Scott Perry teaches solopreneurs a decision-making system built on opportunity cost and sunk cost thinking. He introduces the Zespirometer (Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I doing the thing wrong?) and the Decision Triangle (What's now? What's next? What matters?) to cut through decision fatigue and align choices with your values.
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We are live. It is 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time. And welcome Alice, Anthony, Kendra. Great to have you here. Going to give the notification a chance to get sent to everybody's inbox and just give folks a chance to go ahead and join today's live if they want to join. If you want To participate in today's live, we're going to be talking about decisions and opportunity costs and sunk costs and this mythical Zest Barometer, uh, which is a tool that I hope will be super helpful to you that maybe you haven't thought, uh, or aren't aware of. And I'm also going to send you off with access to a really powerful decision-making tool. So we are going to talk about decisions, what they are, what they are not, how to make decisions better, how to weigh opportunity costs and sunk costs when you're making decisions. And then this Zespirometer tool that will help. So for those of you that are here now, if you want to join in the conversation, tell me a decision that you are currently working on. What's— what are you making a decision about right now? What's a decision that you're wrestling with right now? If you share a decision that you're wrestling with right now, you'll be able to kind of walk it through this process that I'm going to share on the live. Hello, David. Great to have you here. Claire is also here. So we have a lot of Circle and Inner Circle members here. Kendra, Alice, Claire. All Inner Circle or Circle members. Alice is also, um, has the rare privilege of speaking to me every day in Boxer Velocity as a Boxer Velocity client. And for all of you who are not aware of David's work, David is a legitimate Substack rock star that I've had a couple of conversations with live, and, uh, you should be checking him out. He, he, He shares a lot of great stuff and is doing good work and is a very talented writer. Judith is also here. Judith, also an Inner Circle member. So again, one more time, uh, before we get started officially, today's substat— or today's live is about decisions, opportunity costs, sunk costs, and the zest barometer. With a promise to send you away with an additional tool that will help you make decisions better. And it would really help me if you are willing to share a decision that you're currently wrestling with right now. So obviously, the caveat is don't share a decision that you're struggling with right now that would trigger you in any way. We're not— I'm not going to give you anything that's going to solve one of life's big problems. Or if you're in a severe hardship or engaged in some sort of trauma. I definitely recommend you don't share that or start with that if you're going to be applying some of these frameworks, although the frameworks definitely work when you're wrestling with life's big questions in terms of your own life. But it's better to get a little practice with things that are a little bit easier. So if you want to share a decision that that you're currently wrestling with, that would be great. Hello, Penny, great to have you here. Penny, also a Boxer Velocity client and also a member of the Inner Circle. All right, so we've got more than enough people here to get started. So I'm going to start officially. I'm gonna give a little introduction in case I decide to share this edited replay for educational purposes later. And then we'll get going. Welcome to Creative On Purpose Live. This is a special bonus pop-up broadcast where we are going to talk about decisions, opportunity costs, sunk costs, and the zest barometer. And so what I am hoping to provide you all with today is we're going to explore how decisions actually work. The impact of opportunity costs and sunk costs. So if you're not totally familiar with those, uh, those terms or those concepts, I'll explain them a little bit. And then I'm going to share some tools for how to make decisions better. And then I'm going to wrap it all up in an invitation to, uh, go and check out a framework that I have created for making decisions better. That is very easy and based on 3 very simple questions. So the change that I am, that I have on offer for you all today is I'm encouraging you today in how to approach decision-making and knowing that too often we get stuck in decision-making loops or succumb to decision-making fatigue, and that keeps us from moving forward or moving forward with clarity or gaining confidence. And we end up letting fear or guilt or shame hijack our decision-making progress. And we make decisions that we wish we had made. And instead, I'm going to give you some ideas and principles and frameworks that will allow you to make decisions with greater clarity, with greater confidence, with greater integrity, and with greater intention so that you can start stepping into possibility, the possibility you imagine for yourself, and the potential that you're trying to, to cultivate within yourself. It will help you become the kind of person that you want to become, a person that is better able to make better decisions easier and faster. And so if you are a solopreneur, a purpose-driven solopreneur, which means maybe