101: Optimal Decision-Making with Pat McDaniel

Pete Mockaitis
Patrick, thank you so much for being here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Pat McDaniel
Thank you Pete, I appreciate being on this podcast. It’s a great one too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And so I’ve been enjoying your website; it’s a fun domain as well – wiseinsights.net. Just to maybe tee up what do you mean by “wise insights” and problem solving and decision making, best practices. Could you maybe wet our whistle by giving us a story or a case in which folks applied some of your wise insights and saw some cool transformation in the world of decision making?

Pat McDaniel
Yeah, absolutely. The whole gist of the Wise Insights website is trying to combine two things. One of them is research; there’s just a ton of really interesting studies out there that help us better understand who we are as human beings, as well as just ways to maximize every advantage we can in the workplace and in life. And so I try to bring in a lot of research, but then I also try to bring in what I call “ancient wisdom”. There’s a lot of wisdom that people have compiled in the ancient books from all sorts of traditions that sometimes you forget about, and when you start to say, “You know…”, and you talk about that in conjunction with these research things, to me it’s a real potent combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Pat McDaniel
So I do have a case study that’s really interesting, I think you might find helpful and the listeners might find helpful. Because I do a fair amount of research and have done a fair amount of research on decision making, ’cause hey, who doesn’t want to be better at making decisions? And my little slogan is, “Better decisions equals a better life.” And so when I started doing the research… And there’s a ton of really good resources out there. The ones that I like – Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow is really good, Chip and Dan Heath Decisive is really good. There’s just a number of different ones that are really insightful on decision making.
But a couple of things, statistics that I ran across that I’m like, “Oh my gosh” – that we’re not really very good at decision making. We’re not omniscient; we don’t know the future, so we can’t make perfect decisions. But at the same time we’re really a lot worse than we probably think we are, and so a couple of examples was…
You know how you have these executive search companies that go out there and find these high-powered executives for these big companies. And they had done this research study around about 20,000 executives, and they noticed that about 40% of the recommendations and the hires for these senior-level executives ended up being gone from the company that they were matched with within 18 months.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh dear.

Pat McDaniel
And think about how much time these companies put in and take these temperament tests and all these interviews and it’s just fairly exhaustive. And then to have 40% of them be bust in 18 months it’s just kind of like, wow. And similar, they went back and looked at mergers and acquisitions that companies had done and they realized that somewhere in the neighborhood of 83% of all these mergers and acquisitions that companies move forward with with the hope that it’s going to help their company, strengthen their company, they don’t.
And when you think about how smart these people are and all the number crunching and trying to figure out a lot of things, to have 83% – that’s pretty bad. So, there’s just a lot of evidence out there that we could do a lot better in the decision-making area. And so for me, I wanted to figure out what can I do, and as I began to do my research it was like, “Oh, there’s a ton of things you can do. Ton of things you can do differently or learn.”
And so here’s where I applied this decision-making information in a real life case study, and it was actually for me. I’ve developed what they call a “5-step process”. I have an e-book on my website that talks about the process; we could talk about the actual nuts and bolts of that process in a moment. But I wanted to try that to see if it would help me get a better job ’cause I was working at a digital marketing agency that was an awful experience.
And so I wrote up this case study, which is on the website wiseinsights.net. And it basically takes you through the 5-step process and it’s got all sorts of stuff: I’ve got a spreadsheet on there that you can download if you want as to how I basically broke things down and evaluated these companies. But the happy news is… I ended up having two job offers that were both outstanding. I mean they were like, “Wow, I don’t know.” I mean they were both really great. And the one that I ended up taking has just been a fantastic experience for me. I mean it’s just a great company and I’m actually getting to do the stuff that I really am good at, as opposed to a lot of these jobs out there were you’re kind of having to fit into their square hole and you’re like, “Well, I’m kind of triangular, but…”, that kind of thing. So to me the 5-step process worked beautifully.

Pete Mockaitis
And so can we recap then – what’s 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 there?

