About the Episode:
In this episode of ALL IN, I, Rick Jordan, dive into the critical art of decision-making, particularly when facing life’s tough challenges. I discuss the two primary approaches: surgical precision and using a blunt instrument. Whether it’s a personal dilemma, a business setback, or a relationship issue, the way we tackle problems can significantly impact our journey. I share insights on when to employ meticulous, focused strategies and when to take bold, sweeping actions. This episode is a deep dive into understanding the nuances of decision-making and how choosing the right approach can lead to success in various aspects of life.
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Episode References:
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Episode Topics:
- Learn the art of decision-making in complex situations.
- Discover when to use surgical precision in problem-solving.
- Understand the power of using a blunt instrument in decision-making.
- Gain insights into strategic choices in business and personal life.
- Explore real-life examples of impactful decision-making strategies.
Hey, what’s shakin’? Hey, I’m Rick Jordan. Today, we’re going all in. There are two approaches I’m going to talk with you about today. approaches in business in people surrounding you. I mean, you can, you can look up things that I’ve talked about in previous episodes about your inner circle, but then also in business. And there are ways to attack things, whether it’s a problem or a shift in your life or a new direction, you need to take your business, maybe it’s a pullback, because I was just on the, on a video meeting with someone the other day, and they lost one of their major customers, which eliminated half the revenue, I’m talking almost a million dollars in revenue, that’s a big upset. There are ways to attack these things, there are really only two ways and that’s what I’m going to tell you today, when something like this happens, you need to make some shifts in whatever you’re doing. I mean, as I said, this could even be a relationship, this could even be an approach to how you have some differences between you and your partner, it could be a way that you have a handle a difficult employee. And I’ve talked about how to lead difficult people in the past. But then today is about the two types of action that you can take, and you have a choice between one or two.
For me, there’s no middle ground between these two, there’s absolutely no middle ground. And there are different approaches and different reasons why you would take one of these two options as far as your path forward. So let’s talk about the first one, okay? The first one is using surgical precision. Now, this means you’re gonna go in, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna carve out something that’s a little tiny, meaning you’re focusing on a very, very small part of whatever it is. Now this could be if it’s in business, it could be a KPI, right, maybe you have some defined KPIs, like in my company, there are very defined KPIs across operations. And we call these levers, right, because if you move one, it’s going to affect the other, they always work in conjunction, and that’s something that you should consider as you’re building a business as you’re scaling, if you’re an entrepreneur, whether it’s e-commerce, or whatever, you should look at defining KPIs, I once heard somebody say what you can’t, what you don’t measure you can’t manage. That’s so true. So you look at this with surgical precision, because sometimes if you analyze these things, of course, they affect each other.
But you might be able to take a look at one small little thing and have a huge big impact a ripple effect across a whole bunch of different areas. This is the same personally because maybe you’re having a difficult time with your spouse with your partner. And this is usually recognizing something not in them. But in yourself. For real it is. Or if there’s something that that’s an issue that you see with them, it’s very difficult to make any headway with somebody else, when you look at them, and you have 18 Things that you have a problem with, when you have 18 things and you try to attack 18 things at the same time. And they all require the same amount of effort, that’s an issue, Once the person is going to feel attacked you’re not going to be able to resonate too well, because it’s hard to comprehend all those things at one time. So sometimes, maybe there’s one thing that you can find as you zoom out, in relationships in yourself, or in your business that you can say, You know what, I’m going to focus on the small thing and see what kind of ripple effect and the impact it has across the board.
Now, this usually comes with a lot of reflection and meditation. Because this is using a surgical instrument, surgical precision, to complete surgical precision on that one small area. If you think about the human body and doctors, and that’s what this metaphor is, obviously, that’s what this metaphor is, is maybe there’s a small area on the heart, right? The heart is obviously a very important organ. It’s like duh, right? One of the most important in your entire body, right? You can live without a gallbladder, like me, people can take out half the liver and the liver will regenerate. You can live with one kidney, right? But you only have one heart. So if it’s surgical precision, and you have to go in there, maybe it’s like a small little part. And I’ve seen this happen, right? Because there’s things like electrical stimulation to where they will go in. And I don’t know the exact name. Obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I understand that if there’s an arrhythmia, they can take one electrode and zap one part of the heart, one part of the heart and it can correct the whole thing. It can correct the entire arrhythmia, and that is surgical precision. Right?
