Decision making is a difficult and complex process, and entrepreneurs like Kale Abrahamson know it. Not only do you have to choose at that moment, but you are setting the groundwork for even more choices in the future. These decisions compound into habits, and habits can make or break you.
Good habits lead to success, bad habits can lead you to failure — so it’s essential to make better decisions at every opportunity possible.
One of the most important factors in decision-making is discipline. People often rely on motivation to make the correct choices but motivation wavers depending on moods and situations. Kale Abrahamson recognized this and found ways to combat this flaw to make a good choice, every time.
Kale Abrahamson’s method helped streamline his decision-making and helped him find multimillion-dollar success using these tips:
Make sure people you care about are deeply impacted
Telling others about a project is a common tactic to create pressure to complete things. Nobody wants to be known as someone who abandons things halfway, and nobody wants to explain why they abandoned it in the first place.
Abrahamson takes it one step further. He makes his work have an impact not only on himself but on others as well. In this way, his decisions and productivity can either better someone’s life or worsen it — people he cares about will be affected, which sharpens his decision-making.
An example he uses is of a man who had a porn addiction until he installed an app that sent his browser history to his parents and pastor every time he opened it. Since he knew they would be burdened with shame if they found out he was browsing those pages, he never watched porn again.
It was a simple, straightforward fix to repeated poor decisions that had crystallized into a bad habit.
The good thing about this method is that the opposite is also true. Good choices lead to good habits and if we make our work impact the ones we care about, then these good choices will affect them positively as well.
Using both negative and positive reinforcement to your advantage is a surefire way to know what the correct decisions are, but to follow through with them as well.
Make it hurt your wallet too
Our actions change when we know they will affect ones we care about, but we can also apply this mindset to our financial wellbeing.
Nobody wants to lose money, and most people want to gain more of it. If we make our actions correlate directly to our finances, then we are more likely to make the right decisions more often.
As Abrahamson says, “it’s as simple as making the most important things you do in your business directly related to the money that you make. That way, if you don’t do those things, you don’t make money. Period.”
One thing we can do to emphasize the correlation between work and money is to make the connection obvious. For example, if paid hourly, a worker can keep track of the money they’re earning. That way, they can immediately see the value of each hour worked in the vivid present.
The key is to keep your money directly connected to the work you do, and to keep it at the forefront of your mind — especially when making decisions.
Burn your ships
Perhaps the most important of the Kale Abrahamson tips for making good choices is to burn your ships.
This wisdom comes from Fernando Cortez, a general who, when faced with an impossibly difficult opponent, burnt the ships his armies sailed in on. That way, they would have no escape plan. He made sure losing was not an option, which forced his men to fight for their lives since retreating was impossible.
For Abrahamson, one of the surefire ways to guarantee success is to burn your ships and bridges to fully invest in yourself and your business. When people have a failsafe or a backup plan, they make safe choices that don’t have as powerful of an impact. You have to burn your ships to know you are pouring yourself into your success at your full capacity.
Kale Abrahamson burned his ships by quitting his 9-5 office job, his safety net, to discover just how far he could go with his FBA business. Without burning his ships, he would have never been able to create the multimillion-dollar empires he has built since.
Some questions to consider
Who is most important in your life? Whose opinions do you value most? How can you make those people disappointed if you fail at your most important tasks?
How can you do some cause and effect? And how can you make it hurt in the wallet area next time you fail at your important thing?
What areas of your life require you to burn your ships to see results?
For more business wisdom, you can subscribe and read the Kale letter — one of the better decisions you can make. Also, check out our other blogs for more tips like these!
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