you're a creator or a coach or a consultant, a teacher, a healer, then you're the kind of person that I am always engaged in talking to and trying to help. And you are the kind of person that will be able to move forward with these principles and ideas that I'm sharing with you that will help you fight off, stave off decision fatigue. It will help prevent you from getting stuck in decision loops and getting stuck and going nowhere. It'll help you make better commitments in your decision-making, and it will help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be with decision-making. So the promise I'm making is that by the end of this session, you should have a clearer understanding of what decisions are. You should have, uh, more ability to see opportunity costs and sunk costs and know how to navigate them. And you'll leave here with a simple tool for recognizing whether or not you're in the middle of decision fatigue or a decision loop and a framework that will help you move forward with making decisions better and better able to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. So if that all sounds good, you can hit the heart button for me or drop something in the chat just saying that you're ready to go. Great to have Jeremy and Pepe here. Kato has just joined. Great to have Kato here. Kendra has shared a decision she's working on. Oh, nope. She's just letting me know that she can't engage. No worries. Oh, yes. Be very careful if you're driving, Kendra. All right. Let's get to what decisions are really all about. So some of you know that in my youth, which was a very long time ago, I was a nerd. Well, I guess I'm still a nerd, but I was a Latin nerd. I took 4 years of Latin starting in the 8th grade and taking as many years of Latin as were available at the school that I attended. And so I am, I just, I have a real affinity for ancient cultures, especially Hellenistic cultures, Hellenistic philosophy, Hellenistic languages, and Uh, I just happen to know that the word decide comes from the Latin roots de meaning cut, or I'm sorry, meaning, um, off or away or out and cadere meaning to cut or to prune or to cut away. So what, when we're talking about decisions, we are talking about cutting away or cadere can also mean kill. So killing off, cutting away, that's the derivation, that's the etymology of the word decide. So when you make a decision, you are literally killing off or cutting away all the other possible decisions that you can make. So decision-making is serious business, right? There's, there is a death involved. Every time you make a decision, you are going in on one possibility and you have eliminated a limitless number of other possibilities that you could have chosen, but you have chosen to go forward with this one thing. And so it makes sense, therefore, to, as you're thinking about decision-making, making decisions maybe a little bit more thoughtfully, maybe a little bit more deliberately, maybe with a little bit more intention and integrity because decision-making is serious business. You are literally killing off or cutting away other possibilities for you and the life that you would like to be living. So the question is, you, which future are you killing off when you decide? Which, and what's the future that you're actually stepping into when you make a decision? And this is where we get into the discussion around opportunity costs and sunk costs. When you make a decision to step forward into one possibility, you are eliminating all the other opportunities available to you. So, um, the, the, the cost of not being able to do something that you could have done before you made a decision is the opportunity cost. So for example, if you decide that while you all, you're all in the middle of an opportunity cost right now by deciding to jump on this live and listen to me blab about decision-making and opportunity costs and sunk costs and Zesparometers and everything else I'm going to talk about. There's an infinite number of things that you cannot do with the time that you have invested in attending this live. You have, there's an opportunity cost to clicking on a live and deciding you're going to sit down and watch. So every choice that you make, Every decision you make has this real opportunity cost that should be considered. I'm going to do my best to make sure that you get a return on investment for the opportunity costs that you're in the middle of right now. But that brings up the next idea, which is sunk costs. Sunk costs means the investment of time, attention, money, attention, uh, effort reputation that you already made. So one of the examples I frequently share around sunk costs is I have worked with a number of people who have invested a lot of time, attention, money, effort, and reputation into a career as a lawyer or as a doctor or as an entrepreneur. And did not enjoy the work that they did. And so the cost— so they had already invested so much time, attention, money, effort, and reputation in their career as doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, that they just felt like they couldn't afford to just quit because there was too much invested already. But the way to think about opportunity costs is— or I'm sorry, sunk costs is that the only thing worse than investing in a sunk cost, investing time, attention, money, effort, reputation, and something that you don't want is to continue to invest time, attention, money, and effort, reputation into that same activity. So you can think