#089 Beating Decision Fatigue with Dr. Shawn Watson

Connect with Dr Shawn Watson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-watson-40b59160/

Episode Transcript

The transcript is computer generated. There may be errors.

Sharad: Hi, everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 89. Today we are diving into something we all face.

Decision fatigue. Toll it takes on work, relationships, life is huge. But here's the good news. With small tweaks, we can beat it and make better decisions.To help us, we have Dr. Shawn Watson. He's not just a neuroscientist with a PhD and a published author.

He's also an entrepreneur who founded Senescent Life Sciences, a company tackling decision fatigue, head on.

His company was named one of Singapore's top 20 hottest startups in 2017, one of Asia's top four in nutrition, and Dr. Watson himself has been recognized as a top 10 healthcare professional under 40 in Singapore.

But before we dive in, a huge thank you to all of you. How to Live is now in the top 3 percent of all podcasts worldwide with listeners in 140 countries.

Thank you for your support. Let's get started. Here's Dr. Shawn Watson.

Dr. Shawn's Story of Interest in NeuroScienceMain Recording

Sharad: Hi, Shawn. Welcome to How to Live.

very much. It's great to have you on the show. And let's go to the beginning. What got you interested in neuroscience?

Shawn: So, my grandparents suffered from dementia, probably Alzheimer's, quite early on. So, I was quite interested in the brain from the beginning, and how it worked. And then, kind of like everybody who does pretty good in high school, I suppose, I thought I'd go to med school. but then I was lucky enough, I actually, in, in my undergrad, got introduced to a really passionate, neuroscientist, and I was able to volunteer in his, lab, and I was just hooked, from kind of the first time in that lab, just be able to go in and, there's no limitations on your imaginations, you just need to discover something new, and that's the freedom of academia in, in a big respect.

so then the passion started for the interest in trying to solve the problems with the brain. And then I would say it, it kept going in my career just for general fascination with how our brain works and how it kind of determines everything, who we are and what we do in life.

What Developed Dr. Shawn's Interest in the Area of Decision Fatigue?

Shawn:

Sharad: was under a Dutch scientist, and that was, the passionate guy who got me, got me into it.

Shawn: So a number of years ago, something came across my desk that was just fascinating. And it was this concept of decision fatigue.

So I had heard about it before, but more from a psychological perspective. Terms like ego depletion used to describe this, this

Sharad: like

Shawn: Yeah, so like the depletion of willpower over time. What got me fascinated though was from a physiological perspective, there was emerging evidence that we were starting to understand the biological underpinnings of this condition.

So moving away from psychology, to say this is actually what's changing in the brain, what's happening to cause this condition. And once we understand those mechanisms of actions or what we have a theory for at least, we can begin to test it. And then that's when I really got into decision fatigue about three or four years ago.

and it's just been a fascinating topic since then. And the more we dig into it, the more I realize that it's arguably the most important cognitive disability of our time. And that's, I don't say that lightly. It's, it's, it's a major condition.

What is Decision Fatigue? | Decision Fatigue vs Mental Fatigue

Sharad: Wow. So the science got you excited about it, and we're going to dig into the science. So maybe you can talk about decision fatigue and how it comes into play for people at work and life.

Shawn: this condition really probably was never an issue for our parents or our generation before.

Because the number of decisions people were making 10 or 15 years ago is something like hundreds of decisions a day. Now the estimate is something like 35, 000 decisions a day. Yeah, that's your average person. They're making that many decisions. and, I mean, simply put, our brain wasn't designed to handle that many decisions.

and this is the impetus for decision fatigue. So maybe it's important to separate it from mental fatigue. So mental fatigue we know and understand. This is when you feel tired. Right, and this is when we have a cup of coffee, a can of Red Bull or an energy drink too, to increase our wakefulness.

That's mental fatigue. It looks like decision fatigue is probably, to a large degree, mutually exclusive. And by definition, one way to think of decision fatigue is the deteriorating quality of our decisions.

I love that. And just

Sharad: I'll just make sure that people get that, we could be tired, but we could still be making good decisions.

Whereas decision fatigue is, even if you're very alert, because we made so many decisions we may not be making very good decisions. So it's nothing to do with being tired, it's to do with making too many decisions. And over a period of time, if you're making too many of these decisions, our quality of decisions go down.

Shawn: if you're making the quality of decisions go down. So for example, if you're in a very stressful situation, like a soldier in combat as an, as an extreme, you're gonna suffer from decision fatigue much quicker than the office worker,

Sharad: So let's talk about the implication of decision fatigue. I understand emotions can make it faster, but from an implication standpoint, what does that mean? Is it like by a certain time most of us have made all good decisions and then we're going to make bad decisions?

what are the implications of

Shawn: to make bad decisions.

What are the implications of this? my life in, a big respect is that I started to think of my, my decisions as, uh, finite consumable. I only had a certain number of days and I started to question, well, what was I spending my decisions on? so kind of right up your alley about, you know, priorities and purpose is sometimes we just get caught up by making so many decisions that,

the

quality decisions we're spending are not on the right things that align with our purpose or values.

So that was one thing that forced me to change my life and habits. for the implications of it, first I'll maybe start with what it feels like, just to describe it to people. quite

often what people say, and we've talked to, to hundreds or thousands of people over the past few years, is it's that, heaviness of your, your brain.

It's that fog that you get late in the afternoon or even late in the morning, um, when decisions become harder to make or you avoid decisions, right? It could be a foundation to procrastination. So leaving that email in your inbox, unread because you just don't want to make a decision. It's coming home from a long day of work and your spouse asks you where you want to eat and you say, I don't know, you make that decision, right?

it's that, that fogginess, it's the difficulty to enter that flow state, which is, you know, when we're super productive. It's that loss of confidence to some degree about our decisions because we're making more impulsive decisions. We're not relying on logic as much as just impulsiveness, just trying to get the decision done as quickly as we can.

From a neuroscientist perspective, the consequences of decision fatigue are, kind of, bucketed into two categories. The first category is what we call decision avoidance. It's when you delay decision making, that email in your inbox, or actually you freeze up entirely and your brain just stops making decisions.

You know, scrolling endlessly through Netflix just because you can't make a decision.

Sharad: explanatory thing.

We've all experienced that at night.

Shawn: Absolutely, right? Or looking at a menu or trying to order food for dinner. The second bucket is a bit more sinister, and I like to call it that.

It's what we call default decision making. So this is when your brain will actually kind of move it from a more conscious decision into an unconscious decision. And it will rely on heuristics, it will rely on a more impulsive decision making. Your brain will actually resort to decisions that it feels the most comfortable with, the most safe with.

and this presents itself in a range of different ways, from, doctors or physicians who suffer from decision fatigue, as the day progresses and decision fatigue worsens, they're more likely to prescribe antibiotics, because that's just the safer decision to make, right?

to judges in the judicial system, a seminal study was done showing you're far more likely to get parole in the morning than the afternoon. Why?

Because these judges had decision fatigue, and the default safe decision is actually to keep prisoners in prison rather than putting them into the community.

to, you know, soldiers in combat, very quickly, they can suffer from this type of condition. It could be that rates of friendly fire can go up. Because if they see somebody and they're unsure if they are a friend or a foe, they can make a default decision which could be an inappropriate decision. More recently, we, get a lot of interest from the finance industry.

Because when you talk about risk, right? And, people whose whole career depends on risk to reward and trying to judge that, like commodity traders or people who deal with insurance risk or whatnot, decision fatigue is a major factor. It's been clinically proven to impact decision making in the finance industry quite significantly.

and by the way, all this research is like a couple years old. This isn't something we've known about for a long time. This is all very, very recent work.

Sharad: fascinating. And I remember you were telling me about the banks that there were some people in the bank. If they just went home after lunch, the bank would be more profitable because the decision fatigue catches up.

And in that study, they made more bad decisions that would cost the banks. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Shawn: It's a bit, tongue in cheek, but the data can support it. It was a study in the UK with loan application officers. And, actually they showed that decision fatigue hit these people very quickly. So they suffer from it rapidly in the morning, even before lunch.

And they were the default safe decision in their situation was to reject loan applications. it was costing the bank, I think, half a million bucks, per branch, of lost revenue, of loans they should have accepted, but they actually denied.

So to some degree, like, at some point as a manager, sometimes the best decision may be to, to send your people home or, or give them different tasks because their decision making isn't as high quality.

when you're pitching to people, when you're trying to sell something, uh, not to, not to take it, you know, evil at all, but like it's also something you can leverage, right?

Cause if, if you're pitching in the morning, it's probably the time to pitch Versus if you're talking to that CEO late at night and you're trying to get them onto your program or product or, or whatnot, you probably want to make it a, a safer, comfortable decision as much as you can, right?

So the other side is to try to play this so you, you, it's a variable to add to when you talk to anybody in life. The time of day is a big determinant of decision fatigue.

Sharad: That's such an important point because the default thing, so if you're pitching to someone and they normally say no, no need. It's not a good idea to do it in the evening. Do it in the morning where they'll really consider your proposal. But it depends on the default mode, and I find that interesting.

It can flip on the other side as well. That sometimes the default mode could work for you, and that's a good time to leverage decision fatigue.

Shawn: Yeah, actually my strategy when we talk to big decision makers late at night, because you're right, a lot of business in Singapore is done late at night, is my objective or outcome.

We'll try not to make the decision maker make a decision then, but I'll try to get them to pass it off to their whatever underling, to, to discuss the next morning. Because that's a safe thing for them.

Sharad: to do.

Shawn: If I can just convince them to, you know, I love that hack.

Sharad: When you go in for these late nights where people are not making good decisions, think about the default decision the person needs to make.

And maybe leverage that.

Shawn: to make and maybe leverage that.

Decision fatigue, as we talked about, can be avoiding a decision, so even if you're, you know, you're pitching it and you can allow the other party to avoid the decision, but you can still pass it on, so you still can get a win, hopefully,

Important vs Unimportant Decisions in the Morning

Sharad: it? Nice. Maybe let's go into how people sometimes use their decisions in things that are not that important? quite often when you wake up, you might pick up your phone and wonder, Alright, should I comment on this social media post? Should I reply to this person?

Maybe some people go online shopping and look at what I should buy? So, in that little time, maybe it's half an hour on the internet, you may have used up like, I don't know, 40-50 percent of your decision. Do you see that kind of trend with people?

Shawn: Yeah, I mean, that was myself, for sure.

I would wake up in the morning, and before I turned on the lights, I'd, you know, pull out my phone and scroll through Reddit, right? And then I'd go out, have a cup of coffee, and before the house even got up, I probably did half an hour or 45 minutes on social media, right?

That's, that's probably thousands of decisions that I made. And what struck me is, the most time I could interact with my sons was actually after work. And at that point of time, I would be suffering from decision fatigue and my son would be like, hey, let's do X, Y, Z or whatnot.

And I would just default to doing the same game, playing the same blocks. And it got me thinking that, look, I'm giving my best decisions to, to the social media in the morning, right? I didn't have my priorities set for giving my best decisions to the thing that mattered most in my life so I actually started to try to use the morning to plan ahead for the day to say, okay, what am I going to do?

What are the decisions I'm going to make for that evening to do with my family? Because then the decisions are made and it's done. I don't need to worry about decision fatigue later because I've already made that decision.

Decision As a Currency To Be Spent Wisely!

Sharad: It's almost like a decision is like a currency. how can we use the currency in such a way that we give our decisions there versus areas which by default subconsciously we're giving to other places.

So I think that's a huge insight for folks to think about.

Shawn: I agree. And it's a finite resource and, and you have to choose where to spend it. And we are the sum of our decisions, right? either ones we make for ourselves or those that are made, made for us.

And, in fact, a study was done with like 440 some nurses and decision fatigue. And, they showed that this condition, especially chronically, led to lower job satisfaction, essentially, and, and lower quality of life measures.

So over long term, these nurses, who generally are pretty passionate about their, their profession, they got sadder and, and they liked their job less and their whole overall quality of life declined, probably in their situation because they were, you know, giving too many decisions to their work and not enough to their, their personal

Decision List Instead of To-Do List

Sharad: I love the other tool that you mentioned. Many people have to do lists. You talked about having these decision lists, that these are the five top decisions, or maybe, I don't know, the ten top decisions I need to take, so let me take them earlier.

So, what's that mechanism that you use?

Shawn: Yeah, that was I'll give credit to my colleague for that for sure. Michelle, who came up with this idea as she got more into decision fatigue with us, is a hyper performer, right? She's always trying to optimize her health and fitness and she's doing wonderful at it.

When she started to recognize decision fatigue in her own life and all these conversations we've been having, she said, no more to do list, it's a decision list.

When I get up in the morning, what are the most important decisions I have to make today? Prioritize them to purpose, meaning, and make sure it matches what we want in life, instead of that to do list. And that way, the highest quality decisions were spent on the right task or project or person.

The Science Behind Decision Fatigue And What Can We Do About It

Sharad: Maybe we dive a little bit into the science part of it for folks that are interested. So if you can describe two things. One is the science of how decision fatigue works.

And then we dig a little bit into this physiological versus psychological part of it and the implication

Shawn: the leading theory right now for what causes decision fatigue, essentially a disruption in communication between, between neurons. So in a connection between cells, we call that connection a synapse and what you have is an electrical signal that's turned into a chemical signal and that chemical signals turned back to an electrical signal.

That chemical signal is a neurotransmitter. So we've heard of things, serotonin, dopamine, there's probably hundreds of neurotransmitters in the brain. But the thing about those neurotransmitters is once they're released to cross this synapse, once that communication happens, they need to be cleared away such that that synapse resets and it can get a new message sent.

The leading theory for decision fatigue is that there's so many decisions that are happening that that reset of that synapse, the clearance of those neurotransmitters doesn't have time to occur. So you start to see a buildup of this in the synapse. We can call it waste

for lack of a better term. And as that waste builds, the signal, the fidelity or integrity of that connection begins to decline. And now add, if we think of every signal as a decision, and you're making 35, 000, that synapse itself just becomes fatigued and it isn't functioning, it isn't sending the signals that it needs to.

Sharad: So long story short, what's kind of the leading theory, it's probably a buildup of glutamate if there's any other neuroscience nerds listening, in the synapse, uh, which is causing this type of fatigue to occur. I understand it as a layman, it's like, if these packets are being sent between these two neurons, and there are lots that are going at a certain point of time, things get, things fall off and there's no time to clean it.

That's why you said that if you space out decisions, So is that how you're looking at ways in which you can avoid decision fatigue?

Shawn: So what can we do about it?

I mean, ultimately for recovery, there's only one mechanism that we know can make you completely recover from decision fatigue and that's sleep. So great studies have come out over the last number of years about this, you know, this cleaning cycle that happens as we sleep when everything kind of resets and you start fresh.

Certainly time or breaks between long sessions of decision making also helps. So if you look at the literature from the judges that I spoke about,it's even like the loan application officers. A break, from those intense periods of decision making, going out for lunch, you know, break at work, going for a walk, can alleviate some of the symptoms of decision fatigue, or at least to some degree reset the speed at which it's happening.

What's really interesting actually is, professional video gamers.when it comes to decisions, It's one of the few cohorts that every decision is recorded. Every click of the mouse, stroke of the key,

What these professional video gamers do is, you know, they'll be playing video games for 14 hours a day, if they actually go and have a nap. Like a 20 minute nap. Between matches, or when they're not playing, just to try to reset this.

They have a term for decision fatigue, they call it tilting. So they are very readily aware of this condition, and they don't take an energy drink, they don't drink any type of caffeination, um, they'll actually go for a quick cat nap to try to restore some of their decision capabilities before they go back and play.

But probably the most important thing is not necessarily adding something new to your life, it's taking away.

Taking away the Reddit in the morning, taking away decisions, or at least meaningless decisions

Sharad: And I think once you do like some sort of an audit, you can already look at, oh my god, 80 percent of my decisions are meaningless stuff that I'm doing.

Shawn: or the other alternative is, is like reducing the cognitive load of those decisions by maybe building habits. We've talked to a lot of fitness professionals and probably, you know, if you're suffering from decision fatigue, you get home from a long day to get up off the couch to go to the gym rather than just default to staying on that couch, uh, it's a very difficult decision to make.

There's probably a bigger mountain to climb, but if you can turn it into a habit, you're taking away the decisions just because you do it every day, your brain already knows what to do. Um, so building habits is another way to try to reduce that kind of cognitive load of decision making.

Sharad: Autopilot on unimportant things, whereas the important things then get your brain

Shawn: You

got it.

Long Term Solutions For Decision Fatigue

Sharad: So these are some short term things that people can already start doing as they're listening to you and make a difference to their life. What are some other long term ways of helping our brains make better decisions?

Shawn: First from a product perspective, is there a product out there that combats decision fatigue?

No, there's nothing out there in the market. Everything you see from energy drinks to nootropics is all mostly targeting mental fatigue, right? Are people working on it? Absolutely. We're working on it. This is something that we want to try to develop.

and the two, two mechanisms that I'm the biggest proponent of right now, is cognitive motor, dual tasking and mindfulness. so I'll break it apart. First is CMDT or dual tasking.

This is when you pair a specific cognitive load with a physical activity. So, a very simple example, it's doing Sudoku while you run on a treadmill. Okay, it's more sophisticated than that. But what this pair is there is a surge, if you remember, of brain games. Right? Like all these different apps and stuff to try to treat your brain like a muscle.

Most clinical work has shown that none of that has any difference. Yeah, unfortunately, I mean my

Sharad: I

Shawn: My mother still does it.

Sharad: still does it.

Shawn: But it looks like those types of brain games, you get better at the game. But it has no tangible benefit outside of that situation. Cognitive motor dual tasking, when you pair these types of activities or loads, cognitive loads, with physical activity, seems to provide lasting benefits for the brain long term.

We don't know the exact mechanism. There's a lot of theories for it. One that I particularly like is it helps to build the connections between, uh, different regions of our brain. So it makes, it develops, further develops the infrastructure of the brain. Which theoretically would also include decision fatigue.

So it would make the load of decisions less. So CMDT is something we're actively exploring with a number of partners, as a means to build resilience to this type of condition.

If you're here in Singapore, there's a, I think one of the only gyms in the world is cognitive motor, dual tasking Anna from, from sparks. Um, so you can just Google that.

Sharad: I'll just ask some dumb questions and let me know if that's right. I started doing this when I heard about it from Cal Newport. I was walking and I thought of problems in my head. I don't know if this falls into cognitive dual motor thing where I'm solving something in my head, I'm not looking at anything else, and I'm

doing physical exercise.

Is this in the thing or what are some examples of cognitive dual motor

Shawn: Sure. Sure.

Sharad: What can people do?

Shawn: Okay. So there's, it's a big range. There's sophisticated equipment that's used by the military to develop, you know, high tier skills and spatial recognition orientation and things like that.

But you are walking and solving a math problem. Would that have an effect? I would say yes. cause you're really starting to stress and, and play up parts of your brain that aren't normally used in, in walking, right? And it's all about building connections, I believe.

Does this include going on social media when you're exercising? Probably not.

I'll do like the children's games. Like you run through the alphabet and name animals, right? So as I'm exercising, I'll be like, you know, ant, bat, cat, and try to go through. So just random tasks I try to employ. and if you look at the data for it, what, what is out there, it's, it's pretty remarkable about the improvements you can see both cognitively and physically.

So it improves both domains, which is really, really fascinating. So yeah, one big takeaway I'd say for listeners is check out cognitive motor dual tasking or motor dual tasking. There's a few different names for it, but it's basically combining that cognitive load with physical tasks.

Sharad: Very clear. The second one I think you said was mindfulness.

Shawn: Yeah, mindfulness. I confess when I used to hear about mindfulness, I thought it was more in the realm of pseudoscience. I can definitely say I was wrong. If you look at the data out there, there is remarkable clinical evidence for the benefits of mindfulness.

So mindfulness isn't just about psychology, and I know we're going to touch on the difference between the two again.

it actually causes structural changes in your brain. From the amygdala to the hippocampus, stress, your resilience towards anxiety and stress, your capacity for learning and memory. These are all functional changes that happen from, from certain mindfulness protocols. So I've become a huge proponent of mindfulness over the last few years, provided it's done in, in kind of scientific methodology.

So using protocols that we know work. But in regards to decision fatigue, I can't say whether mindfulness builds resilience for decision fatigue, or, because we know it builds resilience for stress and anxiety. So maybe mindfulness helps with decision fatigue just because it lowers your base state of emotion.

So yes, I've, I've also become a big proponent of mindfulness. And what I love about it too is everybody can access this, right? There's, there's not, there's no fancy equipment. It's, you know, a short period of time. Anytime in the day, everybody can gain these advantages. and. You're going to tell me all the other benefits, I'm sure, from mindfulness as well.

Just beyond the functional, it's also, you know, emotional well being, spiritual well being. There's just a lot of ancillary benefits from bringing it into your life.

Impact of AI on Decision Fatigue

Sharad: I

think let's touch upon AI

Shawn: upon

Sharad: That's such a buzzword now. And a lot of people might think that, all right, let AI make my decisions and that's going to ease my decision fatigue. Does it work like that? How does AI interfere with that decision making? What is its impact on decision fatigue?

Shawn: So the AI question is really interesting.

And actually we were working with a big bank and we're talking about decision fatigue and how it affects, you know, their business. And one of the first comments that we had was, Hey, Shawn, we don't need to worry about that because we have AI now.

The reality is, I think AI is actually just going to worsen this condition.

Because if we think of, you know, tasks we have at work, and say you spend four or six hours doing something, you know, working on Excel or doing some research, and at the end of that, that period of time you make a decision. So a long period of time, you know, mundane research or Excel, and then you make one decision.

Now that AI is doing all of that for us, it's actually compressing everything down. So we're making more decisions faster. What we, you know, what used to be five days is now one day of decision making. So there's a lot of benefits from AI, but I think what people seem to forget is there's always a human component.

Always, right? We're not yet giving AI all of our decision making capacity. Hopefully we never do. but there's always a valuable human component and we're not thinking, and companies and people are not thinking about decision fatigue. With this, this new world that we're living in, of AI. That's

Sharad: such a

good point. And that reminds me of something, Oliver Berkman, a New York Times bestseller who we had in our podcast, had to say that being efficient does not take away from the busyness. So the more efficient you are, the more decisions you're making, there'll be many, many, many, many more decisions to make.

Right now, you say we make 30, 000 decisions a day.

Maybe two years from now, you say we make 300, 000 decisions a day. Something like that.

Shawn: This is a major consideration that I don't think people are actively thinking about because we're hitting the limitations of the human brain. This is what we're talking about today is the difference between physiology and psychology. We're hit. We're hitting a physiological limit.

of, of decisions that our brain can, can handle before something starts to change or go wrong, right? Um, there is a physical limit, and that's what we're, we're hitting, and AI is just making us kind of knock on that barrier even quicker.

Sharad: It's a direct result of changes in our society. Sure.

Shawn: want to read up more about decision fatigue and, and get some more information, where would you direct them? Which is a big barrier, because one, it's tough to find the articles.

Two, there's usually a paywall. So usually only researchers can get in without paying a boatload of money. So no, there's no real one place yet to find good information about decision fatigue.

but it's building this awareness through podcasts, so have a look at our other podcasts to learn more, more about it. because the exciting part about this is it, it is so new. This is something that we, we didn't research or talk about or consider 10 years

Sharad: podcast.

I know you're doing a podcast on decision making, which covers this. So we leave a link to that for folks who want to listen.

Shawn: with you? You mentioned you're working with big banks.

Sharad: How can people who want to improve for themselves or maybe for the organization, decision making, how can they work with

Shawn: Reach out to me on LinkedIn for sure. That's usually a great place to start. I will say it's a fascinating topic that affects, you know, we're talking to big banks, traders, we're talking to, to a range of different people. But what's unique about this condition is. As I alluded to, everybody suffers from it and it's not just banks and finance.

It's its athletes. So we do a lot of work with athletic performances as well. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me. I always love to have these discussions. Also, if there's other scientists out there who listen to the podcast, get in touch. We are big into research. We've been doing this for a number of years now.

So we've we've done a clinical trial We're gonna you know, do a few more so even on the research side always love to talk to people

Sharad: A little personal before we end, you're a scientist. You're looking at data and you're also an entrepreneur.

You've been an entrepreneur for 10 years now.

Do you use different brains? How's that? How does that work? Those two worlds for you?

Shawn: entrepreneur for 10 years now. Do you use different brains?

How does that, how does that work, those two worlds for you? I treat entrepreneurship like I treat science. So every problem that I had, you know, building a business, you break apart into smaller pieces, and then you try to solve those smaller pieces, right? So I bring science into entrepreneurship to a big degree.

and any entrepreneur knows, knows this, a successful business is built on successful people. So it's about who you, who you hire, right? I would say the most challenging part, though, is balancing personal life with work life. Because entrepreneurs, you know, you're very passionate about your subject, and you tend to leave a lot of stuff behind, and so it's very important to bring mentors into your life, to talk to people like yourself, to make sure that you're not losing track of what got you there in the first place, that passion, and also that you just kind of keep your personal goals and objectives kind of front and centre.

Because it's easy to get lost in entrepreneurship.

Final Advice To Listeners

Sharad: 100%. That's great advice. As we wrap up, and we've talked so many things, is there any bottom line advice you'd like to leave people with?

Shawn: I hope listeners just become aware if you start to think of your decisions as a finite resource, ask yourself, do an audit of your life and say, where am I spending my best decisions? That's what I think I would leave people with, because I think if they do that, they'll start to kind of make some corrections.

I was, that's what I did in my own life. So just think of decisions as, as that limited resource and where are you going to spend it?

Sharad: limited resource, and where are you going to spend it? No, really appreciate to, to be on the podcast for

Shawn: No, really appreciate to, to, to be on the podcast for sure and you're absolutely right to really bring this out. It's about collaboration and the science is, is one story, but it's how do we, how do we bring this to people? That's what I'm excited for the future for sure.

Sharad: what I'm excited

Shawn: Wonderful.

Sharad:

Thank you, Shawn, for such an informative and useful conversation. For more on Shawn, please check the show notes. Here's something all of us could try. Let's do a decision audit and see all the decisions we make every day. Which ones are unimportant? How can we eliminate them? How should we change the flow of the day so that we focus on the important decisions first?

I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next one will drop two weeks from now. Do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye