She May Not Be Who She Says

Discovery

"Absolutely Guaranteed for Life"

"Never Before...Never Again"

"Bigger...Brighter...Stronger"

"Always...Everyone...Anytime"

How many times have you fallen for an alluring and magnetic headline or statement that is too good to be believed? With smart gadgets constantly in your hand, how can you avoid it?

Today, she may look great...but without PhotoShop (another app)?

Commitment

The underlying issue is really one of deception from the sender and gullibility by the receiver. The commitment should be to yourself. It requires more commitment than ever to filter down to the truth and with whatever it takes to get there. This scrutiny includes headlines, brash statements, obvious lies, empty promises, deceptions in every form...in other words...the truth v. the lie...from anyone.

http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/leadership-truth-or-lies-a-crisis-of-integrity/


There is no better objective in making a wise decision than one based on the facts and rooted in the truth.

Solution

The goal here is to become more aware and conscious, and to discern headlines, statements and promises through your own MODEL (it all comes back to a repeatable process).

The classic adage:

"If it walks and quacks like a duck" has never been more pertinent.

Point is, we are now living with the product of collective decisioning. How is that working out?

So, with words and statements that simply do not add up, our decision making future depends on our ability, commitment and discernment to be successful in this critical area of our life.

Action

Make a goal...take a vow...keep a promise...do something that creates a paradigm shift about effective decisioning. It is time we all become more pro-active in a consciousness that combats deceptions and lies no matter where they originate.

As always...you decide (maybe you need the book).

Completely Sure and Completely Wrong

Discovery

We all know them…family, friends, associates and countless others (maybe even me). Their mantra is often “I know what I’m doing so get out of my way.” In other words, they are totally sure and yet, provably wrong.

While it may seem gifted to be so clairvoyant, it begs the question of how/what/where does this attitude come from? Gut feelings, intuitions, astrological signs, or other subjective sources?

In many cases, their stance and resulting decisions are completely unfounded and yet determined. Scary.

Among my own tribe, I concluded that there is little I can do to change a mind that is determined to make decisions without regard to any critical thinking, sound reasoning or provable evidence.

Commitment

Since it seems futile to try to convince an inconvincible subject, my commitment is to continue our Zillion Dollar Thinking site with that in mind. The hope is that some of the ideas and techniques, with a healthy dose of tangible logic and facts, may do more to persuade than mere words that float through the air of unwelcome conversation.

Solution
The most reliable solution to this dilemma, in the majority of cases, is to search and research. Maybe ten years ago, we had the excuse of fact finding being a time consuming and inconvenient job.

No more.

Within a few months, the iconic Dick Tracy watch should become a reality. That means anyone at anytime can search a topic as quick as they used to simply tell time. In other words, the real solution to consistently taking the wrong path could be right on our wrist.

Simple as that.

Action

We may all differ on this point, but the goal of this should lead to one of action and not complacency. As the product of this method of reasoning becomes more liable, the antidote should become more of a priority.

Point is, if you are determined to be wrong, at least be able to prove it.

Author's note:

Notice the four steps of the MODEL?

　

Should You Rethink the *MODEL?

At the core of the book Zillion Dollar Thinking, is the MODEL for making objective decisions. It was designed to be a simple, effective, memorable, repeatable and transferable concept. The research behind this formula repeatedly showed that most attempts to build a decisioning process were buried in confusing, complicated and lengthy forms.

The continuing question is…why adopt a process or system that has so many built-in negatives that it is unworkable and ineffective?

An age old maximum says “out of sight…out of mind.” There is no substitute for repetition. So, moving forward, and considering the above dilemma, we plan to package our blog entries around the four steps of the MODEL.

Since everything is going digital and traveling at thought speed, it is more important than ever to have a simple and repeatable process to manage and decide on this avalanche of information. Time to rethink the MODEL?

The four MODEL steps again:

One: Discovery

Two: Commitment

Three: Solution

Four: Action

Yes, the basic words can be substituted as long as the definitions stay in tack. The important point is that each step stays in the same order and no advancing of sequential steps until each one is complete.

Note again the emphasis on objectivity. Now may be a good time to repeat our meme:

“Thinking Through Life One Decision at the Time"

Stay tuned…

　

　

*MODEL
: Method Of Decisioning for Everything in Life

What do you make? Per: Seth

“Decisions.