about this, um, even in like relationships. I've, I've had clients that are in unhappy, sometimes even abusive relationships that feel like they can't, that they've got too much invested, they can't quit. But the thing to remember with sunk costs is that you actually are making a decision to reinvest in the life that you were living, in the career that you are in, in the activity that you're doing every time you show up and do it again. So Every day that you stay in an unhappy relationship, you are reinvesting time, attention, and effort into a thing that you actually don't want. Every time that you wake up and decide to go to work in a career that you don't enjoy, that brings you no fulfillment or satisfaction or feeling of significance, is a day that you've decided that instead of doing something else, you're going to continue to do the thing that is fueling your unhappiness. Happiness. You are fueling the sunk costs. Seth Godin often talks about sunk costs as a gift from your former self to your current self. Your former self made a decision and made an investment that you now know was a bad investment and a bad decision. And it is a gift because today in this moment, you can say, you know what, I choose to stop investing in this decision and investing my precious resources of time, attention, money, effort, reputation into this thing that I derive no benefit from. And so that's the way that I think about sunk costs. So if you're on this call still and you are finding no value in what I'm saying and don't think it's worth it to hang on until I give you the big payoff at the end with the Zespirometer and the other tools that I'm going to provide you with for making decisions better, the best thing that you could do right now is to hop off this live and go do something that is actually a better investment of your time and attention. All right. So going to pause here right now to get to some questions before I get to the Zespirometer. But Alice says, not sure if it is a decision, but to stick to 4 hours work only and 1 day off a week. But what happens if I, if it takes a bit longer, my work or keep Learning and absorbing info like procrastinating. Okay. Yeah. So Alice is asking, do I, at least I think this is what you're asking Alice, do I continue to learn things that might be missing from my current level of knowledge or my current level of skill, or do I reinvest or do I instead save that time, attention, money, and effort that I've been investing in learning and instead apply what I already know to the work that I'm doing, to the difference that I want to make, to optimizing the business that I've already started. And I'm— so there's a couple of ideas here that might be helpful to you, Alice, before we get to the, the Zespirometer. But in my experience, uh, we spend, we, we spend way too much time learning stuff. That we really don't need because learning feels like outcome. Learning feels like we've, like it's meaningful, like it's significant that we've done something. And yeah, you've done something. You've invested time in a course or reading a book or watching YouTube videos, and maybe you've got a certificate or maybe you've got an interesting idea or an interesting insight, but learning that does not lead to action that provides data that allows you to optimize your system for getting closer to what you actually want is absolutely useless. This is like the whole foundation of the current educational system, at least here in the United States, is we, we teach just-in-case learning to kids from the age of 7 until the age of 17 or 18. We get, we make them It's compulsory, right? They have to do it. They have to go to school and they have to learn all these things that they might use, or more likely will not use, just in case they need it for what they decide to do for a living later on. That's just-in-case learning. I'm going to learn this just in case I need it. We live in an age where Even before AI, we could learn pretty much anything we wanted when we needed it. So it was not just-in-case learning. It's now we live in an age of just-in-time learning. Like, oh, I need to learn how to create a community. I can watch a YouTube video on creating a community. I can read Parker Pria's book on creating community. Now you can actually get on an AI like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, and in minutes, learn everything you need to know, everything you need to learn about something that you actually need. But the whole point is, Alice, in my experience working with a lot of folks, and you and I have been working together for a while, a while now, um, you already possess more than enough knowledge and more than enough skill. What you, you will not benefit from acquiring more knowledge or skill as much as Applying what you already know in the arena, in real life, letting your learning collide with reality so that you can figure out where the holes in your knowledge are, what knowledge is not helpful and doesn't have to be paid attention to anymore. And if there's anything missing, what's missing, broken, or needs work, and then you can invest in something that's actually going to give you a return on investment. And Alice follows up with, but when I'm looking to change, when I am looking to change, I've spent hours on something, I guess like 30 minutes, then apply it in action. Yeah, I would just, I would, I would run an experiment, Alice, and just put yourself on a learning hiatus for a week, two weeks, a month. I'm