What Decisions Would Your 100 Year Old Self Make? A Primer On Making Good Decisions.

Hey everybody, my name is Danny Dumas and this is the earn your title podcast. Good question for you. How do you make decisions? Do you have a protocol? Do you have procedures just fly by the seat of your pants? One of the things I've been blessed with as a firefighter and a paramedic is a we have a procedure. We have a system for making decisions and they're actually two pretty different systems on the medical side. We have we use algorithms meaning it's a lot of if this then that.

we'll do that. For instance, if I show up and the patient is unconscious, the next question is, are they breathing? If the answer is no, they're not breathing. The next question is, do they have a pulse? If the answer is no, then we start CPR. It's very forward. If the answer is yes, then we're going to get them on our monitor. We're going to do these things, but it's a yes, no, and it takes you down a path based on these yes or no questions.

And there's some things in our life that we can have yes or no questions and It's very effective if you have known issues, known things that are going to occur and you have known solutions to figure these problems out, having, you know, algorithms in your life, like if this happens, this is what I'm going to do. That is a good way to make decisions.

Now, unfortunately, most of life's decisions aren't yes or no, or I shouldn't say aren't simply yes or no. It's not an obvious, if this is happening, then you obviously do this. There's a lot of gray area and that's the firefighting side. We have, You show up to a burning building and if the answer, the question is, is the building on fire? Yes. There is not always an obvious answer. It's not always we'll get the water out, put the fire out. It's are there people inside?

Is it too dangerous to go inside to put the fire out from the inside? Or I put it out from the outside. So we need some other things. And what we do is we base our decisions on priorities and orders of operation, things that are important first. So for instance, if you were to come to my fire academy, And I would tell you, these are the things that you need to do. The decisions you need to make need to be based on these categories. First, the first one being life safety.

Are there people inside the building that could be alive, possibly be alive or, and if they are alive, are they in spaces that we can access? So it's life safety is number one. Then we call it insulin stabilization. That's just a fancy word meaning can this, scenario be stabilized? Can I make it better? Now I might not completely stop the fire. I might not be completely, you know, put it out, but I can make it better at stabilize the scene.

And very last is, is, can we save property, you know, property conservation? There's another order of, of things that we can figure out is it's rescue first. Then we're going to, we're going to make sure that other buildings don't catch on fire. Then we're going to contain the fire to a small area. then we're going to put it out and then we're going to make sure the fire doesn't come back up. So we have these protocols.

And as I've thought through my life, I've tried to apply some of that thinking to, to my life and come up with protocols. And I just read a book called someday is today by, Matthew Dicks and it was really good. And part of it is a, I got a productivity kind of take on it. He's a, he's a creative guy. He's a writer, he's a storyteller. And so he's coming at it from a being creative standpoint. but he has a few questions and he has a way of thinking about making decisions that was really good.

And I'd like to share that with you and some of my takeaways. And the first question that he's going to ask himself when it's coming, you're coming to make a decision and you need to ask a question. And it's not the question that you ask, but it's who you ask the question to. And that person is you, your hundred year old self. You are an old man.

You're sitting on the rocking chair and you're thinking about life. You're thinking about all the decisions you've ever made and you answer the question based on that reflection. For instance, you get home from work, long day at work, you're exhausted and you sit on the couch and you grab your phone and you just want to zone out and watch YouTube videos of people wrecking their million dollar boats because they don't know what they're doing. That's your thing.

and your six year old comes up and says, Dan, let's wrestle. At that moment, you have the ability to make a decision. If you ask yourself today, the you right now in the present moment, you're tired, you've been making decisions all day, you're mentally frustrated, you're maybe overwhelmed, you can have all these things and sitting still, not having to think about anything, not being physically active is the right thing to do based on how you're feeling now.

But if you ask yourself, you're 100 years old, ew. What decision should I make? I think the obvious answer is very clear. Play with your kids. If you are a little bit further on in your, you know, your parenting and your kids are a little bit older, they don't ask for those interactions for the entire, you know, the entire time of the youth. That is a segment of childhood that goes away. And the hundred year old self would say, take advantage of this.

And that I think if, if, if, if your family is your priority and it's not being comfortable, that's not your priority. family's priority, you know, God, country, family, those things like that, then ask your old self, what would you do? And I thought that was really powerful to just go through life making decisions based on what would my 100 year old self say to do and then do that.

Because I think sometimes when we think of decisions, we think of big decisions, like what house I'm gonna buy, that's a big one. Who am I gonna marry? What career?

And we put a lot of thought into that and we analyze and you know, we, And if you're buying a car, you do all the research, you watch reviews, you go online, you talk to people, you make all this effort into big decisions and little things like, you know, am I gonna play with my kid or am I gonna sit on the couch and stare at my phone? You don't put hardly any thought into them, but they can be just as impactful.

