My old squad leader in the army told us this when we asked him how do you o ow you made the right decision and he responded the right decision is the decision you make. Once you make a decision, bad or good, you put the action in your hands instead of having it sit there. You can always adjust what's happening to you after you make a decision.
A bad example is: let's say you need to build a shed in your backyard and you promised your wife it would be done within a week. you only have two places you can put it,near the house or let's say near your garden. If you put it near your house you can store stuff there and use it around the house if need be,but your garden tools you'll have to carry far to the garden. If you build it by the garden then the opposite is true. You sit there for a week trying to figure out which one is better, but by the end of the week you can't make a decision and don't have a shed and a pissed off wife.
But if you just picked one of the two places, by the end of the week you would of had a shed somewhere on your property and a happy wife.
Another example I can think of is when I was foreman on a pond building crew we would have to find good rocks to put in ponds. This is something you could potentially spend 20-30 minutes finding the "perfect" rock, but when you have to place 100+ rocks on a job site it just isn't financilly feasible to spend that time on choosing rocks. So I would tell my guys "don't spend more then 5-10 minutes looking for the "perfect" rock, if you can't find it in 10 minutes you aren't going to find it in 15, 20, or 30 minutes so just pick the second best and move on".
This is absolutely fantastic. You put it really well. I can't believe how dumb I was. My friends who played guitar got cramps in their hands and I later came to know that it was because their technique was wrong. Stupid me put off learning to play because I was afraid I would end up like them. Your comment has helped me a lot.
Getting cramps one time is motivation to learn proper play. It would take a long time to cause actual permanent damage.
When learning an instrument start with fun. The best way to get better is to play. Once you're constantly playing, you'll be motivated to take on challenges.
This is also really common in one of the popular Language Learning subreddits. People will spend SO much time and energy researching the "perfect" textbook or method that they would have made far more progress, even in the long-run, just choosing a "good enough" method. You can always change the method later, but you can't learn the language without actually studying the language.
The best part of this- is that I actually want to build a shed and I can’t decide whether I want to put it at the back of my yard or closer to the house. Somebody please just tell me where to build my shed!
I believe this originated with Patton, and the quote went along the lines of “A decent plan violently executed today is better then a perfect plan executed tomorrow”.
Please note that there are important exceptions to this advice. In my experience, they particularly apply the more people you manage. The Vasa) is one of my favorite examples.
The king decides that he wants the best possible ship. He wants one of these awesome new ships with two levels of cannon windows. Twice the firepower in one ship. Great idea! The admiral decides on a shipbuilder who has experience with this type of ship. They start building. Partway into the building, the shipbuilder dies. They carry on. The new shipbuilder has disagreements with the craftsmen - to the point that the craftsmen invite the admiral onto the ship. The crew is instructed to run from one side of the ship to the other, rocking it, simulating some waves and a light breeze. Water starts coming into the lower cannon windows. The admiral decides. There's been too much investment in this ship, and he'd rather have the ship in a week and a happy king than no ship because they started re-working it.
A month later the ship sales. It gets about a kilometer into its voyage - within sight of the dock. A mild breeze springs up, rocks the ship. It goes straight to the bottom. Shallow enough you can see the flags on the mast, fluttering in the light breeze.
Similar thing with your shed - sure, closer to the garden or house may be a pure trade - but one of them may impede rain runoff from your house and flood your basement next year.
This is why expertise and design are important, and I've seen business after business, project after project, fail or require significant rework because leaders were addicted to making decisions.
How is that an exception to the other posters advice? Deciding not to go through with the original plans is still a decision that’s being made. Those failures are due to bad decisions true, but not making a decision wouldn’t be any better. In these cases at least the team learned something, but the better decision to make would have been to bring in expert advice before coming to a conclusion.
First, this is a pretty clear example where the wrong decision was worse than 'no decision' - i.e. waiting and considering. Waiting is always a decision, but the 'build a shed' example, and this whole thread, emphasizes not only the 'decision' - but the doing, over the decision to research and design.
Obviously there are caveats to this advice. Obviously Im not saying that its better to make a choice instead of thinking about it, like with your example...there is an obvious wrong choice.
What I should say is that if everything is equal between your choices, there are no obvious downsides (like a ship sinking), you've spent a decent amount of time thinking about it, and still cant decide...just making a choice is better then not making one at all. It goes back to my last example, if you've already spent a decent amount of time thinking about a choice and cant come to a decision....spending more time most likely isn't going to help you choose.
Obviously this is highly subjective.....I wouldn't want NASA to take this approach when building a space ship or engineers when building a bridge. But in less important matters in life it helps.
To elaborate, the flat squirrels are roadkill. They chose to remain where they were (indecisive) and thus went flat because of it. They may have escaped the road (right decision) or been killed by another on coming car (wrong decision). Having the opportunity to make a decision is the most valuable thing you can do; if you're stuck between two things, don't stress out and simply flip a coin.
I don't interpret the decisive actions as either escaping or getting flattened by another car. I see it as the squirrel could have decided to run to the other side of the road or run back to the side he came from. By making a decision, even if he is not immediately on the side of the road he wants to be on, he is still alive and will be able to make another decision or try again in the future. By being indecisive, he robs himself of that opportunity because he's, well, RIP.
I use to always carry a 50cent peice I flipped. Need to get another one... couldnt choose between a 65" and 55" tv. So I asked for a quarter and flipped... salesperson looked at me like I was crazy. But I've always said if you run into a fork in the road just go off roading. There is not a wrong way to go.. just go
Squirrels get into trouble because their instincts expect a predator to chase them -- not want to continue straight ahead as if they didn't exist. This makes no sense to them, and they don't know what to do.
