Lesson: Decision Making & Happiness with Kevin Fishner

Step #1 Goal-Setting: Learn to set goals and monitor your progress

Goal-setting matters, because it makes decision making in the future much easier. I am of the belief that you have unlimited amount of decision making ability each day, and by setting goals, it takes that decision making out of your daily process. So then you can just focus on execution and getting the things done rather than, "Oh, is this the right thing to be doing?" So it just saves time in the long run.

There's a few things with cognitive ability that you have a limited amount each day. One is purely thinking, the second is restraint. You can only say no a few times a day, and eventually by the end of the day like, "Sure, I'll eat this ice-cream,” or, “No, I don't want to work out." So by setting a strict schedule or goals, it allows you to kind of budget out your restraint and your decision making ability.

I’ll spend probably once a month just deciding what I want to improve upon or accomplish, and then the rest of the days that month is actually doing it. So my process for deciding what goals to work on are always done in the morning, so I wake up before work for a few hours and write or kind of think about new ideas. It’s usually not a planned process, it's more of how many ideas can I connect to create something new, and from that, goals come out of it. It's not as structured as goals are, which is ironic, but is a combination of mashing as many ideas together as possible and seeing what comes out of it.