Pat McDaniel
Okay, so the first step is really pretty simple, and that is what I call “entertain openness”. Because we all kind of go into these decision processes and we sort of have favorites and we sort of have biases, like, “I really want this to work.” And part of the problem with the decision process is we approach it with a “I’m going to try to make this one work” and it just doesn’t work that way. You basically have to keep yourself wide open and entertain all sorts of things. And I’m a person of faith, so I believe it makes sense to ask God to show me what does He think I need to do because He knows way more than I do. So that first one is just force yourself to stay open and not close off the option too quickly.
Second thing is to expand your choices. And there are a lot of reasons why. We tend to get into our little ruts in the way we view things like… I have kids and I’ll talk to them about things that they’re trying to figure out. And a lot of times they do the same thing we do, which is, “Well, I’m thinking about this or that.” And it’s like, “Well, what about this?” “Well, okay, what about that?” And they hadn’t thought through a lot of different choices. And so that’s a big one, is really stretching out your choices because let’s face it, more choices and better choices make for better decision.
The third step is simply to be able to, what I call, “expose your bias”. There are a lot of biases that we have that really do impact your decision. And Pete, you and I were talking earlier about this. We can go through a number of these biases, but the reality is that the facts upon which we make our decisions are not as solid as we think they are; they are actually often mostly distorted. And so you’re making a decision based on a distorted fact that may or may not really be what you think it is. And so you have to kind of go back and look at these various influences that are kind of pulling you one way or the other, and come up with a more solid basis on which to make some good decisions.
The fourth one is to be able to, what I say “escape your emotions”. You actually need your emotions to make decisions. They’ve done a lot of really interesting research, like there was a gentleman who was in some sort of terrible accident and a portion of his brain was injured and it was a particular area of his brain that affected his ability to have emotions. And he not only had no emotions, he was almost like a sociopath at that point, but he also had great difficulty in making decisions because he just didn’t have the ability to integrate the emotional side to it.
So I’m not saying that you need to be Spock or something like that to make a decision. The problem is that you have to look at your emotions and kind of keep them a bit at arm’s length, because they do distort a lot of things. There’s a lot of irrational fears that we have, that you start to look at something and you think, “I don’t know…” And in reality that’s just my emotions talking; that’s not me looking objectively at a situation. And so, you do need to be able to step away from your emotions a little bit and get a little bit of distance.
And in the e-book in each of these steps I give you a bunch of different, like, “Here’s how you counteract this, here’s how you would deal with this.” For example on the emotions, part of it is giving yourself a little bit of a time perspective, where you’re kind of looking down the road 10 years from now. Maybe right now marrying this girl… Oh sorry, Pete. Marrying this girl is going to be the greatest thing, but if you look down the road you might say, “I don’t know if I’d be happy with that decision 10 years from now.” So, there’s a number of things that you can do, and part of it is just getting some feedback from people outside of yourself, who can kind of see how you’re caught up in an emotional viewpoint rather than more objective.
And then the final step is what we call… And this comes from Chip and Dan Heath – they said, “Prepare for the worst”. Meaning face the facts that even if you’re very deliberate and you’re very careful and you’re doing all the right things, there’s a really good chance that you’re not going to make the right decision just because, again, we’re not omniscient. So there are a number of things you can do to mitigate against that.
So, as an example one of them is called the pre-mortem. And Gary Klein, who is an interesting psychologist, coined the term. It really deals with the idea of… We’re all familiar with the post-mortem, but what you want to do is you want to look at something, “What might go wrong with this decision?”, and really look through all the options, “Well, I guess this could happen and that could happen, this could happen.” And then from there you kind of lay out some possibilities like, “Well, if this does happen how would I handle it? And if this does happen, what would I do next?”
And so if you prepare yourself, then you should be able to address these things a little bit more effectively and ultimately come up with some better decisions because you’ve taken the time to work it through a careful process rather than just, “I just know in my heart this is going to work.” It’s like, well, there’s a place for intuition but sometimes making just a gut decision isn’t always the best idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I hear you. And I think you just proved this overwhelmingly, convincingly and beautifully in terms of illustrations. In your 50 Hidden Influences That Can Wreck Your Decisions infographic on your website, it’s so captivating, it really pulls you in. So you’ve listed 50, but we probably don’t have time to cover 50. I’d like to hear just a few, I don’t know – 3, 4, 5 – of some of maybe the most sneaky or commonly occurring or just maybe rationality-crushing kinds of hidden influences that are really worth shining a spotlight on right now?

Pat McDaniel
Well, there’s one that we’re all pretty familiar with. We just came through an election season and what you see in our country today is a great example of the confirmation bias, where we tend to hear what we want to hear and we tend to dismiss what we don’t want to hear, and then we think that we’re making decisions based on the facts and it’s like, “Well, actually, no.” And it’s not just anecdotal evidence.

