[0:06] Your success is determined almost entirely by the quality of decisions you make. As a leader, it's doubly important because you're making decisions that impact the rest of your team, so it's a scale multiplier. 

I'm Rusty Gaillard, and this is Do Something Different, a leadership podcast for highly intelligent, driven, successful people who want to get to the next level. Your decisions impact not only how you spend your time, your energy, your resources at the company, how the team is focused. Also, if you have budget, how the budget is allocated, all of these decisions drive your success. If you're good at making decisions, you're going to be way more likely to succeed, achieve your career goals, have the financial independence you want, and the reward and satisfaction of an impact at work compared to if you're not good at making decisions.

[1:02] My wife often makes fun of me when we go out to eat because i am famously indecisive at a restaurant because i go in there and i look at the menu and i'm like oh this kind of sounds good i think i'm going to get that but really what's going on in my head is not just what sounds good to me but there's some part of that narrative which is what should i eat i may feel like eating a hamburger but i think i should be eating something healthier and if you've ever been to one of those restaurants where there's calorie counts on the menu, man, I am doomed because I'm like, oh, that looks so good. And then I look at the calorie count and I say, oh, there's no way I can eat that thing. The problem is I've got multiple decision frameworks going on in my head at the same time. Maybe there's some part of you that can relate. It may be at a restaurant like me where you're debating between what you want to eat and what you think you should eat. It may be in work where there's something that you believe is the right path forward, but you're not sure about how it will be received and you're not sure if it's worth spending the political capital to get that path approved.

[2:06] Oftentimes, we've got this conflicting back and forth in our head, and it's that kind of dynamic that is a setup for bad decisions. If you want to make good decisions, you can find a way to step out of that back and forth and really tune into what do you believe is the right path forward. Now, if you're listening to this, I know that you're a smart, analytical kind of person, and you like to think through things. And I would guess that on the spectrum between rational, thoughtful, deliberate decision-making and gut, instinctive, intuitive decision-making, you're further towards the former. You're much closer toward that rational kind of analytical decision-making process. Here's what I've discovered through many courses and many lessons that I've taken around making analytical decisions. Any kind of framework that you use can be manipulated. You can always adjust the weights, the scorings, and so on to get to the result that you want. Even when you try to make it analytical, it often ends up being somewhat intuitive.

[3:11] Now, of course, there are some decisions that are strictly analytical where you've got hard data and you can do a hard ROI. But having been in this business world for over 20 years, I know most decisions are not that way. ROI is rarely cut and dry. It is always subjective. There's always a question of whether or not you will actually capture the benefit. And to think about some of the greatest steps forward that have ever happened, they're not hard ROI-driven decisions. I was around when Amazon was just a bookstore. And then they started selling other things. And everyone said, oh, that's silly. Why would Amazon go into anything besides books? Because they're known for books.

[3:50] But they did. And of course, it turned out to be a good decision. Think about Steve Jobs and the iPhone. He got rid of the physical keyboard. The biggest product of the day was the BlackBerry because everybody loved the physical keyboard. They liked to be able to touch the little buttons as they typed. And yet Steve Jobs knew intuitively that the right choice was to get rid of that. That is not a data-driven decision.

[4:15] That is insightful and trusting your gut. So my challenge to you is how can you get better at making decisions, even when you're lacking perfect information, when your analytical decision-making framework is not going to give you a clear cut-and-dry answer? How can you still get better at making the kinds of decisions that make you highly successful, that differentiate you among other leaders? I'm going to give you three tools that you can use to help you do that. The first one is one that I've talked about in prior podcasts about decision-making. The other two are new, but the first one is a repeat because it is so important.

[4:55] Most of us operate a big chunk of our professional day in a stressed mindset. And stress is basically a softer word for fear. Because when you're stressed, what's going on in you biologically is it's activated your fight or flight mechanism. And when that is activated, biologically, you do not get the same blood flow into your prefrontal cortex, which is where you make analytical, clear decisions. When you're stressed, what's going on in your brain is survival. How do I survive?

[5:28] And when you're making a decision, if you're in that stressed mode, you're way too risk averse. You are going to be overemphasizing survival. And survival means fitting in, not making mistakes, avoiding pitfalls, avoiding loss. And in fact, our brain is wired to avoid loss. It's called loss aversion. It's one of the biases that we have as human beings. That if you're given the choice between winning something and losing something, it's much more painful to lose something you already have than to gain that same thing if you don't have it. One of the ways they've tested this is they've done a really kind of fun experiment, which is they offered people a mug it's like hey here's my mug the gratitude nerd mug and they offer people a mug and say how much would you pay for this mug that's one group of people the second group of people they give them the mug say hey here's a gift have this nice mug they give them a mug and then they say how much would you sell it for what's the minimum that you would sell it for.

[6:27] And universally once you have the mug you value it higher you would sell it you would the lowest you would sell it for is still a higher price than anybody would ever pay for it when you go to those people who don't have the mug, they say, yeah, I'll give you two bucks for it. But the people who own it, they're like, man, this is worth five bucks at a minimum. Once you have something, it's more painful to lose it. That risk aversion plays into decision making. So the number one step that you can do when you're making decisions is to recognize that that is in the atmosphere at work and step out of it. How do you step out of it? You give yourself space, you change your space, change your physical environment go outside do some deep breathing go for a walk find a way that changes your physical space and changes your mental space so that you can be calm and deliberately tell yourself.

