Are you mindful of the power behind conscious decision making?

It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it is powerful.

The key to a fulfilling life is quite simple:

Make the right decisions (as opposed to the wrong ones).

While this may seem subjective, it is totally dependent on you having ambitious goals and is not conducive to a life of leisure.

In my theory, having goals, and working towards and achieving those goals leads to a fulfilling and happier life.

On the contrary, not having goals is a depressing downward spiral to existential oblivion.

And all of this comes down to making decisions.

Making The Right Decisions

Here’s an example of making the right vs. wrong decision.

You’re trying to become great with girls.

Friday evening rolls around and you feel an urge to grab yourself a tall can of beer, smoke some weed and fire up the Xbox.

But rather than just following your hedonistic impulses, you stop and ask yourself: “Is this the right decision? What are the long-term consequences of this action?”

Try thinking out the “effects” of your decisions

You look at your “decisions list” and scan for “beer” and “Xbox.” You’ve already thought this out, so you scroll through the “effects” of video games, which are:

• Distraction
• Fun
• Avoiding
• Detour
• Fantasy
• Time suck
• Poverty
• Fat
• Stupid
• Lazy
• Shallow
• Stress relief

Then you scroll to “beer” and see the effects, which are:

• Downer
• Altered state
• Fun
• Short term
• Fat
• Hangover
• 1 day of recovery
• Lazy
• Stupid

Next, you analyze your list of alternative decisions:

• Exercise
• Read
• Clean your room
• Call friend
• Meal prep
• Write book
• Play drums
• Write blog post
• Make Youtube video
• Meet girls
• Meditate
• Study Spanish

Looking closer at the “effects” of “meet girls” you see:

• Fun
• Sex
• Social skills
• Adventure
• Romance
• Potential partners
• Life experience
• Social circle
• Charisma
• Opportunity

You scan further down your decision board to your long-term goals:

• Make one million dollars
• Buy a house
• Travel the world
• Find a beautiful wife
• Create a fit and powerful body
• Find a social circle of talented men
• Build a successful business
• Write a hip-hop album

As you feel the pull of your gaming system, you look back to the effects list, then to your Xbox, before finally making a decision.

You put on your shoes and head out to meet women.

As opposed to drinking beer, getting stoned and playing video games – in order to realize the long-term goal of finding a beautiful wife – going out to meet women would be the right decision.

Had you neglected to consider the long-term implications of an impulsive, lazy, hedonistic decision, you may skipped going out completely.

Your entire life is just a continuous series of decisions

I’m a small business owner. Every day I wake up when I want, go to bed when I want, and work as much as I want.

As you can imagine this is not easy. I’m constantly making decisions.

Do I go to that beach bar and get loaded with sexy women, or fix the broken plugin on my website? Do I watch two more hours of culture war commentary on Youtube, or work on my digital product launch?

Which decision will bring me closer to my goals, and ultimately more happiness and fulfillment in the long run?

At any time at least a dozen distractions are clawing up from my unconscious.

When you come to the crossroad of decisions, notice how powerful the pull of bad decisions are.

You could call these decisions sacrifices, and you call the act of ignoring the distractions discipline.

Your energy wants to flow like water downhill taking the easiest route. It does not want to forge a new path.

Making the right decision for long-term success is never as easy as an impulsive, immature, instantly gratifying, hedonistic, lazy decision.

Consider your life a farm

If you nurture your crops, feed your animals, and maintain the property, it can yield great wealth and fulfillment. Neglect it and you have chaos.

Weeds will conquer your land, the animals will destroy your property, and wolves will feast on your livestock. All because you decided to sleep in.

The reason men don’t achieve their goals… is that most men don’t have any goals beyond eating, humping and paying rent. They haven’t planted even an idea of what they’d like to grow.

If your greatest goal is to make it through the work, or school day, then go home to gorge on fast food, fall asleep to porn, and do it all over again the next day…

Ask yourself if in your elder years, will you reflect regretfully on what your life may have been like had you made better decisions? Or will you take the time to consider your options and steer yourself toward a better, more rewarding outcome?

Avoiding self-delusion

Let’s bring a little more mindfulness to our decisions.

Write out some of your long-term goals. Maybe to get in great shape, meet more girls, or buy a jet ski.

You must be honest and aware of your vices, time wasters, and shitty habits that keep you from actualizing your best reality. Don’t bullshit yourself that everything is okay.

