I am watching something on sixty minutes about Generation Y spending money on the credit card.  They showed a young lady going on how she is a victim of the sleight of hand from the banks.  This got me thinking about the way we frame our problems in the modern world and I have to say I am appalled.  It would be easy to blame the banks (who probably shoulder some responsibility) but there is something in this report that irks me.

I make many mistakes but at the end of the day you have to take responsibility.  You have to say to yourself that if you racked up the debt there wasn’t a little man who swiped the card out of your hand and forced you to rack up the debt.  There are genuine mistakes.  Then, there are stupid ones.  In any case, you can read from a victim script, blam others or whatever.  My thing is this: your happiness in the present moment isn’t worth the years of having to pay off tons of debt.  There is no merit in that.  Absolutely none.

I have spent years paying back loans.  So far at least six of them and I am not even close to clearing what I owe.  Most of them were stupid decisions.  Yet, there is no one I can blame at the end of the day, I have to blame myself.  So should you.  Take responsibility.   You racked it up you have to pay it.  Whatever you put away today you pay for tomorrow… don’t be a jackass!

The thing that I want to see people do is to think.  Going without is one of those things you have to do sometimes in order to improve your overall position later… it’s a cornerstone of strategic thinking.  I see none of this with people (and I put myself in this category) who rack up a ton of debt and then blame others or claim bankruptcy.   You made the decision… now pay for it!

courtesy of razee81

Yesterday I was rambling about decision making.  Well… today I am going to talk a bit more about surfacing hidden bias.

The devils advocate

In religious literature the devil is a being who opposes God and argues against the ’saints’ of God in order that he may bring them down.  Being a Christian I don’t particulary like the devil there is however something we can learn from him.  How to surface hidden bias!   If you notice that you keep making the same mistakes you are probably operating under a bias of some sort.  Let’s take the example of the Gambler’s Fallacy.

“If I pull the lever this time I am more likely to win because I have pulled the lever more times”.  BIAS!

So the devil would say (if he was against gambling)…

“How do you know if you pull the lever this time … it will work”.

A seed of doubt gets sown into the mind of the participant and voila!  You have them doubting what they think they know!  If there is a bias here it will become obvious.  The relative strength of any idea, is only as good as the flaws that are in it.  Here is another example of the devil’s advocate.

“I have to buy those shoes.”  But… the devil might say:

“What would happen if you didn’t buy those shoes.”

The opposite point of view is used as a frame of reference to tease out the flaws in the thinking of the person with said bias. Okay one more:

“If I buy this item off ebay it will save me money later.”   The devil would say:

“How do you know that you will save money later… you might not even want to have it later.”

This technique makes use of the opposite point of view and forces people to confront their bias.  This does not guarantee that they will necessarily follow your advice but it’s a meaningful way to surface hidden assumptions!  Here is another technique I have seen people like Gordon Ramsey use.

Direct Confrontation

Say for a moment somebody you know is in dire need of a change of scenery.  They may be stuck in a rut and their thinking may not be helping them at all.  So what can you do?  Well, you can confront them!  There is an art to this as the following story indicates.

A while ago somebody very close to me was in an abusive relationship.  In the beginning I made myself available to talk to this person just about their relationship and the problems they had.  Overtime I noticed that I was not helping the problem… so I took a different approach.  I would confront them and deliberately raise the issue making a point out the bias in a non-accusing manner.

A word of warning: When you do this be prepared for fireworks.  People don’t like being told they are wrong or their ideas don’t work.  Yet, for the sake of helping them you sometimes have to hurt them.  Just today I did this to a person I have a great deal of respect for.  They basically got angry and said something to me which was uncalled for.  This is where things like learning to see through the biases of others is important.  They are not really angry at you (though they are temporarily!) they are angry because you have exposed them.  When you do this it takes extreme care.  Sometimes the best way is Gordon’s way though I wouldn’t recommend reaching for that one first!  The point is: we don’t know we have a bias until it surfaces and even then we are not sure how to get rid of it.   I have had this happen to me and it hurts!  Be careful.

Using positive ‘confession’ or self-talk

One of the better ways to rid yourself of a bias is to replace it with positive self-talk. Management research suggests that one of the ways we find answers is by talking to ourselves.  I have found that we solve our problems this way too.  That is, we can talk ourselves into and out of things on a regular basis.  Once we are aware of the bias, we can routinely begin to speak through the issue by replacing it with a positive belief.  Example:

“If I had of only looked when I crossed the street I would not have been hit by that car.”