[7:19] I don't need to worry about this. What if I can be calm and believe that this is going to be successful? What's going to happen? There's a great Medium article written by Barack Obama, whether you agree with his politics or not. He talked about his decision-making process. And when he was faced with a big decision, he would sit in a meeting with his core advisors, he would gather information, he would debate it, and then he would step out. He would leave, he would go have dinner with his family, he would go do something else, and then come back to that decision a short time later, and make the final decision because he knew he needed to change his environment. When you're in that pressure, stressful situation, none of us make our best decisions. So give yourself space to step out and make a better decision.

[8:05] The second tool I want to give you for making a better decision is, believe it or not, a coin flip. It is remarkably surprising. You take a coin and you say, I'm going to let the coin flip decide which decision to make. Of course, this only really works if you're looking at an A or B kind of decision. But assuming you are looking at an A or B decision, pick up a coin and choose. Heads, it's A. Tails, it's B. Flip the coin, catch it, and let that make your decision. Of course, that's not going to be the way you make a decision. But the key part of this is to tune in to how do you feel based on the result of that coin flip. Oftentimes, when you're faced with a decision like that, you will flip the coin and you'll get, let's say you get heads and it's decision A, you might feel a sense of relief, in which case that probably was the decision that you were pulled toward anyway. Or you might feel a sense of dread, in which case, oh my goodness, that was clearly not the right, that is clearly not the right decision for them. Use that coin flip trick to help you make a decision when you're deciding between two possible paths. It's super powerful as a way to reveal what's going on inside of you.

[9:18] So the third tip that I want to give you, the third tool that I want to give you is 10-10-10. And the purpose of this is to help you look into the future and reflect back on whether or not this was a good decision. So you can ask yourself, if you make this decision, let's say I'm going to go down path A. If I go down path A, how am I going to feel in 10 minutes once I've made this decision? Then ask yourself, how am I going to feel in 10 months once I've made this decision? And then project ahead even further and say, how am I going to feel in 10 years having made this decision? We often optimize for the situation that we're in and what's right around us and those kind of pushes and pulls that we feel around what other people think and what do they want and is this a politically risky kind of decision? We optimize for those things as opposed to looking in the long time horizon and saying, what is the best outcome in the long time horizon? 10-10-10 is a great tool. How am I going to feel 10 minutes in the future, 10 months in the future, 10 years in the future?

[10:21] I used a similar kind of technique when I was contemplating leaving Apple. Leaving Apple was a scary decision. I had been there for 14 years. I had worked in the corporate environment for 25 years. The idea of leaving that to start my own business was frightening, frankly. I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I was going from always being a part of something bigger to being completely on my own. And it freaked me out.

[10:51] I used something like this 10-10-10 technique to help me project into the future and say what feels like the right decision. Because there was a moment in this process where I had been working part-time at Apple because I went to my boss and said, hey, I'm going to leave. And they said, we really want you to stay. And I said, look, what if we do part-time for a while? So we did part-time for a while. And at the end of that, they wanted me to continue on. And I had to make a decision because frankly, continuing on was a great deal. I was working part-time. I still had health benefits. All of my equity was vesting. There were a lot of good things about being there part-time. And I could still work on my coaching business on the side. But I knew if I made that decision 10 months later, 10 years later, I would say to myself, that was not the right choice. I just knew that intuitively because the time was right for me to step forward.

[11:43] Here's the question for you. Is this the time for you to step forward? To bring your best idea to work. To take control of your schedule. Rather than saying yes to the meetings and the requests and all the things that come at you in the corporate world, to take a stand for what you know will help advance you and your team and the company to be successful. And make a decision to stand in that and to implement it in your schedule and the priorities of your team.

[12:17] Is this your time? Think about the 10-year time horizon. Don't optimize for what's going to be right today or in the next 10 minutes, even the next 10 days. Look at least at that 10-month time frame, if not at the 10-year time frame. Because when you zoom out and you think about it in that standpoint, you said, this is a decade of my life. Am I going to spend that decade turning the crank, doing the same thing I've always done, playing it safe? Or am I going to spend that decade investing in something that I believe in and taking a stand and expressing my voice and bringing my strongest opinion to the table and advocating for that?

[13:02] I encourage you to lean in, to take control, to bring that courageous mindset, that confident mindset where you can say, this is clearly what I think is going to help. And I'm going to stand behind it and make a decision to implement it. Be that person. That is a leader. That is the kind of person that Steve Jobs was when he said, we're not doing a physical keyboard. We're doing a virtual keyboard. That is the kind of person that Jeff Bezos was when he said, my vision is much bigger than just books. We're going to be everything, a marketplace for the world. What is your vision for yourself, for your career, for the impact you have at work, for the sense of meaning? You can absolutely achieve that. It requires a decision. It requires courage, but you can use these simple tools. Give yourself some space to get out of that stressed mindset and into a place of clear, calm thinking.

[14:06] When you're nervous about it, do the coin flip experiment. Do the coin flip and see how you feel and use this 10-10-10 framework to expand your time horizon and think, is this the right long-term decision for me? Because if you want to have impact in the course of your career and in the course of your life, You have to think long-term. And when you think long-term, you can absolutely achieve it. I've heard it said that most people overestimate what they can get done in a week and underestimate what they can get done in a decade. Don't be that person. Aim high. And it requires a different way of making decisions and a different way of taking action. But do that different thing and see where it takes you.