Whoever said money can’t buy happiness never got divorced from The Blonde. I don’t know if it was merely the end of the stress and emotional drain of dealing with the process, or simply the fact that she was finally gone and no longer had to suffer from her ridiculous nonsensical drama. Finalizing my divorce felt great and was by far the best thing I did in my life, aside from founding JuicyAds, the sexy advertising network.
Friends have assumed that I would never get married again, or that somehow I was disillusioned by how bad the first one was. The truth is, I wasn’t going to give up on the first one, even though that would have been by far the better decision. Oftentimes we downplay or out-rightly ignore the signs of a bad decision, everyone does it for different reasons. Sometimes to avoid having to admit failure or to avoid making the harder “right” decision. I knew what the right decision for me and “us” was, but I didn’t know how to make it.
I have seen so many people come and go over the years, but there are a few who have remained year after year. They are the ones who make consistently good decisions, or at least as few bad ones as possible.
What’s more important: making the right decision, or keeping your word? Is it wrong to embark on a climb up a mountain because you said you would, only to find that you are ill-equipped to reach the summit and will most likely die in the process? What would you do? I chose to keep climbing that damn mountain and it almost killed me. To this day I still believe that I stuck to my marriage because I had made a promise, and my word was more important.
When it comes to business, especially in the adult industry, your word is your bond and reputation is everything. If we all came out of a convention with all the business everyone said they would do with us —we would all be rich.
Adult is a (sometimes) lucrative industry and there are a lot of people wanting to take advantage of that. I have seen so many people come and go over the years, but there are a few who have remained year after year. They are the ones who make consistently good decisions, or at least as few bad ones as possible.
Procrastination is the enemy of good (and bad) decisions. It creates guilt from failure to complete the decision. The choice lingers and we push it away to “do it later.” It creates clutter and mess in your life by not making it quickly. The most notorious example of procrastination of decisions in my life manifests itself through my email inbox. It doesn’t matter how paperless my office gets (XBIZ World May 2014). That digital box is where the clutter in my life accumulates. It took a long time for me to realize that the reason my inbox was always so cluttered was because I was avoiding making decisions. My inbox had become not just about communication, it had also become my to-do list, and storage for decisions I did not want to make or things I did not want to do.
Realizing that the clutter was from lack of decision making, I started to ask myself “what will make this email go away and never come back?” That’s how conscious decisions and action began to be taken with the ultimate goal to reduce the clutter and make the right decisions instead of taking no action at all. With action comes the “bounce back” effect where I would be inspired and fire off dozens of replies and people would reply fairly quickly, but it was progress.
Things that I continually put off or never wanted to handle, or could be done just as well (or better) I delegated to other JuicyAds team members.
If I had made the decision and ended my relationship with The Blonde when it felt time to do so, I could have saved myself a lot of energy, money, and time. However, if I had made the decision much sooner, I never would have been put on the trajectory that caused me to meet The Brunette -- the love of my life. We as people are truly the culmination of all of our decisions, the good and the bad. We will be knocked down, even from the good decisions. Without making bad decisions, we can’t make mistakes and allow for better decisions later. In some cases, without bad decisions, we could never see the good ones right in front of us. Mistakes make better things possible.
Time is the one thing none of us can get more of, so make the decisions you can as quickly as possible. Always remember what your end goals are. Whatever you decide, you’ll feel better about it if you listen to yourself. In the worst case, bad decisions often make great stories; ask anyone about the last convention.
Juicy Jay is CEO and founder of JuicyAds.com. Follow Jay and JuicyAds via Twitter@juicyads.
