Wanzology

 Oh, what's happening in your world? What’s going on? It's really good to be back with you. It must be Wednesday because it's another episode of WANZOLOGY! Welcome! And if you're back again, thank you! I hope you're uh, spreading the love, telling people about this podcast and subscribing, and maybe even leaving a comment.

I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to like collect the comments because I want to try to start advertising. Would you like to be part of an ad? Would you? Would you? Hold on a second. Would you like to, help spread the word that this podcast is the shiznit? Hmm? I'll tell you what. What I would do is, if you're on Instagram, look for WANZOLOGY. W A N Z-OLO-GY, and send me a message. Should I start a blog, maybe? How, how, how, how, how, how, how, how? How can I take your ideas and choose one? Right? Because, you know, we need to make this big. Big and bold. Joe Rogan's nice. I don't like him, but, you know, some people think he's nice. He's got the most popular podcast. I'm not trying to be him or anything. But, I would like to get as big as possible. Nothing wrong with that. I just can't do it without you and maybe 10 or 15 thousand more of you. Okay, on to the next.

Today, we’re doing another chapter from hashtag the Book of Wands, one of my favorite topics. It goes like this: “TWO THINGS IN LIFE ARE CERTAIN, YOU DIE AND YOU MAKE DECISIONS”. One of my father's coolest sayings, “Son, there are only two things you have to do in life. Die and make decisions. I don't recommend the former, so you better get damn good at the latter.”

He was right about both those things. Death is certain. Decisions are inevitable. He was right.

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” - Rush

We make so many decisions that we don't even realize we're making them. Little ones like, do I wear this? Or that? Do I eat here? Or there? Should I kiss him or her? Left, or right? Up or down? Better? Not better. Now? Later? Well, how much later? Getting better at making choices is a little different than making better choices. We all know not to put our hand on a hot stove, but do we know if the next word that comes out of our mouth will hurt someone's feelings? Do we know not choosing to take an opportunity will lead us down a path to bad things? No, we don't, but in order to make better decisions, one must be able to know the difference between a good and a bad choice.

Oftentimes, the difference between making a good or bad choice is taking just a few more seconds before making that choice. A little more time to consider the consequences of any choice, no matter how small, isn’t a bad thing, but it's hard to do. We all want what we want, when we want it, and not a second later. It's this impatience that sometimes causes us to make bad choices. Be patient. You may not know everything that's gonna happen, but you increase your chances of choosing a good thing if you take your time before making any choice.

I had a man ask me once, “What's the difference between a reaction and a response?” The answer was: time. As The SOS band song says, “Baby, we can do it, take your time. Do it right. We can do it, baby. Do it tonight.” Well, yeah, that's not all in the book, but the song has a point.

Well now, choice.

As I've said before, the problem is choice, and the question is, what choice are you going to make? And will it be a good choice or a bad choice? Well, you won't know until after you make it. I love how, in the second Matrix movie, Neo is told, why can't I see what happens? And the Oracle, I believe, says we can't make a choice that we don't understand, which explains why we can't really foresee the future. It explains why there's so many things we don't know and not knowing is cool. If you believe that every choice is a new experience in experience.

Think of experience is like a bank account, and every second of every minute of every hour of every day is a deposit in that account. Now you can think about what happened yesterday. Pick out good choices, not so good choices, bad choices. But can you go back to what you were thinking right before you made those choices? Can you figure out if you've made some of those choices before? And how did they turn out? The longer we live, the more experience we accumulate, and we get that experience by making choices. It's amazing. It's one of the only things you have to do. I mean, you can't sit around and not make a choice, because, as the Rush song said, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” As humans, we all have this in common. Now, look at all those people that might be around you or that you were around earlier or gonna be around later. They're all doing exactly the same thing. Making choices. But their experience isn't yours, and yours will never be theirs. So, how is it that that person chose to wear the same thing you're wearing today? I don't know. Kinda weird, huh? How is it that you go somewhere you haven't been for a long time and you run into somebody you haven't seen for a long time? I don't know.

Choice. The problem is always choice. If you can take a little more time to decide what, how, when, where, if, do you think that you'd make more good choices than bad ones? My dad was right. Die and make decisions. The only thing that you have to do. You can do anything else, but that would be a choice. Hence, you didn't die. If you can't make a choice, then you're probably dead and you don't care about this anyway, if your spirit is in the right place, you've gone somewhere and it's like, “hey, I don't have this problem anymore of making all these choices.”, and then being responsible for them. But, while you're here, you're responsible. What's it gonna be? Hmmm? Chicken or fish, left or right, on, off, wait, go, back up, so many possibilities. But, if you take your time, maybe recall a familiar situation and the choice that was made, I like your chances of making a different choice and that choice leading to a better result. Hopefully not a worse one, ‘cause Lord knows, if you remember being in a situation and all of a sudden, you're in a worse situation than you were before, okay, that's what we think of as a bad choice. But, conversely, if you look back on a choice and it wasn't that great and you make a different choice and all of a sudden it's like you're getting whatever it is at the moment that you wanted. That's a good choice. It's up to you to figure this out. In my song, Get Lucky, in the middle it's like:

“I can't say what's gonna happen, I didn't come here to read your cards
I'm not here to hand you a tissue just because your damn life got hard.
But I will say that anything is possible if you have the strength to try.”

And that's what it all boils down to. Do you have the strength to make a better decision? Or what you think is a better decision, because you're never going to know until it plays out. That's just the way life works, baby. As long as you're breathing, you get to make a choice, and that choice is always going to be your superpower. Can you stand by the results of the bad choices so that you can learn to make better choices and have more in the bank of good choices? We'll see. We'll see. If you're hungry, where are you going to eat? What are you going to eat? If you're thirsty, when are you going to drink? What are you going to drink? If you're lonely, be careful. That Tinder date might not be all that you think it is. Might be more than you want it to be. It could be the coolest person you've ever met, or the scariest thing you can't get rid of.

Choice is yours. Be careful out there. I tell my kids all the time, gather as much information as you can, and make the best choice you can at the moment. But make sure that you stand by the results of making that choice, no matter how good or bad the result is. In one of these last few episodes, I told you about a, a meme that I saw in an advertisement on my Instagram. WANZOLOGY Instagram, you can like, reach out to me if you send me a message there, I will reply.

But on there, I started seeing this ad, and it was a brother, standing with a sweatshirt on, and it said, “Either I win or I learn”. Not bad choices, win or learn. Neither one of those is bad. At least I don't think so. What about you? Because, you know, that whole learning things, that was really great when we were in elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, post doctorate. We know so much more than we did yesterday, an hour ago, 10 seconds ago. If you're paying attention, that is. Think about it. How many choices are you going to make, and what are those choices going to lead to? Take your time. So that you're responding rather than reacting. Reacting uses what they call the ‘lizard brain’, meant to protect you from everything. Because it doesn't really know anything but how to protect you from everything. That decision making part comes in after the ‘lizard brain’ and says, “Okay, we're not going to die! We're not going to die. So, you can choose what we do next. Be aware of the ‘lizard brain’, it may not lead you to safety. Try to slow the world down, taking all the information you can make the best choice you can, and then stand by the result.

If you like baseball, think about it this way. Every time you make a choice is like being in the batter's box and it's about the percentages, 3 out of 10, that’s a 300-batting average. That's really good. Really good. Be really good. Okay?

Yes. I think being good is one thing that you could be really good at. Drop me a line at WANZOLOGY,
W A N Z O L O G Y on your Instagram dial. Let me know what you think of the podcast. Maybe give me some suggestions. I mean, I'm going to be done with hashtag the book of wands one of these days. Maybe you can give me something to think about that we could all talk about. Hmm? Should it just be a blog? I don't know. Lots of ways to go. Lots of ways to go. Lots of things to do, so I will let you get on with your day. May it be a good one.

Okay. Take good care. Later!