The Ryan Hanley Show - How to Make the Right Decision Every Time

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comEver wonder why some decisions lead to triumph while others nosedive despite your best intentions? The Jordan Peterson Method can help... ✅ Join over 10,000 newsletter subscribers: https://go.ryanhanley.com/✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhanley✅ Subscribe to the audio podcast here: https://ryanhanley.com/podcastUnlock the secrets of sound decision-making as I guide you through the use of structured frameworks and filters, steering clear of the often misleading influence of personal beliefs and emotional biases. I'll take you on a journey through my own experiences, revealing how bypassing these essential techniques can result in choices that might seem appropriate in the heat of the moment but fail to withstand the scrutiny of time. We'll dissect memories' unreliability and the frequent haze of emotionally charged judgment, stressing the importance of sidestepping these common pitfalls for more logical and enduring decisions.Get ready to delve into The Peterson Method, an innovative decision-making framework inspired by thought leader Jordan Peterson's critical questioning. I'll illustrate the significance of grounding decisions in truth and reality through personal anecdotes and reflections on attending Peterson's event. This method, which marries the Socratic method with the concept of steelmanning, challenges you to fortify opposing arguments to ensure your conclusions are sound. As we wrap up, your insights and critiques are not just welcome—they're crucial. So, subscribe, share this with your circle, and join me in this continuous quest to master the art of making life's toughest calls.#decisionmaking #leadership #leadershipdevelopment

Today we're going to talk about how to make decision-making a competitive advantage. Let's go. What's up guys? Ryan Hanley here. And I got a question from you guys, the audience, this week, essentially asking why I'm always talking about frameworks and filters when making decisions. And if you've listened to the show for a while, you've either heard through the interviews or some of the solo episodes that I do like this one, talking about a series of frameworks and filters that I use every day to make decisions. And oftentimes, when I make bad

decisions and I'm going back and reflecting on that decision, it's because I didn't use my frameworks and filters for making that decision. I either flew off the handle or I went off a previous bias or based off memory and ultimately came to a conclusion that at the time I thought was the right direction, and over time proved to be not exactly the outcome I would have liked. And in my reflective process, which I use for almost every decision, good or bad, in terms of outcome, always go back and reflect on that decision to figure out how I got there. It is often because I didn't use frameworks and filters. So what is the opposite of frameworks and filters? Let's work through this process together. Now, the opposite of frameworks and filters are belief and reason. And oftentimes, reason would be

associated with making good decisions. Unfortunately, reasoning, which is the use of facts and evidence to make decisions, are then, without frameworks and filters, passed through our beliefs. Our beliefs are biases, they are memories, and they are our emotions. They are the identifying characteristics oftentimes, rigid identifying characteristics that define us as people, right? I believe in X. I am biased towards X, right? It could be conservatism. It could be liberalism. It could be capitalism. It could be communism. It could be big government, small government. It could be a math-based education,

a liberal arts-based education, it could be I like a certain football team or I'm biased towards a certain geographical region or I'm sexist, racist, misogynist, I believe in a hierarchical structure, I believe in a flat structure. All of these are biases that define us as individuals that can ultimately impact our decision-making process. The second item that I listed were our memories. Now, the problem with memories and making decisions on memories is that our brain is not set up to accurately capture memories. The purpose of our brain is to make better decisions.

But unfortunately, the way memories are captured in our brain, quite often, not a neurosurgeon or a psychologist here, so take this with a grain of salt, this is a glossing to a certain extent. And if you have specific knowledge or information or want to correct something, I say, please, please leave it in the comments if you're watching on YouTube or just email me and I will correct in a future episode. And that goes for everything said here. The way our memories are captured in our brain, particularly our long-term memory, is that is more of the subjective aspect of that memory, the feeling attached to that memory. And unfortunately attached to that memory.

