Making Decisions

How are you? So happy to have you here today. Come on in the studio. Listen, I would suggest you decide to come on in and listen. You don't have to. In fact, you may be like, what's he going to talk?

You're trying to make a decision right now, aren't you? I mean, I didn't hook you into the first 15 seconds. You're like, oh no, maybe I shouldn't stick around. This guy's going to be a waste of my time.

Not really. We're talking about decision-making today and you're trying to decide right now, which is what's happening in your life all day, every day. So I'm going to take you on a deep dive into decision-making because a lot of y'all having a hard time with decisions these days. Am I talking to you?

It is the daily boost for motivation to move.com. The positive boost you need every single day. My name is Scott Smith. Good to have you coming up on 20 years, 20 years, man.

In December, we hit it. I take the December holiday. By the end of the year, we'll hit 20 years and, uh, That's a lot of episodes, man. That's a lot of talking.

If you listen back about 10 years ago, my voice wasn't quite as raspy. It's crazy stuff. It'll be good to have you. Thank you for stopping by today. If you'd like to reinvent something about your life, I'm going to invite you to take a little bit deeper dive.

A lot of people want to do that, reinvent just something, a little thing, or maybe everything. I don't know what it is. But if you listen to The Daily Boost, The Daily Boost is really just a little incremental boost every single day. I teach you a couple of things.

We can't change the world in this thing. But if you listen for More than an episode or two, it starts to change your world. And how do I know that? Because I've done it 20 years now, and I talk to people all the time, and they say, man, it's just every day.

By the way, it's planned that way. It's planned that way. It's planned to slowly seep into your mind, to drop little Easter bunnies or Easter eggs. Yeah, no bunnies here.

So you finally go, oh, that makes sense. I got it. But if you want to reinvent something, you've got to go beyond the boost. You do. And you do that just by going to my Face Your Passion group.

That's where real progress and transformation takes place. That's where you talk to people that are like you. That's where you make friends all over the world. That's where you talk to me.

That's where you can hit a chat group and I pop up right there. FaceYourPassion.com. Join us this week. We are digging deep and we're going to dig into what everybody's up to and we're going to give a pathway for them to start taking those first couple of steps.

Okay. FaceYourPassion.com. Call us on Thursday. So go ahead and, is that today? Might be today. 11 a.m. Yeah. I don't know. I'm recording in advance. I don't know.

Let's talk about decisions today. There's a problem right now with decisions. There is an epidemic right now with decision making. And maybe there's too many options.

Maybe there's too much information out there. There's too much influence out there. Maybe that's it. I think that's the case. I know a lot of really good decision makers.

Most of them are pretty far in their career. They're mid to upper level in what they do. Been at it 20, 25 years. You know, they're over 40 years old.

They've been at it. They're in the upper echelon of these companies they work for. They may do their own thing and they are so confused. They don't know what to do.

Mostly I'm convinced is because they're trying to use chat GPT or claw to figure it out. And it's confusing them. And the worst thing is that, that everybody else is doing the same thing. They're all confused.

And then you take what you're confused about and pop that into chat and say, figure it out. And it can't do it. It can't make a decision. And there's too much data there, but making decisions is,

is the most important and the potent and I think a respected skill that you can have, your ability to make a decision makes you a superhero. Having a clear mind is essential. Like I said, I spend a lot of time doing this. I work with a lot of very smart people, MBAs and PhDs, and most of the time I'm helping them make a decision.

I just think differently than they do. That's all. Your emotions are not the thing that you should use to make decisions. You already know that, right?

But if you get frustrated because you can't figure stuff out, isn't that an emotion? Yeah, you're using it anyway, right? So you may as well harness it. Harness the power of your heart to make a decision.

I find that, we'll get to this here in a second, but I find that to be the biggest thing. When people are confused, when you're chatting all the time or clotting all the time, whatever it happens, and you start to get really, really frustrated, that's when you start to say, how many times have you argued with ChatGPT?

Every time I see it on Facebook all the time, I've been fighting with Claude today. Yeah, that's called frustration. Get your act together. Stop telling me that stuff.

Now you can get someplace, can't you? If you're like most people, by the way, your most important and fun decisions have always been very emotional. Whether to get married, to move into a home, to buy a new car, things like that. Emotions are always really the first key in decision-making.

Remember, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Hang on, I'm getting too excited here. But emotions are always the first step in decision-making. But sometimes you choose to approach decision-making maybe from a logical point of view.

The logical side of your brain kicks in. That's what you're doing with all the chat stuff right now. The logic side of your brain kicks in, and you start to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. You kind of check off all the boxes.

You do your due diligence, and here it is. The answer should be right there clear for me to see, and yet it's not. Whether it's emotion or logic, both aim for to kind of find this approval spot where you can then move forward or a disapproval where you can turn away, right?

But black and white reality rarely makes for a really good life. So, you know, I'm a kind of stoic fan. I wouldn't say I'm a stoic philosopher. I'm more of a practical philosopher kind of guy.

But if you were to put on my resume, that's what you'd probably say. He practices practical philosophy. But in 300 BC, stoic philosophy first brought to mind that decision-making follows a simple formula.

If you haven't heard this before, it's going to make sense to you. Emotion plus logic equals your outcome. It happened a few years ago when we made a big decision.

And I discovered that my wife wanted to buy an alpaca farm and raise alpacas. It's my wife. I'd never lived on a farm before. I already had a house picked out on the beach.

I was going to move to Daytona Beach. I was going to go beachfront, beachside. And suddenly, within a second, emotionally, we bought a 12-acre ranch about 15 miles from the beach and started raising alpacas.

Man. Tell you what, it got us excited. Kind of overwhelmed a little bit. But we're looking at our brand-new adventure here, and we stayed there four years before she said to me one day, you know, I think I made an emotional decision that didn't really work.

I'm not into animals that much. I got to learn to drive a tractor and clear fields and put fences up. I got to learn to do all that stuff. But it just didn't take long before our logical brain kind of stepped back in.

And the number one thing when it comes to alpacas, people say, so how do you make money on them? Do you sell the fleece or what? No, the answer to that question is you don't. You just kind of write it off.

It's a nice expense on your taxes. That's about it. But eventually you kind of change your intentions, get the emotions out of the way, logic kicks back in. And in that case, the logic was what?

Sell the farm. That's what we did to somebody who was still in an emotional state of mind. It was awesome. By the way, the same things happen to me every time I bought a motorcycle.

The last motorcycle I bought, I was that guy. I took a ride on a Saturday morning. The beautiful ride, riding the loop in Daytona Beach. Have you been there?

It's a beautiful place. If you ride motorcycles, you head up the coast, up the Flagler, and you kind of take a left. You go back through the mangroves. Just an absolutely beautiful ride.

I just took a ride. I said, let's go down to the Harley dealership, and let's go down and get a cup of coffee and a donut and hang out a little bit and look at the new motorcycles.

Two and a half hours later, I was riding out on a new bike. Had no plan on buying one whatsoever. Emotionally, I got into it. Started negotiating a bit.

Called my wife up. Good cop, bad cop. Logic kicked in. Logic, logic, logic. How much is it going to cost? What do I got to do? And eventually, it makes sense, right?

And you go, okay, well, yeah, fine. And then emotion comes right back. I can't wait to get on this bike. They ring the bell. You're kind of holding that grin back.

Harley Davidson, they ring the bell when you buy it. You're like, oh, yeah, look, this stupid sucker spent $35,000. I've done it seven times now, so I guess I haven't learned from my lesson.

The point is this. If you're trying to make a decision right now, emotions are where you are going to start. And you will be in that emotional state, and eventually you will go logically and try to begin to kind of put your due diligence into this. And you will arrive at the outcome.

If you're a salesperson, if you do the stuff I do like we teach in Face Your Passion, the leads and offers stuff they're going to be doing here in the next week or two,

You will understand that if I'm talking to you, trying to get you in there, if I want to sell somebody anything, I'm going to go for emotion first because emotional buyers buy first.

But eventually I'm going to switch over to logic and now I'm going to get the logical buyers. And then some people need a combination of the two. You're the same thing. Whatever you're trying to decide to do, if you're frustrated, you can't make a decision.

My guess is the frustration is the real emotion coming back into play. Logic's going to kick in. You're going to make the choice to make a change and think a little bit differently. And then you're going to go, happy dance.

You're going to be emotional again. So the thing you have to take from this today is you're going to be an emotional person from the start. You are, you can't get it out of the way.

But you got to put some logic into it as well. Get some clarity with that. And then you'll come back to where you want to be. Try that today when you're chatting.

No, chat TV does not have emotions. It does not. It just pretends that it does. I'll see you at faceyourpassion.com.