This may sound preposterous to some. What do you mean; “How To Make Decisions”? Doesn’t everyone know how to do this instinctively?
Well maybe not. I recently did a Google search on those 4 words and Google came back with: 84,200,000! I don’t know about you but, that’s an awful lot of people wondering what to do and how to do it!
I have been pondering this over the past several months, this whole idea of “decision making”. How we do it, are there steps, is there a right way, a wrong way, a best way, and so on.
Here’s what I have come up with so far:
- Decisions are often “emotional”
- Decisions can be right
- Decisions can be wrong
- Very rarely are decisions “neutral” (…all things being equal….this…)
- Decisions impact every area of our private/personal lives
- Decisions impact every area of our professional lives
- Decisions can be found to support whatever side we find ourselves lined up with. (ie: Decisions can support our cultural bias, political bias, religious bias, professional affiliation, ethnicity, and so on)
- Decisions are searches for the “truth”
- Decisions are searches for the “lie”
- Decisions determine our road in life
- Decisions can be scientific
- Decisions can be mathematical
- Decisions can be positive
- Decisions can be negative
This list could go on and on, so what’s the bottom line here with “How To Make Decisions”?
Starbucks offers consumers up to 87,000 drink combinations. Researchers at Cornell found that people make an average of 226.7 decisions about food alone. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, offers up to 1,000 channels. Sirius offers 140 different satellite radio stations for your listening pleasure. It is mind numbing.
The bottom line is that; “Decisions” must be made on a second by second basis in our lives. “Decisions” are unavoidable. We approximately one thousand decisions a day. According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can expect to live 77.6 years. If we do the math here that means that over the course of our natural life expectancy we will each make, on average, 77,600 decisions in our lifetime.
Now here’s an even more startlingly fact the human body also makes “involuntary decisions” which are due in part to many of those 77,600 decisions. For example: every time we choose to eat something healthy or to exercise instead of something with high fat and sugar and sit on the couch and watch TV we impact those “involuntary decisions” that clog our arteries, cause us to be unsteady on our feet, joint issues, muscle loss from no use and so on.
Is it any wonder that the brain can become confused and paralyzed when making a decision.
“How To Make Decisions” impacts everything we do for our lifetime. Stay tuned to tips on: How To Make Decisions.