Why most people fail at making good life decisions | The PSTH Method

There are two camps of thought when it comes to success: the long-term visionaries and the short-term goal setters.

Long-term visionaries tend to claim that only by having a long-term vision can you steer your life in the direction you want it to go without getting derailed by every shiny new fad.

The short-term goal setters, on the other hand, argue that the world (and you) are changing so quickly that it’s impossible to predict where you’ll want to be in 5 years, let alone 10 or 20 years.

For me personally it’s been hard to figure out which of these two mantras is better. After all there are ridiculously successful people on both sides.

For the long-term visionaries: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Jobs, Gary Vaynerchuk, Debbie Millman, Ray Dalio, Sheryl Sandberg.

For the short-term goal setters: Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Tim Ferriss, Kevin Rose, Phil Hellmuth, Ricardo Semler.

For quite a few years now I’ve been jumping between the two teams. Sometimes I’ll have grand visions and set lofty long-term goals, and then other times I’ll get super inspired and start working on a completely different short-term project.

Often times this leads me to feeling lost.

It’s like I’m running so many races and never getting to the finish line in any of them.

I’ve seen strengths and weaknesses in both ways of thinking though, which naturally brought up the question, why not create a system that uses the best of both?

After listening to hundreds of hours of podcasts and interviews with thought leaders from both camps and taking some borderline OCD notes, I created this hybrid system that I’d like to call The Decision Making Stack.

(The term stack is from: “software stack (n): a set of programs that work together to produce a result; typically an operating system and its applications.”)

Here’s my Decision Making Stack:

Principles

Principles are the core operating system of your life. These are your moral code or your central ideas. It’s like your internal compass that points to your true North. Some examples of my principles are:

• To give more in life than I receive from it
• To work more effectively before working harder
• To help others live less conventionally
• To do extraordinary things worth writing about

Strategies

I like to think of strategies like strategies on a chess board. My strategy could be to start off aggressively on the offense. Or my strategy could be to sit back and react to what my opponent does first. Some examples of strategies I’ve taken are:

• To do sports instead of going to the gym so that staying fit is fun
• To work a 9–5 job so I don’t have to worry about income while I work on my side projects
• To dedicate each year to learning a new skill or side project
• To optimize my schedule for different types of brain activity

Tactics

I think of tactics the way a football player might think of his plays. Each tactic is a way to get closer to your goal and I can change my tactics as frequently as I like based on the performance I’m seeing. Some examples of tactics I use:

• To show my accomplishments to my boss every month so I get credit for my work (the quality of work is strategy, how that work is deliver is a tactic)
• To work at 80% my capacity so if someone asks something of me I can add it to my to-do list without having to worry about it
• To always invite my friends to activities so they’ll invite me to things in return
• To do creative work first thing in the morning before I tackle anything else

Hacks

Hacks are small actions that help you do things better. A lot of people like to concentrate on hacks because they’re super easy to do and seem to provide strong payoffs. I like to use hacks as much as anyone else, but I’ve noticed that it’s very easy to get side tracked by only using hacks. Some hacks that have really payed off for me though are:

• To eat two eggs every morning for breakfast to get 30g of protein in the first 30 minutes of my day
• To substitute green tea instead of coffee at work so I’m not overdoing my caffeine intake
• To use the app flux to change my screen temperature so I can work longer without my eyes getting tired.

To be honest, I don’t think this idea is anything new. I think we all use these 4 categories every day to make decisions.

The problem is that we don’t realize it when these are out of alignment. It’s when our principles, strategies, and tactics get out of alignment that we begin making poor decisions and struggle with which direction to go in.

I used to think that the reason I wasn’t succeeding at my goals was because my strategy wasn’t good enough. And yes, while it’s true you need good strategy, I’ve found that it’s far more important that your strategy is aligned with your principles.

If your compass is calibrated correctly, it won’t matter what obstacles get in your way, eventually you’ll end up where you want to be.

