How to Make Fast Great Decisions with David Meltzer

ABOUT DECISION MAKING

• We make many decisions every day, but we have never been trained to how to make the best decisions, we never practice making decisions
• Often we don’t understand how the best decisions are made and do not know how to assess the situation in a quick manner in order to make a good decision
• To improve your decision-making abilities, a good place to start is knowing your values
• Decision making requires a balance between the pragmatic realm of money and the utopic realm of faith. These two realms are often in conflict
• Using a strictly monetary analysis while making a decision will mean you are not using your values for the decision, but blending in your values to the decision making will give you a great result and allow you to access your faith.
• One decision-making trick: extract time from your decision making, time is the nemesis of making decisions.
• Try asking: “What would my decision be if there was no such thing as time?”

THE 4 VALUE TYPES

• Personal values: character, love, integrity, things that you are as a person
• Experiential values: values created by what you’ve learned through the inaccurate senses and memory that you have
• Giving values: how is this decision going to provide value to others?
• Receiving values: how you feel about receiving.
• Our receiving values create the most interference in our decision making because often people are scared to receive—they feel guilty, don’t feel worthy, and think they shouldn’t ask for what they want.

4 DECISION-MAKING HACKS

• Gratitude: while making a decision look for the positives and best outcomes
• Forgiveness: while making a decision, forgive yourself for the lessons you haven’t learned, and know that you will make mistakes again.
• Accountability: often people are already thinking about the excuses they could make if the decision doesn’t work out, and start thinking about blame, shame, and justification.
• Inspiration: while making your decision, rather than asking “will this decision make me inspired?” switch to “I’m inspired all the time”.

VALUE-BASED DECISION MAKING

• What makes a decision good or bad is whether it is in line with your values.
• For every decision you make, you could find thousands of people who would tell you it’s a bad decision because their values are different from yours.
• If you’re going to feel good about your decisions, you have to know your values.
• David does a quarterly exercise with his wife: they spend an hour apart writing down their values for the next quarter, then spend an hour together discussing where their values are not aligned, possible compromises, and the decisions they would like to make.
• To make decisions together, your values have to be aligned.
• You can use your values to work out how to prioritize your tasks and invest your time.

PRACTICE

• A tiny amount of practice each day is better than 2 hours once a week—overtime, bits become chunks become glaciers.
• Take a small amount of time and do a value assessment of the decisions and actions you will be making throughout your day.
• A quick exercise to build gratitude: say thank-you before you go to bed and before you wake up, and over time you will start making decisions based on gratitude.
• People think they are motivated by fear, but try thinking about it as the focus instead—fear focus you.

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