Over the course of my life thus far, I’ve been faced with a number of difficult decisions… From simpler ones like which sport to play in high school, or which college to attend—to more complex ones like who to marry, and which profession to pursue… How many kids do you have? When do you invest your money and when do you take risks with new adventures? When your daughter has Type 1 Diabetes, which healthcare do you choose? How do we want to structure our business? Employees or contractors? LLC or S-Corp…    I have a “GoDaddy graveyard” ofGREAT IDEAS!!! that didn’t turn out to be great ideas at all. I’ve started down paths to pursue starting clothing companies, learning environments, online courses, co-working spaces, art galleries… All ideas. All on the cutting-room floor.    We’re faced with thousands of decisions every day. In fact, if you do some research you’ll realize that we make somewhere around 35,000 semi-conscious decisions per day. Nearly 300 just on food alone, according to researchers at Cornell.   

• what to eat
• what to wear
• what to purchase
• what we believe
• what jobs and career choices we will pursue
• how we vote

  Less tangible decisions like… Who should I trust on this one…? What should I believe about XYZ…? Some of the most profound “decision-making” has been around how I view myself, and understand my faith, and how I should exist and operate in the world around me. Who should I invest time in? Who am I discipling? Which leaders am I committed to developing? When to work and when to rest?    You’ve likely heard of the phrase: Decision Fatigue. And it’s real. Somedays I’ll hit a point where a seemingly simple decision has me stumped. All morning I had no problem with pricing out $25,000 websites, and then I’m standing in line at Starbucks and I can’t for-the-life-of-me decide whether to order a Cold Brew or a Can of Tuna Fish… It’s like the little Drill Sergeants in my mind all took a smoke break at the same time and I’m left with no one upstairs.    Something that I learned from Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg is about how they dress themselves… Both some of the most influential and central people on the face of the earth… Nearly impossible decisions to make. And they both dress with the same philosophy.    In 2012, Obama told Vanity Fair that the position of being President required him to cut away the mundane, frustrating decisions like deciding what to wear every morning. He said, “You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," he said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."   Zuckerberg said a similar thing in 2014. He said, “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” he said, meaning he doesn't want to spend mental energy on deciding what to wear or what to eat for breakfast.   Same thing with Steve Jobs and his trademark blue jeans and black turtleneck.    A psychologist that studies decision fatigue, Roy Baumeister, says that "Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no to doughnuts, drugs, or illicit sex… It's the same willpower that you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom," Baumeister told the New York Times. "Your ability to make the right investment or hiring decision may be reduced simply because you expended some of your willpower earlier when you held your tongue in response to someone's offensive remark or when you exerted yourself to get to the meeting on time."   I’m a big fan of avoiding unnecessary decisions… I wear a very similar wardrobe every day. In fact, I just wore a new t-shirt that felt like the most comfortable and best-fitting t-shirt I’ve ever worn… So I went to my friend’s t-shirt shop and ordered 30 of them in different colors and cuts like v-necks.   Some decisions, however, are unavoidable. And when we must make a decision, Yes or No, Left or Right… How do you decide?    I think back to a book Andy Stanley wrote in 2014 calledAsk It: The question that will revolutionize how you make decisions. And the heart of the book was this simple question: “In light of my past experience, my current circumstances, and my future hopes and dreams, what is the wise thing for me to do?”   In light of these 3 dimensions: past, present and future dreams: “What’s the wise thing for me to do?”    “In light of my past experience, my current circumstances, and my future hopes and dreams, what is the wise thing for me to do?”   This can help steer us when we get confused. It’s incredibly helpful to separate certain decisions away from “Is this RIGHT or is it WRONG?” Or even believing that only one of the directions is right. Sometimes there are multiple options with multiple strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes the decision is so nuanced and layered that it’s crippling to even attempt to label the options as “RIGHT” or “WRONG.”    The truth is that any of the options carry with them potential beauty and potential pain… Pros and Cons. And it’s helpful to step outside of a one-dimensional decision making process and begin to ask “What is the wisest thing to do?”    Not which is most fun, not which is most tempting or sexy or exciting or immediately rewarding… But which is wisest.    And then… For me personally...   I’m only ever 80% sure.About anything. I’d have to say with every decision I’ve ever made in my life, I was only 80% sure.    