not going to spend any time trying to learn something from books, courses, videos, et cetera. I'm just going to apply what I'm doing and then come back to me and say, actually, by just applying the learning I already had and just being clear about what I'm trying to accomplish, where I am and what I'm starting with and trying to figure out what are the things that I need to, to do to close the gap. My guess is you will find that you already possess more than enough knowledge and skill. And what you need to do is to figure out the 2 or 3 things that need to go right and need to go more right for you to close the gap with greater ease and efficiency or, uh, or ease and velocity. And you'll actually get way more benefit from applying the things you already know than you will ever get from the things that you don't yet know. The truth is, I believe that we're all born completely sufficient and whole and can possess everything we need to succeed in anything that actually matters to us. We've proven this over and over again as children. You know, it's kind of becoming a talker or a walker when you're an infant is impossible. And yet sometime during our toddler years, within the first couple of years of our life, we figure out how to walk and talk. We already, without a course, without a book, without a YouTube video, without any real instruction other than witnessing and getting feedback from the people that we are practicing walking and talking badly with until we can walk and talk better. That's all we get. So that can be true of any worthwhile endeavor that you want to engage in, whether it's a business venture or a life venture, is if you actually just start doing the thing, you will become the thing. You become the thing by doing the thing. And any holes in your knowledge or skill that need to be shored up will be identified. And then you can apply yourself a little bit more assiduously and deliberately to the things that you need. All right. And Jeremy weighs in here with embodying or practicing, applying implementation. The knowledge to real life is to acquire skill, right? Yeah. Yeah. You become the thing by doing this thing. Practice. If you want to be a coach, start coaching. If you want to be a writer, start writing. If you want to be a community leader, join a community and see if you can't become the most valuable participant in that community. You'll learn a whole lot more that way about creating a community and what it takes to lead a community by being a member of a community than you will trying to learn it all in books and then try to reverse engineer it and make it perfect in the first, in your first attempt. So let's move on to this thing called the Zespirometer. So this is a wayfinding tool, a decision-making tool that I developed that I found very useful. And I developed it because One of the things that I learned in my own experience is that, uh, I'm a person and I'm guessing like a lot of the folks in this room, like if you are solopreneurial minded or entrepreneurial minded, you possess a lot of zest, a lot of, of energy. You possess a lot of creativity coming up with brilliant ideas and investing time and effort and attention into those things. It's not hard. You probably have 6 or 7 brilliant ideas a day, maybe a minute, maybe an hour. I know that I have no shortage of brilliant ideas. How do I know that they're brilliant? Because they're my ideas. And I can get started very quickly. I am a high implement type of person. Once I come up with something, I can get going and get into it. And I possessed enough energies, enough zest to just keep grinding and grinding and grinding for longer than most people can or should. And that has actually hurt me because by starting and investing in a whole bunch of things, I've created a bunch of homework for myself. I've created a lot of activity that's not actually getting me closer to what I actually want. And it takes a daily investment of energy just to keep those things at the level that they're at. And that means that over time, I, I have, I have spread myself too thin. I have less time, attention, money, and effort to invest in the things that actually matter, the things that will actually move the needle and help me close the gap between where I am and where I want to be. So what I end up doing a lot of the time is I just quit. I just, uh, I decide that I'm doing the wrong thing and I just stop doing it. And in many cases, it's not that I was doing the wrong thing. It was I'm doing the thing wrong. And that's what the Zespirometer is. It's two questions. Am I doing the wrong thing or am I doing the thing wrong? Now, if you have gone through the process that we teach in the Creative On Purpose Circle and Inner Circle communities around getting super clear on the lifestyle that you're optimizing for with your business. Like your business is not just a money generation machine. If you are running a purpose-driven business, the purpose of that business is to fund and fit the life you want to be living. And if you're not yet living that life and your business is not funding and fitting the life that you want, then the goal is to optimize the biggest, the most immediate constraint in your business that is preventing you from optimizing that business to fund and fit the life you want. You have to be super clear about what you're trying to accomplish. And once you do that, you again have to make decisions about what do I, what do I knowingly need to stop doing? What do I need