There is no such thing as a wrong or right decision, there are only consequences.
In life, we often fret about whether we make the right choice. We make the simple act of decision making way more complex than it needs to be.
When we’re faced with a situation we have the question of, “what should I do?” and then we have the question of, “have I made the right decision?” And that second question, “have I made the right decision,” is a total waste of time.
There’s no such thing as a right or wrong decision. There is only the decision you made, and the consequences of it. And the consequences could be negative or positive, depending on circumstance, but you won’t know until you actually make that decision and experience those consequences. You can guess, for sure, but you don’t know. You haven’t got the required data, and you don’t have the power of foresight. Nobody does.
Your choices are much more basic than they may seem
When you are faced with a decision, you have a choice. Your choice isn’t between making the right decision, or the wrong decision. It’s between making a decision, or not. Not making a decision is a decision in itself because you’re letting the universe decide for you, you’re letting it just happen as it happens, you’re letting the cards fall as they may, and that’s no good.
You have at least the perception of free will, so exercise it. Your life is your responsibility. And it is your responsibility to make those decisions, it is your responsibility to accept and live with the consequences, it is your responsibility to farm the data so that you can make a decision that’s more likely to have positive consequences next time.
Decision making should be quick and painless
There is only so much time in this world. There’s only so much time that you have, and there’s only so much time that you can assign to each situation that crops up in your life. And that time is extremely limited. So you need to think about efficiency, as well as whether or not the decision was right for you. And the most efficient thing to do is to just pick something, see what happens. Then if it doesn’t work out for you, if it doesn’t provide you with the consequences that you’re looking for and you desire, you go back and you try the other thing.
Some decisions can only be made once, and you can’t come back to them. But those are actually few and far between, is by far more common for something to come up and you’re faced with 2, 3, 4, or 5 choices that you can perceive, at that time. And you pick one. It doesn’t matter how you do it, Whether you sit and think about it, or you go Eeny meeny miny moe. You just pick one and you run with it, you see what happens and you find out that actually, that’s not what you want it to happen so you go back and you pick the next one. And you see what happens until you find the one that provides you with the consequences that you’re looking for, the consequences that you desire, and that you feel you need at that moment.
Hardly any decisions are truly final, scary eh?
That process is something that people are frightened of but it has enormous benefits for your life. It provides you with much more data. So in that instance, whether four or five choices that you could make, that means you’ve got four or five times more data you can farm from that situation. Four or five times more information that you can use to make a decision that is going to provide you with the consequences that you’re looking for. Four or five more chances to widen your perspective, four or five more chances to learn about how things go wrong, how things happen when they don’t work out as you want them to, four or five more chances to learn about yourself and your decision-making process and what you really want.
More often than not, those things end up being far more valuable than just making the decision that provides you with the desired consequences. They are the things that open up your perspective, they open up for new questions, new thoughts, new feelings, and new direction. Deciding whether something is the right choice or the wrong choice before you’ve made it is a fallacy, it is something that is actually impossible. You don’t know until you’ve tried what’s the right thing for you. You don’t know until you’ve lived the consequences. A lot of the time, when you achieve the consequences that you were looking for, it doesn’t turn out quite the way you wanted it to and It doesn’t turn out to be the thing that you thought it was going to be. It ends up being something less positive, underwhelming or ends up having unforeseen consequences.
There is value in exploring the unknown, there is value in exploring what you would perceive to be the wrong decision.
There are lessons to be learned, data to be farmed, experiences to be had, and connections to be made. fretting about whether you’re making the wrong or right choice is the wrong thing to worry about.
It’s not going to help you move forward. Worrying about whether or not it was the right choice is not going to help you progress, and grow. It’s not going to help you change your life for the better.
When you are stopping to worry about what choice you should make, you are preventing yourself from making any choice at all. You are procrastinating, my friend. Procrastination is a slow death, procrastination is the opposite of what you want to do in life, and procrastination is the very thing that will prevent you from getting anywhere and achieving anything throughout your entire life. And that is not okay. You do not want to assign yourself a slow death. You do not want to kill off any potential that you have through doing nothing.
Decision making boils down to a choice between taking action or not
Not taking action is poison. Not all actions you take will achieve the things that you want it to achieve and that’s okay because it still provides you with new data, it still provides you with a wider and healthier perspective of your world.
There is no such thing as a wrong or right decision. There are only consequences.
Consequences in themselves are not negative or positive. I know I did mention before that they are either negative or positive, but that’s not actually the case. The consequences are just the consequences, the negative or the positive comes from how you feel about those consequences.
Your emotions add positive or negative connotations to the result of your decision making
How you feel about those consequences right now will be different to how you feel about them later, or tomorrow, or next week. How you feel is fleeting. It chops and changes with every moment of every day, it is influenced by every scrap of new data that you acquire, it is influenced by the environment in which you are in, and it is influenced by the people that you are surrounded by.
Positive and negative, or how you felt in order to achieve that state of positivity or negativity, is purely subjective. When we take things down to a level of pure logic, there are only the things that are and the things that are not. There is no positive or negative.
There is a decision you made or the decision you refuse to make, the action you took or the state of inaction that you existed in.
