#36 Have you made bad decisions recently?

I had made up my mind that I am discontinuing Self-Discovery Sundays.

Today was meant to be my last newsletter. You might have noticed that my website is also completely rebranded, focusing on an audience closer to my daily work as a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. But as I was reading the old issues, I had to draw lessons from myself (so to speak).

Let me explain.

Decision Making

I wonder whether you’ve made big decisions recently and looking, realise that you were at a turning point in life. The saying goes, “You have made your bed now you must lie in it.” When the decision is bad, one must lie on a bed of thorns, painfully suffering from the consequences of one’s thoughts.

We all make big decisions at some point. Tragically, we often work out the decisions in our heads. This is what leads to over-thinking and chronic mental health problems, where we live in our minds, get trapped in an echo chamber, and then make flawed decisions over time.

A better way to make important decisions is to follow a 9-step process I developed last year. The process is meant to slow down the decision-making, draw thoughts out of the mind and organise them on paper. Psychologists call this externalisation. Once thoughts are on paper, one often makes better decisions.

9 Steps to Making Better Decisions

The nine steps to making better decisions are as follows:

1. Collect Thoughts: Write all the facts leading to the current situation as bullet points. Then frame the decision you make as a question at the end of the list.
2. Organise Thoughts: Identify the themes or conflicting principles.
3. AI Analysis: Copy your notes from step 1 and paste them into Chat GPT with the promise analyse this: followed by your notes.
4. Gain Perspective: Consult with at least two people who can assist with the situation. This can be a professional if needed.
5. Discussion: After consulting, discuss the situation in a journal from 5 perspectives, namely: i) Ethical, ii) Social, iii) Emotional, iv) long-term view, and v) practical (time & resources).
6. Decision: Now you can make a decision
7. Exit Points: Crucially, how will you know if the decision is wrong and how will you exit? Define the exit points.
8. Action Steps: Write a list of the next action steps
9. Assess: Come back a few weeks later and check whether your decision was correct.

This seems daunting and it is far easier to just make a decision, right? But think about it; our lives and the situations we find ourselves in are all a consequence of decision-making. Sometimes the decisions are made by others and they affect us – fair enough. But think about all the decisions we make that shape our lives and those who depend on us. Surely, carving out a day to think a decision through and then sleep on it is worth it.

This takes us back to the newsletter. What happens next?

In my analysis, following the nine steps above, I realised that the newsletter was adding value to you and many others because it is growing every month. We now have 144 readers. However, the challenge is sustainability. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to research and write the newsletter, and this takes away from other things I could be doing.

You might have noticed that over the weeks I also created products, hoping to earn some revenue. But the products have not sold as I thought they would have. This is a business problem and fortunately, I know how to assess business problems. I narrowed it down to a business-model problem.

Instead of discontinuing the newsletter, I decided to transition it into a paid newsletter. Of course, the moment we talk money we also have to be serious about value. One must transition from a hobby to a profession. So, here’s the first step:

• All the products I created, explore them here, will be freely available to all the paying subscribers.
• The decision-making process you see above will be turned into an APP in the next month or so. The APP called the decision journal, will be integrated with Artificial Intelligence to help you make better decisions and crucially, keep a journal of all the decisions you made in the past. This will also be available to you as a subscriber at no additional cost.
• I will also run monthly webinars to take questions, facilitate discussions and add even more value to you as a subscriber.

In other words, I am doubling down on the Self-Discovery Newsletter. I will also register a separate domain, self-discovery.com or something, where all the newsletters and future products will be kept.

I hope this will be worth $9 (or R100) per month for you. I hope the newsletter will grow enough to get assistance, like a research assistant and editor to make this even better in future. We transition on 03 March.

Have you made bad decisions recently?

Every day is a series of decisions, some more important than others. Have you made bad decisions recently? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them? More importantly, how could you have prevented the bad decision in the first place?

Today’s newsletter was thinking out loud and showing that even when one has the tools, one can still make mistakes. I hope you draw from my dilemma and make better decisions in future.

Alright, that’s it for today. Until next week.

Vusi.

One more thing: Today more than ever I need your feedback. Please leave a comment or write me an email. I’d love to hear from you about how we take Self-Discovery Sundays forward.