The Power of Decision

In today’s episode, I sit down with Blaine Bartlett to talk about the power of making decisions before certainty arrives. We discuss how timing and risk tolerance shape our choices and why the cost of indecision can be greater than the cost of getting something wrong. Blaine shares how nonnegotiable habits create clarity while freeing up energy for what matters most. We also talk about recognizing when preparation becomes procrastination, moving from possibility to probability, and refusing to let fear dictate our direction. Ultimately, progress comes from deciding, acting, learning, and adjusting as circumstances change, not waiting for a perfect outcome. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And the decision-making side of it, Napoleon Hill teaches that success begins with a firm, definite decision. One thing about decision is that time, emotion, and value changes the minute you come to decision. And so, most of us don't lack opportunity, intelligence, talents, or desires. We often, we often hold us back with our ability to make decisions confidently and consistently and stay committed long enough to those decisions to compound, because we're diverted by what happens with time, emotion, and value. We can spend months thinking about starting a business, changing a habit, making a call,

• 0:39Speaker 00

  or pursuing an opportunity, but nothing changes until we decide and take action. Our life changes when our decisions change with that time, emotion, and value. Desire without decision is simply a hope, a wish, a prayer. So, it's actually decision that bridges desire into destiny. And understanding that that desire is created by thoughts, and then the conversation diverts the destiny. For you, understanding that all decisions are truly memorialization

• 1:21Speaker 00

  or codification, because there's inconsistencies in decisions, meaning we don't know what we don't know. So, every decision we make is our best guess. Because time, even if, even if we did know, time, emotion, and value would change, and it changes so quickly, even if we were certain about a decision, the instant we make it, it could change. So, how do we deal with that uncertainty in making decisions, especially ones that need to be binding decisions?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Jeff Bezos, at one point in time, basically declared that if I have 60% of the information I need to make a decision, I'll pull the trigger. Now, that percentage may be a little bit off here, but I think it was 60%. He was never organizing anything that they were doing at Amazon around certainty. I mean, it was a brand-new, yeah, they were moving into a brand-new sector, they were disrupting everything, there was no safe path that anybody had identified. So, get the information that you can, in the time span in which you can collect it, relative to, you know, your objective and goal, and that, you know, your tolerance

• 2:33Speaker 01

  for, you know, risk relative to the timeline, and then you pull the trigger. And, you know, the 80% that I've got, the 70% that I've got, does it point in this direction or that direction? And I just trust that the next step is going to be the one that's necessary. I've got to move. If I just, you know, wait for 100%, I will never move. To your point, time and space are going to continue to change.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's so interesting, because I always tell people that timing and risk tolerance is so important, and they really don't even know what I'm talking about, you know? And I use a lottery ticket as an example, you know, because it clearly defines timing and risk tolerance, and why it's so important. Because if you know the timing and risk tolerance, that you spend $2 to buy a lottery ticket, you have a 1 in a billion chance to make a half a billion dollars, you'll know if you've won or lost by Saturday at 8:00 PM. When you lose the lottery invariably, almost all of us will lose invariably every time,

• 3:37Speaker 00

  we're disappointed, but we're not guilty or resentful. We, we continue on and continue to buy lottery tickets, we're not afraid to buy them, because we knew our timing and risk tolerance. And that, to me, is a key bridge in decision-making between desire and destiny, is we don't want to limit our decision-making process just because it was aligned with the timing and risk tolerance, and we ended up falling on the side of the risk, not the reward. If you would like to learn more about that bridge, email me,

• 4:17Speaker 00

  [email protected]. Lesson number two, we need to calculate the cost of indecision. This is kind of like the emotional expense column that we talk about so often. Too many people don't have the cost of indecision column. So, we often calculate the risk of making the wrong decision in that timing and risk tolerance, while ignoring the cost of making no decision at all.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Indecision consumes our time, attention, energy, and emotion. And so, we spend, let's say, six months debating an opportunity, because we're afraid of making the wrong decision, when a reasonable decision that could have given us six months before would have given us experience, feedback, relationships, and growth that we desired. How can we go ahead and take that leap in studying the cost of indecision comparatively to the wrong decision?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Indecision is an energetic sinkhole. I mean, that'd be one way to think about it. So, I, I've got a finite amount of energy that I can deploy at any point in time. So, this goes back to the risk-reward, yeah? What's the investment I'm going to make here? And if I stub my toe going in this direction, I've, I've already assessed what's the downside. So, in that sense, there really is no wrong decision to be made. Once I've done the, you know, the appropriate vetting, any decision I make is actually going to be in service of that out, you know, that, that, that objective. The, the thing that trips a lot of people up is the meaning, the meaning that we hold around mistake. Mistake is just another way

