Larry Weidel breaks down decision-making into three categories: laws (always true), principles (generally true), and preferences (personal choices). He uses gravity, taxes, and an IRS arrest story to show why mixing these up leads to bad choices.
Let's talk about how to make great decisions. How to make great decisions. Now the reason that's a big deal in life is you find that life to a large degree is based off the quality of decisions you make. And you're going to be having to make choices and decisions as you go through life. In fact, even in the art, creative world, they say creativity, art, everything is all about choices. Well, guess what? Life is all about choices. That's a Q quality and the decisions that you make. So let's try and give you some guidelines, some information that allow you to maintain order, maintain continuity if you have a team, maintain unity, discipline. All of those things come from making the right kind of decisions and also causes you to get the most value out of any given time frame, allows you to avoid slumps. So the first thing let's look at is the concept of laws, principles and preferences. I heard my good friend Lou Miller do this at a manager retreat a million and a half years ago and just stuck with me like a laser because of how much sense it made. He said the thing about laws, laws are always true. Laws are like gravity. They don't care where you believe in them or not. You know, you can say it's against my religion to believe in gravity. In our world, we don't believe in gravity. Okay? You know, gravity doesn't care if you believe in it or not. Go up and step off a high rise building and see what happens. Gravity wins. Gravity is one of those things that wins every time. And so you need to know of the things out there, what are of the directions and things in life which are inviolate. These are like non negotiables, negotiable, always true. You can count on them. What's the next thing? Well, the next thing is principles or are principles. Principles are things that are almost always true, generally true, most of the time true, but not always. This is where you're going to have the occasional exceptions. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Exceptions. But then, so you have some wiggle room here. Here you have, we can go over here, you have no wiggle room. Wiggle, not wriggle, no wiggle room. Here you have a little wiggle room. You can make some exceptions, you can make some allowances, but everything changes down here at the bottom. And this is the world of, you have laws, principles and preferences. Preferences are like wall. It's all your choice. It's how you decorate your house. This is not like a beam that's going to hold up your house. This is wallpaper. This is paint. This is choice. That's choice. All your choice. You can change. It doesn't matter. It's your discretion. Do what you want. It's like you want to cut your hair, you want to style your hair, you want to dye your hair, you want to cut your nails, color your nails. You want to get a tattoo, not get a tattoo. What kind of tattoo? It's your discretion. Always nice to get those choices that can be reversed if you change your mind. But this is whim. It's totally in your ballpark. So in life, when you go over to this area, this is all wiggle room. You can keep things fresh. You can change it around. The problem comes in where people say, I'm going to take, you know, the unknowing. You tell them a law like gravity, or, you know, if it's something about, well, anything that's a legal situation. Taxes. I'm not going to pay taxes. I don't believe, and I can prove in the Constitution that we don't have to pay taxes. Great, great. But unfortunately, you don't get a chance. This is not a personal choice situation. This is personal choice. You don't get a chance to decide about taxes. You cannot pay your taxes, but they're eventually going to come get you to cart you off to jail. We used to have a tax shelter I heard about. There's a tax shelter at dinner in Aspen one time. The guy was going around and telling about these great tax shelters down in St. Thomas. And you could go down there and get set up and get a Corporation and spend $50,000, get your residency and then what? You don't have to pay 50% personal income tax. Well, I had my guy check that out and found out it was all bogus. And Congress had found out about it, was cutting down on that. Well, another guy in our company heard about it. He said, that's a great theory. I'm going to do it without ever making a trip down there, without ever following up. He says, I like that choice. I choose to not pay my taxes here. I'm going to pay my taxes down there. Well, that went great. And then about three years later, they came, IRS got him and threw his butt in jail, which he's still in jail. So you got to make sure when you're making decisions, you know, are you dealing with something that is always true? So something that is almost always true or something that is totally all your choice, that's one of the keys to making good decisions. And now we'll go. And that's all I'm going to do on that one. And part two, I'll go into a couple of the others.