to decide to cut away or to kill off because it's not giving me a return on investment to getting clearer about and closer to what I want and defining, deciding what the 2 or 3 things are that will actually, if I optimize them, create a system that allows me to get closer to what I want with greater ease and velocity. And so what normally happens, at least again, in my experience, working with a ton of people, I don't even know how many clients I've had at this point, but if I add up my clients and community members, we're talking, I've over the last 10 years worked with at least 1,000 people, probably multiple thousands of people around this. Most people don't know what they actually want. They just think they'll get what they want by making more money. And the people I know that just chase more money never have enough money, even when they have more than they could ever spend in their lifetime. Money and time are the means to accomplishing something that matters. So instead of saying, I need more money, more time, or setting arbitrary money goals, like I need to make $10,000 a month, what would you do if you were making $10,000 a month? What would you do if you made that $10,000 a month working 10 hours a day, 8 hours a day, 5 hours a day? 2 hours a day? What's the lifestyle that you would be funding and fitting your business around? What is the ideal lifestyle vision? That's what you need to have first. So it's not what the, the time, the amount of time or money, it's what would you do if you had the time and money that you needed? And then what's the actual cost of having that, like, Do you, do you need to have 3 houses with a Ferrari in every driveway? Does that really provide you with the happiness that you want? Like, what does happen? Like, you, you got to get super clear on that. And then if you are able to do that, most businesses require just 3 things: an irresistible enough offer that is put in front of a audience that is engaged enough to be interested and the way and the system for putting that offer in front of that audience. You need an offer, an audience, and a marketing system or sales system. That's all you need. And most of us know what our offer is and know who our audience is. So most of the time we're just optimizing the system that puts the offer in front of the audience and moves someone from, I don't know you exist, to investing in the offer and the means, the promise that you, you are making through the thing that you do. And if you just focus on those things, which if you don't have an offer, you have to have an offer to have a business. If you have an offer, but you don't have a market, then you have to find your audience. If you have an offer and an audience, you have some traction or some validation that there's an audience for the offer that you have, then it's about optimizing the system for moving someone from awareness, attention, permission, and trust across the bridge into the sales cycle of I'm interested in what you can do for me. I'm enrolled in the journey you can take me on, and I'm ready to invest in the promise that you are making me. And we have a whole system for how you can do that with the least amount of effort and the greatest velocity inside the Creative on Purpose Substack. You're welcome to check out the Forever Offer Formula format, the Be a Blessing marketing web and the Close the Gap goal achievement system, and you'll have everything you need to create a profitable business that gets you closer every single day to the life that you want to be living. So I want to close with the decision-making format, the framework, but the Zespirometer is a test. If you are feeling stuck, if you feel yourself grinding, if you feel yourself being more depleted every day than excited every day about what you're doing, then it's time to apply the Zespirometer and ask yourself two questions. Am I doing the wrong thing or am I doing the thing wrong? And most of the time, because life has a strange way of pointing us in the right direction and getting us pretty close to where we're supposed to be headed, most of the time it's you're doing the thing wrong. And most of the time, the doing the thing wrong is you're doing way too much and you're not doing the things that need to be done nearly as well as you need to do them in order to succeed. And if you just stopped wasting time, money, attention, and effort on the things that you don't need to be doing anyways, you would have more than enough resources to reinvest in the thing that you want. Not only that, but you probably find that you're closer to living your ideal lifestyle than you thought you were. Jeremy asks, how do you determine what is necessary to implement the greater idea you come up with? Trial and error, find a best example of it, or something else? Yeah, so this is a reasoning from first principles question, Jeremy. And I just shared an example. How do you create a successful business? Well, Reasoning from first principles, I would say that like you have to define what success is. And for me, a successful business is a business that funds and fits the life I want to live. Then continuing to reason from first principles based on that assertion, then I need an offer that is irresistible enough to an audience that is eager for the change I can make through that offer. And I need a system for putting that offer in front of that audience. That's all I need. Now, when I look at all of the tactics and tools that I'm applying to achieve an