This can easily become:

“I did what I did and at the time I thought it was the best course of action.  I cannot change it so therefore I accept it.”

What’s the difference?  Well the hindsight bias stops us from making better decisions in the future.  By accepting failure and alas being human, we can move forward.  We can make better decisions. Here’s a management example:

“Bob keeps calling in sick.  I have given him two warnings and this will be his third.  However, if I fire him now I won’t know whether or not he will turn out good as an employee.”

In this bias you are deferring action to a future date because you are fearful of confronting Bob.  Firing Bob is the future event you are avoiding so you make up a story to convince yourself that doing it later is the better option.  What to do?   Direct confrontation?  Hold up.  The problem isn’t Bob … it’s you.  It’s what you think the problem is.  If you have around here long enough you will learn my golden rule:

The problem is exactly what you think the problem is.

You think that Bob won’t be happy, you think there will be an issue of having to fire him and you think the outcome will be bad.  One thought produces another which in turn, produces another and that produces another and so on.  Until you have a mess that is purely made up of a system of related biases in your mind.   You need to first look at the situation and begin to restructure your thoughts.

“Bob keeps calling in sick.  I wonder what the problem is with Bob that he would do that?”

Now you have detached the future event from the payoff so you can leave it open as to what needs to be done.  Secondly, getting more information instead of building a scenario where Bob gets fired might actually create a win-win situation for you and Bob.  Bob may just be in the wrong job or he may have genuine problems.  Either way don’t predict events before they happen… you aren’t Nostradamus!

I find in situations like this that my imagination is helpful.  I can imagine a better outcome than Bob getting fired and it clears my mind to help me focus better.  I can use the devil’s advocate to challenge myself and more often than not it settles my emotions.  In closing I would like to relate a story of something that happened to me a few years ago.

After being offered a scholarship to finish my doctorate I had two catastrophic events happen to me.  1. I got struck down with pneumonia and asthma and 2. my primary supervisor pulled out of my PhD.  It meant that I wouldn’t finish my PhD on time and I might be out of a job.   During the coming months my boss continually reminded me to finish my PhD on time and hounded me.  I heard about how I was going to be found ‘unsatisfactory’ in my performance.  In my mind I began to build all kinds of horrible pictures, mental imagery of the worst sort!  My performance review came and went and to my suprise I was found ’satisfactory’.  I had spent so much time preparing for the worse that when the best happened… I was totally surprised!  I learned something extremely valuable from this experience (other than prayer works I might add!): don’t create a worst case scenario without considering the best case scenario.  Have both on hand because you have no idea what’s going to happen.  Be prepared and whatever you do don’t settle on one over the other.  Think it through and make good judgements!

Courtesy of tijmen

I want to talk to you about biases and how they effect your judgement.

Identifying Bias

A bias is a way of thinking that you are accustomed to that sits in your head.  It’s main features are that it forces you to make decisions through it.  Hence:

1. When you make decisions that contain bias you get the same result… again and again.
2. When you are not aware of a bias you have no idea it’s affecting your outcomes
3. The reality of what you are doing is obscured by your biases
4. A bias is built into your decision making processes

The classic example is that of the football team.  If you follow a certain team, no matter how biased you think you are or aren’t… you will always side against the decisions made to that team… even though they may be right.  I have a friend who follows the ‘Collingwood’ football team in Australian rules.  No matter what I say during a game he is ready to kill me if I suggest that the umpire was right.  Do you know people like this?

How do Biases effect me?

The main way a bias effects you is that it makes you have impared judgement.  Once I was sitting in a meeting where I had to work out who to ‘let go’ as they say.  When the conversation came up about the person I suggested, everybody agreed.  I suggested the ‘least’ qualified to be removed.  At the time I justified my decision by saying that the person should have gone because they didn’t meet the criteria of the organisation.  Can I say it was a big mistake?  That person was the best person I have ever had working for me and I have not settled on another person since.  ‘Qualified’ people have come and gone but most of them have given me headaches.  I learned through this experience that my judgement was affected by ‘qualification’ bias!

In your case you have different biases that live in your mind that act as a template for how you make decisions… this is part of what the late Geoffrey Vickers called ‘the art of judgement’.  How do you know when you are operating under a bias?  Let’s have a look.