Those little everyday decisions are what makes your kids feel attached to you versus feel like you're the robot that goes to work and you're disconnected. So I think that's really important to have something. that you can go back and ask your hundred year old self, what would you do? And there's really, there's three answers. Yes, I would, you know, I would play, I would wrestle with my kid or two. No, it's not a big deal or I don't care.

And there's like, you know, I'm going to have, should I have chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream? Your hundred year old self doesn't care. Now maybe your hundred year old self would say, you know what, you've already had, you had dessert at lunch, let's skip it for dinner because I want to make it to be in a hundred. And that would be a time where, that comes in, but it's going to be yes, no, or it doesn't matter. And then for the decisions that it doesn't matter, don't stress out about it.

There's no wrong answer. You can't be wrong, which is kind of relieving. So that was the first thing that really stuck out to me is asking your 100 year old self. The second thing, and I thought this was really powerful, is that he talks about spending time. We talk about spending time, but you really can't spend time. What you do is you spend your life. you have, you know, for lack of a better year, life force, right? The energy is finite.

We are going to die and that's at a specific period of time, hopefully really far in the future, but we are spending our life. We call it spending time, but it's really our life because we can't manage it. It's like managing. I want to manage my time better. You know, you don't manage your time. You manage your life inside of time. It's continually ticking that we have no control over. And he really emphasized the power of

coming up with priorities, things you really wanna take care of, things you really wanna tackle, things you really want to, that are a priority in your life, and then fitting them into the little periods of time in your life that normally we would say things like, I'm gonna kill some time. For instance, I don't take nearly as long to get ready as my wife and daughters. They just have a lot, I don't have to comb my hair.

I mean, just that alone saves me 10 minutes between my wife and my daughters. And so I'll find myself sitting on the couch killing some time. Well, you know, I've got, I'm going to be making a keynote presentation. I'm going to be, giving a speech and I want it. I want it to be awesome. What if instead of playing Angry Birds on my phone or candy, Candy Crush, I spent 10 minutes going over my outline, typing out my outline, you know, thinking through ideas, researching stories, it's 10 minutes.

But if I acute, if it was going to take me 10 hours to write this, write this keynote and I can do it in 10 minute chunks and not take away any time from my family, which I think is truly important. Like it's hard to get home from work and then say, you know, I really want to write this book. I really want to do this keynote.

I really want to develop this side business and I'm going to take this time, take my life away from my family when we have all these little moments that we could really inject it. And so at the end, I'm actually going to share with you a challenge that I'm going to do myself and see how it works. It has to do with, you know, finding time to do these little things that I want in my five, 10, 15 minute breaks. And so I think that was important. We can get a lot of done in the in -between time.

We can get a lot of done in that just, you know, I'm sitting at a, you know, sitting at a doctor's office waiting because I'm on time and they're never on time. So the power of, the power of little moments, it doesn't have to be even big. For instance, I, what could you do in five minutes? Empty the dishwasher. you know, little things, they can make your life way better. You can fit inside of these, these small things.

The other thing that when you start thinking about filling in that, that spare time, because life is important, right? You're not going to waste your life with your time. You're not going to waste that time, which is your life energy. Sometimes we'll say things like, like say we'll go back to the dishwasher. Maybe you have three minutes. Like I like to, I make, I like chai tea. That's like my more hot morning beverage and it takes three minutes to heat up on the stove.

That's not always enough time to unload the dishwasher, but it is enough time to unload the lower rack of the dishwasher. And sometimes you're like, well, if I can't do all of it, I don't want to do any of it. But I think that's a poor, that's a poor mental, mental thought process because half is better than nothing. You know, I think a lot of times, we put things off because we can't completely finish them. And like, I'm not going to do it unless I can do a hundred percent.

Well, I don't think that's true. We really can't give a hundred percent to anything because there's all kinds of things that we have. We don't have control over. You can't stop breathing, right? You can't stop, you know, producing energy. You can't stop doing these things. So we're at some point we're just spending some time being alive. So we can't give that, that energy towards our goals or dreams or desires. So you can't always give a hundred percent.

So give the three minutes while you're waiting for your coffee to heat up. Do, you know, be productive. Could you, how much more could you get done in a day? Which leaves time for doing, you know, things that maybe are just relaxing and fun later in the day, for lots of time, like spending time with your kids, if you're willing to fill up those small moments. So fill up those small moments. And that brings me to my challenge.

My challenge is I'm gonna spend the next 30 days and I'm gonna work on, you know, inside those five, 10, 15 minute moments. There's a few categories I'm gonna work on. One of them is my fitness. I am going to do a pushup test. I'm gonna see how many pushups I can do and I'm gonna do hand release pushups, which means my chest will touch the ground, the weight will come off my hands. How many I can do before I just completely break down form. And then I'm going to do pushups when it's appropriate.

in my five to 10 minute gaps. And over the course of a month, I'm going to see how many pushups I can do. How much, you know, if I can do 30 now, maybe I can do 40 in a month. And all I did was fill in five minute moments throughout the day. I think that's going to be powerful.

