MISTAKE vs DECISION

Have you ever known someone to claim something they did or said was a MISTAKE, when you know it was really a DECISION?  Yeah, me too...

Everybody makes mistakes. That’s not the issue.

The issue is what we call things after they happen.

Because sometimes, what we label a “mistake” wasn’t an accident.

It was a decision.

John Dave for some INTENTIONAL talk about:

• Mistake vs Decision 
• 10 Times Bad Decisions Get Labeled “Mistakes”
• Why We’d Rather Call It a Mistake
• 5 Public “Mistakes” That Were Really Decisions
• 5 Ways to Address Bad Decisions Honestly
• 5 Ways to Prevent Bad Decisions

You don’t grow from mistakes alone. You grow from owning decisions.

You’re going to have things happen to you. That’s life.

But you also have the chance to turn almost everything into something that works for you. That starts with honesty.

Call your mistakes - mistakes.
 Call your decisions - decisions.

And when one doesn’t go your way?

Don’t hide from it. Don’t soften it. Don’t send it off like a scapegoat.

Use it.

Because the moment you stop being the victim of your outcomes is the exact moment you become the beneficiary of your life.

Giddyup!!!

Email David@Otalks.com or OWD@Otalks.com for comments, questions, or ideas for content on an upcoming O'talkin' with Dave podcast.  Otalks.com

Check out OtalksOfficial on Instagram and TikTok

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to O'Talkin' with Dave. Coming to you from his fortress in Sin City, put your hands together for the pastor of positivity whose glass is always at least half full. Here's Dave.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Hey, how you doing out there? I hope you're great. I am top shelf, living the dream, all the other stuff that people say where they're in a good spot. And that's exactly where I am. I've noticed things r recently. It's um it's a nuance, and I want to talk about it because purple car theory, click, click, click. I'm I'm hearing it everywhere now. And it's when people are saying, I made a mistake. Hey, I made a mistake. It was just a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. When sometimes it wasn't a mistake, it was a decision. That's right. Everybody does make mistakes. Yeah. That's not the issue. The issue is when we call things and what we call things after they happen. All right, let that marinate a minute. Something happened. Maybe they were called on it or it came to light, and all of a sudden their decision was a mistake. Yeah. Because sometimes what we label as a mistake, it was not an accident at all. It was a decision. And how you label it determines everything that comes next. Okay, Dave, you're nitpicking here. Give me a minute. Give me a minute. Because people are doing things to you, people you love, places you work for, I don't know, different people, places, and things on purpose. And if they get called on it, or if it doesn't work out, or whatever the things after to save face, ah, it was just a mistake. That's it. Growth mistakes, yeah. Excuses decisions. Ownership. I made a bad decision. Or avoidance. What are you doing? Yeah, you're avoiding your responsibility. And then we can go back to the whole victim versus beneficiary. Right. Yeah. This would be this would be more of an advocate or villain type scenario. So let's be clear. A mistake is unintentional. Oops. It can be something very small or something very large. You didn't see it coming. You missed something. Something got by you. It's honest. Sometimes there are mistakes, sometimes are honest mistakes. However, a mistake is unintentional, where decisions, they're chosen. You saw the options and you picked one. You picked one. I'll do that one. It's a choice. Now here's where it gets interesting, though. When a decision goes sideways, ah, it's downgradable. I'm going to downgrade that to a mistake. Why? Because mistakes happen to us. Decisions, those are on us. Yeah. The whole victim thing? Mm-mm-mm. Yeah. And that's where the victim versus beneficiary line gets drawn. Victim says, this happened to me. Poor pitiful me. Why do things always happen to me? Where the beneficiary says, all right, gotcha. The whole two versus four, the beneficiary goes four, meaning, what can I get from this? Now I know I've said this over and over. It comes into a lot of O talks because it's so important. The thing is, with this subtle difference versus mistake versus decision, ownership is key. Same event, different ownership. So let's just talk about it. Just some a few things, a few times when bad decisions get labeled as mistakes. Okay, maybe you ignored the red flags in a relationship. Happened to you?

unknown 4:21

Huh?

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Yeah, I ignored red flags in a 44-year relationship. Yeah. Bad decision. Hey, if it happens once, maybe it's a mistake. If it happens constantly, I think you've uh made a decision there. That's on you. Or spending money you knew you shouldn't. Mm-mm-mm. That's a bad decision. My Amazon app uh is a bad decision. Many times. Yeah, it's a bad decision, but it's a mistake. Ah, I shouldn't have done that. Ah, I hit I hit 18 boat oars instead of one. I don't know what happened. Avoiding a conversation that needs to happen. I just ran out of time. Oh, I've got just got so much going on. Those are excuses. That's why it can be a mistake. No, it's a bad decision to put that off. Staying comfortable instead of moving on. It was a mistake. No, it was a decision. You could have moved on. Not preparing and just hoping it works out. Hello. Hello, my college career. That was a bad decision. It wasn't a mistake that I went in and uh they were passing out the test papers. That from the last session I cut class and missed a test. That was kind of a mistake, but it was definitely a bad decision to cut class on that particular time. Everything worked out, though. Look at me. Then uh not preparing. I've just covered that. Not preparing. I hope it works out. That happens a lot. I'm a test crammer. I cram. I cram well usually. However, in life, that's a little that's a little risky. And it is a decision to not prepare. How about uh this is a little of the red flag mentality, but trusting someone that your gut saying, mmm, I don't know. I don't know. I tell you, it's I take a lot more, I don't know if heed is the right word. I never thought about that. That's a weird word. I take um I think of a lot more of a person who has been hurt in the past if they don't trust me than if they just trust me no matter what. Because they're basing their decision to trust me off some tough times. However, they do, and I want to make sure they don't make a mistake. But I I consider that. But if you just trust everybody, I mean the the 15th time your identity gets stolen, maybe you should put a second layer of authentication on your stuff. Yeah, if you don't, that's a mistake. No, that's a bad decision. Right. Okay, waiting too long and losing the opportunity. It's a decision to wait. Procrastination is a decision. It's not a mistake. Choosing ease over discipline. That's kind of like the same thing with comfort versus making the move. Yeah, it's you decide that. Breaking your own standard and acting surprised by the result. I know better than this. You decide to do it, things go to hell in a handbasket, and you call it a mistake. No, it's a bad decision. So you get the point. You get the point. Yeah, Dave, we got the point like five examples ago. Still, I like to be thorough. Okay? These things aren't random, they are decisions. Some well thought out, some not well thought out. However, you had a choice and you chose that one. And when we call them mistakes, we're just quietly stepping back into a victim role. Oh no. Drama drama. Yeah. Then we love to find scapegoats. This isn't new. Scapegoats. The idea of a scapegoat, you know where it came from? An ancient practice. Most famously referenced in the Hebrew Bible, not King James Version, but the Hebrew Bible, where a goat symbolically carried away the sins of the people. You put the sins on the goat's back and patted it on the bottom and scared it into the wilderness, and all your sins went with them. A scapegoat. Did you know that? Well, no, you do. Man, I get stuck on those reels of baby goats, and uh, I'm in the bathroom just cackling. But anyway, we use language like it just didn't work out. It was just bad timing. Well, things changed. And those all those can be true, but the translation is we sent the the responsibility off into the wilderness. We made a bad decision. It wasn't a mistake, it wasn't happenstance. I don't believe in coincidences. You know, any coincidence, it's a result of a bad decision, or usually. Sometimes there are victims, and you know, things happen like that. But most of the time you can look at it, and you they usually they repeat themselves. And don't take my word for it. I mean, you know I back most of my stuff up with stats or research or whatever, but people take credit for success but blame external factors for it, for failure. They 70% of the time people blame an external factor when something doesn't go right. Homework or play. Homework or play. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I lost that tennis match because of the wind. The wind was horrible. Yeah, it was only blowing on me, not the other guy. Yeah, but I keep slicing my drive. It's gotta be a bad driver. Yeah, right. Yeah.