Telling yourself that playing six hours of video games five days a week is okay because you’re working on your hand-eye coordination, or eating an entire chocolate cake in one sitting is fine because you have a foodie blog, would be self-delusion.

Wait until the next big decision arises. Don’t ignore it, but rather be fully conscious of your desires and habits. And yes, spending two hours reading Twitter is a big decision. Think of what a man like Picasso, or Abraham Lincoln could accomplish in two hours.

If you feel an urge to consume two thousand calories of junk food, or watch three hours of Tik-Tok, or play video games, or do anything that you know is the wrong decision, catch yourself in the act and stop to think:

“What are the effects of this decision?”

You don’t need to make a decision just yet. You only need to deeply consider the effects of that decision.

Write out all the effects of your decision

So grab a pen (or open a document, a dry-erase board, etc.) and start writing the effects of each choice.

For example: eating a giant bowl of chocolate ice cream and watching two hours of Jordan Peterson videos.

Effects:

• Fat
• Tired
• Interesting
• Lazy
• Broke
• Inspired (It is JP so not a total waste)
• Entertained
• Full (of empty sugar calories)

Now write out alternative decisions, specifically the ones that move you closer towards your goals. Let’s say your goal is to lose weight and get in shape.

Alternative activities:

• Don’t eat ice cream and binge-watch Youtube
• Do twenty pushups while listening to Jordan Peterson with headphones
• Crunches
• Lift weights
• Run
• Yoga
• Practice piano
• Go to the gym
• Listen to an audiobook while exercising
• Eat salad
• Meditate
• Go for a walk

Write it all out and this will create a mental model to base your future decisions on.

Bringing conscious awareness to your decisions

Most of these “unconscious” bad decisions keep us down because we don’t take the time each day to consider the cost of our decisions.

The act of consciously considering each decision is usually enough to guide us toward the right ones.

Does that mean every time you play a video game, watch a movie, fap, or eat a bowl of ice cream you’re ruining your life? No, not at all.

But by consciously drawing attention to your decisions, you will have nobody and nothing to blame for yourself when you steer your ship into the rocks.

Sometimes you may not even catch your decisions until you’re already mid-action

For example, you have a huge project due in a week and now you’re doom scrolling social media and smoking weed.

The difference between you creating a digital product that could make you a million dollars, and working for peanuts for the man, could be that one decision.

It’s like smoking cigarettes. If you’re a smoker it may not feel like a decision to put one in your mouth, but it is. Every time you light up you’ve made a choice with severe long-term consequences. You’ve decided on a future that may be far less ideal than if you’d chosen to drink water.

Start making conscious decisions today

The people you admire aren’t superior to you, they just make better decisions.

Your thoughts, your habits… they aren’t set in stone.

All you need to start this journey is to grab a pen, a notebook, and the next time you need to make a decision before you act habitually, journal it out.

Imagine the results if you converted just 10% of your time from bad decisions to good ones. Then imagine what you’re capable of if you converted 20% of your time.

Pretend that rather than watching ten hours of YouTube shorts, or Netflix, or video games per week, you read books.

Considering it takes an average of five to ten hours to read a sixty-thousand-word book, you could read a book per week. That is roughly fourty-eight books a year.

I average twenty to fourty books a year. And trust me, reading like this will drastically change your life for the better. Nearly everything I have, I owe to my reading habits.

So let’s do a little imagination game

Picture a life of stopping to question your most important decisions, which are often your smallest; like choosing to play a video game, rather than read a book, or do a pushup.

As you dive deeper into this new life theory, you find that the power of making conscious decisions becomes more critical in every aspect of your life. Armed with your decision list, you now navigate your day with purpose and intent.

Over time you notice increasingly powerful results

As you invest time into fostering meaningful connections Your relationships grow stronger.

Your health improves as you spend more time working out and eating healthy.

Your wealth grows as you take the steps necessary to advance your career by improving your knowledge and skills.

All these gains are achieved because rather than succumbing to distractions, you’ve made the right decisions. You notice the pull of bad decisions exists but it has less hold over you.

As you steer your ship toward brighter horizons, you look back knowing your final destination was never set. You’re no longer drifting on the current of circumstance, but plotting your own course.

The power to shape your life was always within your grasp, just waiting to be harnessed by the simple act of making the right decisions.

Reading this entire article was the right decision.