On making decisions

We all make a lot of decisions every day. Sometimes I can feel slightly overwhelmed. I found a few “laws” to help me snap back quicker.

No one decision will make everything right or wrong

“Happily ever after” is highly unrealistic. Those “pivotal moments” serve well in well-crafted narratives, but in reality it takes tons of decisions more to follow up those so-called pivotal decisions. So there isn’t one decision that instantly make everything in your life right (of course, a really bad decision can instantly kill someone, but usually these are obviously bad enough to tell right away).

It won’t be outcome A or B; it will be outcome Z

A consequential way to look at the above statement is that the eventual result of a decision will likely be much different to what we think when we make the decision. It is natural to imagine a handful of possible outcomes, but from my experience, I don’t recall anytime the actual outcome matches any of the possible imagined outcomes.

Things usually won’t go as you wish. But on the good side, it means that it usually won’t be as bad as you initially think.

Bad decision is usually better than no decision

An interesting corollary of the last one is the preference of action over strategizing in one’s head. I do not mean acting without thinking at all. But thinking, like everything else, seems to have diminishing marginal utility. It stops giving more value at certain point.

I used to be too analytical that I think, plan and analyse a bit too much, trying to imagine all alternatives and potential action plans. Later I found that you simply can’t have all the detailed plans. Often you have to make information based on incomplete information.

It may be a bad decision, but often it is still better than the case where you make no decision to take action.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything (Dwight D. Eisenhower)

Be responsible for it; it’s not the end of world

If, unfortunately, a decision turns out to have more downsides than upsides, the best way is to push forward. A traditional way to say it is “suck it up”. It may go against our emotion at the time. You may feel angry, annoyed or frustrated. Very often, the right way is to use these feelings as the guidance to right actions.

Another good news is that it’s not the end of world. The emotion may say otherwise, but in reality you always have more options than you think. Knowing this certainly helps you to “suck it up”.

Don’t confuse the right decision with the individual outcome

I first read this from Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness. Human are actually pretty bad at recognising casual relationship in a multivariate context. We misattribute factors in success or failure very easily. And we should avoid both types of misattribution.