offer that is irresistible enough to an audience that is eager enough with a system that puts that offer in front of their audience, what I normally will find is that I have collected a whole bunch of tools and tactics. That are just wasted resources. Right now, I earn my annual revenue number in less than 6 months. I've done this consistently for 3 years now. I earn my annual revenue goal in less than 6 months, working 2 hours a day, 5 hours a week. Without any social media other than Substack Notes, without any platform other than Substack, without any funnel, without any niche, without any ideal customer avatar, without any landing pages or email sequences or lead magnets. And Easy peasy. Every— I be— by focusing on the people who have already given me permission, permission to have an anticipated, relevant, and personal conversation with them by being a member of my Substack community of subscribers, meaning all subscribers, free and paid, I'm able to generate enough interest in my offers to have a high-ticket program that's $1,000 a month filled, a low-ticket program that's $250 a month filled, and a low-ticket program, uh, of $100 one time only. And all of those remain filled all the time. I work less than 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, earn my revenue goal. But I am, you know, that took me, took me, took me 7 years just to figure out what I actually wanted to do. And then it took me a full year to optimize the system, but it all came down to auditing the business that I already had, eliminating all the things I didn't need to do by microstepping, right? I didn't just Quit social media. I stopped running ads on social media first. No change to my business, saved me a ton of time and a ton of money. Then I stopped posting on social media for 90 days. No, no damage to my bottom line. Actually improved my conversion rates, uh, in terms of open rates on my Substack. And only when I proved that I could do it without ads and I could do it without social media platforms. And that took 6 months to do those 2 things, 3 months of no ads, 3 months of no posting on social media. I then decided it was safe for me to deactivate all my accounts. So you have to do a, uh, a cost-benefit analysis before you do something. You have to make sure you mitigate all the risk and that you optimize all the upside. And then you run small tests to test the efficacy and the viability of the things that you're trying to optimize. But if you can, if you— sounds like it takes a lot of time. Well, it doesn't take as much time as continuing to just grind away doing the same thing today that I did yesterday and getting the same crappy results I've always get. I did that for 7 years. In less than a year, I went from working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week to working 2 hours a day, 5 days a week by simply applying first reasoning from first principles, system thinking and reliability and micro stepping my way into optimizing my business. So it's a process for sure. But once it's a process, it's very easy to trust because it's the only way that any meaningful change for the difference has ever been made. If you look at it through those lenses, right? What are the things we know to be true? Reasoning from first principles, first principles thinking. What has to happen for me to achieve the result I want? What is the system that is giving me the results that I'm getting? And then how do I micro-step my way into optimizing that system to have the fewest possible components and optimizing the least effective components until I have a system that is running smoothly, a flywheel that is turning and getting me the results I need made with the minimum amount, minimum investment of time, attention, money, effort, and reputation. All right, I'm going to close with the framework for making better decisions, or actually making decisions better. And this is a process that I call the Decision Triangle. If you go to the Creative on Purpose Substack, you can search for Decision Triangle. You'll find a white paper that details the entire thing in just a couple of pages, and you'll find a podcast episode with a video, um, addition as well that will actually walk you through the whole process, uh, with examples in less than an hour. But here's the process in a nutshell. So Zespirometer. Am I feeling consistently stuck, depleted, exhausted, unenthused about the work that I'm doing? That's a signal that I need to check my zesporometer. Am I doing the wrong thing or am I doing the thing wrong? It's unlikely that you're doing the wrong thing. It is highly likely that you're doing the thing wrong. If that is the case, it's time to make some important decisions about what you can stop doing, what you can do less of, and what are the 2 or 3 things that you should be investing the time saved money saved, energy saved, and not doing the things that you don't have to do or could do less of and investing some of that into the 2 or 3 things that need to go right. And so then the decision triangle is simply this: what's now, what's next, what matters? It's not necessarily a sequence of do this, do that, do the other. It actually kind of It helps to start with what matters. And what matters is who you are and who you want to become and what you're willing to do to get there. You should be making every decision with absolute intention and integrity. You should not be making decisions that pull you away from who you are, your values, your guiding