Coffee with Mike- Making Progress

My wife came home the other day with something she said I was going to like, and I said, "what is it?" She said, "a water bottle" and she handed it to me. I looked at it and I thought, 'now that is a nice thing' and I thought about how I could use it. She told me that she bought it because it has a filter in it that would take out all the stuff that comes out of tap water that might be bad for me, and so I could put it I could put tap water in here and not worry about it. It would save us from buying bottled water, we wouldn't be putting plastic into the earth, it would be a good thing all the way around. 

So I said, "OK, how does it open?" She showed me the button and I press that button, and boom! This is what I saw. I said to her, "It's a sippy cup. You bought me a sippy cup." She said, "No, I didn't. I bought you a water bottle." I said, "Well it looks just like what my grandsons have." She said, "Yeah my grandsons have something like that, but that doesn't mean you can't use one." I thought, 'well gosh, I don't know if I want to carry this around and drink out of it public. I mean, do I really need a sippy cup?' She said, "Just take it and use it. Don't be so sensitive about it you know. It's a good thing." So I I started taking it, and I started using it, and I've gotten over my reluctance to have a sippy cup and it's turned out to be a really good thing for me. 

I'm telling you about it because I think there are some things in my life that I have overlooked because they seem too simple; they seem too childish; they seem something that I don't need anymore, and so I let go of those things, or I never used those things anymore because they're just too elementary. I feel like there are times where we talked to people about their financial situations, we talked to people about their jobs or careers, benefits that they leave unused, and when we talk to them about it, some of them say that it's just something they really don't need, it's something that they used to need, but they don't need anymore, and they have let it go. When I take a look at what they're doing, and I take a look at what their values and their concerns are, I see it as a valuable tool. So how is that disconnect happening? 

Well, they've gotten used to seeing things in a certain way. Just like my wife, she saw a water bottle and I see a sippy cup, and it's just kind of, I don't need that. I think that happens when we look at different things that could be probable solutions to the problems we have, or probable answers to the questions that we have, and we're passing those things up because they look too obvious, it looks too simple. There's a guy who has a theorem out there, it's called Occam's Razor, and he basically said that if there is no evidence to the contrary, the simplest, most obvious answer is usually the right answer, is usually the best answer for you. 

So what we've done with our business in advising people is we help people develop a decision-making process that makes that most obvious answer to them obvious enough to where they say, "Oh yeah, that's what I want to do. That makes perfect sense, and they can make a decision that feels good, that they feel very confident about, that they know will work. So they go out and put it in practice. It's not like they got a recommendation, and someone else said, "hey, you ought to do this..." They go, "Oh, OK" and then they leave the office and they think about it for a little while, but they really haven't bought into it so they never do anything about it, and therefore their situation never improves. 

We don't want that to happen to our clients. We don't want them walking away with a recommendation we make because we think it's the best thing for them to do, because they probably will never implement. What we want is for you to take a look at things, let us help you take a look at things, and see the things you see, maybe just a little bit differently, where you recognize it- you go, "Oh, aha! That's what's the best thing for me. I can see it. I recognize it. It makes me feel good. I believe in it." When you leave the office, you're thinking about the decision you made, not the decision I made, and when you're thinking about the decision you made, you're much more likely to implement it. If you implement it, you're much more likely to make progress on what you want to make progress on. 

So it's really simple for us. It's kind of like a sippy cup, right? We just want to find out, we don't want to make things complicated. We don't want to make things where you have to just work and work and work, and just make it so complex. We want to get rid of all that. We want to get rid of the complications and the complexity, and just find the simple most obvious answer to you, that you'll go ahead and implement, and make progress on.
 
We built a whole website for you to go look at and we're adding things to it all the time to help make the simple, obvious answer apparent to you. So obvious to you that you're willing to make a decision, and you feel good about that decision. We've got a lot of things on that website, please go to that website check it out. Take a look at what we've got and see if there's anything that strikes you. Maybe it'll be obvious to you what you should be looking at and if it is, we know it's going to help. Thanks for listening.