That’s the point of this post – and I’ll get back to that in a minute…

I have been reading Common Wealth, economist Jeffrey Sach’s take on how to make the world a better place. This morning, I came across his chapter on the economic proposition justifying social welfare – how increased taxation with a corresponding increase in social services can be fiscally responsible and yield quantifiable social benefits. While his argument was quite one-sided – after all, it’s his book – it got me thinking how we can use a bit of mathematics to make better decisions. Sachs was asking this sort of question:

If you were in government and thought that you had too much money, would you cut taxes or increase social welfare?

But I was thinking about my everyday decisions.

In the next few months, I have a number of flights scheduled though not yet booked. For example, I am due to fly from Sydney to Brisbane sometime after 7pm on the evening of 28 January. That route is mainly serviced by Qantas and Virgin Blue at that time. So how does one decide which flight to take?

At first glance, Virgin Blue is the easy winner. Virgin Blue’s DJ999 is available at $79 fare while Qantas comes closest with the QF556 is $98. That’s $19 difference.

But when you look closer at the Virgin Blue fare, you find that $79 doesn’t give you any check-in luggage. If you want to check-in luggage, that will be an extra $10 for a total of $89. So we’re down to just $9 difference.

Virgin Blue still gives better deal.

What if we take into account the quality of the experience?

HTC HD2 - my new phone

That’s hard to do, but let’s try. Having flown this route dozens of times, I find the 90 minutes passes very quickly. I have my wonderful noise cancelling headphones and my HD2 to entertain me, and magazines to catch up upon. However, Qantas offers refreshments – Virgin Blue does not. If you’re the sort of person who likes to have a snack onboard, lashing out the extra $9 to fly Qantas seems a really good deal – and I love that fancy fruit juice that they have.

So this is where some judgment is required. If you value the muchies on board, the meal might be worth $10 or so. But even if you don’t value them much, having a drink and some snacks is probably still worth $5 or so. Of course, if you’re just going to sit down and sleep or something, maybe it’s really worth nothing to you.

After all, this is public transport, isn’t it – just a fancy type of bus with acceleration that can really blow your hair back, right?

It is nicer to fly Qantas though. Don’t get me wrong Sir Richard, Virgin Blue is great. But Virgin Blue is clearly a ‘cut price’ or low cost operator in this field and the service standards that you get from Qantas are generally at least a little bit (and often quite a bit) higher. How much is that worth? For a 90 minute flight, for me it’s not really worth too much – but it is worth at least $5.

Does that change things?

Well, we started with the Virgin at $79 and Qantas at $98. If you want to take some luggage, it’s $89/$98. With the deemed value of the food ($5) and general service experience ($5), Qantas has a better value proposition, remaining at just $98 with Virgin’s effective cost at least $99… unless you are just going with carry-on luggage, in which case Virgin Blue still has a $9 advantage.

So fly Qantas when you have luggage and Virgin Blue when you don’t?

Not so fast. What about Frequent Flyer Points? Now I don’t know the Virgin system too well – I tried to sign up for it five years ago but after they lost my application, I never got around to applying again. But I do have a (very) active Qantas Frequent Flyer account. If you have a Velocity account, let me know how much the points are worth and I’ll think about updating this.

That same flight on Qantas would yield 1000 Frequent Flyer points.

Good to know, but how much are they worth?

I’m glad you asked. And the simple answer is, “it depends… but at least $8.50, and probably more like $13.80 for me.” (I’ll explain the messy details at the end of the post)

And THAT in turn brings the effective cost of the Qantas flight down by at least $8.50.
So we have the following value propositions:

Virgin Blue: $79 (without luggage, without food, with cheaper service experience)
Virgin Blue: $99 (with luggage, allowing for the food and service experience deficit)

Qantas: $84.20 (with luggage)

So, Qantas is only $5 more, even if you don’t check-in luggage!!!

For me, the extra comfort and convenience of having some food on the flight and traveling in just a little bit of extra comfort is clearly worth an extra $5.20. And if I’m checking luggage, it’s actually about enough cash saving to cover my Irish Nut Creme from Gloria Jean’s at the departure gate…

Most of the time we don’t make rational decisions.

Much of the time we can’t – there’s too little information and too much uncertainty. But if we can start to use some numbers, we can make the comparisons simpler, less subjective, and give us more of what we want, more often.

For example, I want my son to have the best education – but it’s pretty tough to say where he’ll even be attending school, never mind where the best place for him to attend might be, nor what schools will even be like when he is due to start high school in 2023! Emotionally, I’d love for him to go to State High like I did – I think he’d enjoy being a fourth generation State High student. Yet I put him on the waiting list for a private school earlier today.

On one level, our decisions reflect our values. For some people, all that matters is price. But someone with strong brand loyalty to Virgin Blue might never even consider flying Qantas – no matter what the price. Someone who vehemently opposed private schools might never even consider their child attending one. Most of us have these biases but values are easily left tacit and their impact overlooked and unacknowledged.