I mentioned that keynote, I'm going to be working on this keynote and I'm going to go in my phone, starting with the contacts with letter A and I'm going to contact, I'm going to text message my friends or even my acquaintances. If I look at my phone and I would say, is that my friend? Is that a, an acquaintance that wouldn't think it's weird that I reached out? I'm going to send a text and go, Hey man, I was just thinking about you. How are you doing?

And I'm going to just let that conversation goes to the obvious conclusion. Maybe, maybe we'll be back and forth all day long in five minute moments. And I'm going to attempt to recreate or to reach out and just improve my friendships, improve my network. And it's not going to cost me anything except for, and I guess this will cost me something. I'm going to try to create more five minute moments, more 10 minute moments.

And how I'm going to do that is I am going to go off social media for the next 30 days. I just think it's important to do. Now I will be posting the podcast information. You know, I think that's important to keep producing that, but I'm not going to be, I'm not going to be getting online. So I'm giving that up. And if you want to follow along, I'm going to give an update after 30 days, roughly 30 days of how I do. So it is my fitness pushups. I'm going to be writing a speech.

And I'm going to be reaching out to friends. So I think that would be cool. Yeah. So follow along. I think maybe this is something we could do together as a community. Something else that that this book brought up is that sometimes it's okay to break the rules, especially when it comes back to getting your time back to reclaiming the those moments. And one of those things, and thankfully I don't deal with that a lot, but it's meetings now.

I have friends that are in the corporate world and many of you are, and they just talk about the death by meeting, how many pointless meetings they're in that they don't need to be in. And I'm going to challenge you to break the rules a little bit. Don't go to meetings. Now I'm sure there's some like if you don't go to you're getting fired, but just try it. Try it for one week. And when someone says, we've got a meeting, you say, I'm sorry, I can't, I have priorities that I can't give up.

And that's true, right? You need to get your work done so that you can get your work done so you don't have to bring it home so that you can spend time with your kids. Try it. Try not going to meetings. Try deleting all your emails. I've got friends that have like 10 ,000 emails that they never get rid of any of them. If you've got Google mail, you can archive all of them. Just go to inbox zero, select them all, inbox zero. If it was really important, people will call you back.

They'll send you another email and then all the ones that are coming like, yeah, this one's probably important. You know, at work, We just really recently had a mandate to form some discipline and me and my fellow coworker, we share the same rank. We just decided, man, this seems like a bad idea. And we didn't do it. We just said, no, we're not going to do it. And it worked out. You know, we were able to fix the problem. So, you know, break the rules.

Don't, you know, if you're coming home from work and everybody stops for traffic, and this isn't even breaking the rules. This is, I'll go off on a tangent here. This is. something that maybe I'm public safety announcement or service announcement. If you're going home and there's construction and the construction is going to go from two lanes to one lane, almost everybody gets into the one lane that's going to be open miles and miles away and they leave a wide open lane.

And now some of you are going to hate me for this and we're going to probably lose subscribers to my podcast, but it's worth it because I speak the truth. The way it's supposed to work is everybody drives all the way to the front and then. person in the right lane, that's one person in the left lane go in and both those cars go in and then you see you filter in and that's called a zipper merge. And that's how you're supposed to do it.

But some people see that as like, you know, you're breaking the rules and I'm telling you then if you think that's breaking the rules, break the rules, get home to your family quicker. One, it's the fastest way to make everybody get in and go through the narrow opening. But two, like if your family's important, is the social aspect of waiting in line that, you know, is it more important than your family? Get home to your wife and kids. have priorities, be willing to break the rules.

You know, you go to the doctor's office and they ask you to fill out a paperwork and you fill the same paperwork out 13 times, fill out the minimum. See what happens if you don't put your address again for the 10th time. Take your time back. When it comes to taking your time back, I think we have this idea and there's a saying that how you do anything is how you do everything. And it leads to a perfectionism and in some things that can be excellent.

And in a way I agree with the sentiment that people who have attention to detail for the small things usually have attention to detail for the big things. I saw someone posted on social media that you can tell a lot about somebody by their willingness to take the cart back. to the corral area or maybe all the way back to the store. Like if they don't do that, that basically means they're a jerk. That basically means that they don't care about society.

And I'm gonna push back against that because I think that you can be a very kind, caring, moral person. Like let's take like brain surgeons, and not just brain surgeons, pediatric brain surgeons. All right, let's make this person a mom. She's got two kids. She has given up a huge portion of her life. huge portion of her life dedicated to helping little kids with brain injuries, brain damage, brain cancer. And she's got two little ones at home and she has to stop at the grocery store.