Decision making is a binary process
Contrary to what people tell you over and over, most things in life are binary. They are black and white. There really is no grey area in most things. As human beings, we create the grey area, but that grey area is an emotional state of being, it is something that we use to protect ourselves to some extent, but nearly everything in life is binary. It is yes or no, true or false, do or do not (as the little green dude would say).
That grey area becomes quite dangerous because that is where indecision happens and procrastination lives. That is where sitting and contemplating making a decision rather than actually making a decision comes from. That grey area exists through insecurity and anxiety. But nearly everything you face in life is binary, despite what people tell you. Yes or no. True or false. Do or do not. Engage or disengage.
We are, as human beings, a species that thinks in binary terms.
This is evident in every decision ever made and it goes way beyond decision making.
You will ring off a list of choices, but there’s never a bit of everything. When you’re deciding what to wear, you pick out the red top, the green top and the blue top. You don’t say, “I’m going to take half a red one and half a green one,” because that’s ridiculous. It is binary, one or the other. When you are deciding what to eat, you don’t sit and think about every food item you’ve ever consumed in your entire life, you ring off a couple of choices and you decide one or the other. Binary. When you’re deciding whether to help somebody you gave yourself a list of pros and cons but when you boil it down, it comes down to a binary decision. Help them or do not. When you are deciding whether to take on a piece of work, a project of some kind, it is binary. Yes or no.
Nearly everything we do, every decision we make, every situation we create and face is binary. The grey area is nonsense. And not only is it nonsense I genuinely believe it’s actually detrimental to you as a person, as an individual. It is also detrimental to your business as well. Binary, everything is binary.
Just pick one or the other; decision making is actually very simple
Getting back to the original topic about decision making, everything is binary. You are faced with a list of potential choices, you’re considering the outcomes, and you’re feeling a bit stuck because you’re weighing up those potential outcomes. But, you don’t know what the true outcome is going to be. So the real decision is not what are you going to do based on those outcomes, it’s what are you prepared to do right now. What leap are you prepared to take. And that is binary. Is it option one, option two, or option three. Binary. Yes or no. True or False.
When you break things down into their absolute most basic elements, it all becomes a series of binary choices. Stop fretting about what-ifs and potential outcomes. What are you prepared to do right now? You are faced with these choices. Which one are you prepared to do right now? There is a strong possibility that you’re going to have to do them all. So, which are you prepared to do right now? That is your binary choice. Which of those are you prepared to do right now? One, or the other.
You go and do that thing and you farm that data by experiencing the consequences of that choice. And then, if needs be, you can come back and try one of the others.
Stop living in the grey areas and start adding to what you know
Breaking it down into a series of binary decisions makes your life a hell of a lot easier. Fretting about what-if’s, maybes, and potential outcomes that you don’t actually know until you get there slows you down and prevents you from making a decision. It introduces a grey area. The grey area is no good. The universe around you operates in binary terms, you think in binary terms, we are not hardwired to think in terms of a grey area.
You are, or more specifically your brain is, a computer that operates in binary. True or false. Yes or no. Do or do not.
Make that decision and make it quickly
The quicker you make that decision, the quicker you can act upon it, and the quicker you can farm the data from the consequences. And, the quicker you can come back and try something else If it hasn’t achieved the result that you desire or that you need. But break it down into a binary decision and make it snappy.
Life becomes a lot easier when you do that, grey areas don’t really exist. They just don’t. We create them. We dream up scenarios, we think about what-if’s, but in reality, none of that matters because you are still left with a binary choice; yes or no, are you going to do the thing or not.
The speed of your decision making process matters
Make your decision-making process quicker and more efficient. Don’t allow yourself to be weighed down by the emotional attachment to any particular outcome, because that creates an element of positivity or negativity, neither of which is especially helpful. Just make your decision quickly, live the consequences, and then move on.
This decision that you’re faced with right now isn’t the be-all and end-all of your life. It might feel like it, but it isn’t. You will have another decision in 2 minutes time, then another one, again after that, and then another 30 seconds after that. That is life. Everybody exists in that state, everybody. Stop worrying about what-if’s, maybes, and grey areas. Just pick something, be binary. Pick something and do it now.
Right or wrong decisions are not what you need to worry about as a business owner
As a busy business owner, you have a lot to worry about. Some might even say too much. I, however, disagree. If you are in the ‘too much’ camp then it is quite likely that actually, you’re worrying about the wrong things. Some aspects of life, actually most aspects of life, are completely outside of your control.
Those things do not need your worry, devotion, or your dedication. All they need from you is acceptance; understanding and acceptance. And that’s it. The things that you need to worry about are relatively simple.
Speed of decision making matters more than dreamt up consequences
Your decision making process should not be a cause of worry. It will not be if you view everything in binary terms and engage quickly. You can make two left turns then a right before you can contemplate and understand which turn you truly need (which may still turn out to be wrong).
If you would like to know what you should be worrying about as a business owner then you need to check out the following blog post – https://mybizacademy.co.uk/the-worthwhile-worries-of-a-busy-business-owner
If you find yourself worrying still then it sounds like you could do with a chat with someone who has some experience of dealing with such matters. In that case there is help available. Go over to my company website and drop me a message – https://mikethebizguy.co.uk/Contact