• 5:56Speaker 01

  of saying, I gathered some information, particularly if I'm moving into an area I've never gone before. I won't have that information unless I took that step. So, you know, looking for guarantees about what's the safe path when you're blind, you don't know what the safe path is, that's, it's a foolish way to organize your life.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it occupies space, right? Every open decision occupies space, and space is where the growth occurs. And a lot of people make the decision to not make a decision instead of taking the risk and making the wrong decision, learning the lesson, and growing, expanding in that space. And so, identifying decisions and being able to analyze or calculate the cost of the decision and regulate it between what's the cost of making the wrong decision versus the cost of making no decision, indecision, and including the emotional expense in there. If you would like to learn how to calculate the cost of

• 6:58Speaker 00

  indecision, email me, [email protected]. David means beloved, D is my first initial, Meltzer means servant. Let me be your beloved servant. All right, lesson number three. As always, it seems in these lessons, we, and, and, trainings, clarity always comes. And clarity, to me, is seeing what interferes with the clair, with the infinite. And clarity eliminates overthinking, overwhelming, procrastination, and these often disguise itself in preparation. And you know people like this, that, especially in the book-writing side of it, remember

• 7:39Speaker 00

  our friend Rob Angel? He wrote like six or seven books because of indecision. And literally, he could not distinguish between, you know, overthinking, and he disguised it in preparation. And we tell ourselves we need more repetition, more information, more time, more certainty, but there comes a point when the additional information stops increasing probability and starts feeding feelings of overwhelmed or procrastination. How can we decipher between preparation and stalling?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  That's a great question. Particularly, and I'll just speak from my own experience here. I used to procrastinate, yeah, when I was at university. I've got finals coming up, night before the finals, that's when the cramming happened. So, was I prepared? Well, that's an open question.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  You know, because I wasn't going deep, I was, I was just pulling the tops right off the lesson and then regurgitating it, which is a lot of what our education system is designed for. Preparation is organized around clarity. And I go back to that 80%, 60% metric. Do I have enough information here now to move the next step? And it's an ongoing basis, it's not going to be static. Do I have enough information today to take that next step, whatever that next step may be? Take that step. Now, do I have enough information? No, I don't quite yet. Okay, well, part of the preparation is to make that assessment on an ongoing basis, you know, rather than trying to gulp it all in one bite.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  So, so good. And I always use the differentiator between the empty miler and the extra miler. So, the empty miler prepares 15 minutes a day and gets an A on that test, and the extra miler studies 15 hours before a test as well. But too many people over-prepare and aren't ready to get up to bat. And, you know, we want to accelerate towards what we want and understand what distracts us from what we want, and utilize preparation to get to a certain point where it's time to launch. Progress, not perfection. And understanding the quality and quantity of lessons in that growth, we can now know personally, experientially,

• 10:08Speaker 00

  giving and receiving-wise, and we will separate necessary information from unnecessary preparation or unnecessary overthinking. If you would like to learn how to get clarity to eliminate feeling overwhelmed, procrastination, over-preparation, overthinking, email me, [email protected].

• 10:30Speaker 02

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• 11:11Speaker 00

  The next lesson is using our non-negotiables to make better decisions. The idea of a non-negotiable takes circumstance out of the equation. It says that I'm going to hedge my bet on the 24 hours of time that I get by saying, no matter what happens, I'm going to assign a minimum amount of time to my sleep, my health, my family, my faith, my finance, the study of time and the study of relativity. And this allows us to predetermine our values, our standards, our behaviors, which simplifies our life because we take circumstance out of the equation. And yes, we make exceptions, but then we super prioritize that non-negotiable the next day