Many of our decisions are irrational.
So often, we do things that won’t get us the best outcome, no matter what our values, no matter what our intentions. It’s easy to see why – there’s just so much information that our brain can’t process it all at once. But if you can break down a complex problem into the different components, you might just have a chance to put your own price on something that has no price… and give yourself a chance to make better decisions.

If you’re interested, we can look at the value of those frequent flyer points…

It’s kinda complicated because you need to deal all the different uses that you might have for the points that you generate. But for me, I’m most likely to use points to fly either between Shanghai and Brisbane or Brisbane and Sydney. You’d think that they’d be worth the same either way, but they’re not.

Let’s start with the same Sydney to Brisbane flight. Booking it through points will cost 8000 points plus about $11 in taxes. If we compare that to the Qantas flight, that gives $98-$11=$87 for 8000 points, or $0.01875/point or 92 points/dollar. If you were after the worst value use of those points, you would have to compare that points flight against a luggage-free Virgin Blue flight. There, it’s just $79-$11=$68 for 8000 points, or $0.0085/point or 118 points/dollar. Hence, at a minimum those 1000 points are worth $0.0085*1000 or $8.50.

Using points to fly between Shanghai and Brisbane will cost you 72,000 points – plus about $200 in taxes. Paying cash for the same flight might cost around $1200 (including taxes). Based on those figures, it’s pretty easy to work out that 72,000 points is worth about $1000. At that rate, you’re looking at points being worth $0.0138/point or 72 points/dollar, making 1000 points worth $13.80.

Thus, the value of your points will vary by at least 62% depending on how you use them!

I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How?”

Rather than trying to reassure him that he wasn’t, or denying that he was a failure, I got curious and wondered how he could feel a failure after so much ’success’. And sure enough, the answers were clear too. For him,

“The goal of movie-making is to star in a film where your performance drives the film, and the film is either a soaring critical or commercial success, and I never had that.”

And although he starred in the 1990 action film The Hunt for Red October, which made more than $200m, it was successful because it was based on a popular Tom Clancy novel – not because of his performance.

Damn, people can be hard on themselves!

He feels that his career is a failure not because it “is” – after all, how can we really define whether someone’s career is a success or a failure? But he feels that is is a failure because of how he defines success.

What do you want most? What drives you?

Success?

Happiness?

Joy?

Achievement?

Love?

Money?

Each of us have many things that drive us. Some things that pull us forward – that we want to experience something. And maybe there are other things that we desperately want to avoid.

We all want to experience different things. And that’s great – that’s one of the things that drives the rich and diverse world in which we live. Yet how well are we setting ourselves up to feel good? There are so many ways that we can find to feel bad. And there are so many things in the world today about which we could feel bad if we wanted.

Feelings – good and bad – are a process. We have a mechanism for feel happy or sad, excited or anxious, loving or angry. If you can get to know how you feel the way that you do, you can find yourself back in the driver’s seat.

What could happen if you could feel better more and more often?

When I was small, I wanted a Ferrari Testarossa. You see, I have red hair (well at least it was when I was younger!); when I found out that “Testarossa” literally means “red head”, I decided in the unequivocal way children can, that it was my dream car.

Then I saw one… and I thought, “hmmm… that’s a pretty ugly car” – but it was my publicly stated “dream car” so I held onto the dream.

Shortly after starting my first company, I sat in a Ferrari for the first time. It was in a dealership in Brisbane and I was so excited – finally, I was going to get what I had always wanted. As I sat myself into that hard seat of fine Italian leather, it felt fantastic… For a moment… until I realized, “It’s just a car.”

And it hit me like a cement truck falling at terminal velocity. It wasn’t the car that I wanted. It was the concept that the car represented. It was the feeling that I thought the car would give me. Pursuing the car was great in that it took me closer towards things that I really did want (excellence, achievement, impact, joy, passion…). But it wasn’t about the car.

Whenever I’m getting too attached to a goal – whether it’s doing another degree, making more money or even buying a new mobile phone – I’m lucky to have my wife ask me, “What do you want that for?”

What will it give you?

What will that allow you to experience?

And I find that there’s usually something even more important that lies behind the surface desire. Sometimes what we think we want is the best way to get what we really want; sometimes it’s not…

I wanted to feel strong and able to defend myself. I could have meditated and transcended my insecurities. Instead, I did a black belt. Good plan – but it was just the beginning. I wanted to feel confident running a business so I did an MBA. I’m not sure that was such a good plan

The feelings of what you really want are the destinations… the surface desires are just vehicles for getting there. Make sure you get to the destination by a vehicle that suits you rather than just one that seems to work for you.

Perhaps this is particularly significant for me since my wife is pregnant with our first child. If I don’t live my life true to my heart – giving it my all, pursuing with passion the object of my heart’s desires – what sort of role model will I be for my son? What sort of husband will I be if I am not living with the integrity of being my own man?

