or decay now dividends is when you make one decision once and it's half-life isn't only a long time but it starts to pay dividends right so the decision adds more value in

55:55 the future then it does today right that is a really good decision the same way money accumulates compound interest when saved so I if you have money then you get paid interest that comes back round and adds to the principle on which the interest is recalculated and it grows and then you see an exponential curve right that means that that decision today to save money is worth more in the future than it is today you don't see much today but in the future you see a lot now that is something that has a special kind of half-life to it not only does that decision last for a long time but it's value increases exponentially over time so this one would pay dividends right and you can have linear

56:41 logarithmic or exponential dividends over time and these these are really good decisions they're rare if you ever find one of them jump at it most you're just lucky if the damn thing lasts a bit of time and doesn't pay any dividends right but ones that actually have a ones that pay dividends over time in curve exponentially like those of really big ones another one is like decisions can also have decay right so like what am I going to eat for lunch today that decision doesn't even last twenty four damn hours because if I'm thinking what am I going to eat for lunch then that's only really going to last about six hours before I'm like I'm hungry again

57:26 what am I going to have for dinner so it's decay is sharp it pays no dividends and it lasts for six hours so it's a terrible decision six hours no dividends done why would you want to spend any of your time dealing with something that has things like that right bad so I like to get rid of all of those things and just focus on the ones that have these nice properties like what's a decision that's going to last for a long time and what's the decision that's going to pay dividends exponentially in the future right some of these decisions you might be wondering well saving money is a great one right because of compound

58:11 interest and all of these things so saving as good spending lots and being an idiot isn't and then your health that's a really important one so like food and exercise those pay exponential dividends because in the future when you're older you're gonna you know really be noticing the effects of your decisions today right so that's another one hiring good people very important knowledge your brain like reading books and like trying new things and really like experimenting and building your knowledge and your library of mental models becoming smarter becoming healthier fitter and being more disciplined having a simple life all of these things have really positive

58:59 effects in the future more so in the future than they have today so these are great things to spend your time thinking about also hiring good people if you hire someone today then today they're not gonna add that much value but if you think out into the future they're gonna add a lot because well they might add really nothing they might ruin your whole right a hiring decision is one of those big ones because who you hire is going to go and interface with other people in the company if you hire someone good they're going to make everyone else in the company better they're gonna make the company better and they're gonna get better over time and so everything's going to get better over time right and then that person is going to hire people and A's hire A's but bees hire seeds so

59:47 if you hire an a then they're going to hire other A's of which we'll hire other A's and you're good your company's going to get exponentially better with time however you hire a bee then they're going to interface with other people and probably make them a bit worse in productivity worse products and every other thing in the company worse and then they're going to go out and hire people worse than them because they are so that they don't want anyone to be a threat to them so they're going out on purpose hire people beneath them so they can think that they're good and then that your company is now because obviously if ace hire A's and B's hire cc and C's are gonna hire a decent if you've got DS than you you're either gonna fail or you're going to go to jail right so again look at the half life of

1:00:33 these decisions and you want to free up energy by reducing load so that you can think critically and analyze the decisions and spend more time and more energy on things like who are we going to hire and like health and fitness and saving and savings and and knowledge and learning and less time on like what am I going to wear and what am I gonna eat all right what else we got consider second-order consequences so number six I've already got that sorry I didn't explain it I actually kind of explained it with the a CIA's B's high C's already so second-order consequences is again like something that you find a lot with

1:01:21 like chemistry and what it basically means is that if you like if you do something now then that's gonna have a downstream effect that you're not going to be fully aware of right so let me give you an example let me make it completely clear so let's say I'm deciding should I buy a 42 inch HD plasma TV or whatever the hell they call those things these days right should I buy this TV or not now if you were an immature decision maker you would think that the only downside of buying this TV would be that it would cost you some money oh this TVs gonna cost me a grand that's

1:02:06 a grand I don't have in my bank account that is slit debt mmm they're weighing these things right should I have the grand in my bank account should I have the grand in a TV and then the TV's gonna depreciate TV might get stolen so I might need some and contents insurance TV might consume some energy right from like the grid like this is this might be the limit of the their analysis what I'm interested in isn't the first-order consequences it's the downstream effects so what's going to happen the second order the third order the fourth order right so the second order consequence of buying a 42 inch TV is that I'm going to watch it why am I gonna watch it because why the hell else would I buy it obviously I'm going to watch it and you know what the

1:02:52 worst thing is that I'm gonna think that I'm not getting my value if I don't watch it so I'm going to be in a state of mind where am i I need to watch this TV to make the most of it to make to prove it out as a good investment I need to sit there and look into this tube right this is this is very gets dangerous because now I'm spending my time watching the TV so now not only if I lost money of which I can't easily liquidate because it's depreciated probably 60% at the moment I left the store and now I also am watching it so my time is gone right and then my intelligence is probably starting to decay too because I'm watching this tube right so now it's real now that's the