Types of Biases

It is impossible to label all of the biases as I know them.   But here is one I encounter more often than any others… hindsight bias.  Let’s look at this story:

I recently moved out of a house in another suburb because it had asbestos roofing… I didn’t want my children to get sick.  After I moved they changed the roof and fixed the asbestos problem.  I should have stayed.

Note: This is hindsight bias.  You have identified a problem, noted the solution but failed to take into account the moderating variable you weren’t aware of.  What is this moderating variable?  It’s the fact thay you didn’t realise the roof would fix the problem.  If you knew that… and were certain of it… you probably wouldn’t have moved.   How then can you justify a choice you weren’t aware of… it wasn’t a choice at all! Here is another example.

I have played the poker machines 200 times in a row.  The chances of me winning are much higher next time I pull this lever… after all you have to be in it to win it!

This is the Gambler’s Fallacy. I have met entreprenuers with this condition, sales people and many, many others.  It’s the idea that previously random events decrease in their probability which each new cycle of the event.  People stuck in this fallacy are likely to believe in things like ‘lucky’ streaks or use some item of clothing that brings them luck.  Former Australian Cricket Captain used a red rag in his pocket for good luck when he was batting.  Now for one more example:

I met a woman once who bought a loaf of gold bread.  When I asked her why she told me that she was collecting them and would one day sell them on ebay.

Quite often we make purchase choices without realising that afterwards that we actually have no need of the item we just bought.  The ultimate goal of the purchase is justified through the bias.   This is post-purchase rationalisation or post-hoc (meaning after the event) rationalisation. We do this when we are facing a messy problem.  We create stories to justify our actions. A final example of biases in action:

I was worried about having burn-out.  So I looked up burnout on the web and it was confirmed… I have burn-out.

What’s so bad about this?  The person in question has only looked for confirming evidence of their bias.  They have not really looked up evidence that suggests the contrary.  What if they have something else?  They call this one: Confirmation Bias. You are seeking information that only confirms your position… not denies it.  When you do this you can become narrow minded.  It can develop into all kinds of mental problems and make you frame your problems in such a way that you will not be able to see around them.

Other types of bias

The ever helpful Wikipedia resource lists a bunch of other biases which you can read about here.  The main type of biases I have mentioned here are probably the most common ones I have seen.  The main point of what I have said here is that these things live with us.  In a later post I will talk about surfacing hidden biases and learning to develp yourself from them.

*Image Credit: Namida-k

Scholar Robert Chua says that we have spoken so much about decision making that we have gotten it to the point where we can no longer talk about it in a meaningful way.  However, we need to say something because we are of those that must make decisions.  I think decision making is the act of making choices in certain situations where there are knowns and unknowns.

Your boss comes to you and says can we afford to do this?  Should I do that?  You job is to reason between the two points of view and reach a conclusion.   You reason between that which we know about and that which know about.  Here is a story from my own life:

Recently I was asked what I thought about an assignment from a student… was it good enough?  When I looked at her assignment it looked to me as if it was fine so I sent back an email saying that I thought it was fine.  When marking time comes I have to apply a set of criteria.  That criteria returned an above average grade but wasn’t a ‘perfect’ grade.The student then contacted me and said, ‘You told me that I would get a better grade, you said it was fine.’  My very unpopular response was: yes the assessment was fine and that’s the grade I gave it.  To me it was good enough.  It was fine.  But it wasn’t great.
On the surface it looks like I am being nasty.  However, that student demonstrated a decision to trust me to tell her what I thought.  She gave me the criteria for making that decision.  She asked me if it was good enough.  To me it was.  But I can’t tell you what a great assignment is until I see one.  Why?  Simply because I don’t set out to make perfect assignments… as a student that’s your job.  I can give you the parameters.  I can tell you this is what I think greatness looks like, but unless you show me greatness… how will I know what it looks like?

The decision for me was based on a set of knowns in my mind.  What is good enough?  I have a set of ideas locked away in my mind that says, ‘here this is what is good enough’.  Therefore my response was framed that way.

In my way of thinking we make decisions to solve problems.  Note:
1.    A decision is made under constraints
2.    It’s based on what we think the problem is
3.    Under the constraints of 1 and 2 we make certain choices
4.    We act
For this reason when you make decisions you need to be aware that you are acting under constraints.  What kind of constraints?  What kind of process are you involved in?  What kind of pressure has your boss or employees or YOU put yourself under?  All of these things affect the way you make decisions.  A decision is something you make based on a certain criteria.

What kind of decisions do you make?