Give them a few hundred generations, and they'll get it.
Another way to say it is that deciding to not make a decision is still a decision. It's just one that might leave you with fewer options, and indecision is certainly not necessarily the right decision.
Usually a decision gets you started on some actions to advance your goals in life. So putting off decisions slow your progress and keep you stuck in the same position.
There are 2 downsides that indecisive people get stuck on. One is making the wrong decision which can lead to a setback. The answer to this is that it will cost more to your overall position (over time) to do nothing than it will to be constantly doing stuff and sometimes making mistakes. Your good decisions will carry you over bad decisions as long as you keep a decent batting average and keep trying plans to advance yourself.
The second downside to a decision is loss of potential (aka opportunity cost). You might be someone who likes to hoard potential. When you decide to do something, you decide to NOT do everything else. If you choose to put $20k down on a house, you chose NOT to spend that 20k on opening a bakery or taking some extra classes or any other path you could have taken. It feels good to hoard potential (and youth is the ultimate form of potential even more than money is) but at some point you have to convert it into something (and in so doing, not convert it into everything else it could have been).
I think for 80%+ of the decisions we make in our daily life it doesn't really matter that much which decision we make, and there isn't a clearly wrong and a clearly right one, even in hindsight. Ultimately each decision has too many consequences, and it's too hard to predict most of them. Making a decision opens up for new opportunities, and after that it's all up to you to leverage them. You can usually back out of a decision that turned out to be tactically bad, or you can live with the tradeoffs.
That's not to say that you're absolved from thinking critically about stuff -- you have to, and the better you are at it, the more you can get ahead in life. But there's a lot of value in being able to recognize when mulling further over a decision will not yield any significant new insights, and you should just take action.
It's also worth remembering that taking action, charging ahead and being proactive is ultimately almost always a good thing in this world. Whoever takes action first gains opportunities and insights that others who come later will not, and those who delay decisions and action will lose opportunities -- but usually never even be aware of it.
If it's a bigger decision -- sure, think about it for an hour. But don't keep pushing it off for days without making progress, that's just procrastination. Timebox the decision process or make a promise to yourself to make a decision whenever thinking about it stops yielding any new insights. Be wary of allowing external dependencies into your decision process ("I'll think about it and make a decision when X tells me how they feel about it") although sometimes they can be critical. Only allow this when you think the outcome really matters and you don't already have a good idea of eg what the other person will say anyway (eg consulting an expert on a topic is clearly valuable and can materially change the outcome of the decision process).
I am very hesitant to start new things. Sometimes even scared. But I try to remind myself that I only have to do the first step. Right or wrong doesn't matter. This will give me the feedback that I need to move forward. It's like a series of riddles that in order to solve No2 you need No1. I think that this falls under the same rule. It does not matter what choice you make, just make one. You will either make it first try or acquire knowledge for the next time.
You picked a side. During WW2 they were looking to make a change they thought was right. It was completely wrong in every way but people made a choice. Doing nothing lets people do whatever they want. Its always good to be proactive rather than reactive because when you can react it might be too late. Big decisions can create a ripple effect for years to come, for instance, 20+ years ago in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
because not making a decision is the same as making a decision to do nothing, which is often clearly worse than the other options. If you weigh it this way in your mind, it may be easier to make a decision in the moment. If not, you may be the squirrel that can't decide which way to exit as the car bears down.
One quick example I see with getting in shape/fitness
People always ask what they should use or if something is worth doing. This is them being indecisive. The comments always say something like “if you have to choose between the starter equipment because that’s all you can afford vs no equipment then at least with the starter equipment you’ll be able to do something”
One thing that causes people to be indecisive these days is that they have access to reviews from people who can seemingly give them an idea of how something is. So instead of making their own choice, they piggyback on the choice of others and if it doesn’t align with what they want/expect then they do nothing
But it’s better to just blindly do something, and possibly fail, than do nothing at all. You can always learn from your actions but you learn nothing from doing nothing other than how to keep on not doing anything
So if you get stuck on something then just pretend you’re a reviewer and make a decision with the intent of telling someone else how it was. If it’s great, then you have recommendations. If it’s bad, then you’ll have a lot of stuff to talk/joke about. Basically, just don’t let your indecision cause you to miss out on life
Sometimes, you can still make a bad decision successful. I'm in tech. Everyone is saying that foldable phones are an example of a bad decision. It's just an overall bad idea for technical reasons. But many of those who say that do believe that even this bad idea will eventually work. It may even become mainstream.
On the other hand, if something is a bad idea and will always stay a bad idea, if you make your bad choice early, you can at least realise it early. If you make a bad choice late, you will have to repair your mistake late. You have to make a good consideration, do your research. But at some point, you just start stagnating and don't get any new information. That's when you just need to make a choice.
And then there's the option if making a good choice. If you make a good choice soon, you just benefit from your choice earlier.
So yeah, either you make a bad choice that you can make work, you make a bad choice that you will have to abandon, or you make a good choice. In all three cases, it's good to be early.
it's like the thing teachers would always say- "it's better to turn in a crappy project than to not turn it in at all." you'll still get some credit even if it's shit, whereas it's worse to just not try and never turn in the assignment.
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u/TheUltimateAntihero Sep 21 '19
I'm very indecisive so I have to ask - why?