And when you can live in the present with passion and purpose, opportunities show up that you could never have prepared or planned for… when you can put your cup of water back into the ocean, you can work with the force of the ocean.

Yet she had a problem.

Although all that side was yellow, the other edges weren’t in the right place. She had different colours on the adjacent sides. And that meant one thing: The side that was “solved” wasn’t really solved.

And to solve her problem, she would need to rearrange the whole of that side so that the appearance of order would necessarily be replaced with disorder – temporarily if she got it right!

As tempting as it is to hold onto something that is almost good enough, sometimes you need to let go of what you have that isn’t quite right in order to get what you really want.

Chen-Bo Zhong (from the University of Toronto) decided to find out by asking whether people would lie and screw someone over. Some did and some didn’t.

If they were encouraged to “make decisions based on gut feelings,” they would rip off the other person by lying just 27% of the time.

But if they were encouraged to “think rationally” they would screw them over 69% of the time!

The effect was so strong that they concluded, “Deliberative processes can license morally questionnable behaviors by focusing on tangible monetary outcomes and reducing emotional influence.”

That’s why it’s important to make moral, ethical and strategic decisions without relying upon the numbers. Sure, use the numbers. Check the downside. Make sure you can afford it if everything goes wrong. But ultimately we make better decisions – at least morally better decisions – when we allow our ‘inner goodness’ to shine through.

For me the warning is that the next time I’m making a decision, don’t just rely on the numbers… You gotta listen to your heart.

Sorry Spock.

It’s always like that though. There is so much that we can say, yet we have very limited attention spans (ala my friend Warwick’s book, The One Minute Presenter)… effective communication is so often more about deletion than it is about creation.

When we communicate with people that we care about, we need to delete information. We can’t tell them everything. So we generalize. We delete. Sometimes we even (innocently?) distort what happens and what is going on.

One of the participants on my current Personal Transformation workshop shared how she doesn’t tell her parents what she is doing because she fears that they wouldn’t understand and instead would just worry about her. But we all do it.

We change our focus on the basis of many things. Mostly these are unconscious. But what happens when you can take personal responsibility for the spotlight of your attention is amazing.

It’s genius.

It was while I was at university, and while I found that I could work hard enough to get some of my best academic results, I felt drained. Not that I couldn’t think – but just that I could only think within the rules. I couldn’t look beyond the rules, frameworks and paradigms that were presented to me, and I certainly couldn’t explore the connections between systems. So I went back to enjoying dreams.

Still, it was a worthwhile experiment!

George Bush was talented. He did a great job when it counted. He was ambitious. And he got lucky.

But how does that equate to being part of a ‘major family’?
How easy is it to forget that he has just done what was in front of him to do?

Greatness is built by little decisions. In his case, the decision to serve in WWII rather than going straight to college. The decision to enter the oil business. The decision to move his company from Midland, Texas to Houston. The decision to travel 400,000km attending 850 events in 1979 in support of his campaign to become President. The decision to serve under the man who had just beaten him, Ronald Reagan, as Vice-President.

His father did help. He had certain advantages. He got lucky. But one of the great lessons that stands waiting for us to learn here is that there is nothing bigger than the little things.

There are no ‘major families’ except those that our perceptions project. Those ‘major families’ become major through the efforts of one person being built upon by succeeding generations, but which, at any time, can be undone by the work of the latest generation. Or rebuilt by the one following them.

Every generation is a chance to reclaim our birthright – or to create one for our children.

In Vanilla Sky, when David (Tom Cruise) got into Julie’s (Cameron Diaz) car, he lost the love of his life, Sofia (Penelope Cruz)… especially when Julie to kill him. It was a little decision – a tiny little decision – but, as David realizes in the final moments: Little things… there’s nothing bigger, is there?

There have been so many “little” things in my life. The second time I came to China, I almost didn’t come – I was in London and booked on the Wednesday flight to return directly to Australia until about 6:30pm Tuesday night!

… And I only came across China NLP because I happened to meet the right person at a Toastmasters meeting, and happened to have mentioned that I was interested in NLP – and it was that introduction that led me to return here six months later, and ultimately to live in Shanghai.

It’s the little things that give us the most juice and energy too. Whether it’s in love, in travels, or in our work, so we can find that it is the little things that cause us stress or give us joy.

But I know that you have your own examples. So the question that I ponder now is just this:

How can we make the most of those little things, now?

Sometimes we are happy; sometimes we are excited; sometimes we are not so resourceful – some of us might even be a bit grumpy from time to time. That state – our subjective emotional condition – opens and closes possibilities. It’s like a pair of sunglasses that tints the way we see the world.

And for colour blind people like me, those filters change what we can see at all.

Greg reminded me how important it is that we can get back into our core state of being.

It’s about alignment. We can be happier and more fulfilled when we deliberately design our experiences and our lives so that we can move towards that core state consistently.