Decision-making is the most important activity, and one of the most difficult things we can do. But what I wanted to talk about now is not even the complexity of it, but what people do to avoid making a decision, or to pretend to have made one. The point is that making a decision is an independent action. It is making a choice, coming to some certainty, taking responsibility for agreeing to some option. You could use the phrase “making a choice,” but I like “making a decision” better because it reminds me phonetically that it requires some determination. And that’s important.
Why is it hard to take decisions
This independent act of will is one that people often try to avoid. One of the most common and insidious ways to do this is to substitute thinking for deciding. When a person ponders, analyzes, studies, pros and cons, predicts, visualizes a picture of something, he performs various cognitive procedures over the options from which he chooses. It may seem to him that at this moment he is busy making a decision, but, alas. Decision-making is a single act of the will, and it has virtually no duration. It is not a process or an activity of duration, but an atomic action. It just happens. Once, the decision is made. Or not made. That’s it. There is no continuity.
Before making a decision, we often take some action, which we also include in the subheading “making a decision.” We say that “I sit down and make a decision,” but in reality we are only thinking it through. Sure, it’s good to make deliberate decisions if time permits, but we don’t have to do it. Yes, decisions can be good and bad; deliberate and ill-considered; weighted and unweighted; based on intellectual arguments or emotional ones; made under pressure of circumstance or freely. But all these external factors are only condiments to the most important core: the act of making a decision. A decision made instantly, without deliberation, is still a decision. If a person has found a million pros and cons of both options, if he consulted an expert, compared options with his resource base – this is still not a decision.
You can create as many ideal conditions as you want; you can gather all the necessary information and methodically analyze it; you can get enough sleep, have breakfast, stretch your legs. You can enjoy Mason Slots Online, bring your nervous system to peak performance; you can get rid of all annoying and distracting factors; you can present all the available material in front of you in a handy infographic, table or chart, and still not make a decision. Or you can, without any of the above, make a decision. Preparing for a decision and making a decision are separate activities, independent of each other.
People who have a supply of resources don’t make a decision because they don’t want to accept that it’s inevitable. They don’t want to get rid of the fantasy that they can somehow magically substitute thinking for decision making; to give up the fantasy that by submission to another, by intellectual analysis, or by tarot cards, you can substitute your own decisions.
By not making decisions yourself, you are forcing the world around you to make them for you. And you are unlikely to like such decisions. In order not to get to that point, you need to commit a specific, specialized, isolated act of will: to take responsibility for your decision and carry it further.