What is your role?  What are the expectations of your role?  Here is an example from my own life:

Role: I am a lecturer

Expectations: To undertake research, teaching and service to the university under given constraints.

Decisions I make and am responsible for: When to do research, how to manage students and deliver courses, when and where to help the in the university decision making process.
These are the decisions I am paid for.  Note the constraints.  These are the things I can’t control.  I can’t just make my own decisions when I find a cheat for example.  I can use judgement.  The question is am I aware of those constraints?  Do I know what I am responsible for?

Decisions are those things we have to come to a conclusion about in which we must choose a course of action.  They are based on what we know about something and unfortunately, what we don’t know.  In my life I have often made decisions on what people have known and how they have come to know it, without realising I am operating under different constraints.  That is, when I make decisions, I have thought I could copy what someone else had done and expect much the same results.  It just won’t work.  Hence, this is why we haven’t yet invented a business system that can actually do the job it was assigned to do.  Every organisation is different… every person is different.  We have different stories we tell ourselves. And on we go.

To conclude this post I want you to begin to think about the decisions you make and under what constraints you make them.  What are the rules you use to make decisions?  What pressure do you put yourself under?  Think about it… the answer may just surprise you.

I was in the car driving home from work when I suddenly realised something. Big actions often come from deep seated unconscious feelings that we really don’t understand. Think about the decision to have children, was it a rational choice or something that you felt you had to do. What about the choice to follow a career in the field you are in? Was there something about that kind of job that just spoke to you? A lot of the time the choices we make, especially those from the heart, cause us to take huge actions.

There is a thing called post-hoc rationalisation which I lectured on the other day that says we often take actions and later justify them by making sense of what happened because we don’t really know why we did what we did. Take me for instance. I am attracted to things that are new. No, not shiny things… new things. I like to create stuff and make it. In my job I don’t get much of a chance to do that at present so I have been a bit tired. But, when I am working through something new and ideas are flowing I feel like I have had a fire set under my backside. It’s truly wonderful. Why is that? It’s because deep down that’s me and when I see that in the world it’s me coming out.

As small step we need to begin to pay attention to what we do and trace it back to what we think and then some kind of underlying feeling or emotion.  These deep things we ignore are us.  I have once heard it put this way you are not what you think about you are the bit behind the thoughts.  I think in business we need to pay more attention to these things and take them more seriously.  I think this is an interesting topic and I will be posting more about this in the next few days.   Thanks for reading.

Technorati Tags: unconscious, feelings, decision, actions

Have you ever been stuck to come up with cool ideas? Today I thought that it would be nice to share some of the things that have worked well for me over the past few years. So here goes: 4 ways to come up with cool ideas.

1. Write (journal) your ideas down

There is a lot to be said for the art of writing. One of the most helpful things I have found in coming up with cool ideas is to write about the topic and see what flows out of my pen. Now this is really the free flow of intuition coming out of your pen. I don’t really know why but writing is a really easy way to find new ideas. Try this: take a blank piece of paper (or open up an office document… open or MS variety for you lovers of Bill Gates) and simply start writing about the topic. Those of you who have experimented with journaling before will understand what I am talking about. This is a wonderful way to find new ideas. When you switch off your reasoning process and move to the right side of your brain you will begin to think in a creative manner. Writing stuff down is a great way to do this.

2. Build a mind map

Mind mapping for me is a fruitful activity. It’s helps to see your assumptions about an idea right there on the page. I have used many modelling techniques over the years but this one is the simplest and quite possibly one of the best (maybe with the except of rich picture building) techniques available. If you aren’t familiar with it I would recommend reading the wikipedia article. Remember though, you can make more than one and then compare your results. This is also very important!

3. Synthesise

This is the art of putting two old ideas together where it was previously thought impossible (roughly speaking). To synthesise means you take one idea and add others to it to see what results. The process of brainstorming is a good example of this. Of course synthesis is flawed because it relies on the premise that you can put two things together and there will be a good result. Clearly this is not so (consider the Pug?). However, sometimes the right amount of synthesis can be a good thing. Adding one idea to another can spark a revolution of creativity which leads to new perspectives not previously available. Try it!

4. Talking to yourself (meditation)

In the bible we find the term ‘meditation’ which I think really means talking to yourself or thinking out loud on one concept for an extended period of time and doing so from different angles. I am not sure why this is so but I have to admit when I talk to myself about a topic my creative processes (I would argue intuitive processes) take over. Once I was stuck on a topic for a model I was building for one of my lectures on the Mobile Workforce. I began to think it through and talk about the concept from every possible angle when suddenly the idea spontaneously formed within me. The students in two classes responded so positively to it I believe most intuitive things are like this. We are often one good meditation session away from the answer!

