"Is It Beneficial To Make Decisions Quickly? by the Butterfly Marketing Team, the Most Effective Internet Marketers Today, Mike Filsaime, Paulie Sabol, Donna Fox and Tom Beal"
20. Is it beneficial to make decisions quickly?
Mike Filsaime: Yes absolutely Ralph. As you’ll see you’ll be talking to a lot of people and we all quote famous people and successful people. Especially quotes from Napoleon Hill.
Napoleon Hill teaches that one of the habits that he notices about all the successful people he interviewed was that successful people are decisive in nature. Successful people make decisions very quickly. And they change them slowly.
Unsuccessful people make decisions very slowly and they change them very quickly. I saw that in the car business. What that means is if I ask you “What color is a blue shirt?” You say it’s blue because you know it to be true.
Sometimes we know the right answer but we were brought up to say “Never make a decision right away. Always sleep on it. Always think about it.” That’s a bunch of nonsense but we have to look at the people that taught us that. They were people that lived their structured life where they made $472.63 a week
Those are the people that are teaching our kids today. I want the kids listening today to know that when they know something is right to make the decision. Stick with it and make it through and focus on that decision you made because you knew it was right.
If it turns out to be the wrong decision then we go back and we talk about what we learned from our mistakes. I will venture to say that 19 times out of 20 your gut instinct is right and you know the right decision. The mistake that people make is they say I’m going to sleep on it.
It’s like me saying “Here you give me $5.00 and I’ll give you ten tomorrow.” Then you say “Well let me think about that.” And the next thing you know you end up saying “I remember when Snapple came out. My friends bought it but I decided not to buy it. I remember when Google came out and I was going to but the stocks but I didn’t.”
Because they knew it was right but they didn’t act on it. What ends up happening is that when they do end up making a decision they say “Everybody bought Google. I waited a year and half and I’m going to buy Google now.”
They buy Google for $110.00 a share and tomorrow it goes to $109.00 a share. Remember unsuccessful people make decisions slowly and change them quickly. It took them a year and a half to make the decision then all of a sudden they say “Oh wow, I just lost a dollar. Let me pull my money out of the market place.”
Next thing you know as they pull their money out of the market place it goes up to $115.00 and they lost the opportunity when they had the right decision to begin with. So that’s an example that I can give you.
To answer question in a nutshell when you have a decision should you act quickly? I believe the answer is unequivocally yes.
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Paulie Sabol: Historically, it always has been. I think the benefit of making quick decisions is becoming even more clear now, and I would encourage every one of your young heroes to read a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. Blink shows us that even if we are amateurs at something, if we don’t have degrees, if we haven’t become fully immersed in an area of study, the fact of the matter is, our quick momentary intuitions are often more right than the experts are.
So the ability to make a decision, to realize you’ve made a decision, and then to put motion behind that decision is exceptionally valuable.
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Donna Fox: I think that it is definitely a major success principle to be decisive in nature. Quickly is relative. You might decide what you want from a restaurant menu in 15 seconds and that could be quick.
You might take a minute and that would still be quick to some people. You might decide about moving into a new home and making a decision about a home. That could take months.
So “quickly” is relative. I think what is most important is to decide and if, as you are listening to this, you are having trouble making decisions in your life, start with the small ones. Start making decisions with a menu.
Sit down and say, “I’m only going to look at this menu for 30 seconds” and then make a decision. Just force yourself to make decisions that don’t matter because ultimately most decisions in life really don’t matter. They are small things.
What’s that book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff? Being decisive does help.
You also asked about procrastination and I have found the key to overcoming procrastination, because you are right, we all do it. We all procrastinate, especially we internet marketers because it’s so easy to start our day and start reading email and the next thing we know we are surfing the web and reading people’s blogs.
All of those things are valuable things to do but they don’t build out business’s bottom line. I took a tip from Brian Tracy. He has a book called Eat That Frog.
What he says is if you have a number of frogs to eat, if you take the biggest, ugliest frog first then all the other frogs seem easier. I like to call that concept “kiss the frog” which is a bit more palatable and sometimes when you kiss the frog you get a prince.
So each day I have my frogs and I line up four or five frogs each day that are the things I will most likely procrastinate on. But I try to make them things that generate revenue for my business, that actually move me forward.
If I take the biggest, ugliest one that I am most likely to procrastinate on and get at that first thing in the morning before I open an email, before I do just about anything other than drink some coffee, suddenly my whole day is better because I have got something done right away.
It’s just that simple restructuring of my day, making it the first thing that I do, that makes all the difference. Again, it’s back to that idea of little tiny improvements, kaizen.
My friend would call it the butterfly effect. How one little thing that you can do right now can make a tremendous difference in the future. It also makes a tremendous difference in procrastination.
Ralph Zuranski: It sounds like you make decisions fairly fast but take a fair amount of time deciding and making sure that you do make a good decision. You never know what the outcome of the decisions is.
I guess that’s the weird thing about decisions. You don’t know which way they are going to turn.
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TOM BEAL: Oh, 100%! Napoleon Hill had an egg timer to answer the question whether he was willing to pursue the study of success not compensated by the richest man in the world. That doesn’t sound like a pretty logical choice to make but he took it on.
But he had an egg timer and little did he know that Andrew Carnegie, he found out later, as soon as he posed the question to him & after a couple of days of downloading what this would require & how Andrew was going to make the correct contacts, he had an egg timer.
The ones that said “Let me check with my wife, let met me do this.” they didn’t make the cut. You have to be decisive based upon full information. Once you have full information then make up your mind, yes or no. The more you can flex that muscle of decision making the more quickly you can rise to the top.
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