So if you’ve got your business is out of sync, your departments are not functioning well. Right that maybe there’s not a lot of communication happening between them and that’s the thing that you find, and it’s not really something that you have to go in and address as a whole. But you can find one small thing. One small thing that happened with my company about a week ago, a big migration from an integration, we bought a company, we’re, we’re getting it integrated, right absorbed into the operations of the existing business that we have, as we continue to grow and scale. And as we moved some technical systems over, I’m talking just like Gmail from Outlook like that kind of a thing, right? From teams to Slack, those individual things. And there were people that were having difficulty with one of the applications, and it’s because they, even though it was posted out in email, or whatever, people don’t read emails all the time. I mean, I take a look at my inbox, you know, it’s difficult to stay on top of that, I’m sure you think the same thing. But guess what, everybody reads text messages. So with surgical precision, what I instructed my team to do was say, you know, what, from here on out, as we bring on acquisitions, we collect everybody’s cell phone numbers, but we do anyways for HR, right? We do anyway, because that way we can contact them in case something ever happens, we collect them regardless, like put it into a system for us, because that’s where we’ll meet people. And this one tiny little thing is like 160 characters of a text message to send out and say, You know what, this is happening at 8 am.
Tomorrow, for more information, go here. And it’s that simple, right? It is surgical precision, surgical precision, very tactical, that will solve a whole bunch of issues because now everybody is in the loop. That’s the ripple effect that I’m talking about. This isn’t something where we had to go in and like, make a whole bunch of big shifts and all that stuff, it was one tiny little thing that is going to make the difference in a very big way. Now the second option that you have, as you’re tracking with me today, the second option that you have, and I’ve had to go down this route before too, is using a blunt instrument. The first time is using surgical precision, the first option, the second option you have is using a blunt instrument. And this has to do with why we’ve had to do this before with an acquisition. And the reason is just because you take a look at it, and it was just becoming extremely expensive. And where the company was at that point in time. There was revenue that was lost, which means companies you see this in the news all over the place right now. No joke, like Google, I was just reading this morning, just laid off a whole bunch more of its staff. Right. And as I took a look at that, it’s like looking into the future. And our cash flow projections, what we’re going to have in three months, it’s like there’s no way we can sustain this. So we’re going to put in a slew of eight efficiencies overnight that we’ve identified. And we’re also going to eliminate some roles because we have to save cash, right?
So we went and for us, it wasn’t mass layoffs. It was several it wasn’t like Google or some of the other tech firms that you see. I was reading Clubhouse, Do you guys remember Clubhouse, the right Clubhouse is trying to reinvent itself right now, as an audio-only communication system like two-way communications or something like that rose to the heights of social media platform audio only now, Twitter or ex has something called spaces, which completely crashed the value of cup of clubhouse, and nobody’s really on there anymore. It was a big thing during the pandemic because everybody was just sitting at home. Right? It was a brand new thing people caught on really fast sword took off and then crashed down twice as hard. As soon as people got out back into the world again. And then Twitter of course launched its thing called Spaces. Twitter obviously had a lot more followers. It was good, so now the clubhouse is trying to reinvent itself. But what I read is that it was sometime last year that they laid off half their staff, half their staff, I’m gone, absolutely gone. And then going into the new year, it was another half of that gone. Right. So now they’re down to like a fourth of the people that they were before. And that’s because the entire company is making a direction change. They have to because it’s no longer sustainable as it was. So they went in and they needed to. And it’s just like a lot of other tech companies right now use a blunt instrument to resolve the problem and set themselves up so that they can move forward. There are times for that. Let’s take a look at this.
