Sandeep Maheswari is an Indian entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and youth influencer. He recently got an offer of 100 Crores (14 Million USD) to give away all the rights of his non-profit youtube videos. He straightly denied this lucrative offer without any doubt. He said to the offeror: “Even if you give me 1000 Crores, my answer will be NO.”
He announced it publicly, and there are many such bold decisions this gem has made in the past. I’m sure of his outright denial because I’ve known him for the past seven years.
So, was it easy for him to make this choice? Yes, it was super-easy.
And in this article, you will deeply understand how you can make such mind boggling decisions in a flick, maintain your focus, and persistently move towards your aim.
We all have experienced the dilemma of choosing one option over another, like in career, job, business, goals, etc. And nothing new in it, we all have to go through it. But if one can find the master-key for making quick and right decisions, he will be unbeatable like Sandeep.
Why? Because every slow decision kills our precious time, and every wrong decision pushes away from the growth path. We often get defocused, and to gain the focus back — we need to manage many distractors and the choices we make throughout the day. These series of right choices will keep us aligned with the purpose of our goals.
It makes us in-distractable.
Now, stop for a moment and think about any growth-related big decisions you have made in the recent past.
How was the experience? Did you take anyone’s help or made an independent decision? How much time did it take for you to come up with a clear option? Was it confusing? What emotions did you deal with?
We often get trapped and confused in many situations while moving towards our goal. We tend to choose emotionally, which is overwhelming.
And it disrupts our daily routine.
“You are not the victim of the world, but rather the master of your own destiny. It is your choices and decisions that determine your destiny.” – Roy T. Bennett
This one skill you need to solve the problem is
“The ability to see the things as-is and making bold choices, without any emotional biased-ness”. That means making ruthless, rational decisions.
There are multiple ways and approaches to developing this skill. I used my own system to make the right choice and stick to my growth path.
I first discovered my core values and principles during the self-journaling sessions and named it the manifesto of my life.
“It is not hard to make decisions once you know what your values are.” – Roy E. Disney
I’ll explain how you can found your values, but before that, let’s, deep dive:
How did I use one of my values: “Mastery Over Success”?
This value means, priority is to focus on mastering the skills over running after the success, but both have their weightage.
Whenever I’ve tried something new, it has shown me a clear direction. Be it into the stock market or starting my youtube channel, or enter the world of writing.
In July, when I started writing actively, I joined a few Facebook writers groups to see what’s happening there. What kind of success and problems writers are sharing.
It was overwhelming to see few writers earning massively, and it became a moving motivator to me. The earnings of others were powerful enough to distract. I started following the local success and moved away to gain mastery in writing.
That’s when I paused and self-reflected using the “Mastery OVER Success” mantra. It helped me regain my focus instantly.
It works as a navigation compass for me.
Also, it’s not something you reflect and forget. You need to practice and make many such conscious choices until it becomes your innate habit.
I recently watched Tim Denning’s interview on a social platform, who is a veteran writer. He said he is not on any of the Facebook group of writers. In fact, many people call him: “A writing machine, and he works like a robot.”
I feel he’s an extremist when it comes to focusing on writing. He produces two articles a day, consistently along with his 9 to 5 job, and there is nothing wrong with it.
But an important question is, how is he able to do it?
I firmly believe it’s his regular practice to consciously focus and align with his core values and principles, which became a habit now.
How can you find your growth values (and what to do with it)?
Once you identify your growth path and goals, start observing your patterns of taking various key decisions.
Find, what is the problem? What is the one thing you don’t want to compromise? If nothing comes up, don’t worry, simply look for desired behavior to meet your goals and extract your values from it.
Reflect repeatedly until you see a few values. Even if it’s not the right one, it’s okay. If you truly work on it, you will get enough opportunities to validate and re-form them. You can also use any other method of discovering them.
During this discovery, you can also find a few principles for better growth (examples):
· Gain clarity first to make faster and fear-less decisions.
· Help others in succeeding with what you just learned.
Now, let’s focus on a value clarification exercise to understand how easy it was to make a small yet important choice.
Four months ago, when I was exploring my goal of writing a book, I attended a webinar hosted by an online book publisher. It was an enlightening session, and I learned a few tools and techniques. This one session broke my myths about writing. And I was almost sold, on joining a book launch program he had offered.
But, I gracefully chose to drop that idea very next day because writing and publishing through his program was pushing me away from my growth values and the purpose of writing a book.
I did a self-check: “What did I plan and where I’m going? Is that what I wanted?” Many of the answers came straight from the values I’ve.
I was able to see my path clearly. There was no doubt while making a choice. It prevented me from decision fatigue.
Similarly, I made other choices as a fun challenge rather than a problem at hand. I witnessed the right and wrong clearly and enjoyed the moments of it.
These values became my best friend during my growth journey.
“All decision-making is a value-clarifying exercise”– Tony Robbins
What else can you do to grow?
Look for an opportunity where you are finding it hard to choose between the two options. It can be anything on growth or life situations.
Make use of a journal to self-reflect on the purpose of your aim. Clarify it against your values and generate insights to make fearless decisions.
Use relevant values, aligning with the process of goal execution. You need not to use the format I followed “X over Y”.
Do a check when you feel you are moving away from your desired path. Practice daily for the smaller, yet important choices until it becomes your ingrained habit.
Final thoughts
Believe in making rational decisions based on factual information than your perception. Let your values drive your desired behavior.
Create a system — regular journal sessions along with the values and principles — to make your life decisions ever easier.
Let’s be fearless like Sandeep and maintain our focus to meet our goals and destiny.