Remember that when you are creating you are building things up from the inner you. Our minds prohibit this in general because of our capacity as humans to build overly large mental structures which form rules for us to live by. I think that when we engage in creativity we are putting the logical process aside so we can create new things to build. That is, when we build things from the inside we are creating things for the outside. I honestly believe our educational processes set aside creativity and intuition as a second order concept. In a later article on faith I will develop this idea further. I hope you have enjoyed this post and I look forward to hearing from you if you would like to add some techniques to the very short list I have here. Thanks for reading!

Technorati Tags: cool ideas, creative processes, creativity

In a recent post I discussed making the right choices. To continue this I would like to say that most choices we have to make are of the heart and of the head. Heart decisions are the effective choice most of the time where as efficient ones are of the head. Head choices are come to through a reasoning process like this one. Clearly there are some choices we make that are the right ones and others which are the optimal ones. Recently I had to move house and thanks to the ridiculous prices of houses in Brisbane I can’t buy. So I have to rent. My daughter started school about 18 months ago so I began this process by figuring that I could move to a cheaper suburb and save some money. I thought I had this all figured out.

Then one night I heard my daughter crying herself to sleep. So I asked her what the problem was. She told me that she didn’t want to leave her school. So here I am with a choice to make. Do I move to save a few bucks or stay where I am and stretch. What’s the trade off in a situation like that. What’s ironic is that I wrote about this not more than a month ago and here I am having to make this kind of choice. What kind of reasoning process will help me here? If I move to save money my daughter will be upset and uprooted. On the other hand if I stay my daughter will be happy but I may have to move in another year because I can’t afford it. One of these decisions is an effective choice and the other is efficient… what do I do?

The pro’s and con’s in the lifehacker post simply do not apply to me and I suspect that a great majority of people find such things innocuous. My family is not a business and I shouldn’t make decisions that are business like so far as my children are concerned. What I should do is do what I can to stay near her school and give her a stable environment. If I can’t then all I can do is make the most effective choice I can. That is the right thing to do.

Effective Choices

Effective choices are often those of the heart. Once I was stuck in the middle of bitter argument between two colleagues which made me feel very uncomfortable. They just decided that (for whatever reason) they didn’t like each other anymore. The problem was, one was the boss and the other was an employee. Ultimately the employee lost because the boss had more power and eventually got rid of the other guy. I was caught in the middle of this and being a young academic at the time didn’t know as much about politics as I do right now. I had plenty of opportunity to warn the person being fired that this was their fate. However, I never did. A few years later the same thing happened to me (I got fired!) in a similar way. When it happened to me I realised I had been making ambitious choices to the detriment of those around me. Since then, I learned a valuable lesson: Always make the right choice. The choice that is most effective over the choice that is most efficient.

Effective choices are the right thing to do. In any given situation you will know what is right if you look into your heart. Ambition is good so long as it’s mixed with integrity. Why? Being the best should be your goal but if what you are doing is destroying other people to get there then you are not making effective choices. What do you want people to think about you after your gone? He was a mongrel… I am glad he is dead! No. I should think you want people to think about your integrity, your character and how no matter what you always made the choices that were the most effective.

Efficient Choices

We live in a business environment that is ‘process’ and ‘profit’ minded not ‘people’ minded. All you have to do is open up the latest copy of Business Review Weekly to see that most business people are trained as efficient thinkers. I have spent the best part of seven years working with people who can tell you every reason why the economy is failing yet not once mention how people are involved. We can hear of a lack of oil and then fear sets in. What happens next… people panic and the so-called ‘economy’ falls to bits. I recently watched Die Hard 4.0 (Live free or Die Hard) and they used this to great effect. People were in a panic and it caused huge problems for the economy. People are not part of the problem… people are the problem!

Efficient choices are those that are ‘optimally’ satisfying… given the known constraints. We have a whole swag of decision making practice built on the backbone of this kind of logic. The idea of satisficing… making the best choices with the amount of information you have is one such idea. No I know we don’t always have all the information but that doesn’t mean we go on and make decisions that rely on us being ‘optimal’ so far as our heart is concerned. People use such ideas as an excuse to make efficient decisions. Just because you don’t know something does not mean that you can say, ‘well I did my best.’ Nonsense! According to what? You did you best so far as you are concerned but what did you exclude? ‘Well I just didn’t have the information.’ You didn’t have it or you just didn’t look for it?