principles, your boundaries and guardrails, your, your non-negotiables. Those boundaries, guardrails, non-negotiables, values, and guidelines, guiding principles, that defines who you are. Anytime you are violating those things, you are becoming the kind of person you don't want to become. So can you first define your core values, your guiding principles, and your boundaries and non-negotiables? If you can do that, then you are going to go to what's now. What is the situation I'm in? And you have to frame the situation as objectively as possible. You have to be able to name your situation without any adjectives, without any adverbs, without any narrative fallacies, without any biases and false beliefs. Plainly speaking, what is happening? It's not, oh, my business sucks, the market sucks, the economy sucks. These are all things that are totally outside of your control. And if you're going to make decisions based on the fact that the planets are not aligning and that the world is not cooperating with your desires, you're never going to succeed at anything. Because the only thing that you can control are the things that you can control, and you can't control much of anything other than what you decide and what you do next, how you see yourself in your situation and what you decide and do next. That's all you can control. Now, can you influence the people around you? Can you influence some things? Yes. And the more clearly you frame what's happening and more, the more objectively you frame what's happening and the possible choices The chances that you will make a decision better and pick the thing that will actually move you closer to what you want is very, very high. If you just go on gut instinct or intuition or reaction based on the stimulus of what's happening to you, you'll make a very bad decision and you'll only make your situation worse. So you have to, number one, you have to know yourself. You have to know thyself. I know who I am. I know what I believe. I know what I don't believe. I know what my values are, what my guiding principles are, what my non-negotiables are. And based on that, I'm going to objectively state what's going on. If you take a clear-eyed look at your situation and say, I don't have enough people engaging with my offer. Then obviously you have an offer that's not getting engagement. You need to work on your offer. All the advertising marketing, all the tweaking of your brand logo, taglines, brand colors, website. That's not going to change anything. If you, if you are not making a promise that you can keep that people want, then it's You have to focus on the promise. If you have something that has some traction, people are interested, people have asked you for it, you have delivered on that promise, but you're not engaging enough of those people, then you need to— then the, the actual situation is I don't have enough of an audience for the thing that people have already demonstrated is valuable, is worth it, and gets the result they want. Finding an audience of people that are looking for the promise that you— the result that comes from the promise you make is— then becomes a solvable problem. And if your problem is related to the marketing or to the sales cycle, to how you're attracting the right people and attracting the right customers or clients, then it's a systems problem. It's a marketing and sales systems problem. And you have to audit your system to find out what's unnecessary, what's underperforming, and what's the first thing that you have to do to optimize that system. So you make a clear objective statement of the problem that you're trying to solve. And then the next, the what's next is the next. So what matters? Values, guiding principles, beliefs. What's now? What's happening right now? Objectively, no adjectives, adverbs, narrative fallacies, or false beliefs. And then what's next? Uh, what are all of the possible choices? All of the decisions I could make. And of all the possible decisions based on what I know and what I'm trying to accomplish, Which of the available choices or decisions, if I made it, involves the least amount of risk and the greatest potential payoff? And then you just decide and do that thing. And if you've made the right decision, if you've made a decision better, you haven't risked burning out or blowing up. You haven't risked taking yourself out of the game. You've just put yourself in a new position that you're either closer to what you want or further from what you want. And if you're closer, then you figure out how to optimize the system that you just optimized to continue to accelerate toward achieving the thing you want to achieve. And if you're further, then you figure out what's missing, broken, or needs work, what needs tweaking or maybe letting go of, and make the next decision that you need to make. Hello, Jennifer. Great to have you here. You are coming in just at the end of this. But anyway, that's the entire, that's the entire thing. So just to review and for Jennifer's benefit in case she wants to watch the replay, what we've been talking about is what are decisions, what are opportunity costs and sunk costs, and how do I use the Zesparometer and the Decision Triangle to make decisions better. So that I can get clearer to, clearer about and closer to the things that I actually want, which should be the life that you want to live, the person that you want to become. Your decisions should get you closer to the person that you want to become and the lifestyle that