• 11:53Speaker 00

  so we don't double down on our behaviors. If we decided that, for example, health is a non-negotiable part of our morning, we don't wake up every day asking whether we feel like exercising, or if the weather is good, or if I have the appropriate equipment, or whatever excuse that people make not to prioritize their health because of circumstance. The decision was already made. How important is it to create non-negotiable behaviors and assign time, a minimum amount of time to it, to take control out of the uncertainty of each and every day?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Energy follows attention. And if I'm not clear about what it is that's important to me, I get distracted because I've got energy spilling out all over the place. My non-negotiables create a container that allows me to move freely about the rest of my life, knowing that that foundational container is in place and it's intact. And I work a lot with the notion of creative constraint. These non-negotiables become constraints, but they're constraints in the sense that they keep me connected to what's important to me, what matters. But they also begin to produce creativity and innovation.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  If I lock into, I'm working out every day, that's non-negotiable. I don't even have to decide it. It's already decided. But what begins to happen, something encroaches, I get creative about how I handle that because I've already committed to and made a decision about that exercise regime.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  So smart. Using our non-negotiables to make better decisions. Email me, [email protected]. The fifth lesson is to increase, and this is right up Blaine's alley as he moves possibilities into reality, increase probability and move through the false evidence appearing real, the fear, the uncertainty that exists. So, anything may be possible, Blaine, but we shouldn't allocate our time according to possibilities alone. Our job is to take action for the sake of what we desire that will increase the probability of the outcomes we desire while refusing to allow fear, interference, interference, to make our decisions.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So many people focus in on what's missing, what they don't have, what they don't want, or what other people want for them, or what social media says they should have. They create fear from this and it interferes with the desire and the infinite possibility, probability, and perspective that can then be had. You are the master of moving possibilities into reality. How can we help people stop hoping the right opportunity finds us and focus in on what actually already is and diminish, dissolve, and disappear the fear that interferes with where we want to be or better?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Everything exists on frequencies. And you and I talk about this all the time. Yeah, and the quantum structures do exist, the quantum science is in play. So, possibility exists at a location in time and space. It already is there, it's present. Where fear comes from, and that location is in the now. That now is infinite and it's abundant and it's completely filled up. Now is, everything is there. What gets in the way is this thing that we call fear. And fear is focus on the past or focus on the future.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I want to be in the now. So I lock into the frequency of that possibility. I move possibility into probability in my mind through perspective, through experience, through vibrational connection. Possibility into probability, probability moves into reality. As soon as I've made the move from possibility to probability, I start feeling it. I start, now I'm in tune with that frequency band. And whatever is existing on that frequency is accessible to me. I don't have to worry about it, I don't have to be afraid of it not coming. All of that stuff is guaranteed because that frequency band contains everything that is appropriate for that particular reality.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  So good. I just want to remind us as we get to the sixth lesson, most people live as drifters, which is what you'll learn in Blaine's book, 98% of the people don't live. So stop drifting and start living. And they live into nothingness. I call them tubes, food in, food out. Well, when you know what you want in the divine direction of where you want to be and you align the meaning, it becomes a possibility. When you know who, who you can help and who can help you, it becomes a probability. When you know how you're going to use the 24 hours a day with your non-negotiable and negotiable behaviors, it becomes your perspective. And when you do it now, when you make the decision, when you do it next and you make the decision, it becomes a reality.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  And finally, we apply our why to that reality by staying present, by not going into the future and not going to the past, but aligning the meaning of the past with where we want to be or better in the future. Leads me to the final, email me by the way, if you'd like that possibility to probability perspective, let me know, [email protected]. The final lesson, as we're coming into the close here, is to decide, act, learn, and adjust. There are no perfect decisions. There are decisions followed by outcomes, by time, value, and emotion changing, which creates lessons, which creates the adjustments and expansions of capability to align with

• 17:44Speaker 00

  the new circumstances, which makes better decisions. So the faster we move through this cycle, the faster we grow. We make decisions that don't create outcomes that we expect. So instead of blaming ourselves or others, justifying, or living below the line, we need to evaluate and understand what happened. Ask ourselves, what did we do to be responsible, to attracted, to participate in this perception? And what are we supposed to learn from it? Now we take a new alignment, take new action and adjustment through the AAA strategy. Speed doesn't mean recklessness, Blaine.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  How can we decide, act, learn, and adjust at its appropriate speed, looking at this idea of alignment, action, and adjustment?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  It starts with staying connected to that for the sake of what or what matters. Because that's where the vibrational frequency actually exists. The idea of decide, act, learn, adjust, the faster you can do that cycle, developing the capacity to continuously start over, that's what decide, act, learn, adjust is all about. So I get really adept at and masterful at making that transition, making that cycle real fast. I make a decision, I take an action, how did that work? And I take, and this is the real key to this, I take the words right and wrong, good and bad, out of the assessment.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Did this work or not work? That takes all the stigma out of it. It's just, literally, it's a data point. And I can do something with that. If I start assigning right and wrong, good and bad to it, now I get my ego involved. Now I get, oh, what are they thinking of me? Who am I? I mean, take that off the, take it off the shelf. Yeah? Quick iterations.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  We must decide, act, learn, and adjust. If you want to learn the AAA strategy of alignment, action, and adjustment, email me, your beloved servant, David, means beloved, D is my first initial, Meltzer means servant, [email protected]. Let me be your beloved servant. So, in the idea of the power of decision, success isn't created by knowing alone. In fact, I believe knowledge is a commodity. Wisdom is valuable, but because of technology, knowledge is seconds away and very, very accurate. But this knowledge alone, it's created by deciding and doing both.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  We don't need to know exactly how everything will work before we're willing to move forward. Those people will be stuck in la-la, no man's space, and nothing will get done. You will certainly be a drifter. When we make a clear decision, when we take action, when we learn from the result and adjust appropriately, we create another opportunity to move forward. That's all we're creating, is more opportunity to move forward with decisions. You will have no opportunity to move forward if you continue to prepare and don't make decisions. So we need to consistently, persistently pursue repeatedly the decisions that create

• 21:08Speaker 00

  that momentum that will compound the opportunities to move forward, that compound our lives. In conclusion, decisions determine direction. Direction determines behavior. Behavior determines results. And results compound into who we become in our lives. I want to thank everybody for this collaboration of decision-making training, The Power of Decision. We will gladly send you the exercises, the guides. We will send you the replay, maybe minus the intro part of it where I screwed it up. But nonetheless, please email us, [email protected].

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Blaine, thank you for your patience. Have a very uneventful flight and I'll see you in a few hours. Thanks for joining me.