In a Brew Talk titled “Why you do what you do,” Oklahoma Christian University Professor of Communication Joshua Watson shared his ideas and research about what drives, guides and motivates people to make every-day and professional decisions.
According to Watson, many people on a Christian campus might default to making their decisions related to faith—reflecting glory back to God in their life—while others have not considered the reasoning behind their career choices. Watson said the book “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek explains how the “why” for what you do matters more than the “what.”
“A lot of us get this the other way around,” Watson said. “What school am I going to go to? What job am I going to get? What major am I going to choose? What person am I going to date? He says don’t have these ‘what’ questions, have these ‘why’ questions. It’s your purpose, cause, belief—what drives your actions.
“Once you know your ‘why,’ you can develop the quiet confidence that Seneca called euthymia—the belief that you are on the right path and you are not led astray by the many tracks that cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost. If you can figure out your ‘why,’ you are not distracted by all the other people who never could figure out their ‘why,’ and I think that’s pretty important.”
Another perspective of “why you do what you do,” according to Watson, has to do with considering data or evidence in one’s life. Watson said there are decisions people make every day, which may not be the best option but have become habit.
“Cold, emotionless, concrete data indicates that many beliefs and actions we are engaged in every day are not the best ways to accomplish the goals that we say we want to accomplish,” Watson said. “This whole idea is called evidence-based management. It was developed around the mid 90s in healthcare and basically said there are lots of nurses and doctors that do what they learned in medical school 20-30 years ago. There’s a lot of people who do what they’ve been told or what they heard works, but not what latest evidence and studies reveal should happen.”
Watson said evidence-based management typically goes against the status quo, so it is not often received well when implemented. He gave an example in advertising to illustrate an instance when this method worked.
“Lots of people will tell you TV advertising is the best ‘bang for your buck,’” Watson said. “But in 2018, data will actually show you TV advertising is often horrible, inefficient use of your resources to reach specific audience. A great example of how this was done in 2018, an evidence-based approach, was ‘Deadpool.’ They live-tweeted the Superbowl, they didn’t buy a Superbowl ad. Another thing about live-tweeting on social media is that everything they did was directly trackable—you don’t get that in TV advertising.”
Applying these methods to personal life, Watson said to ask oneself why “you do what you do” and whether those decisions are based in data and research.
“The whole basis of the restoration movement hundreds of years ago was that we wanted to be new testament Christians,” Watson said. “We looked around at all these flavors of Christianity and almost all of them have this thing called a ‘creed,’ which was written by man and says, ‘Here’s why we do things and why we don’t do things,’ so these folks were like, ‘I would like a body of evidence that’s just the Bible and that’s how I make my choices.’
Similarly, you can think about the decisions you make, are they based on objective data or based on what you’ve always done, what your parents wanted you to do, what your friends did. There are lots of things we do that we don’t compare to best practices or just get caught in a rut of, ‘This is kind of what we’ve always done.’”
Though research is important in making best decisions, Watson said people can often come to different conclusions from the same data.
“I’m not going to argue, ‘Life is simple. Go find a study and you’ll figure it all out,’” Watson said. “We’re not going to get unanimous agreement on the legitimacy and implications of all data. But, I will say—if you’re wondering, ‘Is this study, is this person who operates on evidence-management somebody a person I should emulate,’—track behavior, which is basically analytics, and then track outcome. In a faith circle, you would say, ‘Look at their fruits.’
“Track and measure the analytics of your life. If you’re operating on objective data, it can serve as confidence fuel for you to do things that people tell you can’t be done. Then, the last thing, you’ve got to be open to change. Statistics and data, they don’t usually have an agenda, so you might just be missing a pretty big opportunity.”
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