And unfortunately, what that does is set us up for something that actually Annie Duke talks a lot about in her book Thinking and Bets is that we may have a positive result based on a bad decision-making process and we attach a positive emotion to that decision-making process because of the result. And that can set us up for failure. Now, if that didn't necessarily make sense, walk through that again. We make a decision based on a bad set of either biases or memories or emotions, et cetera, a bad set of facts. We make a decision that ultimately would be a bad decision the majority of the time,

yet in this particular instance, because luck is a real thing, would be a bad decision the majority of the time, yet in this particular instance, because luck is a real thing, we have a positive outcome. We then, in our memory, attach this decision-making process to the positive outcome and our emotions associated with it. And in our memory, all we remember is that I made the decision this way and therefore got a positive outcome. We do not remember the exact details of the memory, how we got our decision-making process in our memory, how we got there, and what might ultimately have been a false positive, essentially, is what we're getting. And in that book, she has a quote from Jeff Yass, who was the founder of Susquehanna International, in which he says, the biggest risk is that you have a losing strategy when you think you have a winning one. And that is the most common when we make decisions based on memory. Last and

certainly not least, when we're talking about beliefs and the rigidity of them is making decisions based on emotions in which oftentimes these emotions spur out of fears that we don't necessarily understand. We talked in a previous episode of the show about how a fear of failure is actually not a fear of failure because failure isn't actually a real thing, right? It's a fear of status most often, right? Our fear of failure is often associated with a fear of status. So we have an emotional reaction to losing a sense of status

or the potential of losing our status in a community or group. That emotion is applied to a decision, and ultimately that can impact that decision because as a whole, biases, emotions, and memories, as a structure applied to reasoning, these beliefs oftentimes lead to poor decisions. Or I shouldn't say oftentimes, they set us up for a higher probability of making a poor decision. And this is why I skew as often and as far as I can away from making decisions based on previous biases, emotions,

and or memories, regardless of what the facts and evidence are of that particular decision that need to be made. Instead, and this is something I've had to learn over time because I have made every bad decision that could possibly exist in the world, just like you, I like to think through frameworks and the filters associated with those frameworks. And one more point on the rigidity of our beliefs and a pure kind of reasoning mentality on making decisions is that it oftentimes neglects nuance and does not equate for black swan thinking.

So if you're unfamiliar with the concept of a black swan, it was popularized by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his book by the same name, Incredible Concept, and this is essentially events that we cannot predict. And what happens is, similar to our kind of false pious, our false positive bias that we have attaching positive emotions to a good outcome that came from a bad decision, we will do the same thing with black swan events where a black swan event will happen and then we will try to go into the past and act as if we could have seen that black swan event coming, which ultimately, when you really break it down, and Nicholas Nassim Taleb does in his book, is that we couldn't have seen it coming.

These events could not have been predicted no matter what kind of maneuvering we do with information from previous to that event. So what we, and basically what his recommendation is we start to build our lives in a way that allows us to understand that these things are possible. And ultimately this leads into a book that then came after The Black Swan called Anti-Fragile, which is if we can build our lives in a way that is anti-fragile, meaning able to sustain through these types of chaos and disorder, particularly unseen chaos and disorder, which is the essence of or executive positions inside of companies, for those ambitious among you who want to be able to sustain and survive. Working to become anti-fragile is incredibly important. Additionally, this concept, if we're filtering all the way down into our personal lives, if you are a head of household, if you have children, if you have people you care about, creating an anti-fragile environment with those individuals is crucial. My argument to you today is that if you have bought everything that I've said up until this point, the only way to create anti-fragility and to make the decisions necessary to have a higher probability of positive outcomes,

which ultimately lead us to that anti-fragility, then we have to get rid of our belief-based decision-making, right, with the undercurrent of that being biases, emotions, and memories, and get to a series of frameworks and filters. And the reason that I like this concept of frameworks and filters is that it removes biases, it removes emotions, and it removes our reliance on memories. Not that those things can't be data points, not that they can't be additional filters in an overall framework. However, if they are the sole filters, then we've already discussed why we ultimately are setting ourselves up for a more fragile lifestyle and ultimately that remove biases, that remove emotions, and remove memories completely, it allows us to be malleable to the situation and reasonable,

rational, and pragmatic to the decision that needs to be made in that moment to ultimately have the best chance at a positive outcome. So what does this look like? One of my absolute favorite frameworks is one that I learned from Jordan Peterson. Now, Jordan has never actually named this. Honestly, I don't know if he has even thought through and could articulate what I'm about to explain to you because I'm sure it is more robust and more nuanced than what I'm actually going to describe. But as a way of