You don't run a punch press or haul iron ore. Your job is to make decisions.

The thing is, the farmer who grows corn has no illusions about what his job is. He doesn't avoid planting corn or dissemble or procrastinate about harvesting corn. And he certainly doesn't try to get his neighbor to grow his corn for him.

Make more decisions. That's the only way to get better at it.”

Seth Godin: Credits
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/01/what-do-you-make.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Thanks Seth for your continued and exceptional insights. At Zillion Dollar Thinking, we have made decisioning our singular mission and goal. As rational individuals, decisioning is our differentiator.

Generally, when you look back, you can summarize your life based on the turning point decisions you made or did not make. How life defining is that?

So, to keep this a simple thought, please consider the product of your decisions as a New Year’s resolution that could well define all your future years.

As always…you decide.

　

　

　

　

Senior v Junior Decisioning

“Could brain changes make older people more prone to scams?”

“The findings appear to agree with what experts on scams and the elderly have long noticed, says Doug Shadel, Washington state director for AARP, a national grassroots organization that represents older Americans.

He said scam artists have admitted in interviews that their main ploy is to get their intended victim "under the ether," or in a heightened emotional state that puts them off kilter.

"They're bypassing that same part of the brain - the frontal cortex, the part that makes you doubt things - and bringing you to the present moment where you're going to make a rash decision," said Shadel.

"It's something that we in the practitioner world have suspected for years. But getting concrete science behind it is really important," added Shadel, a former fraud investigator.

In fact, the findings may help older people avoid such scams.

Taylor's own father was the retired school counselor who got scammed by the two young men, who were homeless and missing teeth. "He thought they were nice young men and he was making loans," Taylor said. And Taylor's aunt was the victim of telephone marketers who convinced her to purchase fake gems.

Given older people's weakness when it comes to judging whether a person is trustworthy, Taylor advises to reduce the temptation.

"You want to get people to shut it off before they ever have the conversation: to hang up without talking, to throw the mail solicitation away, to not go to the free lunch seminar," she said.

AARP recommends that people never decide to buy something while listening to a sales pitch or reading a mail solicitation.

"Always give yourself at least 24 hours so that you have time to engage your rational mind," Shadel said.”
Read the full article and credits here:
 http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/12/03/brain-changes-may-make-older-people-more-prone-to-scams/
　

Enter…Zillion Dollar Thinking:

 

The key question to this dilemma is “what will you use to help you make an informed decision over that 24 hour period?”

As with many sales techniques and attempts, sales approaches often rely on emotions and various degrees of pressure…often neglecting the fundamental requirements of due diligence and suitability.

Point is, when your intuitive facilities begin to wane, you may well need rely more on an objective model of decision making.

In our book (Zillion Dollar Thinking which I heavily recommend that you own in this emerging environment), the simple framework has four progressive steps.
 
Step One:Discovery and Identification of the Problem
 Step Two:Your Commitment and Their Commitment
 Step Three:The Best Solution for the Identified Problem
 Step Four:The Actions needed to complete the Decision

Simple, objective, tangible, repeatable, demonstrating, understandable…applies to little or big decisions…you get the picture.

To summarize, if for any reason your emotional and intuitive instincts are not as sharp or reliable as before, please consider a model (as above). If not this one, there will be a zillion others from a web search.

Going forward, there is really no substitute for objectivity.
As always…you decide.
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

　

　

　

　

Tags that Decide

If you will be exercising your voting right in the very near future, here are a few due diligence tags worth considering before you cast your decision:

   “The Latest Polls Say…”

How many times a day do we see this headline? How many times is there full disclosure that describes the details of how a poll was structured and framed? One site that you can use as a benchmark:

“20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results”

 

http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/the-latest-polls-say/

　Truth or Lies? A Crisis of Integrity.

Overt or subtle, it’s all the same. A lie is a lie, and the truth is the truth (absolute opposites). It is a white hot issue, especially in the current climate of corporations, politics, world order and the influence on our individual freedoms. Who can or will you trust? It is a vital decision.
 
http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/leadership-truth-or-lies-a-crisis-of-integrity/

　Which is the Higher Decision?

Beliefs are deeply held truths about life. Beliefs are one’s thoughts about some aspect of life, the way it is or the way it should be. Think of beliefs as long term perspectives about life…about all of life and not just one’s own life.