You know, there's only 200 brain surgeons that are working on PEDs and the entire nation. You know, like this is a very specific woman who has given her life to make the world a better place. And she decides that she's going to leave the cart right in front of a car and leave. Is that a, is that a, is that person bad? Are they immoral?

Are they not caring because they didn't return the cart because they gave up most of their young, they gave up all their twenties, probably half their thirties just to get to the point where they can actually do their job on their own and they want to get home to see their kids. I don't think that makes them a bad person. I think attention to detail is important, but I think sometimes people, especially people who have perception, perfectionist tendencies use that as an excuse to be busy.

You know, if putting away the dishes, and maybe the big spoon gets put with the little spoon, they all get mixed up and that takes three minutes where if you perfectly organize all the spoons so they're all lined up, they look real pretty, that takes eight minutes and that's eight minutes you can spend with your kids playing a board game, talking to your spouse about their day. I think you've got your priorities in the wrong place and I'm not against details.

I teach at our fire academy and on day one, We go hard at the details. If someone doesn't polish their shoes, their boots, we go hard. If someone forgets to button a button, everybody gets punished. Everybody's doing pushups. Everyone's doing setups. I understand the value of details, but we do that because in the next two, three, four, five, six weeks, we're going to put them in situations where the details truly do matter.

Not checking your tank out, not having enough air in your tank, making sure you don't have a seal. You're going to go into a burning room with... carbon monoxide that will kill you if you don't pay attention. So we're building this skill of paying attention. But once they get on the job, whether or not they have polished, polished boots has zero to do with if they're going to be good firefighters or bad firefighters or safe. It has nothing to do with it.

But so we build that in and sometimes people can't separate that. And I think as husbands, fathers and leaders, we need to realize what's important and put our effort into that. And it's that that means that we might need to give up a perfectly organized garage. so we can spend time playing catch with our kids. And that can be tough for people who have those perfectionist tendencies. They see it as a must. Or even, it can even affect your relationship.

You have a wife, stay at home kid, or a stay at home, excuse me, you have a stay at home wife, two or three kids, and you come home and the sink is full of dishes. And in your mind, that's wrong. She had all day long, she doesn't have a job, her job is to maintain the house. And you get home and you get upset. because she didn't do the dishes and maybe the kids were terrible that day.

And maybe she should, maybe, you know, that is an expectation that we should have that, you know, house is clean, food is prepared. But is it really important? Is it important because you grew up like that and that's what your dad thought? Or is there actually a articulable reason why doing the dishes the next day in the morning is terrible and you have to do them before you go to bed? I would argue that there's not.

And I think when we, when we lack perspective, when we, when we don't go back to the hundred year old self and say, Hey, I'm about to get into a fight and argument with my wife because she didn't do the dishes. Is that an argument that I'm happy that I had as I'm a hundred year old man sitting in a rocking chair, thinking about my life. And I think the answer is no. So it all goes back to thinking about your priorities.

It all goes back to, you know, actually being living an intentional life, a life that you're happy about a life where you've made good memories, where you've been happy. you are, you know, have been successful, you have to be intentional. I think by reclaiming the five, 10, 15 minute moments in your life to do things that are important to work on your side hustle, to work down and being creative, all those things are important.

And I hope you can use these tools to become a better husband, father and leader. I am really excited with the direction this podcast is going. I just found out that I'm in the top 10 % in the world of podcasts and that is cool. And it's all thanks to you. And so I really appreciate that.

And as part of growing, I wanted to interact more. And so I have created a, it's a 14 day course of individual coaching where we are going to help you reconnect with your family. I know myself, I've had this happen in my life. And I know a lot of friends that have had this happen where you feel like you're on this treadmill of wake up, go to work, provide, come home, go to sleep, repeat. And the connection with your wife, the connection with your kids and your family. has separated.

You feel like you're under the same roof, but you're a thousand miles away. If that describes you, I'm looking for a few guys to take this beta program. We will talk on Zoom or FaceTime for about 45 minute coaching session. We're going to come up with a plan. We're going to come up with action steps. I'm going to give you unlimited access to questions, question and answer sessions with me.

And then 14 days later, two weeks later, we're going to follow up and set intentions for the rest of the year. And I think it's going to be awesome. but I need some beta testers. So if you're interested, there'll be a form that you'll need to fill out. You'll need to be accepted. I'm looking for three to four guys. I think it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be two weeks. It's gonna be fast. It's gonna be great results.

So if that's something you are interested in, look in the show notes, find the form, fill it out. It's gonna be great. My name is Danny Dumas and this has been the Earn Your Title Podcast and I will talk to you later. Bye.