The Indecision Game
Two roads diverged in a wood, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered which one I took
I read this article today about making the right decision vis-a-vis taking a decision you’ve made and executing on it. The gist of the article is this:
It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about “making the right decision” and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.
I admit it. I am spectacular at not making decisions. I should have a Phd in it by now. My thesis would be called “The Seminal Guide to Worrying to the point of Crippling Indecision”. Every decision-making process — be it picking between Italian & Chinese for lunch or deciding which city I should live in — has been fraught with endless drama (in my head of course, I’m not ready to declare to the world that I’m crazy), pro-con list-making and counsel seeking from what I believe is a balanced, varied and unbiased demographic.
Having acknowledged this debilitating affliction, I have spent years maintaining notebooks and creating frameworks to rationalize my decision — so that I can relinquish all responsibility for my actions.”The data made me do it” has been by far my best defence for a variety of bad decisions both professional and personal.
From this vantage point, well-cushioned by my matrices, this article in HBR was disappointing, thought-provoking and eye-opening in that order. It made me go back and think about the decisions I’ve taken in the past. For most part, despite the analysis-to-paralysis I ritually engage in, I made my decisions based on 70% gut and 30% data validation. Once I had made this decision, my actions post the sacred decision-making moment were the key determiners of the long-run outcome of the decision.
Ok, time-out while I explain in brief what the article said. Paraphrasing — Choosing the best option doesn’t mean things will turn out well in the long run. It’s the actions in the days/months/years that follow the decision that determine whether things turn out well in the long run.
I then went back and looked at some of the key decisions I made in my life. Choosing Italian that day was fine — but it was the roasted plum tomato soup I ordered that made my decision truly game-changing in the long-run.
Then of course there’s the whole dropping engineering to do arts things. I chose arts — I liked economics, I liked political science — who knows, I might have re-invented socialism to relevant and applicable to the post—dotcom, multi-screen world. But, really, it wasn’t going with the flow that made the decision right for me — it was when I threw myself head-first into the subject, discovered its the calculus that makes my blood race and not the policy writing, discovered that’s a relief since I’m no good at policy writing, found the entrepreneurship society and its many peripherals despite its obvious divergence from the “Arts” that I so vehemently stood up for in 12th grade and jumped the wagon from the policy purists to the indifferent technologists. For all I know, I would have gotten here no matter what I chose. But this was my journey, and its the only one I know. That decision — couldn’t have mattered less.
So today I resolve — while I may not completely denounce my overanalyzing, list-making ways, I will not obsess ad nauseam on every decision I make and instead focus on the relatively important part of the process — the execution.
Amen.