Regardless of where you come down on either position, notice that one decision is active while the other is passive. One requires discovery and the other is simply rejection with or without due diligence.

Decisions and fundamental beliefs are closely linked. They also are predictive of future decisions. Your pattern as a believer or a disbeliever should be easy to track over a relatively short time. This is certainly not scientific or certifiable, but food for your decisioning thought.
 
http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/which-is-the-higher-decision/

　Are You Paying Your Dues?

Considering this bit of Wordsmithing, the key point is that due diligence is the first and most principal obligation to satisfy when making most any decision of substance.

Here’s the question: Before you make any important move, purchase or decision, can there be too much due diligence?

As an example…consider that you are about to buy a business (a typical small business in U.S.). What would be the minimum steps that you would impose on the acceptance or rejection of the deal? Try these for starters:

http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/are-you-paying-your-dues/

　Will You Decide on Herd Mentality?

With less than a week, we will have a ( 2010) National election. Here’s today’s headline:

“This weeks unemployment has dropped from 450,000 to 434,000

 

…and that’s the good news."

And, of course this has come on the heels of several weeks (in succession) of similar such good news. Overall, this is a dismal picture that we are supposed to embrace as progress [herd mentality] because it was not as bad as expected. But, this could be any news that is fed to us by some media chain that has its own particular reporting agenda.

http://zilliondollarthinking.com/discovery/will-you-decide-on-herd-mentality/

These are just a sampling of several posts that you can use as due diligence in your decisioning and before casting your vote. The common denominator in each of these is that this is serious business. Unfortunately for some, not even worth the effort. Conversely, the opposite camp considers this as a vital election. Hopefully, these nuggets will be of help.

As always…you will decide.

What Will I Tell My Neighbors?

"Once someone makes a decision about your cause or your product or your resume, it's almost impossible for you to persuade them that they may have been initially wrong. You're no longer asking them to remake the first decision, you're asking them to admit their decisioning error, which is a whole other thing.

Compounding this, organizations often make it awkward for someone who is trying to come around to be embraced, largely because the tribe is hurt that their decision was rejected in the first place.

The opportunity is to encourage the non-supporter to look at new information and make a new decision. Give them a convincing story they may need to tell their colleagues and neighbors…

“Amnesty for Latecomers” by Seth Godin:

Please see the full post. Re-printed by permission.
 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/10/amnesty-for latecomers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Thanks Seth…an excellent backdrop for this option…

As we have encouraged repeatedly, show them the track, system or model of how you arrived at the decision in the first place. If you demonstrate that right up front, it can create an additional opportunity of buy-in, and authenticity (which is proven to increase believability).

All that said, the idea here is that you want to eliminate second guessing or doubt and also demonstrate the strength and accuracy of the initial decision to the first party and even a potential second party.

As always…you decide.

When Opposites Attract

A short list of opposites can help us make a major point in decisioning.
These are actually decisions on auto-pilot.

Opposites

War - Peace

Black - White

Start - Stop

Good - Evil

Begin - End

Life - Death

Bondage - Freedom

Hot - Cold

Night - Day

Finite - Infinite

Even though these are polar opposites, they can become choices that, in the extreme, are easy decisions. But, what about the in-betweens?

It’s the gray (B/W), the lukewarm (H/C), the afternoon (AM/PM)…the somewhere in the middle ones that catch us.

Point is, when it’s not as stark in definition (as above), how do you come to a conclusion?

We are, and will remain, consistent about the answer. It is a model, system, formula or track.

The Zillion Dollar Thinking MODEL:

One. Discovery

Two. Commitment

Three. Solution

Four. Action

So, the next time you get into the gray area of decisioning, please consider the ZDT track. If not this one, cyberspace will have plenty of options (there are now 700,000 apps for the iPhone alone). At the minimum, please download the complimentary eBook at our ZDT site.

Point is that a model is the antidote to staying endlessly stuck. As one author framed it…“better to be consistently decisive than to be completely right.”

As always…you decide.



　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

Zillion Dollar Thinking - BlogTopSites.com

Zillion Dollar Thinking - BlogTopSites.com

The Latest Polls Say...

How many times a day do we see this headline?

How many times is there full disclosure that describes the details of how a poll was structured and framed?