1:03:37 second order what's going to happen third order well now because I don't have much time I'm getting lazier I might be going to bed later and now my cognitive ability is harmed because I'm getting less sleep because I want to stare at this tube for more hours and then my intelligence is going down so now I end up at work and I'm dumber I am a bit more delusional because I'm seriously deprived of sleep and I'm also a grand poorer right and I also feel like I don't ever that much time right and my mind is always like trying to connect dots about all of these different shows that I'm watching it's trying to problem-solve fickt fictional characters like fictional life problems more than it's trying to solve my own immediate problems so now I'm

1:04:26 basically right now from here the third order fourth order fifth order is just going to go go to hell from here then I might get fired now I'm going to spend more time watching the TV because I'm fired now I'm probably going to start beating myself up and then I'm probably going to start hanging out with other people who are fired and beating themselves up now we're going to go exponential and feedback on each other and then I'm probably going to get fat and then I'm like it's go it's getting bad right that is what I'm thinking about so that is second-order consequences and don't think it's truncated just a second order it goes third fourth fifth six it goes all the way downstream so you want to consider these things when you make a decision but a decision like eating a

1:05:12 salad it sucks right now I won't I won't lie like I eat salads every day it's not that fun I'd rather eat a burger right but I think of is this good what is it's going to do for my health good things I'm gonna be healthier that means I'm also going to be fitter and I'm going to be in better shape which is always feels good and it's it's healthier and that means I'm gonna have more mental clarity I'm also going to have more self-control and self discipline because I didn't want to do this thing and I forced myself to do it right and it also costs this money I didn't have to think about it much and now in the afternoon my cognitive ability is sharper because my my body isn't committing so much blood to my stomach to you know to ingest this piece

1:06:00 of meat so it's all good and every day that gets better right so you can order consequences of eating a salad versus a burger second order consequences of reading a book first buying a 42 inch TV you see what I'm doing good now what else have we got consider dependencies and sequencing dependencies in sequence right so when you are looking at these different decisions and running one of these different mental models you also you've got your now you've got your goal and you can look at these different vectors but different things work at different degrees depending on their dependencies

1:06:47 and where they are in place in time right so you might take one action here and then one action here one action there and then two in parallel and then that allows you to go three in parallel and then one massive effort to get here right now the sequence so obviously you can't have concurrent like you can't run concurrent projects and products until you have a team not only a team but two teams that can really act autonomously and achieve excellence on their own right this is why I don't understand entrepreneurs that build so many products like people think I'm crazy for

1:07:33 everything like one product when we all need a small team and now we've got like two or three if you include my mastermind but really I think they're crazy for Evan 20 products we're near one person because you can't run 20 things in parallel when there's one of you you can only run one even when there's a few of you they're not really product developers there or product managers there you might hire some customer support and some sales people these people help with the operation of the business right in the selling of it and the bookkeeping of it and the operation but they don't create the product in the value and they don't create that so you can't actually run concurrent products if you just a one person or if you have a few people so the right time

1:08:20 to add another product to your product suite or there right time to do multiple things at the same time is it depends so it has a dependency right so a dependency of doing it multiple products might be that you have to have a team right or I'll give you another example with my company we've got a refer-a-friend program where people can our customers can refer a friend and get a commission for doing so right now in order to do that which is always been on my on my roadmap I always wanted to do it but we needed some dip it had some dependencies first of all we had to own our own billing system because there was no way I could implement this on

1:09:06 anything else we also had to have our one content portal basically because none of the other out-of-the-box solutions could do it and then we needed to have email ability to send emails to people and we needed to have really good tracking so in order to do refer-a-friend I needed to have our own content portal our own billing system our own tracking system that was really good with algorithms for attribution and that were accurate and then we also needed to have yeah I think I'm going to see done a few other things but those are dependencies so then we're looking at the dependencies of this and then we like which one makes most sense now and then so you know this is kind of like how you're playing Cheers you're a grandmaster and Cheers as

1:09:51 always 10 moves ahead right so when they move one piece here most people are just looking at their move there but really what the grandmasters doing is this move is only a requirement for the endgame all right and so you don't understand what's going on and so this is a dependency in a sequence you when you think long term and you reverse engineer from that backwards then you can start to sequence things in the right way and it doesn't make sense to a lot of people but it makes perfect sense for the long term goal that's another thing to think about then what else we got way input and output

1:10:38 symmetry so seven input output symmetry so when you make a decision you have to do something you have to like you have to take action right there requires energy and time and resources money too then you have an output which is basically what value you're going to get it might be freed up time it might be more money or it might be more value added to your customers which in later and downstream will turn into money right so like you've got inputs and outputs and what you want to do is you want to weigh the input against the

1:11:24 output and you want to look at it like this so if I let's say this requires 10 units of energy in and then it has 1 unit of energy out right I spend a lot of time working on this and I get barely any value so this is a symmetric down there's more downside than there is up and we say asymmetric because it's it's not symmetrical right but then this would be something that was symmetrical we would have a 10 in and a 10 out right if we do this one we're going downhill over time so we're going nowhere well actually going we're going to

1:12:11 failure now and if we scale up these efforts we're just going to accelerate our demise and then this one we don't know where which is basically failure because you know you you have like the Red Queen effect going on in here which is basically like an evolution there's basically an arms race and you need to innovate it faster and faster and faster intervals over time so really if you're if you're if your goal is to maintain then you're dying right there's no such

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