This solution in your personal life may be with relationships that you have friendships, right? If you take a look across this is something I was with Dane Cook, at a mastermind, obviously big comedian and everything. There are some things that he talked about that were just incredible. And he said he was working on a new piece for his upcoming special he’s doing and it was funny when he presented it. I can’t remember the exact words that he used. But it was actually a thought leadership moment in, in addition to a comedic moment, a very humorous moment. So he said he starts out the bit like this and I don’t remember the humor parts you’re just gonna have to live with this okay? But he starts all this he’s like go through your phone. This is something I’m doing and I’m encouraging people to do from my stage Dane is saying this thing click saying this. Go through your phone and straight up delete everyone who would not call you and ask, Hey, how can I help you? So if you go through your contact lists, and you see people that are in there that wouldn’t call you and say, Hey, how can I help you? Or if you’re in a conversation with them, say, Hey, how can I help you? Meaning generally people who are out for themselves, or people who are negative all the time and negativity, I have to tell you, negativity causes you to focus on yourself only, only on yourself. That’s it, because it’s about your problems about everything else.
Now, you tend to project those out and think that it’s everybody else causing it right? When really, it’s, it could be somebody else causing it, but it’s up to you to change it. It can’t be somebody else causing it. And you know, those gurus that say, you know, you cause everything, you chose all this stuff, whatever, there’s stuff that does happen to you in life, give yourself some compassion, you didn’t create all the crap that’s in your life, I want you to forgive yourself for that right now. Just forgive yourself, you did not create all the crap that’s in your life, things absolutely can happen to you that are outside of your control. It’s the decision that you make from that point forward, I’ve talked about that a little bit. Negativity focuses you inward, and on all of your problems, whereas possibility allows you to focus outward on things you can affect and things you can shift. So when you take a look at what Dane Cook was saying about everybody on your phone, that would never ask you, Hey, how can I help you, they need to be out of your life. And this is what he is an example of blunt instruments. This is absolutely an example of that, you know, your inner circle people, if they’re not building you up, they’re pulling you down, you know, it’s like black or white, right? And he’s like, you know, it doesn’t mean that those kinds of people are like, we might say, hey, you know, I’ll get your tickets on my show, you give me tickets from your show exactly. But you can limit those, especially if it’s family, right, you can limit those conversations to five minutes each.
At the same time, you’re using that blunt instrument, to push that entire bad vibe out of your life to make a shift. This could even be in the example of a blunt instrument, maybe you’ve tried surgical precision for so long on your relationship, as I was talking earlier, to go like one tiny little thing, and you know what, just like a medical example that I gave, sometimes those procedures don’t do what they’re supposed to do. And then you try another one, that’s, that’s not as risky. Right? So you can see if that’ll, that’ll help and affect things. And then you try a third and a fourth, I’m telling you, by the time you get to that point, sometimes it’s just you gotta use a blunt instrument, you have to say, I need this done. In order for me to continue with you, I need this done. There’s something that I need here, and this is what I’m observing. And sometimes that blunt instrument is just simply moving on. Regardless of fear, regardless of everything else, that blunt instrument is making that dynamic shift in your life, and who you could potentially be coupled with. Or maybe who you are coupled with. When you take a look at those things, and you look through your phone, like Dane Cook was saying, see who’s around because that blunt instrument may be the dynamic shift that you need for that new purpose, that new direction, that new exhilarates, that new vibrance that you’ve been looking for, for your life.
Business, I already talked about that. There are ways to do that, too, because it might be restructuring entire departments. That can be the case, maybe it’s moving things around, or maybe you’re moving one department over or underneath another department because you’re combining efforts for more efficiency. Now it’s different, maybe you’re it’s time to hire and these are blunt instruments, maybe it’s time to hire somebody who can oversee an entire division. There are a lot of ways to do that, that are very, very impactful. Now those are things that are the blunt instruments, I’m telling you the difference between the choice between a surgical precision and a blunt instrument is emotional most of the time it absolutely is. Because the surgical precision. You need to be of the mindset that that’s going to be the thing that’s going to fix it, period, period. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time and it’s called a half measure. If you can do a full measure with surgical precision, awesome. When that doesn’t work, you might want to consider the blunt instrument or if it’s a critical scenario, something that you absolutely need to get done fast, because there are impending consequences. There’s a lot of risk involved. That’s when the blunt instrument is your best possible choice. These two ways you can create shifts in your life when you have to take action to change whatever you need to change.
GO ALL IN.