So they’ve done a bunch of different studies, and one of the researchers’ name was William Hart and he did like a meta study. So he looked at 91 different studies that looked at 8,000 participants. And he pulled all this together and he just said we’re twice as likely to receive and favor information that aligns with our current viewpoint, as well as to dismiss things that don’t fit into my worldview as to what I want to hear.
And what’s interesting to me, Pete, is that it’s not just something that we think we know; we can see it on FMRI scans. So, they did this experiment with a bunch of people where they stuck them into these FMRI machines to watch areas of their brain and watch them light up. And so then what they did was they took two politicians and people were sort of like, “I like this politician but I don’t like that politician”. You can fill in the blanks as to who they are at this point. And they started to kind of feed them information, and so what they found was they were showing these people in the FMRI machines information that their favorite candidate was saying, that they were contradicting themselves or some sort of scandalous thing that they had said or done, that kind of made you look at them in a less favorable light.

And then they also did that kind of stuff for people who you maybe didn’t like so much with the candidate. So what they found was, for the candidates that you didn’t like, the FMRI machine showed that you heard and registered in your brain every contradiction that that person made. And it was like like you heard them all, you had your gloves out to catch them all.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!”

Pat McDaniel
Yeah. But then they watched the people’s brains when they were given the same sort of very incriminating evidence about their favorite candidates, and they dismissed or explained away or whatever way. Their brain basically just ignored it like half the time; they just totally swept it under the rug. And so in the end people’s minds were not made up at all; they were confirmed. So it’s one of the things for me that I’d like to say I’m not like that, but we’re all like that. And so the question is: How do I maintain an openness to information?
So one of the things that I have done is I try to get my news from sources other than my preferred channel, so to speak, because if you sit and watch a particular source of information on a regular basis or listen to certain talk radio shows, you’re really not going to get any new information that’s going to help you see some things. So that’s one of the distortions that goes on and it seems to be pretty common, and I hear it mentioned a lot, is confirmation bias. So that’s one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so fantastic, just that notion about getting them from your non-preferred source, because it sounds like that brain evidence just suggests it’s almost like, I don’t know if you call it laziness or… It’s just sort of comforting and cozy to be in the familiar, “I kind of agree with the way this is slanted” approach. But it takes a bit of effort to pull yourself out of there and say, “No”. And not like you’re being assaulted or anything, but it’s a bit uncomfortable if you like the MSNBC and then you flick over to Breitbart, or vice versa. It’ll be a bit jarring to you, but you’re saying that in fact that jarred-ness is valuable.

Pat McDaniel
Well, and this goes back to a couple of things. One is the fact that human nature does not like uncertainty; we like to have a story that makes sense, that’s credible in our mind. And so once we have that story built, it takes a lot and we see this scientifically throughout the millennia with people have a particular view – Isaac Newton had a view of physics until somebody like Einstein comes along and says, “No, actually it’s not exactly like that.”
But it takes a lot to overcome and get to a tipping point where people say, “Okay, now I’m buying it.” So we all like our certainty, and so once you get comfortable in a particular point of view, if you combine that with your personality… Let’s face it, there are some people out there who are more black and white, and black-and-whiters just don’t tolerate that kind of gray middle very easily, so they would much prefer to have things work out that way. So it’s not at all surprising that we do that; we like our brand of truth and we’ll stick with it, thank you very much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s fantastic, the confirmation bias. What are other couple that are really worth highlighting?