you want to live. And nothing that you do in your business should take you away from who you really are, what you're really good at, and where you really belong. If you are getting out of sync with your values and your guiding principles, or if you're finding yourself having to do things that are not things that you're, that you find joy in doing, you're doing the wrong thing or you're doing the thing wrong. So, uh, that's, uh, that's the punchline. Uh, that's the end. Jeremy says, excellent. Is that in that decision triangle paper. Yes. So the decision triangle is the framework that helps you, provides you with these 3 questions: what's now, what's next, what matters? It illustrates the whole process. Just if you want the, the, the secret behind where does this come from, it's not like this imaginary thing that I came up with. It's not this magical framework or roadmap. It actually comes from Stoic philosophy. It's based on the 3 disciplines of Stoic philosophy and the that is the discipline of action. I'm sorry, the discipline of perception, how you see yourself in your situation, the discipline of action, what you decide to do next, and the discipline of will, which is, are you willing to accept what reality delivers and to move forward in accordance with what destiny and your nature demand of you. And there's a whole thing on Marcus Aurelius and all that if you want to get into the weeds with all that stuff. But that's the Decision Triangle white paper. Just again, put Decision Triangle in the search of Creative on Purpose. It'll pull up several things. Look for the one that has white paper in it, and that will take you to the white paper that puts it all in text. And look for the podcast episode, and that will give you the audio and video workshop replays where we talked about the decision-making, decision triangle framework and the 3-step decision-making process. Jennifer says, just wanted to pop in and support your awesomeness. Thank you, Jennifer. I appreciate that. The solvable problem definition. So Dan Nicholson has trademarked the term solvable problem for this specific process that he has. His book Rigging the Game is very good. I recommend it. When I use the term solvable solvable problem. I'm not talking at all about Dan's process. I'm talking about defining a problem that can be solved as opposed to talking about your situation. So just give you an example, Alice. If you, if you are, if you are in an unhealthy relationship, that's a situation that is made up of a bunch of problems. You can't resolve your situation with a tool, a tactic, or a strategy even, because it is just too complicated and there's too many interconnected parts and moving parts. A situation cannot be solved, but the problems, each of the problems that make up that situation can be, and the The idea is by defining the most immediate problem, the most immediate constraint, the most immediate bottleneck, you will articulate a problem that can be solved. And if you apply the Decision Triangle and decide and do something based on the Decision Triangle framework, you will solve the most immediate problem, the most immediate constraint or bottleneck, which moves you closer to what you want and helps you identify the next most immediate problem or bottleneck. So you're looking for problems that can be solved, not situations that can't be resolved. And this is the great trap that a lot of coaches fall into. Like, I'm a relationship coach. Well, coaching is not going to solve your relationship problems. A coach that operates from reasoning from first principles, understands system reliability, and understands how to help someone become the kind of person that can repair their relationship or remove themselves from an unhealthy relationship, that person can help you. But most people that call themselves relationship coaches are trying to solve a problem that can't be solved. If you're in an unhealthy relationship, and the most immediate problem is your partner comes home every day, cracks a beer and sits in front of the television set and doesn't talk to you. The first step is how can you stop them from going to the refrigerator and cracking a beer and sitting in front of the television set? Solve that problem first, because if you can get that person to start engaging with you, then you have the poss— the ability to possibly move on to the next stage that needs to be resolved, the next problem that needs to be solved to continue to repair the relationship. Like reasoning from first principles, what does a healthy relationship look like from you? What is the thing, the most immediate bottleneck to having that kind of relationship as opposed to the relationship you're in? Solve that problem, it will reveal the next problem. Uh, you're welcome, Jeremy. I just figured out what TYSVM means. So I appreciate that. So yeah, it looks, it looks like there's no more questions coming in. I appreciate all the kind, uh, words and generous reflections on this. I'm glad it was useful. I don't often, um, post these replays, but I will post this one because I think this was a little bit more, uh, more clear and better articulated and obviously from the feedback I'm getting useful. So I'm going to leave you all to get on with your day and stop investing the sunk cost of your time and attention into attending this live. You can move on to what you need to get done next. And until I see you next, be well, do good, have fun.
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