Every goal requires effort, which we must also sustain over time. Here are some strategies that have worked for me to reinforce enthusiasm and keep me active:

• Betting on small strides in my life plan
• Honestly reevaluating my goals; it increases motivation
• Finding where I’ve taken detours from my objectives—this allows me to anticipate and correct myself
• Celebrating efforts I’ve made and lifting my spirits to avoid contaminated emotional states
• Giving myself proportional rewards
• Getting a good night’s sleep and plenty of rest
• Separating the urgent from the important, the necessary, and the priority, based on my convictions
• Focusing on the benefits of doing, not on its difficulties
• Having fun, stimulating myself through activities that guide me toward inspiration
• Attacking first what I don’t like to do in the day
• Surrounding myself with content, information, and people that inspire me
• Seeking to be healthy by eating a balanced diet, exercising, and so on
• Avoiding being all-encompassing. Not dividing my internal energy and focus and not imposing on myself things that, instead of bringing me closer to my life’s purpose, distract me and consume my energies
• Constantly challenging myself to improve in a specific area
• Eliminating as many distractions that limit my focus and momentum as possible—that is, anything that isn’t a significant addition to my life
• Practicing humility in asking for help and team building
• Setting schedules and learning that maintaining order is not the war I might imagine. There’s so much pleasure in moving forward.

Beyond being moved to act by our emotions, we need goals. In other words, we need to get our motivation from the small wins that help us overcome the expected failure. And then we must gain the confidence to keep going and reach a balanced state without falling into a hard line that drives us to the frustration of “I do it because I do it.”

In an open discussion, organized by the Economic Club of Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, revealed that one of the formulas he used to improve his productivity was to sleep more and better.³ This digital business pioneer mentioned that rest allowed him to make better decisions and that most of his work consisted of executing this action appropriately.

SOMETIMES THE FEAR OF SUCCESS PREVENTS ME FROM SLEEPING.

While some “opinion leaders” make fun of people who “sleep too much,” there are those of us who enjoy more and better productive hours when we sleep well and, like Bezos, believe that making good decisions is our most important daily task.

THE DECISION RECIPE

Life is a series of endless decisions. Some of them sneak in unnoticed but can have an impact on the rest of our days. If you look up how many decisions we make in a day, you’ll find that it’s about forty per minute. Obviously, any movement involves a small decision, but many of these are made almost automatically. Regardless of how accurate that number is, some of these decisions have consequences that will haunt us for years, some for the rest of our lives. Whom did I marry? Why didn’t I emigrate? Why did I partner with that person? Why was I such a coward?

When we do self-awareness exercises, such as those in Step One, we have to understand the reason behind many of the decisions that plague us. When we know what we’re really after, we get why we lean one way or the other.

Given that decisions can play such a determining role in our lives, we need to analyze how we arrive at them and be willing to unlearn old habits. Many of our mistakes are due to the unconscious repetition of mental patterns that we must strive to abandon. Start with the intention of introducing a new way of looking at the facts, but aim to develop new habits as a result.

Like in a cooking recipe, decision-making is made up of a list of ingredients, procedures, techniques, and equipment, but no matter how much you control the method, the outcome will be influenced by the quality of the ingredients, external conditions, and the chef’s previous knowledge. We will be able to fix some of these elements, others will need to be offset, and then there will be those that we must accept as part of the process.

Each day begins with the transcendent decision to close your eyes again or to get up and live your day. I know some of these choices may not be made with complete freedom, but they are still decisions. In my book, Las trampas del miedo, I mention that the brain is lazy. Spoiler alert: This has nothing to do with your intelligence. The brain looks for ways to process information using as little energy as possible, so it resorts to shortcuts and automations to make simple decisions, like choosing the best route from home to work. The problem is that these same mental patterns are activated when the time comes to make important decisions that can redefine the course of your life.

Decision-making is a complex process that involves several factors: Some are primary and within your control while others are secondary and come from the environment, which cannot be changed immediately. However, using a culinary analogy, if you don’t have the right ingredients, it doesn’t matter how precise you are with the process. Likewise, even if you use the finest ingredients, they will lose all their attributes if you don’t follow the right steps. Assuming this is clear, let’s revisit the cooking example to create something perfect.

CONDEMN YOURSELF TO THE TRIUMPH OF YOUR PASSIONS.

The ingredients are basically what you bring to the table to make decisions. If you use bad sources to inform yourself, you’ll get results that are very different from what you expected. Recently, millions of people feel more comfortable with what they read on an anonymous social media account than with what a professional journalist has written in an independent publication. The same goes for individual appraisals: Some will readily eat up what they’ve prepared with gossip and entanglements, hoping that it will nourish them. Statistical manipulation and the surgical use of out-of-context situations raise clouds of dust that obscure the glass through which our perception of reality is filtered. And no matter how hard we try, it will remain just that: a perception.

Finding the right ingredients has a lot to do with where we look for them. Another key aspect involves the questions we ask ourselves: We will get different answers depending on what we question. The quality of what we add to the pan will also be related to how we use language. Several studies have shown that when we ask the same question from different perspectives, the answers will vary.

The way we ask questions has as much impact on the answers as the truth itself. For example, after a medical checkup, if the doctor tells us that we need surgery but we “shouldn’t worry” because 90 percent of the patients leave the operating room without any problems, we will have a very different response than if the doctor tells us that we must “unfortunately” undergo a surgery where 10 percent of the patients may suffer complications. They are the same ingredients, but not the same recipe. Usually we will change our minds in a situation where we see a greater possibility of losing than winning, even though the chances are the same. Many studies reveal that we may think twice before jumping on opportunities, but we run away from risks at first sight.

I insist that the biggest problem with decision-making is the ingredients we add to the recipe. Many of them are stale because of our prejudices. It’s only natural for us to discard information that contradicts our core beliefs and to highlight what reaffirms them.

It’s like seasoning; although everyone has the same information, each of us adds more of what we like to the final recipe, even if it’s unnecessary.

PREPARE THE INGREDIENTS

The only way to know how much of each ingredient we should add to the decision recipe is to measure them. If you are an overcautious person, you know all your recipes will be a little too prudent. On the other hand, if you like to take risks, you may be a little too bold. That’s why it’s so important to find a stable recipe and identify what we’re adding too little or too much of, so that we can make up for it at the end of the day and reach a balanced decision.

ARE YOU LISTENING WITH ANYTHING OTHER THAN YOUR EARS?

Our brain works like a decision-making factory, but the outcomes depend on how we program these decisions. Here’s a simple tool that you can use in other concrete and abstract areas. This recipe is designed to help you decide between different options and to minimize the impact of the subjective dimension. Since it’s schematic and concrete, one of its key advantages is that it reveals the biases operating in the decision-making processor within you.

Before using the tool, I want you to be aware that the “best option” doesn’t exist. Each individual situation is different, and our searches are conditioned by the parameters we set according to our interests. This may seem obvious, but experience shows that many mistakes happen precisely because we make decisions based on criteria that aren’t optimal for our interests.