Pat McDaniel
Well, I just wrote an article for Skip Prichard on this, and this is the priming effect. And marketers – I’m a marketer – we know all about these. Robert Cialdini wrote a book called Influence, and he talked about a number of different things you can do as a marketer to influence people toward a decision that you want them to make. And one of the ones, it wasn’t even listed by him, but it’s one that is pretty common is the priming effect.
So, the priming effect is where you introduce a certain variable into the equation to kind of, again, prime the pump or get them thinking along a certain line, and then the chances of them continuing down that path are very very strong. So they did a bunch of really interesting research studies. One of them that I really like was, they gave these people word puzzles and, “We want you to come down and we’re going to put you in groups and you’ve got to solve these words puzzles.” You know how you try to find the words in the diagonal and that kind of stuff.
And they peppered very lightly to one group a number of terms that were a little bit more of the polite side, they were very indirect. And then in another group they used the terms that were a little bit more on the aggressive or rude side. And they weren’t saying you need to be this; it was just introducing a thought into your mind like interrupt or idiot or something, where you’re just kind of like, “Yeah, yeah.”
So that’s what they thought was the test, the participants; but in fact the test was still to come. So then they told them, “Okay, now when you’re done with this we want you to go down the hallway and ask for Mrs. Johnson and give her the test and she’s going to compile them and grade them.” And so everyone was like, “Okay.” So they go down, and this is all staged, of course. So they have this Mrs. Johnson in this room, but she’s actually engaged in a conversation with somebody – maybe a co-worker or something – but it’s a fairly engaged, animated kind of conversation.
So the people who came down who had been primed with these polite terms, basically waited a lot longer before they interrupted as opposed to the people who came down who had already been primed to think a little bit more in terms of aggressive and rude. And the difference between these two groups was 3 times, 300% difference in the number of times that, we call it the “rude group”, interrupted and basically pushed their way into the conversation because, “Hey, I mean I don’t have all day here” kind of attitude because they’d already been kind of subliminally introduced with that kind of concept.
So priming is something that we are not aware of, and in fact when they asked these participants, “Did you know that…?”, they were like, “No! That’s not true!” They just didn’t see it. But it’s a two-edged sword – if you’re not careful you’re going to get primed in a direction that maybe you don’t want to go, which is kind of why I am real careful as to the information and the people that I expose myself to, because I don’t want to go down certain paths of negativity and all of that. You can also use it in a positive way. If you know that if you introduce someone concepts into your life that they will influence you, then you need to intentionally and proactively use things like affirmations and certain things that you know can prime you in the right direction toward success rather than toward worse things. So really interesting stuff, very quantifiable as to what they found.

Pete Mockaitis
And those studies are so fascinating. And you mentioned Dr. Cialdini, and I don’t know if you’ve started reading his latest book Pre-suasion.

Pat McDaniel
Oh, I’m going to get it, it’s on my list.

Pete Mockaitis
It is killer. And I hope to have him on the show soon. But priming, he covers a lot of things like that, and the context surrounding things like if you’re watching a scary movie you’re going to be more responsive to an ad that offers something that can be comforting. Versus if you’re watching kind of a love story, you’re more engaged with an advertisement that’s going to show you how to stand out and be a winner and a desirable mate. So, just fascinating stuff with again, hard numbers behind it. So maybe let’s take one more. Let’s take one more influence that you would like to shine a spotlight on amongst the 50.

Pat McDaniel
Okay. So, the one that I was thinking of was… And it goes by a number of different names – I call it the “endowment effect” – that’s what Daniel Kahneman calls it, but it could also be “loss aversion”, is another way. I have it in the infographic under that. And what that means is that it’s funny how you can very much change depending on how you perceive something to be a part of who you are. So I’m going to lump these two together, just because I think these are really really interesting.
So they did a study where they had students – Daniel Kahneman actually did this study – so he took half the students in this particular class and they received this coffee mug with the school logo on it. And then half of the students did not receive the coffee mug. Then they asked the kids to give an assessment as to the value of the coffee mug. The people who did not get a coffee mug assessed the value of it, and it’s just a plain old coffee mug with a little logo on the side. They said it’s worth $2.87, is what it all averaged out to amongst that group. But then they asked the group that had received it. Now they got it for free; wasn’t anything other than it was now theirs. And they said, how much would they be willing to sell this mug for? And any idea what they thought it was worth?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m thinking about Hoarders right now. Let’s say $4, they don’t want to let go.

Pat McDaniel
Good guess. It was actually $7.12.
Now, I don’t know about you, but it’s like if you’ve ever gone to a garage sale and you had people that were selling stuff and you’re like, “It’s not worth that”. As a corollary, there’s another one called the IKEA effect, and that’s where anything that you develop, you’ve put your muscle into, your effort into, you’ve built it or whatever – and it can go in a lot of directions besides furniture – you tend to value that item much higher than it actually is worth if you were to look at it on the market.
And so there is something about this possession that once you have it or once you’ve done something toward it, it just distorts the value of it to you. And so, you just need to be aware that you’re not an independent agent who’s objectively looking at life; you’re actually being tossed around in all sorts of directions and you just need to be aware. To me, the number one piece of advice I have based on studying all these cognitive biases is, you need to be humble. You’ve got to recognize that you just don’t see things as clearly as you think you see, and there’s a lot more going on below the surface that you just are not even thinking about or aware of.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a powerful I think maybe concluding note there. Unless there’s anything else you want to make sure that you put out there before we shift gears and talk about your favorite things?

Pat McDaniel
No, let’s move on to the fast faves, because I think people are getting the idea, and I’m happy to reference a number of books that they can read to kind of see some of this good stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright then. Well, can you start us off by sharing a favorite quote?

