“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality” -Seneca, Letter 13
We all want to make the best possible decisions. However, chasing the best decision can lead to indecision. Indecision can lead to inaction, which leads to not facing your problems to come up with solutions.
When facing a difficult decision it’s easy to feel frozen in fear. At the center of the fear is the loss of control due to anticipated and preventable regret. The cure is action, which restores the aspects of the situation that you can control. The other part is accepting that much of life is out of your control due to unforeseeable externals and imperfect information.
What if I mess up? I will spare you the suspense. Sometimes you will. It’s ok. What if I lose my life savings, starve, fall ill, or lose a friend? First, ask yourself if what you are facing will really lead to such dire ends or if this is just fear without evidence. We are too quick to imagine the worst possible scenario; not how likely it is. Treat your problem with proper proportion to the facts.
Second, tell yourself all that you can do is gather statistics, facts, opinions, and other evidence. Then brainstorm a strategy to come up with solutions. You don’t have endless time to gather more information, analyze, or come up with a great epiphany.
If it is truly a difficult decision, you will never be able to gather enough information to make the course of action obvious. At a certain point, you have the facts and you have measured your best course of action. Spare yourself, the endless circles of uncertainty or anticipated buyers remorse. Just do it.
All you can do is increase your odds of a better scenario. Like any card game; sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get the wrong information or have a lapse in judgment. Sometimes you make the right decision, but still lose due to chance. But, a pattern of good decisions always increases your odds; and over time will yield better results.
Fancying yourself as a grand chess master like Bobby Fischer or Gary Kasparov, but with life decisions is unproductive. Life is too unpredictable, there is only so many moves ahead that you can reasonably predict. Unlike chess, too much of life is based on externals that are completely out of your control. Not making a decision is needless torture and can make things worse.
Even when there is an epic fail, you have an opportunity to learn how to be better. Acknowledge that much of life is out of your hands, but none of this effects your character. You can always choose who you wan to be. Don’t berate yourself when you make a mistake, you’re only human. Be thorough and methodical; accept that all you can do is your best with the limited information you have.
“Whether it be bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th’ event- A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and three parts coward –I do not know why yet I live to say “This things to do” sith I have cause and will and strength to do’t.” –Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV