EWA Principle: Easy Choices, Hard Life, Hard Choices, Easy Life

Hi. I’m Jamison with EWA. Matt Blocki with EWA. In this video, we’re going to talk about a principle that we follow at EWA. And that principle is easy choices lead to a hard life, and hard choices lead to an easy life.

So Matt, can you tell us what. We mean by this really defined by the choices we make on a day to day basis? And I’ve always heard, you know, quote that it takes a lifetime to build a good reputation and then one bad choice can ruin that reputation.

So hard choice is showing up every day, making sure that you’re following all the principles that you have in your life and just such as simply getting out of bed without any snooze reading versus watching TV.

There’s many, many examples. I think the biggest example in our firm is actually leaving to start our own RAA back in June of 2020. This was an enormous uplift that we had to do. It took a lot of, unfortunately, 80 to 100 hours work weeks.

But we found that now this has lead to a very purpose driven life. And purpose driven life, in my opinion, is an easy life because when you have purpose, it doesn’t even feel like you’re working on a day to day basis despite the fact of long hours continuing.

We have the autonomy. We’ve ensured that the only hat we wear is for our clients benefit. There’s no pressure from certain companies of any kind of production requirements. So it was definitely a very hard choice to start our own company.

It was a big uplift. There’s a lot of time, energy and resources. But that ultimately was a very hard decision that led to an easy career life. And if we had stayed in our former position, that would have been the very easy choice by view.

Our situation would still be hard, but some of the rules, production requirements, et cetera, that would have been hit and followed. Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s a great example. Book we just read as a team, talked about.

Um, discipline equals freedom. So making those hard choices, that leads to freedom down the road. So can you give us some examples of what day to day choices would fall under this principle? Yeah, absolutely.

So, simple ones watching TV versus reading Snoozing versus getting up, alcohol versus water, frustrating versus patience overreacting versus taking ownership, staying up late versus early to bed, and the list goes on.

But you can can see the easy choice is obviously the first thing listed, but then the hard choices are the second thing listed. So there’s really a micro level. This can be applied on a day to day basis.

And then I gave the example of starting our own firm back in June of 2020. That was on a macro level. It’s a very big, hard choice, and this goes down on the daily level, doing the right thing, and then ultimately in the bigger decisions in life as well.

Thanks, Matt. Well, what’s the hardest, hard choice that you have to make on a day to day basis? Yeah, I would say, you know, at a former place employment, we had to do a suit and tie every day, kind of run our own firm.

It’s you know, it’s Lulu lemon every day. So I think the hardest choice is just determining which color of pants to wear. What about you, Jameson? Yeah, I’d say along the same lines, having to wear a suit and tie every day, most of the time, we’re in tennis shoes now, so picking which pair of tennis shoes I want to wear to the office is tough decision every morning.

Okay. You know, that’s not a lot, but clients here for COVID or doing zoom, and they can’t see. But clients here, you got to have those rest shoes on. Anyway, that’s a whole separate video. Thanks for watching.