unknown 10:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

I didn't get that promotion because they don't like me. They don't like bald white guys with six-pack abs. They don't like that. Yeah, right. You you haven't prepared yourself well. People are two to three times more likely to justify a poor decision than admit it. I made a bad decision. Ugh, I was off my game. I shouldn't have done it. I knew better. No. They're three times more likely to say, I would have made it. It wasn't a bad decision. The timing was off. Or if I could just have had some help. Or they didn't support me, or they didn't give me what I needed when I needed. I told them. Sound familiar? But most decisions are made emotionally. There's some problem there. I'm gonna have a sip of Diet Mountain Dew. They're not a sponsor, but they could be. Most decisions are emotional. And then when it comes to the aftermath, we get very logical. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. And here is what happened. And usually it's somebody else's fault. 70% of the time. We get very specific when things go awry. That would be like a mistake is like stepping in a hole you didn't see. Okay? It's a mistake. A bad decision is seeing the hole, stepping in it anyway, because it's a shortcut. It's a shortcut. Both leave you stuck, but only one teaches you something. And that's if you own it. If you own it. So we'd rather call it a mistake. Why? And we've we've touched around it, but first of all, it pr it protects our identity. It does. It protects our identity. I'm not a bad, I'm not, I'm not stupid. If I say it was a mistake, I'm that victim. I'm not that intentional bad decision maker. So it protects our identity. So the next time we make a decision, he doesn't make bad bad decisions. Mistakes just happen to him. Also it reduces immediate consequences. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Hey, that was a mistake. That was a mistake. I didn't think that out. I just did this and I just did that. No, it was a bad decision. It keeps us likable in the moment because everybody makes mistakes, right? Yeah. Everybody has mistakes happen to them. So it keeps us likable in the meantime. And it avoids uncomfortable conversation. Hey, big things in my life. I made a mistake. I made a mistake. I thought I knew I was doing, I was in over my head. And it could be a bad decision. That was a mistake. However, it avoids an uncomfortable conversation. It also lets us know where we move the next move we take without digging deeper. I can see how people react when I say I made a mistake. And then I can know which way to go. Can I play on sympathy? Do I realize I'm not fooling anybody? And then my next step is better. It gives me time. Gives me a little window of opportunity. So it's it's that's why we'd rather call it a mistake. But here's the catch. If you call a decision a mistake, you never fix your decision-making process. Most people that call it a mistake, they believe it. So they don't fix what's going on up here that's making all these bad decisions, and then you just repeat it. And it's tough. It's tough on the person doing that, but it's tough to watch. You got your friends that are doing the same thing over and over. Come on, man, it's because they think they're just unlucky. They think accidents happen to them. They're prone to that. When really they're just making bad decisions. And it shows up everywhere. Home, work, or play. Like at home, you forget something important. That's a mistake. If you don't prioritize a relationship or something leading up to it, that's a decision. Subtle differences. At work, if you miss some of the details or a detail in a in a presentation or in a a quote or in a whatever it is, you miss a detail, okay, that's a mistake. But if you cut corners and wait till the last minute and phone it in or copy-paste or use use uh AI and don't thoroughly go over it, no, that's a decision. And then play. You know, to try something, to just try something and fail. Okay. All right, that's a mistake. But repeating what you you know doesn't work, you know, I'm just gonna hit this, I'm just gonna hit it hard every time, and eventually I'm gonna get one in the fairway. Well, that's a decision you make. That's a decision you make. So this is where two versus four shows up in real time. We go that sometimes, just to go back over, you can watch it four or two. Um, you can watch that O talk, but it's the whole thing around some things we feel like happen to us, but really they happen for us because it prepares us for something else. So, along that methodology or philosophy, victim mindset is this happened to me. Beneficiary mindset is what's this doing for me? And that's also very applicable when you talk about a mistake versus a decision. So let's talk about five public mistakes that were really decisions. Let's not pretend it only happens at the at the personal level. Remember Watergate? Richard Nixon. I remember I was a big fan of G. Gordon Liddy, not necessarily all of his politics or all of his stuff that he did, but his his autobiography, Will, is fantastic. And I I enjoyed his I enjoyed his talk radio show there for a while. But the Watergate scandal? No, that wasn't a slip. It wasn't a mistake. It was a series of calculated decisions planned far in advance. Not a mistake. The Enron scandal. Y'all remember that? I'm dating myself there. Errors. They say they're errors, accounting errors, and all sorts of errors were made. No, no. They were intentional choices all along the way. I was in California in 2008 and I was about to buy a house. Thankfully, I didn't. I made a good decision, but the financial crisis hit in 2008, and risks were everywhere. People were buying houses, you know, interest only, variable interest rates. All those decisions, they were labeled as unforeseen mistakes. No. It's bad financial decisions. Yeah. Remember BP had that deep water horizon spill? It was uncovered. They knew every bit of it. It wasn't a disaster. It wasn't just a natural disaster or mistake. No. The known risks were ignored. They made the decision to ignore them. And then the whole I I was that was very close to this one because I had friends that were tied to it. Not legally, but the whole Volkswagen emission scandal. Yeah. They engineered the outcomes. They cooked the books. And they said, oh, we just made it a clerical error. We just made them a no, no, no. It's not accidents. You did it on purpose to achieve an outcome. Big stage, small stage, same human tendencies.

unknown 18:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

I remember in my old neighborhood, I would blow the leaves out of my driveway. Okay, well, they blew right across the cul-de-sac in Kevin's driveway. I'd like to say that was a mistake. Well, the wind's just blowing. Yeah, I can't control the wind. It was a decision to do that. And about the 15th time he called me on it. Wasn't a mistake. It was a decision. So they're everywhere. Own it. And that's helps with the resolution. But I don't know jump to the end. So there's a the pivoting to how victim and beneficiary ties into this. When you own a bad decision, something very powerful happens. You move from this happened to me to this is happening for me. Repeated theme over and over. Not in a fluffy pretend everything is great, altruistic way. No, it's it's grounded in a useful way. Because once it's for you, it has value. It's a teachable moment. It sharpens and gets more specific and then redirects you. When you own it, it was not a mistake. It was a bad decision. So let's talk about some ways to address bad decisions honestly. Say it plainly. That was a bad decision. Ah, many. I could share, I could probably rattle off 20 bad decisions I have made. Yes, I may have called them mistakes at a time, and I may have used that scapegoat mentality. However, I learned that it was a bad decision, and I call them that. Then you've got to identify what you ignored. Not just what happened, but what did you ignore that caused that to happen? Maybe it's some conversations or some opportunities to correct the record or see something coming in a conflict between friends or conflict between whoever. And you saw that and you let it go, and then something ended up blowing up. You could have diffused that bomb. Don't look at the bomb, look at what happened going up to it. That'll help you with your decision making. And then accept the consequences without deflection. Remember the stat that 70% of the time people blame outside forces. They'll do that. Look at what you did. What involvement did you have? Holy you. Holy cow. But holy you in that, you know, if I'd have reacted differently, it could have had a different outcome. I'm not saying take all the blame, but take the part that belongs to you without deflecting. And then extract the lesson immediately. This is that beneficiary/slash four mindset that you can pull that lesson. Discard the drama, discard the emotion, own the lesson, and then adjust. I think you should adjust quickly and very visibly. Going through some stuff I've gone through in the last year, which I don't have it any tougher than anybody else, I would not trade my problems with anybody. I'll take what I got. I'm in a good spot. However, I took it, I changed my behavior both quickly and visibly. And when people would wonder, I'd just come hang out with me. You'll see. I'm in good, I'm in good shape. I could tell you that, but I'm a sales guy. Come watch me. Let's hang out. You'll see. And that's how you become a beneficiary of something. Own the lesson. Learn from it and adjust quickly. So how do we, Dave, how do we keep from, I'm not going to say preventing. But reducing these bad decisions, they're everywhere, man. They're everywhere. They're like pollen in the spring. My bad decisions are turned my car yellow from the pile up. Well, you've you've heard these before, but I'll give you five ways to reduce the occurrence of bad decisions. And the first one, you know what it is. Pause. Pause. Especially when emotion spikes. When you want something really badly, or you want to react really badly instead of respond. Pause. Let those emotions calm down a little bit. You gotta listen to your gut though. It's usually early and usually not wrong. Your gut something duck is quacking. Well, that's what ducks do, buddy. Oh, okay. Manage my expectations. But listen to your gut. And then ask, where's this lead to? What's gonna happen? If I don't act. In the conversation that I had earlier, if you'd have stopped this, diffuse this tension, diffuse this drama, that bomb might not have blown up. Think about when you see stuff and your gut's going off and you're saying, Mmm, if I don't do something, where is this leading? If I don't, if I keep down this road, what's gonna happen to me? And see, when you think through that, it's not a mistake. It's a bad decision, but you can control it. You have the opportunity to affect it. And then get to get input. When the stakes are high, man, reach out to somebody. You know somebody. You got that tight circle we talked about. You have people you trust. Maybe you confess I've made some bad decisions in the past, and usually here's where they come in. Here's what I got. What do you think? And listen. Listen. And then I think something that we lose sight of. Age helps with this with some people. Sometimes it doesn't, but decide your standards, your non-negotiables. This is your creed. This is your non-negotiables. It's your your beliefs, what you're willing to do, and what you're not willing to do. Decide those before you're tested. I I'd like to use the diet mentality on this. You know, if I'm doing carnivore, no bread, no potatoes. Nope. Oh, you're gonna bring all that stuff out? Okay, you know what? Don't even bring the bread. I don't want to see it. But if it comes out, I'm not gonna eat it. Don't bring it to the table. Okay, that's the way. Set your standards before you're tested. Because good decisions are not luck. They're built, they're practiced, they're repetitive, and they're they're lifesavers. But the truth that most people avoid is you don't grow from mistakes alone. No. Mistakes aren't lessons necessarily unless you learn from them. You grow from owning your decisions that turned into mistakes or turned into something bigger. Because mistakes teach awareness, yeah. But decisions, they teach responsibility. And responsibility is where the power is. It is. So you're gonna leave, you know, you're gonna leave this O talk thinking, oh yeah, who knows what. I think to some degree we still have that comfort of a mistake because it happens to everybody. Bad decisions makes people challenge your intellect or your resolve or what whatever. But things are gonna happen to you. That's just life. Things happen to you. But you also have the chance to turn almost everything into something that can work for you. That's and that whole thing starts with honesty, with yourself. With yourself. If you're victim, oh yeah, mistakes. Accidents always happen to me. Why me? Why me? Call your mistakes mistakes, but call your decisions decisions. And when one doesn't go your way, don't hide from it, don't soften it, don't put it on a goat and send it away. Use it. Use it. Because the moment you stop being the victim of your outcomes is the exact moment you become the beneficiary of your life. And it is a glorious thing. I hope this hits home. It's it's a very important thing to me. There's several levels here. If you'll admit it to yourself, bad decisions, mistakes, both, learn the lessons, learn the awareness, learn all of that. It's also very valuable in reading other people. Whether they're being vindictive toward you, they're scapegoating something else, they're blaming everything, everybody else for everything that happens to them. It's an eye-opener. So look for it. Purple car theory. Take your clicker out with you. I hope this helps. Hit me up, david at otalks.com or davidotalks.com. Go to o talks.com website. Look it up. Tells you where I am, what I'm doing. It doesn't tell you everything I'm doing, but mostly. But it tells you how to get a hold a halt of me. All right. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for hanging on. But most of all, thanks for O Talking with Dave. Gideon. Yahtzee.

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