Pat McDaniel
Well, can I share more than one?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Pat McDaniel
Alright, so here’s a couple of them that I really like that really mean a lot to me and sort of energize me. One is, “Every choice you make brings you closer to or further away from your ultimate goals.” And let’s face it, sometimes we make our choices in a sort of an unthinking way. There’s a corollary one that Burton Posey uses – he says, “Are the habits you have today on par with the dreams you have for tomorrow?” So those are really inspiring to me because they make me be a little bit more intentional and proactive in the choices I make. So when I look at a piece of pie as opposed to my washboard abs, I have to say, “Huh, I don’t know. Is it really really worth it?”
A couple of others that I like, if you don’t mind, I’ll throw these out. One’s by Mark Twain – a lot of your listeners might be familiar with it, but it’s a very potent truth – “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment?

Pat McDaniel
Okay, so here’s an interesting experiment that they did, and this was actually by a professor in Amsterdam who was trying to buy a car and he was really struggling. It comes down to, according to this article in science, it said something like the average American spends roughly 35 hours trying to evaluate what kind of car to buy. I mean like looking through the manuals and going into these places and looking at them and talking… I mean, that’s a lot.
And so he was struggling, and so he did this test where he had a group of, they weren’t students necessarily, but subjects who were given an evaluation; they were to evaluate these four different cars. And the way they slanted the test was to make sure that one of them was definitely the best choice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Pat McDaniel
And so, each of these cars had roughly 4 variables that they had to think about – one might be fuel economy, one might be roominess. And so they had ultimately 16 variables to look at – 4 cars and 4 variables for each car. And they found that out of the groups that took more time to think through and evaluate the options between cars A, B, C and D, that they did “much better” in choosing the superior car, based on the evidence.

So second time they did this test they added more variables. This time same 4 cars, but there were 12 variables for each car. So a lot more things to think about – trunk size and who knows. And what they found was that the people who took more time to be a little bit more thoughtful and deliberate, did much worse than the people who just basically looked it over and then made a gut reaction.
The people who were deliberate got it right about 25% of the time, which one writer said that’s about the average of a dart-throwing monkey hitting a dartboard. But the people who didn’t think about it too much, they got it right 60% of the time. And so what it tells us is that it depends on the type of decision you have to make as to the different part of the brain you need to use.
You sort of let your rational prefrontal cortex think through it if there’s not too many variables; if there’s more variables and you just need to make a decision, then go with sort of… Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Blink, where you just kind of make a decision really quick. And the other interesting part is that the people who made the decision quickly, they tended to have a lot more decision satisfaction. They didn’t regret it thinking they made the wrong one; they felt pretty good about it. So, that was an interesting study to me. It was like, “Oh, okay.” It’s not a one-size-fits-all way to make your decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Pat McDaniel
Well, I always want to say the I is my favorite book, but beyond that Robert Cialdini’s book Influence is great, and Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational is a great book; really anything that Chip and Dan Heath write. They wrote a book called Switch, which is outstanding; Made to Stick, that’s outstanding. Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg was really really good. I mean there’re just so many good books out there. There’s a book by Adam Grant called Give and Take, and he talks about having kind of a generous attitude in how you operate in life. And in the workplace where you’re not always being so calculating as to, “Well, I gave you three favors; now you need to give me three.” It’s just like, be generous. And it’s a fascinating book what he learned.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that you use often?

Pat McDaniel
Well, I thought about that. And one that I have began to use about, I don’t know, maybe 3 months ago, which has worked really well… You know how a lot of times you’re told you need to be more thankful? Gratitude’s a great thing, and everyone’s like… The studies are just overwhelming that grateful people tend to be happier people and all that stuff, so I was on favor. The problem was I would have, let’s say my time in the morning, where I would get quiet and I would spend some time reading and thinking and praying and I’d be full of gratitude. And then by about 10:00 o’clock in the morning it’s all gone.

Pete Mockaitis
I can relate to that. It’s like some maybe software or email thing just ticked you off and it all dissipates real quick.

Pat McDaniel.
Yeah. Or you just get so busy that your brain doesn’t think about it. It’s not like you’re suddenly ungrateful; you’re just… Next thing you know it 5:00 o’clock or 6:00 o’clock or whatever. So one of things that I did is I found an app for my iPhone called Alarmed, and what it does is you can set a chime at whatever intervals you want. So it goes off for me roughly every hour 6 times a day.