Now when I’m feeling lost I treat these 4 categories like levers I can pull to help me make better decisions and get back on track.

If I want to improve my long-term vision, I re-examine my principles and strategies.

If I want to improve my short-term goals, I re-examine my tactics and hacks.

Once I started categorizing all of the things I could do to improve my life it became far easier to diagnose problems and address them appropriately. Here are a couple of examples:

Dating

Background: I had just ended a 10-year relationship with a person I love. I was in one of the most painful stages of my life. The easy decision would have been to close myself off, to say screw it to finding love again and just become one of those douchey guys who dates around mindlessly.

Principle: It’s more important to give love than to get love. My goal is to make someone else happy, even if I can’t be happy myself.

Strategy: Let go of expectations. I’m not ready for love, so I’m simply meeting other interesting human beings. This took a lot of the anxiety out of it and I even ended up becoming friends with a lot of my “failed” dates.

Tactics: Date a LOT. I haven’t dated in 10 years, I need to figure out how dating has changed since 2007. (hint: it has changed A LOT!). I also decided to just be friendly with my dates rather than put up an act. This matches up with letting go of expectations (strategy) and making others happy (principle)

Hacks:
+ A/B test your online-dating pictures to optimize it for matches. What you think is your best photo is never what others think is your best photo.
+ Ask your date about his/her family. I don’t know why this works, but it always makes the date feel more down to earth and easy going.
+Take every date to an interesting place that I know is good for low-pressure conversation. (Top tip: don’t take your date out to a sit down dinner. It’s boring and it’s very formal)
+ Don’t try to sleep with them until the 3rd date. The single best hack, this takes the pressure off and let’s you just have a good time.
+ Set up the second date at the end of the first date. No one likes being in the dark, this goes with the principle of making others happy rather than playing games.

Career Change

Background: I was burnt out on my career as a videographer and wanted to pursue my love for writing. The problem was that I didn’t have any experience so it was like starting my career all over again.

Principle: Getting hired is more about how you present yourself than how capable you are. Yes, you must be able to do the work, but presenting yourself is just as important (if not more important as it turns out).

Strategy: Hack the job application process step-by-step. Test everything and leave my previous assumptions behind.

Tactics: A/B test my resume, my cover letter, my interview responses, the websites I apply on, everything. Take a step-by-step approach optimizing each piece before I move on to the next. I wrote a 5000 word blog post about all the job hunting tactics I took if you’re interested.

Hacks:
+ Ask the recruiter what they’re looking for from the position. Use their exact response when asked a question in the next interview.
+ Use a multi-resume strategy. I created 3 resumes so I could apply to different jobs instantly rather than changing my resume every time.
+ Use LinkedIn Pro to see how I stack up against the competition. I only applied to jobs where I was in the top 50% of candidates.
+ Use bullet points in the cover letter to make it easier to read. This instantly improved my call-back rate.
+ Video my interviews to see where I stumble. This was the single best hack and helped me improve incredibly fast. You can see one of my first interview sessions here.

Takeaways

I think the reason that a lot of us struggle to guide our lives in the right direction is because we’re constantly pulling on these different levers without thinking about how they all align. I know this was certainly true for me.

My principles have typically stayed the same: to help others, to teach, to live an impactful life worth writing about. But, what often happens is that my strategies and tactics get thrown out of alignment from these principles. I end up chasing “success” as it’s defined by society or I watch too much HGTV and all of a sudden my goal in life is to buy a 4-bedroom house in Hawaii.

Once I started using this framework though it became much easier to see where there was misalignment. The interesting thing was that it was relatively easy to fix the problem once I saw it, the trick was seeing it in the first place.

As always I hope that this has been helpful. If you enjoyed reading this I would SUPER appreciate it if you click on those clapping hands and send some claps my way. If you have any questions or want to chat I’m always available on twitter @bogdanyz or in the comments section below.