giving you a practical tool that you can use every day, that I use every day, particularly for larger decisions, you know, whether or not I get a coffee at the store on my way to the office, that might not, I might not work that through this particular framework. There would be a smaller set of frameworks or a set of frameworks that were, you know, better for smaller decisions, such as do I have the money and the time, et cetera. Is it necessary? Maybe is a good one to go with. But this particular framework, we'll call it the Peterson method, is I've picked up from reading all his books, although I can't say that I've read all of Maps and Meaning. I've read portions of it, but 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order.

I will certainly read his newest book. I've seen him live on tour for his latest book, We Who Wrestle With God. And I've also seen him previously in Utah as well. So I've seen him in person twice and I've probably watched thousands of hours of his content. I find Dr. Peterson's way of thinking, whether you agree with his conclusions or not, to be real, honest, authentic, pragmatic, useful, and rational. And again, you don't have to come to the same conclusions, and you don't have to like Dr. Peterson, but I think we can learn from the way he works to a problem. And particularly,

I want to talk through a live event, and this is where this concept really took hold of me and became a practical, something I applied in my day-to-day life, was I saw him live in Utah in 2023 at the Lions Not Cheap Lions Den event. There had to be, you know, somewhere around a thousand people in the room. And Dr. Peterson came out and worked through a series of content that I have heard him talk about before in different parts, but never in an hour and 25 minute long session, which is around his idea of always telling the truth. Now, I'm not going to go into that particular philosophy because that's not the point of this video. I highly recommend you look into some of his thoughts there. I think it is a core framework for our lives

is just always tell the truth, live in reality. However, what Dr. Peterson did live in that event was what I'm calling the Peterson method. And it was essentially combining the Socratic method with a steel man argument style. So let's talk through this. Our best understanding of how Socrates operated was actually what is now called the Socratic method, which was essentially a series of questions that were meant to help us think more critically about a topic. Oftentimes, those series of questions were, you can engage in that series of questions with another individual, and oftentimes that's how it's presented, but you can also do this individually. And essentially,

what we're doing, boiling it down and glossing some of the details because I want to give you something practical and the depth of it isn't necessarily useful unless you're interested and then I encourage you to go down that rabbit hole, is to ask a series of questions that allow you to work through the idea. Should or shouldn't I? If I should, then what? And then if that is not a valuable conclusion, then why shouldn't I? And we work through these series of questions all the way down until we come to a conclusion, right? Essentially, we're asking why, right? Or if we were doing, it would be, if this were a comedy troupe and we were doing improv, you know, it would be yes and, right? So should we do this? Yes and why? And down the train we go until we've thought through critically why we believe that argument is the correct answer to whatever, wherever we started. Okay, that's wonderful. And that's where most people stop. And this is what I saw from Dr.

Peterson in Utah that in my mind created something new and ultimately a framework that I've applied to my life ever since, which is he then steelmans the other side of that argument. So he will walk all the way down the path, and I watched him do this live for 45 minutes, pushing back and forth, critically thinking, asking questions, probing into why telling the truth was the absolute best path forward to live in reality and to ultimately find satisfaction and possibly happiness in our life was to tell the truth despite all the hardships that would come from it right he works through that process all the way down essentially using the socratic method and he gets to this conclusion that yes telling the truth is by far the best conclusion. And then he stops and he goes all the way back and steelmans the other

side of the argument. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the concept of steelmanning an argument, it is the counter to strawmanning an argument. Now, you may have heard, you know, so-and-so in politics, they say this all the time. Unfortunately, our politicians have bastardized so many terms that could be useful in our lives. But essentially what will happen is one politician will say something and then another politician will falsify that argument or pick a part of that argument that can be easily falsified or easily manipulated to sound negative and then use that falsification as a reason to discredit the other politician's argument. That's essentially strawmanning. Steelmanning is the exact opposite.

