The thing I’ve noticed is people generally fall into one of these 3 categories’ when it comes to decision making and whichever one they fall into most predominately will usually end up determining the general quality of lifestyle they have.

Consumers: People who eat lots of fast food, The people who wait in long lines for sneakers, The people who shop on Amazon frequently etc. Consumers are generally people who are most interested in getting that little dopamine spike when they buy that Big Mac or that new iPhone, we’re all consumers at one point or another, but I’m speaking about the people who have adopted consumption as a lifestyle.

Producers: These are the hustlers, the people who live to get results & will work their faces off forever to get what they want. These can be 9–5 employee’s, factory workers, CEO’s, People into fitness, or anyone who thrives on producing results again and again.

Investors: These are sort of like producers, but rather than thriving on producing results themselves — investors thrive on stacking the deck in their favor & controlling the results from a distance.

Each different type of decision maker has a different set of priorities that impact the kind of deal life gives them & they all have to make adjustments accordingly.

Consumers prioritize low cost & high level of instant gratification, they tend to buy cheap products and services for the short term thrill of getting a shiny new toy only to be hit with problems not long after. This trend soon becomes the consumers lifestyle. You eat tons of fast food, you get fat. You sign up for that new cell phone plan, you get that huge first bill with proration and activation fee’s on it. If you were to plot the quality of their life experience on a graph it would consist of a bunch of peaks and valleys. One minute they’re up, next minute they’re down, but overall it would either stay at about the same level or gradually decline over time because they’re using up resources without being productive with them.

Producers prioritize usefulness and efficiency so they’ll spend money if it fixes problems for them and/or makes them more productive. These people expect results because results are expected from them. Since they thrive on results which might have ups and downs depending on variables outside of the producers control, this group would experience the same peaks and valleys that a consumer would — but it would be on a gradual incline because they’re moving themselves in the right direction overall.

Investors prioritize low-risk high reward situations, they’ll spend a lot of money on deals that pay off big in the long term, but won’t spend a dime on something that’s not an asset to them in the big picture. A producer will work 18 hours a day for weeks to get results, while an investor would just hire someone else to do it while he focused on other things just because their time is too valuable to them to be used that inefficiently. Investors are terrified of peaks and valleys so their graph would look like a very long but steady incline.

Ideally, you want to predominately fall into the investor space when you make decisions and only be a producer or consumer when it’s most practical. Investors think long term, they think big picture, they seek to minimize cost and maximize return. For example: Someone into fitness could take the investor approach just by eating clean and going for the long term pay off instead of being a consumer by eating dirty because it tastes good now, then having to put in extra time in the gym just to make up for their own bad decisions — which is a waste of time and energy.

You should audit all your decisions with the goal of maximizing efficiency and leverage the first time around & always consider how others are making their decisions when you’re dealing with them.

— live forever