I wish more business people would start making effective choices and buck the current trend in this nation. This current plague of materialism is informing the decision making process so much that corporate people are forgetting the simplicity of human relationships. It’s very easy to make optimal decisions but much harder to make decisions that are real tough choices. It’s easy (optimal) to remove people out of the way but it’s just not the right thing to do. When it’s time to let someone go do so with tact in such a way that the person is left with their dignity not via text message!

In closing this article I would like to point out that what dictates the right choice is not management theory, not your work environment and not your friends. It’s you. You are totally 100% responsible for you. You can make the right choices right now by always looking at each situation and asking yourself this question: what is the right thing to do in this situation. Don’t ask: what is most efficient or the most optimal but rather what is right? You know this answer already so go ahead and start making these kinds of choices.

Technorati Tags: choices., Effective choices, argument, satisficing

The greatest thing you can ever do is make mistakes. I hear people say to me all the time… if only I could erase my past mistakes then I would be free. That, is a misunderstanding of epidemic proportions. If you erased your mistakes you would erase a great percentage of what you know and the information you have already got in your possession. Why would you want to do that? Because of how much it hurts.

The pain we feel we make drastic mistakes is terrible. When I failed in business for the second time I was devastated. I spent about a month in a complete daze because my whole world and all of my dreams came crashing down with it. To say that I was ruined would be an understatement. Then after a period of time I began to realise I know a few things about failing in business I could teach others. I began to share my stories of failure with people at the university where I work. The students gained genuine insight in what NOT to do. As a result of that my reputation as a not-so-bad teacher increased dramatically. The fruit of that was people following me into other courses and a great wrap from my boss.

When I was sharing with people the mistakes I had made I realised that one of the most important things for me to do is milk them for all their worth. It would be a tremendous shame if you simply let them slip through your fingers. What amazed me about this losing experience was that it has become leverage to me. Now, I can see others making similar mistakes and I can warn them about it. They often come back and thank me later. Now, I am still not physically rich but I am rich in knowledge and this I would argue is of much greater value.

Technorati Tags: mistakes, past mistakes, failing

In the ever growing material lives we lead I am amazed and what people will trade off to get ahead. Now, think for a moment what are the right decisions? I think we can say it this way. There are decisions that should be made and those that should not. There are many reasons for me to ask this question when I take a look at the lives of those around me. The conniving and backstabbing I have seen over the course of my life convinces me that people are interested in making decisions that are wrong. The right decision is one that is made on the basis on what your heart says NOT what you think is best for you.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. Say you are a financial manager of a company and there is pressure on you to ‘cook the books’ to make it look like the company is doing better than it really is. Is that the right decision? No it’s not! Why not? Over time your decision will become like poison to those around you. Every decision you make has the potential for consequences that go beyond your local environment. Every choice you make effects other people whether you know it or not. What will the consequences be if you ‘cook the books’. Chances are you may ruin your company or at the very least loose your job.

What about your children? Do you work so much that they never see you? I have been there working 80 hours a week because I thought I had to. I wanted this or that but as I heard a wise man once say, ‘whatever you compromise to keep you’ll lose.’ In Australia there is a crisis of materialism. Everywhere I look I see bigger houses, smaller yards, less community and more business. There are countless books on getting ahead and making more money out of this or that. These books lack heart. There is no moral voice saying, ‘hold on but what about the future.’ We have a daycare generation growing up with parents who would rather spend money renovating their house than they would with their kids.

The cost of a house is so high now that it takes two working people to pay the mortgage and in some cases that’s not even enough. How did we get here? What caused us to think that this was worth it? It’s not. Having a house is not a dream worth having if it means that children grow up in a materialistic society. Money is great and I like it but when you attach your values to it and make your decisions through it you have become something less than human. Ask yourself this question: what are trading off in your decision making process to come to this. Why do you need to work so hard and never see your children?

Making the right decision is doing what’s best for your family first and putting all else second. You can kid yourself if you like and say that making the right decision is to work hard but that’s nonsense. Choose to live a life where you work the right amount of hours and spend the rest of the time loving and caring for those that love and care for you. Buck the trend. Do something different… make choices where you put your heart first and your head second. Now that’s making the right decisions.

Technorati Tags: decisions, decision?, materialism, decision making