Steelmanning would be if a politician made a statement, the other politician would then spend their time trying to prove the other's case because if we are operating from a place of trying to find the genuine right answer, which is what we do when we're making our own decisions, right? Unless you're a masochist, you don't want to make decisions that intentionally hurt you, right? Unless it's the best course of action, I guess. So if we're coming from a place of genuinely trying to find the right

answer, then we steel man the argument. What is, if you were that other person, why do you believe they believe that thing? And doing it from a genuine and honest place, not trying to say, well, they're so-and-so, they're a conservative, so that's why they believe it. No. Why do they believe, say, in the First Amendment? Why is that important to them? And here's why. Because this leads to this, leads to this, leads to this, and down we go through the Socratic method proving their argument. And the reason that Dr. Peterson does that is because if you get to the, if he takes his theory and brings it all the way down to the Socratic method and then steelmans the other side of the argument, bringing it all the way down, and then you compare those two solutions, what you find in my case, and this is why I've applied this to so much of my life, is that if you're making the right decision then your first attempt at the Socratic method all the way down right oftentimes the steel man

argument of the other side has one of two conclusions either it is completely ludicrous at the at the bottom of that of that thought experiment and it is obviously false which could be true, which would validate your answer, or as you work through the steel man of that argument, what you ultimately see is that the other side is essentially agreeing, just maybe using different terms. And in either case, you're validating this answer.

Or, and here's the other side of it, let's say you come all the way down with your answer and then you run the steel man and you realize that the steel man argument is ultimately stronger, now you know that this is the answer. Now you know the other side is actually the answer and that your original argument was actually incorrect. And by working honestly on both sides of the argument, first working your initial argument and then steelmanning the other side and pulling it all the way down using the Socratic method, you are undeniably shown the answer that with the best of your ability, you are able to affirm

as the right decision. This, my friends, is a framework passed through two filters, the Socratic method and the steel man argument style. And in here, we're not talking about our biases. We're not talking about emotions. We're not talking about our memories. We're working a process that removes those things, those beliefs, those rigid ideological concepts that keep us boxed in, that do not allow our minds to open up and expand, right? We're finding a solution based on critical thinking

and answering, you know, essentially just answering the question, if yes, then why? Or if that's, if yes and why? So my friends, this is why I lean on frameworks. This is just one framework. There are entire books written, you know, other people refer to these as mental models. I like to think of them as frameworks. This is just one framework. There are entire books written, you know, other people refer

to these as mental models. I like to think of them as frameworks. Mental models to me still is a perfectly fine term, but just not the way that I frame it in my own mind. I frame them, I like to think of them as a set of frameworks that pass through a series of filters that ultimately get me to the right decision. So guys, I want to know your thoughts on this. Like this is kind of a heady concept, but this is the way that I make decisions. It's how I think through things. When, you know, I recently had a situation the other day where one of the companies that I'm an advisor for asked me my opinion on something. And frankly, in the moment, I didn't have a good answer for them.

So I took it home and I literally worked through this on a piece of paper and I went all the way down and then went all the way down the other side and came back to them the next day and said, here's what I think we should do. And ultimately, you know, my feedback was that I agreed with them that, you know, we should move forward with the initiative that they had put in front of me. But it took going back because of my initial reaction. And though my initial reaction was close, it wasn't, I didn't feel confident in it.

But when I came back the next day, having worked through this framework, using Socratic method and the steel man argument, and I came back to them and I said, you know what, I'm 100% behind you. I think you guys are making the right decision. I felt supremely confident in that feedback and felt like I was doing my job as an advisor to them.

So use this, don't use it, would love your thoughts on it. Is this something you can use in your day-to-day life? Do you think the logic here that I'm using makes sense? Are there pieces of this that you don't understand? Hit me with questions. You can always leave them in the comments on YouTube or hit me up on any of your socials or email me if you're a subscriber to the newsletter. However you like to contact me,

I do ultimately over time get all those certain methods, get to me quicker than others. If you enjoy this content and you're not subscribed to it, wherever you're watching or listening, please do. And if you think this is cool and you think this is something that helps you, would love for you to share with a friend. I love you for watching this show.

I'm out of here. Peace. Let's go. Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look easy. Hey, stand up guy, boom, ten toes. Big body pull up in a Range Rover. I can chase the whole game when I say so. I pull up, shut it down, yeah, they know.

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