And what it does is you can pick the chime and I picked one that just has this little “Ding!” – it’s just real quiet, it’s nice, it’s not obnoxious, and it goes off at 45 minutes after the hour. And so now there’s a joke around here because when my kids are here they go, “Are you grateful, Dad?” But what it does is it forces me to stop for just a minute and go, “Over the last hour is there anything I’m grateful for?” And it’s like, “Well, I got to go stretch my legs, I solved this particular problem…” It just slows you down long enough to kind of stay grateful. And so that’s been a really nice tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really cool. And I’ve done that in terms of taking the last 24 hours, but you’re really taking it up a notch, in terms of the last one hour. So, that’s fun. I guess we started right after the chime and we’re going to end right before the chime, so I’m not going to get to hear it.

Pat McDaniel
Well, actually it only goes 6 times, so usually by the end of the day I should be in the right frame of mind by now. Sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s fine. Cool. It sort of sounds like you told us about a fantastic habit, but is there anything else that comes to mind as well in the realm of favorite habit?

Pat McDaniel
Well, probably like you, Pete, I listen to a lot of audio books. And you speed it up, you run it at like 1 ¼ speed or 1 ½ speed and you can get in a podcast in 25 minutes or whatever, and you can get the gist of what they’re saying without losing anything. And there’s just a lot of time that we are spending either driving, cleaning the kitchen, I don’t know. I mean there’s a million things you’re doing – exercising or something – that you could listen to something and learn and grow as an individual, and grow in your understanding of life. And so that’s a tool that I use a lot that’s just been a good addition to my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, thank you. And would you say there’s a particular maybe piece that you share or a resonant nugget that when you communicate it, it really gets people nodding their heads and taking notes?

Pat McDaniel
Well, actually you got me thinking about this, Pete, and I went back and looked at my Twitter analytics. And I noticed that one of the top quotes that I have posted, which I post on a regular basis – it basically gets reposted every 3 or 4 or 5 days. But every time it is it gets re-tweeted a very high amount and likes and all that stuff. And it’s a quote from Stephen Covey, and it says, “I am not a product of my circumstances; I am product of my decisions.” And for me that’s a really helpful summation of where I’m trying to go in life.
And part of why I have centered on decision making right now, trying to help people, is because when you think of yourself as a product of your circumstances, then you’re forever trying to modify your circumstances and then you’ll be happy. “If I can just get married, or if I could just get this kind of job, or if I can get this kind of whatever”, and you and I know that that’s just never going to work. But if you say to yourself, “I have more control in my life and how it turns out than I ever thought I had, so I will intentionally make better decisions. And I am a product of the decisions I’ve made up to this point in my life for good or for bad.” So that’s been a really good quote and apparently it resonates with a lot of people because when I post it they tend to re-tweet it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And what would be the best place for folks to contact you or learn more about what you’re up to?

Pat McDaniel
Well, certainly come on over, see me at wiseinsights.net. There is even a contact form on there if you have questions or whatever. There’s lots of really good information, there’s a number of free resources, there is the 5-step decision making e-book which you can download for free, there is the massive infographic that is actually a really good infographic that I think people will find extremely helpful as a resource, that they can download that for free.
In fact let me give your listeners an easy way to find them. So if you go to wiseinsights.net/better-decisions you’ll get to the e-book. If you go to /infographic, you’ll go to the infographic page and you can download those there. And you’re also welcome to visit my Twitter feed, which is wise_insights4u, and there I’ve got a lot of really helpful information that I post on a regular basis on decisions, not just from my research but also from other people that I run across who, “Wow, that’s a great article”, then I’ll post that for others to read. It’s really hopefully inspirational quotes that keep people moving forward when life gets tough, and it always does.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And do you have a final challenge or a call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Pat McDaniel
Well, yes I do. I would just say, keep in mind talent is overrated. And you need to keep investing in yourself – that’s the great equalizer. So grow. Grow yourself, grow your wisdom, grow your skills, grow your winning mindset to success. I would listen religiously to podcasts like How to be Awesome at Your Job. I mean this is the kind of place where you can get good ideas and some actionable advice. So, by all means, keep growing – read books, go to the library. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read that didn’t cost me a penny – I just get them at the library. And then the ones that I thought were really good I buy them so that I could mark them up.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you.

Pat McDaniel
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Pat, this has been such a treat. I wish you lots of luck in Wise Insights and decisions, and all that you do in the years to come here.

Pat McDaniel
Thank you, Pete. It’s been a real pleasure and I love what you’re doing.