One site that you can use as a benchmark:

“20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results”

 

http://www.ncpp.org/?q=node/4

And here is a mantra you can repeat to yourself: “Do Not Trust Undocumented Polls”

And, maybe you can say it (and write it on the whiteboard) to this compounded degree:

2 X 2 = 4

4 X 4 = 16

16 X 16 = 256

256 X 256 = 65,536

65,536 X 65,536 = 4,294,967,296

 …and so on to the zillioneth power.

Exaggeration…yes…but here’s the point:

Please do not trust any poll without considering at least some of the following criteria (from the article):

1. Who did the poll?

2. Who paid for the poll and why was it done?

3. How many people were interviewed for the survey?

4. How were those people chosen?

5. What area (nation, state, or region) or what group (teachers, lawyers, voters, etc.) were these people chosen from?

6. Are the results based on the answers of all the people interviewed?

7. Who should have been interviewed and was not? Or do response rates matter?

8. When was the poll done?

9. How were the interviews conducted?

10. What about polls on the Internet or World Wide Web?

11. What is the sampling error for the poll results?

12. Who’s on first?

13. What other kinds of factors can skew the poll results?

14. What questions were asked?

15. In what order were the questions asked?

16. What about "push polls"?

17. What other polls have been done on this topic? Do they say the same thing? If they are different, why are they different?

18. What about exit polls?

19. What else needs to be included in the report of the poll?

20. So I've asked all the questions. The answers sound good. Should we report the results?

So, you don’t know the answers to all these questions? That is the point. If you don’t have enough of the answers…don’t trust the poll result…especially one with a +/- 7point differential (as many now hide).

Simple as that.

As always…you decide.

in·di·vid·u·al·ism

　
noun

1. a social theory advocating the liberty, rights, or independent action of the individual

2. the principle or habit of or belief in independent thought or action

3. the pursuit of individual rather than common or collective interests

4. individual character; individuality

5. an individual peculiarity

Right now, as we watch the GOP National Convention unfold, it is becoming increasing clear what is at stake.

For example, the GOP V.P. candidate Paul Ryan painted the memories of his transition from childhood to the present. As a kid he was able to wait tables, throw papers, mow yards, work in car factories, and then study economics, enter politics, and now, run for second highest office in the land.

He further remembered what his father told him at an early age. He told him that in life he would have to make decisions…and that what should guide him is that he could be “part of the problem or part of the solution.”

What is most important in this campaign is what they are promoting. In speech after speech, in one way or another, the underlying message is individual freedom. More specifically, the freedom to make and act on individual decisions.

While we cannot change the platforms these different campaigns will offer, we can only control our individual decision as a result.

For years, we have taken for granted the freedoms that we enjoy in this country. Considering the stakes, our singular goal from these conventions may well be to support and promote the administration that will leave you and me with the greatest amount of individual freedom…individualism.

As always…You decide.

　

Beyond the Static…Who Gets It?

How committed are you to seek the truth in decisioning when information interference is compounding exponentially?

Ten years ago, from a routine search engine, most topics would yield less than one million results. Today…hundreds of millions is common.

Then, consider the volume of social networks, digital editions, e-books, blog sites, and a zillion others…all forms of static and interference. Then, the hardware…smarter by the digital minute and growing by the nano-second.

The application of filtering becomes vital when the targeted information is conflicting. As you are seeking the truth, you are being drowned by a volume of competing noise.

The questions: Will you filter? How will you filter?

Could you use a MODEL? What should it include?

At the risk of redundancy, the Model for Intelligent Decisioning remains our best offer to help combat this compounding problem (does anyone believe it will get less conflicting in our future).

Again, the four steps applied to this dilemma:

Step One: Discovery (your issue, objective, problem, candidate)

Step Two: Commitment (your dedication, testimony, involvement)

Step Three: Solution (your specific answer to your discovery)

Step Four: Action (your plan of execution)

The beauty of a model is that it allows you to organize your thinking/decisioning using successive and interactive steps. On the contrary, if you are not willing to take the time to methodically organize, then the decision before you may not be that important.

Boiled down, we often find deciders in one of two camps.

The Methodicals or The Herders

The Methodicals will decide by commitment, resolve and relentless determination. The Herders will tend to fall (and decide) into a group (herd) with limited individual research, facts or true information. They will believe and accept unchallenged polls, data or news and then melt into their adopted herd.

One camp seems to get it…the other one does not, and of course there are those others who are stuck in the middle and stay frozen in place.

As always…you decide.