You leave room for that silly 20% of your mind that will never be convinced… And that’s OK. I’m only 80% sure that I made the right decision in getting married young and starting a family and building a business… There’s always that 20% that looks at friends living a different life and wondering what that would be like… Or wishing you pursued a different college major.    On a good day, I’m only ever 80% sure God exists. There arealways quite voices of doubt and rebellion, trying to convince me otherwise. And I think that HONESTY helps keep me grounded in reality. It helps me keep a healthy dialogue in my mind about what I’m experiencing and what else might be going on. When people hit 100% certainty, they’ve typically gone into the world of obsessive, brainwashing… And they lose touch with reality. That’s when people launch crusades or become terrorists or shoot up their high schools… That’s when people pick up Tiki torches and march for a white nation.    That’s when we lose the necessary humility to stay within a healthy, wholistic human race and participate with empathy and curiosity.    And here’s the truth: I’ll forfeit 100% certainty over 100% inaction any day. If I had to choose between only being 80% sure or being crippled with anxiety and unable to make decisions until I was 100% certain… I’d choose the movement. I’d choose moving forward with a little bit of doubt than rocking back and forth in the corner hugging my knees.    Walter Frick recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review, titled 3 ways to Improve your Decision Making:    The #1 rule he gives for good decision making is this: Be less certain. Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has said that overconfidence is the bias he’d eliminate first if he had a magic wand. It’s ubiquitous, particularly among men, the wealthy, and even experts. Overconfidence is not a universal phenomenon — it depends on factors including culture and personality — but the chances are good that you’re more confident about each step of the decision-making process than you ought to be.   So, the first rule of decision making is to just be less certain — about everything. Think choice A will lead to outcome B? It’s probably a bit less likely than you believe. Think outcome B is preferable to outcome C? You’re probably too confident about that as well.   Once you accept that you’re overconfident, you can revisit the logic of your decision. What else would you think about if you were less sure that A would cause B, or that B is preferable to C? Have you prepared for a dramatically different outcome than your expected one?   Something that has helped me is to find clarity outside of what’s presently in front of me. Clarity exists outside ofthe present decision in front of me.When you’re able to zoom out and begin to glimpsewho you are outside of your decisions, the decisions lose their power to produce anxiety in you. They don’t lose theirimportance, per se, but they lose their ability to cripple… There’s more freedom and grace in the decision making. You can decide to do something and try it for a while, but then give yourself the freedom to admit that it was a bad decision, and either go back to the drawing board or pivot and evolve the current thing to be something new…    Sometimes these decisions cost you money. Earlier this year alone, I spent over $60,000 pursuing a specific model with my business, only to realize that it wasn’t panning out how I’d hoped. I had a decision to make: Double-down and invest more, or, with humility, admit that it’s not working and that we need to make a change. We made the change. We had hard conversations, and we fixed the trajectory of the business. We’re heading in the right direction, and that difficult decision has relieved an unimaginable amount of pressure that I was carrying around.    I guess this kind of follows previous episodes, and includes everything we talked about with Being Kind To Yourself. You need to make decisions. You need to decide when to buy and when to sell. When to settle down and when to set out on adventure. When to propose, and when to break the relationship off… And after you make the decision—Be kind to yourself.    Pay attention to how the decision is panning out. Pay attention to your feelings. Pay attention to whatever Key Performance Indicators are put in place… And if it’s not going how you’d hoped, try to fix it. Maybe you went off on an adventure and now it’s time to come home. I can’t tell you the number of friends that made big moves in the last 5 years, that are now all moving back here to New England. And that’s fine. It’s wonderful. It doesn’t mean it was all a mistake… It just means they have greater clarity around where God wants them and where they feel most at home.    And the same is true for everything.    When it comes to decisions, try to minimize the amount of them you need to make each day. Then, for the unavoidable ones, do your best investigative work to try to get to 80% certainty, and pull the trigger. After that, if it’s not working out, fix it. Make it right. Sometimes it costs you money, sometimes it costs you a relationship, sometimes it means having hard conversations and entering into a necessary season of your pride being torn down and facing your failures… And maybe that’s the most transformative thing of it all.    SO what are you up against? What difficult decision do you have sitting in front of you? Maybe there’s no RIGHT or WRONG answer or direction to take… Maybe it’s just what you feel is the wisest choice right now. And that’s OK.    I love you guys… Make it a good day.